Detroit Rock City (41 page)

Corey Rusk:
You essentially had to sleep standing up.

Russ Gibb (
Grande Ballroom promoter
):
One of my ex-students came to me and said, “Have you heard Negative Approach?” I said, “No.” He said, “Well, there's a place called the Freezer Theater.” So I went to see them, and they were rehearsing in some fucking little place on Cass somewhere; it looked like a little storefront or something. I saw them and I said, “Wow, this is interesting.” They're doing things that the MC5 were doing. Now this is fifteen years later. You know, click, click, click, click. Of course I saw money!

Corey Rusk:
Russ started showing up at the Freezer. He was hanging out and absorbing it all. Maybe it reminded him of his youth in the sixties. He saw that I was involved in some of those shows at the Freezer. Honestly, I'm socially awkward, and it was more enjoyable to me to have a sort of take-charge attitude and be more like, “I'm gonna do a bunch of the work to make these shows happen, even though I'm not making any money from it.” You know, it's not my club. I'd do a lot of the flyering, and Russ saw that in me and started trying to talk to me. I totally blew him off in the beginning, like, “Is this dude a cop, or what the fuck is he doing here? Why is there someone this old here?” I was sort of suspicious of him.

Russ Gibb:
We started a show my students did,
Why Be Something That You're Not
? It had a lot of the bands playing at the Freezer on it. I owned the cable company, and we did that. So when I saw the Freezer, it was just about the same time that that I was getting involved deeper and deeper in cable. I needed the programming.

Corey Rusk:
I'm sure, being seventeen years old and full of testosterone, I was a total dick to him. And he just kept hanging around and being cool, and eventually
I lightened up. He started telling me who he was, what he had done. The fact that it involved the Stooges seemed cool enough. He saw this all-ages thing happening and was like, “We should open an all-ages club together.” So Russ and I spent a long time trying to find a place.

Russ Gibb:
We didn't get rich off it, but it was okay. It was an experiment, and we brought in a lot of people to play there. The one that really closed me up was the Graystone. But Corey was this terrific kid, and he made it work.

Corey Rusk:
We couldn't find any place, and I had been regularly successful at doing shows at this place on Michigan Avenue, the Graystone. It was more than Russ wanted to spend to get a building, but it was also in a better location and a nicer place. He was more likely to get his money back out of it in the end than from some of the really fucked up places we were looking at in the Cass Corridor. Russ ended up buying the Graystone, and the agreement was that he would put up the money and buy the building and he would buy a PA. I would agree that I was gonna run the place and do whatever the fuck it took to make it work and that he wasn't going to put in any money beyond that. He wasn't going to make the club pay rent right away, but as soon as we got to the point where it was actually making a little money, then we needed to start paying some rent. But it never became profitable.

Russ Gibb:
I made a few bucks. I didn't lose on it. By the time I sold the building and everything, I made money on it. I would go there but not often. I was still involved in booking, but by that time Corey was directing. I've always said you go to the people that know it. You get them involved, not people like myself. We're the business end of it. Our end is to put the numbers together to see if it can make a buck.

Corey Rusk:
I ran that place for a year and a half before I moved to Chicago at the end of '86. I've always worked hard my whole life and slept very little, but that was the hardest I ever worked and the least I ever slept. Because on top of doing the Graystone, Touch and Go was doing pretty well. We were working with the Butthole Surfers, and Big Black, and Killdozer. I was also delivering pizzas for Domino's. Running the Graystone, I probably wasn't a good enough business person on behalf of the club. I never made a dime personally from running the Graystone. I felt a duty to do the best possible job I could because Russ had put up this money. I'm gonna bust my ass to find out because Russ has put his faith in me, basically.

Mike Hard (
God Bullies, Thrall, vocalist
):
At the Butthole Surfer shows at the Graystone there were people selling acid inside the door to help enjoy the show. With the Buttholes it wasn't like coke or fucking heroin at the door before you could walk in there. I mean, you could score it. But for the Surfers it was everybody through the crowd, “Hey, you wanna buy some acid?” The whole place was tripping. It almost was part of the price of your ticket. You gotta get acid with it, you know?

Corey Rusk:
The Buttholes broke down one time somewhere near Cleveland, and they had a show at the Graystone the next night. So I had double interest in their situation, in that they were both on my label and we had this big show at the Graystone. We needed the headliner to show up. My dad lived between Toledo and Cleveland, so I got him to drive half an hour to an hour east, get them, and then drive them up to Detroit. I was busy, and when you're younger you don't think about those things as much; it's just like, “Thanks, Dad, I'll see ya later.”

Tesco Vee:
We played the Graystone once when Corey was booking it and then once with Scary Cary, who took over after Corey left. Scary pulled a gun on us. He shorted us on our guarantee. He offered us a certain amount, and then he couldn't come up with the whole amount. So my genius band members decided to steal the microphones. They stuck the microphones in their trap cases and we were loading out in the rain, Scary came out to me and put a gun to my forehead and said, “You better give me my microphones back or I'm gonna kill you!”

