Detroit Rock City (55 page)

Violent J:
Rock's parents were rich. They paid for shit, you know what I'm sayin'?

Shaggy 2 Dope:
Every time he bumped into us, it's not like he was living in a mansion. He had just a little shitty apartment.

Violent J:
But when it came time to press the album, he had the money, you know what I'm sayin'? He didn't work a job nowhere. He had the money. He'd go to his family and get it. There's nothing wrong, if we had the family we'd have done it too. But we just . . . at the time we were like, “It ain't fair.”

Shaggy 2 Dope:
But he deserves everything that he had gotten. He was fucking here forever.

Chris Peters:
Before he made it he was sleeping on my couch and hit on a woman roommate I had. With no success.

Kenny Olson:
When I was playing with Rock and those guys, I started putting together the Twisted Brown Trucker Band. Our first shows sold out the State Theater in Detroit, and all of a sudden all these labels started coming after us. We went with Atlantic to start doing
Devil Without a Cause
. Seriously, we had no idea that this mixing the rock, hip-hop, funk, twang was some sort of big seller. And at first people were telling us we couldn't get away with putting all these genres together and make it work. We did our first album in the White Room in downtown Detroit. We took some of our advance and put a hot tub in the studio. There were two Detroit bands that came out with same shock value as Iggy and Alice: Eminem and us.

Ko Melina:
The whole scene was always just us and our friends. But the friends grew. There were more and more people who were not necessarily musicians getting involved. More people who were just getting into the music. There became a point where you could do package Detroit tours. There were a couple New York things where it would be two or three nights in a row of all Detroit bands at the Bowery Ballroom. Ko and the Knockouts did one of those. White Stripes/Von Bondies. Bantam Rooster did like a Bantam Rooster/Dirtbombs package too.

Mick Collins:
Suddenly all these balding, pony-haired dudes are around looking for the next White Stripes. It was laughable. People were moving there—like whole bands were moving there to make it. It was gonna be like the next Seattle, the next big rock scene; all these people were rolling around. In 2000 you might go see a band, and you could get a table, and you knew everyone else that was in there, and you'd start making rounds like, “Hey, what's up? What did you think of that record?” A year later you couldn't get into the show because it was packed, and if you could get in, it was people from out of town that you never saw before in your life. That lasted for a summer. Suddenly they were there, and suddenly they were gone.

Neil Yee:
A reporter from some out-of-town newspaper asked me if Detroit was going to be the next Seattle, and some of the bands were even saying that, but I said, “If the corporate powers decide so, it will be.” When this garage thing was becoming popular, I found myself being less experimental in what I was booking.

Tim Warren:
You had the irony of these writers from
New Musical Express
interviewing these bands squeaking by on $25 a gig, turning them into superstars on paper that didn't translate to sales.

Jeff Ehrenberg (
The Starlite Desperation, drummer
):
We moved from Monterey, California, to Detroit in July '99 and broke up in June 2000. We started doing national touring and had an album with another on the way. We thought we could make a living as a band by touring and making records. By that time San Francisco was dot-com and more expensive than New York City, and we knew we couldn't be a professional band in Monterey. The summer we wanted to make this decision we got stuck in Detroit, and we had all these shows canceled. We played a show at the Gold Dollar, and some friends from San Francisco were among the eight to ten people at the show. Then shows kept getting canceled, and there we were in Detroit. And we fell in love with Detroit, and that's where we decided to move. I went first and found us a place in Woodbridge on Commonwealth Street. We had a huge house; it was beautiful—place to rehearse and record. We were the first people to move in after it was taken over by a landlord; it was a former crack house. It got trashed real quickly; we had parties and so on. When we moved there it felt like
Cheers
where you go to a bar or a party and everyone knows your name. We had these great shows and people came out, and the after-parties. I don't think anyone expected the Stripes to break like they did. But pretty soon it was Seymour Stein and Japanese tourists. You would see tourists taking pictures of the Gold Dollar and some other venues. It seemed like a stop on the rock tour map for a while. That tour wasn't just Hitsville anymore.

Dave Buick:
Eventually Jack and I were at the mall, and we saw they were selling “garage jeans” at Hot Topic, and at that point we stopped caring about any of it.

Mick Collins:
Seymour Stein saw the Dirtbombs play, and he fell asleep during the show. Tommy Boy Records was looking at us for a signing. Tommy Boy Records? It was ridiculous in 2001; it was the summer of stupidity.

Tom Potter:
I got a free lunch from Seymour. Like most major labels, they just wanted cute and young. Me and most other musicians in Detroit were just not fitting the bill.

John Szymanski:
That whole thing came to an end on its own. A lot of us moved on; it was a good time for some people to get jobs and get married. But some of the bands are still hitting it hard.

Eddie Baranek:
Seymour came out a few times. “I want to see these bands.” And we were one of them. He took us out to dinner before our show, and he ended up leaving his credit card on the floor at the Magic Stick. Then we got the report back from Seymour. “Those Sights guys, they jam too much.” Seymour was sleeping sometimes when bands were playing. He was gluttonous, fat—you know, just kind of, “I know what I like and that's what I do.” Same thing with Little Steven. When he came to Detroit he came to Jim Diamond's, and he played the new record for Little Steven. He's like, “Those guys got to quit smoking pot.” We jammed too much for Little Steven.

Ko Melina:
Little Steven had heard the Ko and the Knockouts record, and he had just started the Sirius satellite radio thing. It was that year, 2001. He told me what he was doing and that he had Kim Fowley, Joan Jett—these names in music. He asked me, “Do you want to do a show for my station?” I said, “Yeah, of course, but why me?” I had never done any radio. He wanted, like, a younger voice at that point because everybody else was the sixties and seventies. I went to New York and did some demos for him. I did a test session, and he said, “Here's a tape of it. Go back to your hotel and listen to it.” I listened to about five seconds of it, and I sounded horrible. I kind of had a nervous breakdown. It was really scary, and I think I cried. So he gave me a really great pep talk. The next thing I knew, it was like, “Now you have a radio show.”

