Detroit Rock City (35 page)

Wayne Kramer:
One of my points in my narrative was Gang War as a stepping stone to New York. I knew Detroit was a slippery slope for me. Everyone I knew was in prison to some degree.

Ron Cooke:
Wayne and I went and played this big show in New York with Thunders. These guys busted into the motherfucking warehouse, tapped into the electrical system. There were twenty thousand people in the fucking warehouse, man. And they were probably selling forty pounds of heroin in the motherfucker. So we get all done, and we were counting the money up, and I go, “This is fucking bullshit, Wayne. Let's go see these motherfuckers, man. We want some dough out of this gig, man.” Wayne goes, “Alright, let's go.” So me and Wayne go down the hallway. There's this big fucking guinea motherfucker standing out front of this door. He goes, “What do you guys want?” We go, “We want to see the boss, man.” He goes, “What for?” “We want to talk to him about some money.” He goes, “Who are you? Where you from?” I said, “My name's Cooke. This is Wayne Kramer.
We're from Detroit.” The guy goes, “Hold on a minute.” Goes to the fucking door, the door closes, he comes back out and says, “Who'd you say you were? Where you from?” I said, “My name's Cooke, that's Wayne Kramer. We're from Detroit. We're from the band, man. We filled this fucking place. We want to talk about getting some more dough.” He goes back in and comes out and says, “C'mon.” So there's this fucking dude sitting in there with a thin T-shirt on. Stone Italian mother fucker. He's really a bad ass. Count the fucking money, man. He goes, “Who are you guys?” We have to go all the way back through this fucking thing. He looks at me, goes, “Cooke, you from Detroit, eh? You know what, man, you got fucking balls, man. And your buddy here.” He goes, “Frankie give them $2,500 bucks apiece.” We fucking hustled the fucking mob cats, man. Thunders? Who knows where he was at?

Vince Bannon:
I booked Iggy at Masonic and then brought him back to play a week of shows at Bookie's. That was a really big five sold-out days.

John Kordosh:
The Mutants opened for Iggy that week, one of the shows. Bookie's was really kind of poppin' then—all sorts of national acts were coming through: the Stray Cats, bands that were really getting big. So it was definitely a happening scene, as they say.

Iggy Pop:
That was at a time in my life that I was the most completely insane. What I love about looking back on that was I was having a very hard time with my career, with my health—it was all bad. But my motives were pure. I would do these crazy things. I had an idea that all the one-night shows you would play in these weird theaters, the promoters would rig the whole thing so nobody could have a good time. It just wasn't happening—it wasn't cool; it wasn't a connection. So what I was trying to do was like what people would do back in the days of the Dorseys or Sinatra—you'd go and play a stand. I did a week in Atlanta at a place called Richard's, and I did a week at Bookie's and one other, and it was a great idea. The things that stand out about it all for me are the things happening offstage. Particularly how disgusted I was and how weird I felt because there was a band called General Public at the time. It was created by the leader of a band called the English Beat, and at the time they were all the rage; they had big hits doing this horrible fake ska. They were playing a bigger venue in the area, and they came down in their tour bus to watch, to hang out or something. I went onto the guy's bus, and he was going to be a cross-over, to be above all music scenes, you know—“I wanted to be a real star,” like Elvis or something, “for the general public.” I just remember
his snotty attitude and just how smart he thought he was. It just disgusted me and I also felt, “Well, oh gee, here I am doing this, things don't look good.” In Detroit I got really nervous when Jimmy McCarty came down, the guitar player from Mitch Ryder. Johnny Bee came with him. Those guys were and still are musicians that I really respect. That was like, “Oh shit, oh shit, here comes McCarty and his guys.” I was a little star struck. It's pretty funny: there's a compilation out there on me called
Roadkill Rising
. And I was singing “One for My Baby,” the blues jazz song. And there's a recording of it from that stand at Bookie's, and people wouldn't shut up. You know the trouble with people if they're out having a good time. I stopped like five times saying, “Shut the fuck up!” The whole tour was kinda like that; it was real rough and ready, and I'm real proud I did that, but on the other hand it was, like, it was a statement to me and it was pure.

