Detroit Rock City (49 page)

John Krautner (
The Go, Conspiracy of Owls, guitarist, bassist
):
The Go wanted to open up for the cool bands, the bands that were pulling in people like Cobras and Rocket 455. Those were the big bands in our eyes.

Rachel Nagy:
The Cobras were all into doo-wop and shit, doing only covers. We weren't trying to do it verbatim; we're not some Motown revue. I heard the songs and would start to change them. We weren't like the other bands, really, at all.

Jason Stollsteimer:
Bantam Rooster was the first band out of that Gold Dollar scene that toured. And they were on Crypt, which made them extra cool.

Chris Fuller (
Electric 6, manager
):
Tom Potter from Bantam Rooster was important in all this. He came to Detroit in 1997 as Bantam Rooster with records you could find in stores outside of Detroit, or even outside the country. There were
bands in Detroit already, but they didn't do records or tour. It was no accident that Tom Potter came to town and things started happening.

Tom Potter:
Bantam Rooster played its first Detroit show at the Tap Bar, and a couple of people from the Detroit Cobras were heckling us. We were outsiders. Detroit had already started something like what we were doing, but we were like, “Fuck you, man.” They were probably pissed because we had gotten signed to Crypt. I had sent tapes out to a couple labels. I got a letter back from Larry Hardy. I didn't know him at the time, but he actually sent a letter back: “We really like it, we're full up right now, but keep sending me this stuff.” I just gave up hope on the other ones, and a month after I'd given up hope I come home and there's this call on my answering machine, and it's Tim Warren: “Hey, daddy. What's going on? This is Tim Warren from Crypt records. I really like this tape you sent me. I was kinda thinking, like, maybe we could do a single or, I don't know, fuck, maybe an album, I don't know.” Just going nuts on the phone.

Tim Warren (
Crypt Records, owner
):
I'd spent a lot of time in Michigan when I was compiling the
Back to the Grave
comps—that state had such great old sixties bands. So I knew Detroit. And Tom sent me that tape, and I said, “Hey, this shit's really good.”

Tom Potter:
Coming home and getting that on your answering machine, like Tim Warren wants to do a record with ya, it's like, “Fuck, yeah, all right.” That was huge for us, because we were from Lansing, not Detroit. That started things. We started playing Zoot's, then the Gold Dollar a lot when we weren't touring. We made money.

Matthew Smith (
Witches, Outrageous Cherry, the Volebeats, THTX, vocalist; producer
):
Before the Gold Dollar there was a club called Zoot's.

Troy Gregory:
Zoot's was the place that had noise bands, surf bands, and some guy with turntables all playing on the same bill. It was where all the people who couldn't get booked anywhere else played.

Matthew Smith:
It was like a house in the Cass Corridor that used to be a whorehouse in the old days. The Gold Dollar became the whole nexus of everything. Between that and the Magic Stick, it was like all the bands were playing there. But that was a real interesting atmosphere. It just felt like Weimar-era Berlin or something.

Troy Gregory:
And when Zoot's went down, Neil Yee was getting the Gold Dollar going, and at the same time Jim Diamond was moving in with his studio. It all came together.

Neil Yee:
The thing about Detroit at that time, there were so many small scenes that had great music, and everyone focuses on the garage thing. And we had touring bands play to no one. Godspeed You Black Emperor! played to eight people.

Tom Potter:
They had prom nights at the Gold Dollar. Just get really drunk and pretend it's your prom.

Matthew Smith:
They did, like, this prom night for all these kids that were these rock-and-roll outcasts and apparently never did proms. But it kind of felt like being at The Rocky Horror Picture Show or something. It was just really, I don't know, it kind of felt like you were at CBGB and Studio 54 and the Warhol Factory all at the same time.