Rachel Nagy:
In a way it was cool because maybe some starving people could make some money. And at the same time, what sprang out of it were people trying to emulate it in a horrible way.

Jim Diamond:
There were people from England coming here, interviewing us. I never thought anything of it at the time. I was just doing my job; I'm like, “This is great.” More bands are coming through. I'm getting people from out of town. This is good. I never thought anything of it, like, “Oh my God, these are special times.” Gregg Kostelich at Get Hip came here to talk with a band called the Paybacks. He'd put out their first two records. Greg told me later that it seemed to him like some people were getting big heads and talking like they were going to explode like Seattle and all this shit. He told me later he thought it was kind of “Eh, don't let your heads get too big.” It might not happen like you're envisioning. And lo and behold, it didn't.

John Krautner:
It was a goal of everybody to just live the dream: be a band and hang out. It wasn't about big cars and big labels—just to be free, to go out any
night you wanted. Tuesday night just might as well be a Saturday night. We were all smart enough to know that it was not the new Seattle. Maybe some of us were optimistic about it going somewhere. But nobody knew what it would seem like if it did go somewhere.

Chris Fuller:
Detroit had been over before, but then Jack left; so did some other bands.

Jack White:
I left Detroit in 2005. I felt horrible; I didn't want to be alive anymore. I felt like I just didn't have any friends and I couldn't do anything that I loved. I loved my hometown and I loved music, and I felt like I couldn't even go out and see a show anymore. It felt like everything had just turned completely upside down, and I couldn't even figure out why or what I did to make that happen, and I just turned it all on myself, thinking it must be me, that I am not a nice person, or I might think I'm doing the right things but I'm doing the wrong things. I have no idea. I know it's just a complete negative mess around me, and I can't be here anymore. Either I just die, lay down and die, or I go away. And I thought a lot about different things. Maybe I need to go live by myself in Colorado or Mississippi and not have anybody around me for a while. Maybe I need to move to Europe or something. The problem is, I've never had any appeal for large cities like LA or New York, which is what you're supposed to do, you know? I was trying to also be really loyal to Detroit. Like I said, White Stripes made a lot of money in 2001 but I stayed in the city of Detroit. I didn't move to Birmingham or West Bloomfield. I stayed in the city and wasted a lot of money on taxes doing so. You don't get any points for that, but you get attacked for leaving. It was almost like, “You guys left me, man. I didn't leave you.” So it was a very bitter time for me at the time. I didn't really know who to trust anymore or why I was even doing what I was doing, 'cause it was that kind of feeling like, well, this is what happens? This is the payoff? I would rather have my friends and the Gold Dollar instead all of this, if that was the choice.

Eddie Baranek:
It was the Stripes and then what else can the major labels pick up? The manager of Fall Out Boy wanted to meet us; he said he wanted to manage us. We took every wrong turn; we were good at mismanaging ourselves. We're in New York; we gotta go meet with this guy. “You wanna hit this joint first?” So he says, “Where do you want to go eat?” We were little boneheads. “Pizza.” At the same time was Rick Rubin. We were on our first tour of England, and we got this call from one of Rubin's henchmen that we need to come back to the states, that Rick
Rubin wants to fly us out to LA for a showcase. And we're like, “Isn't a showcase when you, like, play in an empty room at 5:00 p.m., and he sits at the end of the room and you're on display like a fishbowl? Yes? We don't do showcases.” And we're like, “Yeah, we got Rick Rubin, man. We're bad asses.” But he agrees to book us on a bill and puts us at the Troubadour with Johnny Polanski and Jesse Malin. Minnie Driver was there. It was the Ryan Adams-y Troubadour. We get in, and his minion takes us out to Dan Tana's. We're ordering a hundred dollars of this and that, and they're feeding us drugs and everything—tons of blow. Next day we play our show, and Rick Rubin floats into the Troubadour. You know the upstairs balcony? He just floated in with a fucking cape on. I'm thinking, “Okay, what the fuck? Where is he? When's he coming fucking shake my hand?” No, with Rick you get the call later. Another minion calls. “Rick enjoyed the show. Rick wants to meet you, Eddie, up at his house in the Hollywood Hills. You can't take a cab. I'll take you there right now, if you only say the word, ‘I shall be healed.'” I'm like, “What? This is fucked up.” I said, “No way, man, because this is my band. What is it—Eddie and the Chumps?” This is the fucking Sights, man. That's weird man. Not weird like he's going to touch my balls, but weird like, “Why can't you talk to my friends? Why can't we all have beers?” This was awkward. So I turned him down. We were Detroit; we weren't LA.

Ko Melina:
The question you always get asked is, “What is it about Detroit? Is it something in the water?” “Yes, there is something in the water here. You just have to start drinking it, and you're going to be really good.” John Peel became a big champion of White Stripes and sent his producer, Anita, over to Detroit for a few days to do, like, a radio documentary about Detroit. I took her around; she stayed with me. I thought she did a really great job. So I thought—maybe naively—that all journalists are like that and everybody is, like, looking out for your best interest, and they were going to paint you in a positive light all the time and not really take you out of context or anything. I think that soon after the White Stripes started getting really big, I was getting mentioned in
Billboard
magazine and had one record. Why were they even talking about me? Yeah, it's good, but at some point you realize that people aren't necessarily out to get the truth. At the same time the local press didn't really care about us at all.