Detroit Rock City (32 page)

Gary Reichel:
They basically hired the bands and marched them down to one of the Birmingham salons to get the punk rock haircuts. They had a slick flyer to give to club owners. “And we'll handle everything. The three bands will all tour. We'll use the same equipment. You don't have to worry about time between bands.” That's how they were selling it. And they had bigger aspirations than that. They wanted to get them signed.

Steve McGuire:
Jack Tann was considered to be an interloper, a phony. Don's stage name was Prez, and they came out with signs, like the Ramones.

Rick Metcalf (
creator of Detroit! Motor City Comix, artist
):
Don was throwing chicken bones and holding up signs that said, “I hate you.” People yelled back, “We hate you.”

Mike Rushlow (
Pigs, Rushlow-King Combo, guitarist
):
I was in the Pigs, and we had these songs I wrote—“Stay Away from Janet,” “That's What Summer Is For,” “You're Nuts.”

Jerry Vile:
They had this one song called, “You're Nuts.” “You're nuts. Ask anybody, I know they'll agree, you're nuts, I don't want you hangin' around me.” Really.

Mike Rushlow:
Then we saw this ad Jack Tann and Don Was had placed in the
Detroit News
: “Punk rock band wanted.” We answered it, and Jack Tann came over to watch us practice. I handed him a lyric sheet, and he sat down in a folding chair and read along. So he says he'll get back with us, and he called a couple days later. So next we go down to this place to meet Don, and it was where the Traitors practiced, in this downtown Detroit area. It was really decrepit, with broken windows, pigeon poop everywhere. I couldn't believe there were even businesses in there, but there was a photography studio and this practice place. They also had electricity.

Jerry Vile:
The Pigs had to wear these old suits; they were supposed to be like Elvis Costello.

Mike Rushlow:
Don told us what he envisioned, and it wasn't like this formal thing, but he said, “I see you guys wearing ill-fitting suits.” And we all had glasses, so a lot of people thought we didn't really need glasses, that was our gimmick.

Paul Zimmerman:
They were fake geeks.

Mike Rushlow:
We signed a contract with Don and Jack. Later on, when we moved on, we had to get out of the contract because we wanted to sign with another management group. And Don wrote that up, this end-of-contract document, and it was all this legalese, then at the bottom, in really small print, were the lyrics to the
Gilligan's Island
song.

Jerry Vile:
People would hire me to go on tour with them if they were playing Chicago or Cleveland. Don Was hired me for something, the Pigs or someone, and we went to play Cleveland. I got really drunk after the show, and Don says, “We're going back to Detroit tonight,” and we were like, “Fuck that.” But Don insists, “No, this equipment's really expensive; it could get stolen.” So I'm driving back drunk. It was supposed to be in a convoy, but we just said, “Fuck it, forget it,” and pulled over in a rest area and went to sleep. A few hours later the door opened up, and Don Was has got his fists balled up: “Hey motherfucker, we've stopped at every rest area between here and Detroit! I'm a Golden Gloves, and I don't care how big you are.” I was so sleepy, I was like, “Whaaaa—?”

Mike Skill:
The Romantics played with the Pigs and the Traitors, with Don Was. It was some place in Oak Park at the school where Don's dad was the principal.

Don Was:
Yeah, my dad was a counselor at the junior high in Oak Park. We got him to book the Traitors and the Romantics just to have a chance to get out and play somewhere. It was disastrous. We got to play, but it was a huge incident for my dad.

Mike Rushlow:
There was going to be this Motor City Revue tour, and this was before Bookie's opened in Detroit. So the Traitors, the Pigs, and the Niggers did the Motor City Revue tour—three cities: Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. I don't remember getting paid very often, but we got $10 a day and each band got a hotel room.

Paul Zimmerman:
Don and Jack put together these glossy brochures for the Motor City Revue.

Scott Campbell:
Don and Jack Tann also had this idea to produce an album that nobody would release after getting advance money and spending all the money over at Jack Tann's studio. They would just basically scam the record company to get the advance money out of them. That never happened.

Billy Goodson (
scenester
):
In the midseventies I went with a friend to this place in Detroit, Frank Gagen's. I had no idea this place existed. It was great, with the drag queens and the mime syncing and all the coke and the pot and everything all over the place and everybody dressing up in glam. One guy looked like Marc Bolan from T. Rex. It was called Frank Gagen's, but a guy named Bookie owned it. He was a real bookie, and he had this voice thing where he had to put a little microphone up to his neck to talk. Everyone was going there, sort of underground. Queen came in there after a show, and Freddie picked some kid up and bought him a Maserati.

Vince Bannon:
Bookie had his vocal cords cut, but he would talk, although with difficulty, with no voice box. Most of the time he talked, like, in this almost, like, this really, kind of like, slurred whisper. He was in his late sixties.

David Keeps:
Vince went in and found Bookie sitting on a bar stool with the trach thing, the cancer mic. Bookie would sort of quack like a duck—that's what it sounded like. The only person that could really understand him was Vince.

Stirling Silver:
I used to go to Bookie's when it was called Frank Gagen's. It was a gay bar, and I went there for the express purpose of meeting so-called fag hags. There were girls that were beautiful and wanted to dress up but were sick of men hitting on them. They wanted to be around good-looking, well-dressed men that complimented them and had no agenda. I met so many beautiful women there. I went there a lot with Andy Peabody, who was later the singer for Coldcock. We went to Gagen's all the time. He looked a lot like me: was very gayish looking, good
hair—he was a hairdresser. One night we walked in and to our immediate left was Freddie Mercury and the Queen band.

