Detroit Rock City (27 page)

Hiawatha Bailey:
After I got out I was living at this farm with Michael Davis and this woman, Pam. We had a practice space where Destroy All Monsters would rehearse, and Scott Asheton was living with Liz, his girlfriend for a bit. I had started my band, the Cult Heroes. Fred Smith was coming down, and him and Rock and Scott started playing songs in the rehearsal room. Which was the seeds of Sonic's Rendezvous Band. One night Michael and Fred had a fight at our house. Fred was coming over a lot, and Dennis would come over once in a while, and I thought, “This is great, I'm going to get the MC5 back together.” Fred and Rock would sit in our driveway and drink. So one night I came home and just Fred was out there, so I asked him inside, and then I went to the store and got some Jack Daniels. I was trying to figure out this guitar chord, and we're all in the living room drinking—Fred, Michael, me. I was asking Fred how to play this guitar chord,
and he said, “So you fancy yourself a guitar player now?” He takes my Melody Maker and shows me how to finger it and leans over and gives me a kiss on the head. And Michael says, “What do you think you're doing? You've turned into a real asshole.” They stand up and look at each other—I mean, I'm scared, these are tough guys—and Fred goes, “It's your house. You take the first hit.” Mike says, “You're the guest. You take the first hit.” And Fred popped him one. Man, they fought all over this house; they flopped over on each other. We had this potbelly stove, and they knocked that over. It was the battle of the titans, this MC5 battle in my living room. I finally pulled them apart. Then they sat down and everything was okay again.

Gary Rasmussen (
The Up, Sonic's Rendezvous Band, bassist
):
Ron Cooke was the first bass player. I took his place in Sonic Rendezvous. Ron had been playing with Mitch Ryder and selling his equipment and buying motorcycles. He had a thing with Scott Asheton too, where they weren't real tight. I don't know if Ron didn't think Scott was very good. But Ron would come to me and say, “Hey, can I borrow your amp this weekend?” Or “Can I borrow a bass from you this weekend?”

Ron Cooke (
Detroit, Sonic's Rendezvous Band, Gang War, bassist
):
I only knew Fred Smith before that from passing. Quiet dude. How he ever got the name Sonic, I don't know, man. It would take a bomb to move that guy. I knew Scotty before that too. That was a Fred-and-Scott conscious decision to hook up for some reason. Fred just said, “Hey, Scott's coming over to jam with us.” I always loved playing with Scott. Musically, Scott and I really played well off of each other. When I was there, the band didn't even have a name. So it was kind of like a band.

Gary Rasmussen:
One day Fred called me and asked me if I wanted to play a gig with them in Bad Axe. So he sent over a tape, and I had three days to learn the material. Scott Asheton had been saying, “Ron's fuckin' out of his mind, and you should get Gary.”

Ron Cooke:
I'm not a type-A personality, you know, and where Fred is like not a capital A type. He don't want to move too fast. To get Fred to do something, man, was, like, I can go to the United Nations and get something done easier. And Fred was not a hustler in regards to taking care of his own professional image. I just got tired, and I just didn't think the band was going anywhere.

Gary Rasmussen:
I drove everyone to Bad Axe because I had a car. I don't think anyone else did.

Scott Morgan (
Rationals, Sonic's Rendezvous Band, guitarist, vocalist
):
Fred and I had been hanging out with Gary, establishing a relationship. Then he did that Bad Axe gig, and it was really good. The handwriting was on the wall, and we took Gary. Ron will tell you something different.

Ron Cooke:
Bad Axe. Yeah, I wasn't in the band then. I had quit. I've tried to set this story straight a number of times because this always comes up. After I fucking had done all I had done in my career and I had played with some fucking drummers outside of Johnny Badanjek. I'm in the rhythm section, pal. I got impeccable fucking meter. So my musical mind at that time was, “Am I wasting my fucking time here?” Playing is hanging, and fucking playing, talking to each other musically, man. What do you think jazz cats do, man? They just have a bigger vocabulary, man. I probably said more words to you right there than I ever said to Scotty Asheton in my lifetime, man. God bless him! I'm glad that they got out there and they did their thing. That's fucking fine. The story of that, and I've set it straight that way a number of times. That's the deal. I did not leave that band because of Asheton. That is not the case at all. They were not trying. Hey, I'm from a working band, man.

