Detroit Rock City (4 page)

Norm Liberman (
Frut, vocalist
):
When people got tired of the Grande, we had places in Macomb County, which is north of Detroit. There were two geodesic domes out in the middle of nowhere, that was the Frut Palace. Every band that played there got $400, and we had every band in Detroit play there. My mother would take the money so that no one would steal it. I was standing there one night and my mother's taking the money, and Alice Cooper says, “Mrs. Liberman, why don't you let the guy over there inside?” “No, Alice, he can panhandle a little more before he comes in.”

John Kosloskey, aka Kozmo (
Frut, bassist
):
One of the guys around the Frut, his dad was the pastor at a local church in Mt. Clemens. The pastor wanted to have a gathering for the youth that would, you know, put them in the right direction. They had a hall at his church, and we played and gave everyone a hit of THC as they went in. We were exposing people to a lot of the creative things of the mind.

Norm Liberman:
We also had the Frut Cellar inside this old hotel in Mt. Clemens, the Colonial. We used to have 600 people inside and 250 on the steps waiting
to get in. At that place we could pay the bands for six, seven hundred dollars. Alice Cooper would come in for $800, and we packed the joint. Everybody was drunk on their asses. Drinks were a buck apiece. We would take the cover and pay the bands that were playing. We were usually on the bill too, and we would take the rest of the money and party with it ourselves. The guy who owned the joint would take the bar money.

Neal Smith (
Alice Cooper, drummer
):
We had the Eastown, the Grande, and the Sherwood Forest Rivera, with short drives to Ann Arbor and Lansing, so Detroit was a good spot for us to be.

Pete Woodman (
Popcorn Blizzard, Floating Circus, Bossmen, drummer
):
There was a place in Bay City, way north of Detroit, that all the bands played. Ted Nugent came out on his motorcycle.

Susie Kaine (
Popcorn Blizzard, Floating Circus, keyboardist, vocalist
):
Pete's mom would let the bands stay at the house. Ted would sleep in the woods out back.

Pete Woodman:
He knocked on the door and my mom opened the door and he wanted a cup of coffee or something. She said she'd seen this beautiful guy.

Jack Bodnar (
scenester
):
We lived at Lahser and Lois Lane not far from Southfield High School, and I was this geeky kid. I loved music, going to clubs, going to see anyone who played around town. You could see so much free or cheap music; going to the Grande was $2. When I graduated from high school, I wanted to have this little party in my parents' basement. It was a cinderblock thing, fairly small. I had invited these twin sisters that went to Edsel Ford High School, and they said, “Can we bring a band?” They were groupies; they hung out with bands. They were flat-out gorgeous girls—long straight blond hair. Mostly they hung with Wilson Mower Pursuit.

Bill White (
bassist, Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes
):
Liz and Ilka, Swedish twins. They followed us around. We met them at the Grande.

Jack Bodnar:
I said, “Sure, bring a band,” because we were just gonna play 45s. This was a straight party, no alcohol—my friends didn't drink. All of a sudden a van pulls up and it's some of the guys from the Amboy Dukes and all this equipment.
They had a full drum kit that took up about a quarter of the room. They started playing, and it literally shattered some of my parent's crystal. Stuff came crashing down. It was wonderful. I was suddenly the coolest kid ever.

Bill White:
We'd play a lot of weird places. That very well coulda have happened.

Rick Stevers (
Frijid Pink, drummer
):
We played at some Catholic high school with the MC5, and the school told them not to play “Kick Out the Jams.” Of course they did, and the place tried to shut them down, and in the process shit started getting tossed around, and Dennis Thompson threw his cymbal into the crowd and it hit this kid in the head. There was blood everywhere—can you imagine if that happened now? But Thompson went into the crowd. He was really sorry; he gave the kid the cymbal, and that was it.

John Kosloskey:
We played in Sault Ste. Marie in the upper peninsula of Michigan with the Amboy Dukes at the armory. We were on our way to the show and we got harassed by some local rednecks, and Mosley threw a bottle at their car. These guys called the cops on us. By the time the show ended the National Guard was called and the troops were circling the block where the show was. We thought they were protecting us from our crazed fans.