Tex Newman:
We opened one of those nights, and he was bad. I walked out and people waiting out back were offering me $100 to let them in the bar.

Kirsten Rogoff:
Zion Stooge, this girl, changed her name and had Iggy tattooed on her. She was just in love with Iggy Pop and just saw herself as that. There were a lot of people who had severe mental problems around there, and they dressed the way they did because they had a mental problem, not because they were trying to be something. One person might go with a crash helmet or a soldier's helmet into the club, not because they're trying to dress up for it—because that's how they dress all day long.

Michelle Southers:
When I first dated Jim it was after he was in Germany with David Bowie. He was pretty clean, and I actually met him at Bookie's. I had come in from LA; I was modeling out there. I was working for Richard Tyler, and a designer friend of mine from Australia had given me all these crazy clothes that he had made. I walked in and I was the prodigal daughter. I had this spacesuit-looking thing on, with a really tightly woven full-body stocking, fishnet, and then I had this silver—looked like aluminum foil—big shoulder-pad thing, micromini—like if I bent over, my ass was out—with all these fake gemstones all over and glitter and heels this high. I walked in, and it just so happened that Iggy had played there for how many nights. He wasn't playing that night; he was just hanging out. Iggy walked up to me, grabbed me and kissed me in the middle of the club, and told me he was at the Briarwood Hilton and he would be there for X amount of days, and he gave me his room number. Of course I didn't call until the very last day. I had probably just turned eighteen. I did meet with him; I had lunch with him in Ann
Arbor at the Briarwood. It was just one of those things, a couple times, when he was in Michigan type of thing. If he'd see me, you know, whatever.

Paul Zimmerman:
There was this guy, Tom Mitchell, once we all started hanging out at Bookie's. He was so into “We should not all look the same. There shouldn't be a punk uniform.” So he went down to Army surplus and came back with a silver fireman's jacket that weighed, like, forty pounds, and he used to wear that around. There was a horrible liquor store about a block and a half from there with the ghetto glass and everything. When you couldn't afford the liquor in the bar, you would go get a six pack and drink it in the parking lot. In fact, the big thing at Bookie's was to get there before ten and drink for an hour and a half in the parking lot. Sometimes the parking lot was as much fun as inside. So these guys went to get a six pack, and there were some girls and there were some guys, and they went over, and Tom slaps a $20 into the little ghetto tray, and this little kid came in, a little brother, grabbed it and ran. And Tom made the mistake of going after him. As soon as he went into the street he got circled, and they punched the girls and he got stabbed in the stomach. I'm inside at Bookie's, and one of the bouncers comes over to me and he goes, “Hey, you gotta go check on your buddy. He's bleeding out in the street.” I went out, and Mitchell's sitting up against the wall, and he's just gray. He shows me the stab wound, and the girls are frantic. One of the bouncers goes, “An ambulance will take forever. I'll take you now.” So we jumped in his car, and we piled him in and went down McNichols doing about eighty to Ford Hospital, about three miles away. And, you know, that's not a road you can go thirty or above. We're roaring into this hospital. And we get there and Mitchell's girlfriend is like, “F'n N word, f'n N word.” And we're in the waiting room, and I'm like, “Would you chill? We got him some treatment.” So the hospital comes and tells us, “Well, somebody's gotta call his parents,” and then they all looked at me. So I had to do this call at 1:30 in the morning: “You need to come here. Your son's been stabbed.” They ended up messing up his treatment, and he was in the hospital for a month.

Keith Jackson (
Shock Therapy, guitarist
):
I always carried a gun, a little .45. Only once did I get caught with it, and it was at Bookie's. One night I power slid my car up to the front of the club; I was going too fast and bumped against the curb. I got out and a cop had seen me, just down McNichols. He said, “Do you have any weapons?” I said, “Yes, I do. I have a gun in my pocket.” So they put me up against the car to pat me down, and his partner reaches into my leather and pulls it out. He slides
the clip out and puts it in his pocket. So they run me and I check out okay, and I said, “Can I have my clip back?” They said, “Nope. Have a nice night, Mr. Jackson.”

