Detroit Rock City (14 page)

Leni Sinclair:
I never liked
Creem
—Lester Bangs and all those cynical people. I had a bad run in with Barry Kramer one time that really disappointed me. The Blues and Jazz Festival owed him some money for an ad they ran. And we didn't pay it, and when it came time for the next festival I was sent to the
Creem
office with the check for what we owed and a request for a picture of Ray Charles. I handed him the check and he said, “Just so you know what it feels like to be an asshole”—something like that—“I'm not going to give you the picture.” I thought he was joking. When I realized he was serious, I just dashed out of there crying. Maybe he was crazy in the head at that moment from doing something or just vindictive, but later on he gave the picture to somebody, but not me. I don't know if he had anything against me personally. I mean, we used to hang out together and smoke DMT together at the house on Cass.

Dan Carlisle:
I would sit in that office at
Creem
, and there would be ten hippies trying to do business with Barry. He would light up a joint and pass it around, and I would notice that he would never take a hit off it. So by the time they got to business everyone was blasted except Barry. He knew he was in a business of people who liked to be high and weren't really business oriented.

Dave Marsh:
Barry wanted to be Jann Wenner, the publisher of every successful publication, an economic and mass-cultural success. I wasn't against any of that—in fact I was for it. But my way of executing it precluded it from happening. Barry wanted to be a marker, and there was a thing between
Creem
and
Rolling Stone
; we wanted to be as good as they were and they didn't know we existed. In our recreational time we made fun of
Rolling Stone
. I'm sure Lester and I sat around and made fun of
Rolling Stone
with James Taylor on the cover, but as far as we were concerned, that's what James Taylor had been born for. Even when I went to
Rolling Stone
, I felt like a fish out of water the whole time. I was a rock-and-roll guy from Detroit. I wanted to be respected, but didn't know how to be respectable.

Kim Fowley (
musical raconteur from Los Angeles
):
Barry Kramer called me on the phone and declared me God. I said, “Do you have an album out called
Love Is Alive and Well
on Tower Records?” He said, “Yeah. I like some of it, but I hate some of it. But you seem interesting. When you show up on your promo tour, I will drive you around.” So he meets me at the airport. And he said, “You have normal boring clothes. We gotta put you in some love-in stuff because you're doing Robin Seymour tonight.” It was at CKLW Television. So I said, “Well, let's go somewhere.” Dearborn, of all places, he took me to. And both of us were looking for what we thought would be love-in, hippie garb. So there was this bright thing, and I put it on. I didn't know that it was an Arab woman's outfit. So when I went on CKLW, there was a bunch of people from the Mideast who live in Detroit, suddenly they're watching TV, and here comes some white guy, who's like Ichabod Crane, bouncing around to a song called, “Funky Flower Flower Drum.” So many people called up to complain that they blew out the switchboard. Linda Ronstadt was on the show that night with the Stone Poneys, and she fell in love with me that night. That was Barry Kramer. He helped me out.

Robin Sommers:
Deday LaRene was this law instructor who had taught law in Detroit, and he came down and started writing for
Creem
. So we did an article on this new band called Black Sabbath. When they first came out they really were thought to be Devil worshippers. Between articles that were written in other magazines and doing some research, Deday wrote this article. Deday had written something like, “Fuck God in the ass.” This whole devil thing was bugging him. But we couldn't get the magazine printed because the printer at that time was a kind of religious guy. He usually printed Catholic newsletters. So the printer wouldn't print it. They took the whole paragraph out and left it white space. It was too late when we saw it; we had to get this thing out and didn't have time to fix anything.

Jaan Uhelszki:
I went to New York when I was fifteen because I wanted to be a writer. I didn't tell my parents; I just stuffed the pillows and took off. It was a bolt. I didn't go away to New York to get away from Detroit. I didn't go really at fifteen to think I was going to stay there. It was like, “Wow, let's go see New York. Let's go stay in the Village.” This is
Eye
magazine come to life. I wanted to see what I was reading about, so it really was more like an unfettered vacation where I should have never, never been out on my own at that age, you know.

Dave Marsh:
Creem
moved to the country, this place called Walled Lake, out west of Detroit. It wasn't a great idea, this fuckin' farm. That's what was wrong with it.

Jaan Uhelszki:
In Walled Lake we were in essence a commune. We all made $22.75 a week. They paid for our rent, they paid for our food, and we got our little stipend. We were not, you know, we were not living high on the hog. Barry Kramer lived with us, and I'm sure somehow he had a scheme. You can't forget that he was a rich kid. Everybody had stereos in their room, and then we had a common room. Barry's wife, Connie, usually cooked, so it really was hippyesque. It was a twenty-hour day often. We would all unwind by playing pinochle, you know. We functioned as a group; we would go to these shows together en masse. We'd go to wrestling matches.

Dave Marsh:
We went to Olympia to see wrestling; sometimes we went to dinner. If there was the right local band playing, we'd go to that. Like, “I'm going to write about Alice Cooper. Who wants to come with me?”

Jaan Uhelszki:
Lester Bangs and I started the same day. I think that always forged our friendship. I was going out with the art director, and Barry told me that he wanted me to work as the circulation manager, and that was the day that Lester came from California. You know I just remember that because I was so on cloud nine that Barry had hired me.

Lester wasn't anybody then. Nobody was anybody. The thing is we all started together, none of us had anything going. We all were like people inventing ourselves, inventing the art form.

Dave Marsh:
Lester and I had fist fights. His dog shit all over, and I was tired of picking up after it. So the shit went in his typewriter, but it wasn't about the typewriter—it was more complicated than that. It was what precipitated one fist
fight, but we had other encounters. We liked each other, but why would that stop us from fighting?