Rick Kraniak:
Frut were so stoned out. Leo Fenn booked them on a pop festival in Ohio, and they were so altered in their state of smoke that they not only missed the exit; they ended up in a different state.

Norm Liberman:
I seem to think there was a train involved that also held us up.

John Sinclair:
The most the MC5 ever made at the Grande was $1,800. We were on the bill with Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes, who were making a rare appearance at the Grande. The Amboy Dukes were great guys, but Ted Nugent—how could you trust a guy who didn't get high? Anyway, they had a place they played all the time in Northland Mall called the Mummp. It was like a dome, and they played there every weekend.

Don Was:
The Mummp was formerly Northland Playhouse, which was like a regional theater. It was taken over by the Weinstein family of Oak Park, and the house band was the Amboy Dukes. I could lay in bed and listen to the Dukes on Friday and Saturday nights, it was that close to my house when I was a kid.

Bill White:
I met Ted at the Mummp. They were playing, and they didn't have a bass player and he announced it on the PA. So I went back and met him, then went over to the house and played and I was in.

Ted Nugent:
It didn't really matter where we played. As long as we didn't blow the power and the amps kept working, I was a happy man. I mean, early days you look at the Crow's Nest East, the Crow's Nest West, and the Crow's Nest South, you look at the Birmingham Palladium, you look at the Hideouts, you look at the Shindigs, and the Hullabaloos, and the Fifth Dimension, I mean, they were all just makeshift facilities that were, you know, just rooms with the dividers blown out so we could pack in a lot of people and play. I loved 'em all. I loved the intimacy.

Russ Gibb:
John Finley was this young kid who worked for me, one of the original Grande kids. I always used these kids as a gauge for what was popular, who people would go see. John helped me develop the Grande actually. He went to Redford High School and would hand out handbills for the shows, so we'd always have all these Redford kids coming in. So he was a very early opinion maker. He introduced me to Ted.

Donny Hartman (
The Frost, guitarist
):
When the Frost broke up, Ted called me up and goes, “Hey, man. Ted Nugent.” I go, “How the hell you doin', Ted?” And I knew some of the guys in his band, and they were all bitchin' 'cause they had just done some stadium show, and he took, I think, almost a quarter million bucks outta there. Paid everybody in the band $850. Ted says, “Yeah, man. God, my guys are high. I'm having some problems with my guys.” “I wonder why, Ted.” He said, “Man, I'd really like you to sing in my band, man.” I said, “Yeah?” He goes, “Well, I'd love to pay all your expenses and everything, and I'll pay you $250 a night.” I said, “You shouldn't have made this phone call.” He says, “Why?” I said, “'Cause if I never talk to you again, it'll be too soon.”

Michael Lutz (
Brownsville Station, guitarist, vocalist, bassist
):
I went for an audition to sing with Ted one time at the Fifth Dimension in Ann Arbor, where the Amboy Dukes were doing both rehearsal and auditions. I auditioned with “Sunshine of Your Love” and “Manic Depression.” They were getting ready to do what would eventually become the album
Journey to the Center of the Mind
. They played the song “Journey to the Center of the Mind,” and I thought, “Holy shit, man. This is cool.” I got the call from Ted and he said, “You're it.” But John Drake owned their
PA system, and they couldn't afford a new one. So they had to keep Drake. But for one week I was the new singer for the Amboy Dukes.

Shaun Murphy (
Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, Stoney and Meatloaf, vocalist
):
A lot of people kind of misunderstood Ted. They thought he was drunk, they thought he was high, but he never took any drugs, never took any alcohol—that was him.

Russ Gibb:
He was around a lot of people who partook of the sacrament, but I don't know that I ever saw him indulge.

Ted Nugent:
I was hopelessly inebriated by the music.