Bob Mulrooney:
I lived right around the corner from Bookie's with Vince Bannon. It wasn't even a ten-minute walk from the place, and across the street was Highland Park, which was really rough. We were in Palmer Park, which was okay; it was mainly gays. The black people wouldn't go over and rob the gay people, at least, but later on, when they could see the crowds coming in to Bookie's and there was more nicer cars and shit, then they started paying attention. I know somebody got killed in the front part of the parking lot. I think the heroin really started in the end of the Bookie's days, and I wasn't into it. I had done it once or twice during that time, but the richer kids, the ones that were, like, doing tons and tons of coke and after that, what else can you do except something to calm down? There was this one coke dealer from New York; he used to come in, rent a limo, and sit with the car running while this Louie guy was inside getting everybody high. It was the best coke I ever did. It was so pure, but actually in a way it kept me away from the street garbage in Detroit for a few years. The bouncers from Bookie's started working with those guys. They moved the product in Detroit. Before the airlines tightened down, everybody was making some good, good money.

Jerry Vile:
We started a magazine to talk about the scene, whatever it was, and we called it
White Noise
. Paul Zimmerman and I started it. First, though, we drove out to the West Coast in 1978 to see what was going on there. We'd go to shows and tell people we were from
Punk
magazine. That was the magazine that made journalism understandable to me. It was
Mad
magazine with, like, cartoons and hand lettering. So where everybody else like Legs McNeil might be the influence to some, John Holmstrom was the influence to Paul and me. We were in LA and we bought a copy of
Slash
, which was impossible to get in Detroit. We didn't even think about selling ads; they had to tell us, “You sell ads in a magazine, and that's how you make your money.” We were trying to make our money by selling them for a buck apiece. Don Was and Jack Tann bought an ad for Sound Suite. But we didn't have a business plan. It was printed on newspaper, like how
Slash
was. Paul went to journalism school, and I never even took journalism in high school. Paul's like this really handsome, nice, baby-faced kind of guy that girls love, and the guy's got, like, with this really twisted brain. So our first issue we put Niagara on the cover, and she drew the back cover. The first reaction was from Sirius Trixon from the Motor City Bad Boys, who wanted to beat me up.

Paul Zimmerman:
We did a “Welcome to Detroit” double truck. We had all the bands that we liked, and we were just about to go to press, and Jerry said, “Something's wrong with this picture of Sirius.” And he goes, “I know!” and he takes a flare out and he goes on Trixon's face, dot dot dot dot dot dot.

Jerry Vile:
He had really bad acne. He said, “What the hell did you do to my face?” I said, “I was trying to make it look more like you,” and he grabs me. At that time I was shoveling asphalt for a job, so I picked him up and threw him against a pinball machine. Sirius never bothered me after that. But that was the one reaction I remember well. They had benefits for
White Noise
at Bookie's. It was pretty popular. I also had a band, the Boners, that I started. Then I had even more excuses to be an asshole.

Paul Zimmerman:
The Ramones were playing in East Lansing, down the road from Detroit at this preppy place called Dooley's. We went to see them and maybe interview them for
White Noise
. So we went backstage for this interview, but Jerry and I realized that we didn't have paper. Or pen, for that matter. But Mike Murphy was with us and said, “I'm gonna write everything down and let me go with you and be the transcriber.” So we get back there, and they're all eating pizza, and we start talking and doing this interview. And so one of our first questions was, “Where is Tommy?” This was July 1978, and Marc Bell had just taken over. Joey said, “Well, we had to let him go because he was walking around clucking like a chicken!” I knew this is going to be a good interview, and I looked at Mike, and he was not writing anything down.

Mike Murphy (
The Denizens, the Rushlow-King Combo, the Boners, Hysteric Narcotics
):
I think I wrote stuff down. Or at least I wrote an article on it for
White Noise
. I could have made it all up. Johnny did most of the talking, and Joey just stood in front of a mirror and played with his hair. Dee Dee was too messed up to talk.