Gary Rasmussen:
We made very little money, ever. There were a lot of gigs we did where there was hardly anybody there. The people who were there hated us and said we were way too loud. I used to have to drive to pick up Fred in Detroit for practice because he had his license taken away for a while. He had been drinking all night, and it was like eight o'clock in the morning, and he just plowed into the side of a cop car. Lost his license for a while. Scott Asheton had these weird day jobs. A friend of his did tree work, so he was cutting trees; I had a friend who was doing landscaping, and he would hire me and my friends to come and do awful landscaping work. And he worked at a place called the frog farm for quite a while. It's a University of Michigan frog farm; actually they grow frogs from tadpoles to frogs for experiments—they send them to schools to be dissected. Then he worked at the tofu place in Ann Arbor for a little while.

Harold Richardson (
Gravitar, Easy Action, Negative Approach, guitarist
):
Scott Asheton drove a cab in Ann Arbor the same time I did, and he was a disaster. He would take the cab back to his mom's and just sit. They fired him.

David Keeps:
Scott Asheton was the person out of that whole thing that intimidated me the most because he looked most like the person who would step off a motorcycle and snap your neck like a pencil. So I gave him a wide berth.

Robert Matheu:
The only time I ever got any kind of STD was from Scott Asheton's girlfriend of the time. She was sixteen, and I got crabs from her.

Scott Morgan:
I was living with my parents at the time. Scott was living with his mom. Those guys would live any place they could. Fred stayed at my parent's house. Fred and Freddie Brooks, who was managing us, stayed at Gary's apartment. We were lucky to get Scott a set of drums. We went down to the local music store, and he picked out a set of Ludwigs, and we put them on a payment plan, and his mom signed for it. I don't know if he ever paid that back.

Gary Rasmussen:
Freddie Brooks was managing us, and he was getting some of the gigs. Sometimes I think he took all of the money. For a while Freddie was living in my apartment hallway. The stairs came up and then this little hallway, and my door, and window—he kind of set himself up there outside the door. He would live there and get up in the morning when we'd get up and come in and use my phone to try to get work. There was a little competition between Fred and Scott Morgan, so it was a good thing for the band, because Fred would show up and go, “I've got two new songs,” and Scott would go, “I got three new songs,” and Fred would go, “Well, I've got another one too.”

Scott Morgan:
We both had songs. I would write something, and Fred would write something.

Chris Panackia:
Sonic's Rendezvous Band was really not an Ann Arbor band, but they would play there all the time. They were the kind of band you really had to like to go see. They were just fucking boring. But you got past that because of who was in the band. You would not want to look at that band when they played. They looked like a bunch of fuckin' drunk hillbillies, God bless 'em. Fred's a great player, and Scott Asheton is a fucking great drummer. Never hit his rap tom or floor tom. He was always fixing his hi-hat and right cymbal crash. You look at his toms, and they never had dents, they were never dirty. Because he never hit them.

Gary Rasmussen:
We had label interest, but Fred was bitter about being ripped off by the record labels. He made money, because at some point he had a Corvette
and a motorcycle and a bunch of guitars and stuff. I think he lost it all. He didn't have shit.

Robert Matheu:
Fred had already done that with MC5 and didn't want to play the game. I can say that this is why Fred didn't want a record deal. He already had a shot at a record deal and didn't want to fail again. He wanted to stay where Sonic's Rendezvous Band was and say we have a nice little thing here and it doesn't have to be big.

Gary Rasmussen:
When somebody would come from a label, he'd be rude to them on purpose. He thought, “We're going to do this, but not now.” Which was Fred's thing for years. He'd ask me, “We're gonna do this, what do you think?” I'd tell him, “I think this is gonna be good; I think we should do it. When do you want to do it?” “Well, not this week, but I'll call you next week,” and that went on for years. It makes you nuts.