K. J. Knight:
Back then Rusty Day and a lot of Ted Nugent's peers looked down at Ted because they felt as though he had a disingenuous onstage persona because he wouldn't take drugs. Ted was just a young guy trying to feel his way around, you know, and he wanted to put on a good show, so these guys felt as though even though he was so much against drugs, he acted like he was stoned when he was on stage. They always were trying to feed him drugs, persuade him and encourage him to take drugs.

Bill White:
Ted never took drugs, but he should have been on Ritalin.

K. J. Knight:
He was always down on that whole thing. I don't know if they just decided to come up with this bullshit way of looking at things because they were jealous of him. We'd always talk about a good rap onstage and being a good front man. He would try to come up with a cool rap, and he would maybe be a little bit jive.

Shaun Murphy:
Ted was living with the band in a huge carriage house. The bottom was a bedroom, a place for a car, a big rehearsal area. Upstairs was another bedroom, a kitchen, living room. Everything was pretty sparse but neat. Ted was a perfectionist; he's very fastidious.

Ted Nugent:
The band had a house out there on the west side, in Livonia on Middlebelt. We always rehearsed, and we were just obsessed with creating this new music and writing our own songs and discovering new musical adventure. Dave Palmer, Greg Arama, and I would do twenty-hour marathons in the basement at the house on Middlebelt. I didn't go hang out much.

Bill White:
We got signed to Polydor there. The guy came to see us practice, and he went upstairs while we were playing, got the phone and called New York, put the phone to the floor. That's how we got that deal.

Ted Nugent:
We played almost every night, and the nights we didn't play we'd go and see other bands. I would go the MC5's house over on Hill Street once in a while and then when they had the place in Hamburg. The SRC had a band house too, and I'd go over there. But again, it was all about smokin' dope, and I couldn't last more than a couple minutes because I thought we could play music and talk music, but the hippies couldn't talk. It was a heartbreaker, really.

Bill White:
The lick from “Journey to the Center of the Mind” came from the TV show
Rawhide
. We were sitting there, hanging out, watching TV, and Ted had his guitar in his hands and we said, “Play the next thing that comes on.”

Al Jacquez (
Savage Grace, bassist, vocalist
):
I sat in the back row of the Grande Riviera with Ted watching the Who one time. Pete Townsend went over and hit Keith Moon in the head with a stick during the set. Nugent was like, “Did you see that?” I think he really liked that idea.

Bobby Rigg (
The Frost, drummer
):
The first time we met Ted Nugent all he could talk about was himself and how he was the greatest guitar player in the world. We were in a hotel in New York City. We were staying there, Led Zeppelin was there, Nugent and the Amboy Dukes were there. And Nugent was on the same floor as Jimmy Page, and this hotel was built in a U-shape. Nugent's window was across from Jimmy Page's room; he put a Fender Twin Reverb in the window and started screaming at the top of his lungs, “I'm the greatest guitar player in the world! Jimmy Page sucks!” and started playing his guitar as loud as he could facing Jimmy Page's room. That's the way Ted Nugent was. What you see is what you get.

John Sinclair:
Ted Nugent is an asshole. He always was.

Ted Nugent:
The Amboy Dukes were invited to play Woodstock, but we had been burned by all these hippie promoters, where you didn't go on stage on time, sometimes you didn't go on at all. I'll never forget the Black Arts Festival at Olympia that Mike Quatro put together. He let the stage managers from the Grande Ballroom manage the thing, and they were all so stoned out of their minds that we never even got to go on stage, it was so inept. So I was so let down by the disrespect
towards the music—and the musicians—not just because it was us, but any musician. Look at Hendrix, going on at 6 a.m. at Woodstock. Are you shitting me? Who would do that to Jimi Hendrix? I'll tell you who would do that: an uncaring, an inconsiderate, soulless, piece-of-shit, stoned fuck, that's who would do that. So I was invited to Woodstock, and I go, yeah, it'll cost you $2,500, just send the check here, and if the check shows up, we'll show up, and if not, fuck you. So I would refuse to do those things and get stiffed anymore. You know, we still had to buy our speakers and buy our guitar strings, we still had to eat, we still had to get gas and fucking tires and oil for the vehicles. What do think—it's a donation from us to you? Fuck you.