Tim Caldwell:
Tom Potter was always at the Gold Dollar. One night they had some kind of prom, like the Gold Dollar prom, and Tom was MC, and he was fucked up beyond all control, like Foster Brooks fucked up. Rachel Kucsulain, the bass player from Slumber Party, walked by him while he was raving, and he jumped off the stage and started playing bongos on her ass. Yeah, seventies-porn prom-emcee Tommy was in rare uber-obnoxious, randy, foul-mouthed mode that night. I expected a vaudeville-style hook to yank him at any given minute. Later that night I was leaving and there was this little grassy patch behind the Dollar. It would have been a great picture.

Martin Heath (
cofounder, Rhythm King Records, Lizard King Records
):
Parties with the Wildbunch and the Go. For an English music geek, it was full of amazing beautiful women who, after a slurry hello, turned around and threw up in the sink. Meanwhile there's a banging on the door as the bass player ran in complaining about how he was sitting in his car with a friend having a quiet joint when a dude pushed a shotgun through the window and fired it.

Tom Potter:
Heath was in Detroit—I think he was scouting the Detroit Cobras—when one of us was doing a coke deal outside on Trumbull while we had a party. Some guy taps on the window and puts a shotgun in and demanded they turn over the drugs. The dealer jumped out the car and gets shot in the ass and
everyone runs. They bring this guy into the party, clean the buckshot out of his ass, and Heath is petrified.

Chris Fuller:
He was buying coke, and the dealer pulls up to the curb, and someone comes from another side, and the dealer gets shot in the ass. Heath was saying someone should call the cops.

Tom Potter:
When he said it everyone kind of stops everything and, after a pause, started laughing.

Bobby Harlow:
Why is it that people always act up when we have visitors here? It's like they know they're here and they bring out the guns.

Troy Gregory:
You'd have after-parties at the Electric 6 house on Trumbull, and there would be fights and drunk people and drugs. Cocaine came in real heavy. You added that into the mix, and you had people fucking each other's girlfriends and boyfriends, and that fueled fights. You know, someone is in the bathroom with someone's girlfriend, and it's bad blood from there.

Eddie Baranek (
The Sights, guitarist, vocalist
):
Potter, in this town, is the original two piece. He's the original go out there, do it, figure it out later. Neil was cool about getting us into the Gold Dollar even though we were underage. I'd go down there with Ben Blackwell. Neil tells us, “Don't fucking drink.” So twelve minutes later we were in the women's bathroom slamming cans of beer because the women's bathroom had a door on the stall that locked, and we're like, “Neil's not gonna go pee in the women's bathroom. He'll pee in the men's bathroom. He's not gonna come in the chick's bathroom.” So we would go in there and just chug them and then walk out. Well, he caught onto it, and he's like, “Okay, you guys can't be doing that shit.”

Ben Blackwell (
Dirtbombs, drummer, Jack White's nephew, honcho, Third Man Records
):
They'd let me in and they would say, “We're going to draw like thirty Xs on your hand.” I'm exaggerating, but they're like super, super cautious about it. After a few times Neil Yee came up to me and said, “You really don't drink, do you?” I was like, “No, I really just want to see the show.” I wanted to do nothing to jeopardize seeing any of that stuff. People like Eddie Baranek from the Sights or my wife, who was my girlfriend then, Malissa, they were getting in saying, “Oh, I'm not going to drink” and hammering beers. Then they started putting Xs on their hands. I've been told that I ruined it for everyone by not drinking.

Rachel Nagy:
It was a dirty little place, and everybody knew each other, and the drinks were cheap. There was a security camera, black and white, so you could see who was out back. We never got paid much there. We could play the Magic Stick and do much better. There were never that many people at those shows.

Tyler Spencer, aka Dick Valentine (
Wildbunch, Electric 6, vocalist
):
Neil Yee, who ran the Dollar, liked us, and we played there at least once a month starting shortly after it opened. We were the yang to the yin of what Detroit was at the time. We weren't a garage band—I never owned a jeans jacket in my life—but people coming to see us were taking a break from what was happening in Detroit.

Timmy Vulgar (
Clone Defects, Human Eye, Timmy's Organism, vocalist, guitarist
):
A buddy took me to the Gold Dollar for the first time. The Gore Gore Girls go on, and the only thing I could think of, I was like, “These guys are like the Damned's first album. This is exactly what I'm looking for, this kind of punk, this kind of rock 'n' roll.” I was sick of hardcore and that kind of stuff, and I wanted to hear balls-out rock 'n' roll, seventies-style, punk rock.