Scott Morgan:
Fred met Patti when she came to Detroit on her first tour. We all decided to go see her play, and she was doing a meet and greet at the Lafayette Coney Island downtown. You could see the sparks fly. It turned out really well; they had a good life.

Robert Matheu:
I was talking to Lenny Kaye that night at Lafayette, and I lost his attention because Patti walked over, and Lenny was saying something like, “Hey Patti. Fred Smith's here. Remember I was telling you about him? He's one of the guitar players from the MC5.” It's not like she didn't remember. It always stuck with me that he was telling her who Fred Smith was. Because I thought, “Geez, everyone should know who he is.” I thought later, “Do you think that there was a period of time, like after Patti retired in the eighties, that maybe Lenny just looked back for a second and kinda regretted introducing Patti to Fred?” You know, because they got married, and he was out of a gig and there was no more Patti Smith Group.

Gary Rasmussen:
Patti and Fred were involved while he was still married. She really loved Fred. It was awkward sometimes too, because we'd be playing someplace, just a club, and then Patti would show up, and then here's the crowd watching us, and then all of a sudden the crowd is watching her watching us. She was making money. They were connected; they were on the phone together all the time. We played together, and sometimes we'd have rooms, and she'd be somewhere better.
The gigs with her were way good gigs for us, at Masonic Temple, the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, she was on that level. And we were in the sleazehole clubs, doing whatever we had to do. Not long after that, Iggy approached us for his European tour. It was his last thing for RCA records. We went three weeks early to rehearse. They were great gigs, like three months' worth, three or four a week. I was three months behind in my rent when we went over there, but I was sending money home.

Scott Morgan:
We had recorded “City Slang” and “Electrophonic Tonic,” then Fred and Gary and Scott went to Europe with Iggy. Fred told me Iggy wanted them to go to Europe, and I told him that was fine; we'd put the single out when they got back. Iggy didn't ask me to go. Then the tour ended after three months, and Iggy wanted to keep the band for the US leg, but they had already decided they were coming back. They didn't just want to be Iggy's band; they wanted to be the Sonic Rendezvous Band. I don't know what happened on that tour though, because when they came back, Fred and I had a falling out. They started giving me a hard time because I had been in the studio messing around, doing other stuff, and they were upset about it. So I said, “Well, I don't want my song on the record”—“Electrophonic Tonic.” That was the stupidest thing I could have said. It ended up a mono mix of “City Slang” on the other side.

Bob Mulrooney:
We used to call Sonic's Rendezvous Band “Sominex Rendezvous.” They would play for so long, and they had “City Slang,” which was phenomenal, but they had ten other songs that were just like “City Slang.” They kept giving Scott Morgan, who kind of turned out to be a not-so-great performer, a smaller and smaller role. Freddie Brooks said he was their manager, and he thought Fred Smith was God.

Gary Rasmussen:
At some point Scott Morgan was kind of on the outs; he was not really involved in it anymore. Fred got so involved with Patti that we weren't playing and we weren't rehearsing and we weren't doing anything, although we talked about it a lot, and we went from actively doing things to talking about things, and then it got to be where Scott wasn't really involved at all anymore. Scott Morgan was a little miffed, I think, when we went to Europe to play with Iggy; Patti and Fred were living in the Book Cadillac Hotel before it was renovated. They had a mattress, basically, living this Bohemian lifestyle. Me and Scott Asheton would go to Detroit, and we'd go to the studio and not do that much, just sort of play some, and we'd end up going to the bar, and getting way wasted. I was
stopped a couple of times, and the cops would say, “Can you get home?” I could not drink with Scott Asheton or Fred. They're serious, professional drinkers, and I'd end up trashed.

Scott Morgan:
The band would have meetings in Detroit maybe once a week and just hang out and talk a bit. Then one day Gary called me and said, “You're not in the band anymore.” I'm not sure why Fred didn't call me. I can't ask Fred.