Billy Goodson:
My aunt used to go to Frank Gagen's when it was a restaurant in the twenties or thirties. I tended bar there for a few months in the eighties or so. It used to be drag shows before it was punk rock. There was an oval circle of booths, and you could walk around and on each table see a pile of coke or smack or anything you wanted. This was during the drag scene in the seventies.

Hiawatha Bailey:
Bookie's had been this gay bar I went to where we could dress like the New York Dolls and there were all these six-foot drag queens. It was one of the rare places you could go in Detroit dressed like that and not get your ass kicked. It was just a pick-up joint. Bookie freaked me out with that thing on his neck. Next thing you know, Scott Campbell and Vince Bannon were hanging out with these rich old homos so they could put bands in there.

Michelle Southers, aka Bambi (
scenester
):
It was a gay bar during the day; it always stayed that way. He was actually a bookie—that's how he got his name. I was at Bookie's for the bands at night when I could, but the gay guys adopted me during the day when I could be there. The first modeling I did was for a hair magazine called Flair. My hairdresser was Danny Smith; he was a Sassoon-trained guy. This was 1978. I was dancing with a fake ID, I was a sixteen-year-old making $3,000 to $10,000 a week. I had whatever money gives you.

Scott Campbell:
I met Vince Bannon at a party. He said he was rhythm guitarist for Bowie on the Diamond Dogs tour, who turned out to be Stacey Hayden. He said he had a band and didn't. He basically lied about everything, but I liked him anyway. He was the one who had scouted out Bookie's when people like Alice Cooper hung out there. They had an after-party for Alice in '75 for the
Welcome to My Nightmare
tour at Bookie's. Everyone knew it as Frank Gagen's. You go down to Frank Gagen's da da da, you don't want to pay to get in, da da da da, beautiful cruiser, at Frank Gagen's. Even though it was a gay bar, it already had people from the rock world hanging out at it.

Vince Bannon:
I went in there with Scott Campbell from the Sillies and Andy Peabody and just said, “Hey listen, we're going to try and do shows in here.” He'd lost a lot of his business because a better gay bar had opened next door called Menjo's. He was at a point where he didn't really care about the business, but it would be great if he made some money.

Kirsten Rogoff (
Algebra Mothers, Sillies, bassist
):
You had Bookie's and then Menjo's on the other side, so I mean a person really, if they were so inclined, had the best of all three worlds there. You had Menjo's, you had another place, the Glory Hole, and then in the middle you had Bookie's, where everything in between went on. So if you're bisexual and you wanted to buy sex, you had that; if you're trisexual and you want to try something new, you could try that.

Rick Metcalf:
I was studying to be a lawyer and started liking other music like Blue Oyster Cult and Hawkwind. I read about them in
Creem
, like I read about a lot of music. The first time I had seen that magazine was when it was a tabloid, and I saw it at this biker house in Birmingham near Southfield. It was amazing. The writing was really cool and had some leftist politics and some at the time I didn't get—half the reason I read the
Fifth Estate
was the comics. I was like, “What the fuck are you arguing about?” But the comics were really funny. In May '78 we went to the Hash Bash, this annual stoner event in Ann Arbor. They had it at the U of M gymnasium and first had a jam band playing, and all these stoner types; we probably looked like late-seventies stoners, but we had some bikers with us too. We got kicked out of the show for trying to resell tickets that we found in the trash. Then we found a flyer for this sex bash, at some kind of hooker bar that was within walking distance from the Hash Bash. It was such a contrast to these hippies bragging about the best Thai weed and people depantsing each other to slouching all cooler-than-you with a feather boa. The Sillies were playing at the hooker event, so it was even better. I'd never seen stuff like that. And they had flyers for another Sillies show at Bookie's. I called Bookie's the weekend of the show and I asked, “Is this a bar?” “Do you sell beer?” Really stupid questions.

Tesco Vee (
Meatmen, Blight, vocalist, editor
, Touch and Go
magazine
):
I was the little suburban kid at Bookie's, and I would be, like, going in the bathroom to take a piss, and there'd be, like, a bunch of, you know, like, sluts in the boys room. I was like, “Oh my God! What's going on? These girls are in the men's room!” Mom warned me about gay guys, but she didn't warn me about girls in the men's room. What do I do now? I just hid my penis and peed.

Dave Feeny (
Hysteric Narcotics, the Orange Roughies, keyboards, guitar, founder, Tempermill studio
):
Bookie's was like that PSA, “Your brain on drugs,” come to life. For a suburban kid—we were from Livonia—it was like an amusement park.

Gerald Shohan:
When Bookie's started, it was basically Vince and Andy Peabody talking Bookie into letting this kind of thing happen to his club. They talked him
into doing Wednesdays or Tuesdays. Then it got into another day. Then it was bringing in money and people. Finally we got the weekend nights. Sunday was still left for the drag shows. So Sunday morning we would, a lot of times, we—being Coldcock, this band we had with Vince and Andy and me and Bob Mulrooney—were rehearsing there in the basement, and the drag show would go on at night. We'd stick around for the drag shows.

David Keeps:
Vince and Scott had the whole relationship with Bookie. Vince booked Bookie's. It couldn't have been a more fantastic venue for punk rock. It was like a grown-up supper club let loose. It had a black-and-white tile floor and these fake leather booths. Bookie's was special. Bookie's was, like, basically being allowed to go in this place—you know, like, parents would have the living room that none of the kids were allowed to be in? It was like having access to that and rigging it up. It was really key to keeping things alive in the city during that period.