John Speck (
The Fags, Hoarse, guitarist, vocals
):
I heard a story from one of the guys in a local gang that was friendly with Cary that blew my fucking mind. They went over to Cary's house to hang out. And my buddy Chris asked where the bathroom was, and it was like, “Down the hallway, blah.” He opened a door and Scary went, “Hey! What are you doing there?” Like he peeked open thinking it was the bathroom, and he said that in that room from floor to ceiling was ammunition.

Tesco Vee:
I was surprisingly calm about the whole thing. I was like, “We'll get your microphones back.” So we had to tear everything out apart out in the rain and get his microphones back. I was, like, “You guys are a bunch of idiots.” Turns out now Cary's in prison for armed robbery.

John Speck:
These were some hardcore guys. Cary is a one-percenter, which is a biker outlaw. There were a few people out of that scene who ended up doing time.
I used to work for another guy who was in the Iron Coffins, Bird. Went up for gun running and drugs. I know another guy who's been in and out of prison for a long time, Darrel Maniac, who was a big deal dude. He was an original Detroit Skin. That guy makes me more nervous than anybody else in the fucking city scene ever did. And he's a tattoo artist, and I was trying to get a job at Eternal Tattoos, so I had to do a tattoo in front of the boss to show him what I could do. I get done with it and he's like, “Well, why don't you go hang out and watch Darrel, and if you've got any questions, ask him.” So I go walk over to his workspace, and I'm standing there at the doorway, and he's got his back to me and he's bent over tattooing. Darrel's like, maybe, like, this tall and just a brick shithouse and covered in tattoos. He had a big Manson tattoo. Just a dude that's been in the fucking prison culture for a long time. He turns around, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up just as he started looking, and he just looked at me and said, “Don't stand behind me.” He said it in a way that was just fucking chilling. And obviously I'm like, “I'm sorry.” We had some badass dudes around.

Corey Rusk:
While I was doing the Graystone, the Butthole Surfers records just took off, and Big Black and Die Kreuzen were selling a lot of records too. There was this big staircase at the Graystone that was four and a half feet wide, and it ran up from the club to the apartment, where Lisa and I lived for free. That staircase was our warehouse for the label. We didn't have enough room to store all the records that were coming and going, so we'd get a big shipment of records, and we'd be stashing 'em in every little storage room in the Graystone and in our apartment.

Andy Wendler:
Corey had to quit the Necros to focus on Touch and Go. It was becoming very clear that it needed full-time stewardship, and he was the man for the job. He's another one of those guys who went crazy from all the time in the van. That was before cell phones, so you couldn't even do business.

Corey Rusk:
I got Big Black on the label as soon as I could. The second EP,
Bulldozer
, there was a limited edition of two hundred that were in a galvanized metal casing. That eventually led to me getting in touch with them. We had been talking to the Butthole Surfers about putting out their records, and they were coming to Detroit, so Lisa and I got them a gig at Paycheck's. We were trying to think of an opening band, and we were like, “That Big Black band's really cool. I wonder if they'd come from Chicago and do it?” They were cool and opened that show. Big Black and the Buttholes both stayed with us, and Steve Albini and I got along really well, and we've worked together ever since.

Russ Gibb:
By the time we started the Graystone, I was also deep in television production, so I had a crew.

Corey Rusk:
I don't think Russ needed to make a living teaching school. And here he was in 1981, teaching media at Dearborn High School. He put a bunch of his own money into helping fund Dearborn High School having its own high school TV studio and station that was probably as good as the local public television station set-up. You look at how forward thinking was this fucker? Nineteen eighty-one was the year that MTV started, and the bulk of America did not have cable TV then. You know, like MTV is a household word now, but it was just like this bizarre upstart concept in 1981, and so for Russ to really see that the future of music was in music video in 1981 and to put his money where his mouth was—to say, “I want the kids in my class to have this experience, because this will prepare them for what is gonna be the future.”

John Brannon:
We did those TV shows with Russ Gibb. He locked onto the scene and saw something that was going on, and he was really into the idea of the youth presenting their art. He had his students come out and tape all these TV shows, and they became the first kind of public access TV shows. And they were doing it on this extreme hard core punk.

Corey Rusk:
Why Be Something That You're Not
was Russ's thing in his high school class. Russ would get this huge mobile studio and set up in the Graystone and film. Marc Barie and I tried to film four bands a day, and on a Saturday each segment was thirty minutes. We had Necros, Negative Approach, Meatmen, Misfits, some other Detroit bands of the era that didn't put out records. We did twelve episodes. It probably owed more to
Don Kirshner's Rock Concert
than anything on MTV.

Doc Dart (
Crucifucks, vocalist
):
We did Russ's show with the Misfits, but I didn't know they were the Misfits. They came with these guitars and these outfits. It looked like they'd shopped at K-Mart for Halloween stuff. Little Doc did not like costume parties, first of all. He did not like Halloween costumes, because Halloween's about something much deeper than anything a human could do. He did not like mimes. He hated clowns. He did not like street theater, puppets, or theater in general. So you know where I'm coming from here. If the theme is “Why be something that you're not,” the dress-up thing—I'm not sure how well that gels.