Mark Parenteau:
We would go up into Lester's room, and he would bring a hand can opener, a bunch of Campbell's soup. He would bring a coil that you plugged into the wall and stuck into the can of soup so it would heat it up like you were in prison. He would bring a typewriter, a pound of paper, and he would wait until the very last two days before the issue had to go to bed, and then he would just pound it out. He would take a bunch of speed, he would stay up for two or three days, lock himself in that room, heat up a bunch of soup, and then come out and hand Ben Edmonds forty or fifty pages of typed stuff.

Jaan Uhelszki:
Lester ghost wrote a piece for me for my journalism class because I had to write something and I didn't have time; I had something else to write. I decided to write that, and Lester did it for me 'cause I had no idea what I was doing. He wrote a piece about the wrestling matches that we had seen, and he got a B on it. He was a fast writer—much quicker than the rest of us.

Mark Parenteau:
I'd go to parties with Lester because back then it was all limos, and the record companies couldn't kiss our ass enough. The
Creem
people and the WABX people lived and hung out together; it was kind of like a two-for-one for the likes of Larry Harris and all the national rep guys who would come into Detroit. They'd get not only the big rock station but the magazine and my wife, Gail, the promoter. So it was a very powerful situation. Lester was a part of that; he was unbelievable. They would have these great big dinners, you know. And everybody wanted to go to dinner. We'd go to Charlie's Crab or the Greektown, and Lester would start getting drunk and start throwing food. We're backstage at Ford Auditorium and Todd Rundgren was there and he had sold out the place, and you know he had all that exotic makeup on, skin-tight, air-brushed suits on and stuff. Backstage it was Lester's birthday, and they brought him this big huge birthday cake and everybody sang “Happy Birthday” to Lester, and immediately he just started grabbing fistfuls of the cake and started throwing it at everybody, including Todd Rundgren. It turned in to a free for all because Lester's stop-gap thing was broke. He didn't know when enough was enough. But he wasn't evil or anything; it was just like, “Wow, this guy is crazy, over the top.” Lester was brilliant in perceiving rock and roll. We'd be listening to new albums, and he'd go, “You're not going to play that shit are you?” and he was very opinionated about what we
should play and what we shouldn't play. Once in a while he was wrong, but not very often.

Ted Nugent:
Creem
became a showcase for Lester Bangs's stupidity. What he thought was hip and clever—you know, stream of consciousness—was basically stream of nonsense. That started off right away and from then on, I went, “Fuck these guys, man. They don't write anything down.” It said in
Creem
magazine how I smoked hash with the MC5. I've never smoked hash. I was at the MC5's Hill Street house many times, and I knew they would put stuff like that in food, so I never ate the food. And I never smoked dope with them. But they wrote that I did. You think if I smoked dope with the MC5, I would try to hide it? I mean, what's there to hide? I was eighteen. I think one time I told them, I made up a story about how we'd go to a convent to ask directions to someplace, and put a slice in the map where we claimed we were headed to. And when the nun would point at it and give us directions, we'd stick our dicks through the slice in the map: never happened.

Dave Marsh:
The classic moment a week before I left was when Nick Kent showed up. That nitwit. He and Lester were listening to
Metal Machine Music
at one end of the hall and I was listening to Al Green at the other end, and that was it. When you look at when I left, black music coverage was entirely eliminated. It became all white rock and roll.

Al Jacquez:
There were bands playing around the city—Detroit bands—that you would see and say, “I can't see these guys again.” Then again, when you are involved in a scene like that, you go see a band and you say, “Man, these guys are really good. I have to get my stuff together.”

The whole scene in Michigan was ignored on purpose. I mean some in New York picked up on the Stooges and MC5 and that led to glam rock. I'm just thinking, “Okay, regardless of what you think of our music, you have this East Coast major publishing center with a history of great journalism. And on the West Coast you have
Rolling Stone
, and even if you think every band that's playing in Michigan is terrible, the fact of the matter is people are coming out by the tens of thousands to see these bands. How can you ignore this music?” Sometimes I felt people were wrapped up in the Five or the Stooges, which is cool, but there were other amazing things going on at the same time. When you look at what was going on at the time, the Five was part of a group of bands getting standing ovations and just this wild adulation. Detroit, the Detroit area, from Flint to Ann Arbor, was this machine.

Niagara:
Detroit has a deadly desert around it. Jerry Vile told me, “What happens in Detroit stays in Detroit.”

Wayne Kramer:
One of the reasons that Detroit failed was because we didn't have a Bill Graham, somebody with that business acumen who could kind of market the movement.

Bobby Rigg:
It was not just the music scene they were ignoring. They ignored Detroit. Which is the strangest thing because, all of these acts that were coming from Europe and wherever they were coming from, Detroit was their favorite place to play.

Bob Seger (
Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, Bob Seger and the Last Heard, solo, vocalist
):
I think those bands came and went because they just didn't have the stamina to go all the way. Either that or, in some cases, it was drugs. There's only three acts I can think of that really kept at it, kept pounding away. That was Glenn Frey, Ted Nugent, and myself. The others just burned themselves out. They had attitudes too. You just can't go out and piss people off and expect to be superstars. It just grinds people, and sooner or later it's gonna catch up with you. Like when I'd talk to the MC5, they were fine, real level headed and everything. But then when they went to a concert, they would just give a promoter a whole bunch of shit, and at times they'd even give the audience a whole bunch of shit. So you could just sorta see that it wouldn't last. Whereas Nugent would go out there and sweat, and so would I.