Neil Yee:
The only person that we had to ban repeatedly was Timmy Vulgar. And he'd some back in disguise, with sunglasses and stuff sometimes. We'd let him back in eventually. He would try to apologize, and it would be so primatively ignorant. One time he commented on my racial ethnicity and then apologized by saying he really liked Japanese punk rock bands. I'm not Japanese.

Timmy Vulgar:
One night, it might have been that same night as Gore Gore Girls, the Cobras went on, and Rachel pulls her pants down, moons the crowd. We were up in the front, and her butt's right there, and it says, “Eat me”—like “eat” and then “me” on each cheek—and we're just like this, “Uhhhhh.” We look at each other, and we're like, “Okay.”

Bobby Harlow:
Rachel is Amy Winehouse, but she's like the dangerous version. Amy Winehouse was tragic but was, like, this, can't walk straight, and she's singing, she's a wreck. Well, Rachel Nagy will kick your fucking ass. You know she's real dangerous, really out of control. And check out Winehouse's tattoos—same place as Rachel's.

Chris Fuller:
She was scary. One night she got into it with Joe Frezza from the Wildbunch and had his lower lip gripped in her teeth. He had to beat her on the head with a beer bottle to get her to let go.

Tom Potter:
You could drive as fast as you wanted to in Detroit. Getting pulled over for drunk driving was really rare. That story—you know, “Really, they pulled you over on someone's lawn?”—had a lot of truth to it. It was a drunken rocker's paradise, and the only fee was having your car broken into every couple months and possibly being held up at the ATM.

Chris Fuller:
You could drive up Woodward doing 110 with a straw up your nose.

Tim Warren:
In Detroit, stopping at lights is optional; the place is just down and dirty.

Timmy Vulgar:
There would be great parties after the Gold Dollar closed for the night—people getting drunk, running around naked, falling down stairs. Not the dudes. Well, maybe I just was doing that. One time I came down the stairs at Dave Buick's house, and all I had was a condom on my dick, and I just peed in the condom.

Dave Buick:
Very true. There was this period of time that people were going completely crazy. There were parties four or five nights a week at various houses, either John Hentch's or the Wild Bunch house, first in Hamtramck and then the place on Trumbull.

John Szymanski:
We had a record release party at the Lager House, and a limo shows up and it's [former Detroit Tigers] Kirk Gibson and Dave Rozema, and I guess they were married to sisters. So they're in the bar digging the show with about a hundred people. When the bar closed, my girlfriend at the time was a party girl, and she just invited them back to my house for a party. They accepted, and she jumped in their limo over to the house.

Tom Potter:
The Dirtys would bring down coke from Port Huron. It wouldn't even be like a natural color. It wouldn't be a color found in nature; they'd just be like, “Yeah, I'll do this. It's made from the bones of old people.”

Ko Melina (
Ko and the Knockouts, Dirtbombs, bassist, guitarist, vocalist; DJ on Sirius Radio's Underground Garage
):
Our friends were at the Gold Dollar, but that's about it. Just everybody that you hung out with. Anybody who was in a Detroit band ended up going to the Garden Bowl or the Gold Dollar.

Jason Stollsteimer:
There was no way for us to check out what was going on in Detroit because we were too young to get into the shows. So I threw house shows
at my place in Ypsilanti. The Go played. The Clone Defects played. The Rapture played our house. We had Wolf Eyes play. Wesley Willis played at my house. All these Detroit punk rock bands played, and we paid them in beer.

Ko Melina:
I don't think anybody was really making a huge effort to be known. Tom Potter with Bantam Rooster and the Hentchmen were the only bands that were really touring. Everybody else was playing Detroit and that's about it. This was before Jack was in the Go and he was doing Two Star Tabernacle. The bands didn't begin with this great idea to become national and tour. People were in each other's bands and it was a community.