Detroit Rock City (42 page)

Mike Hard:
Before the Graystone was up and running, Birthday Party played Detroit, 1983. Everyone was there, and it was the night Detroit hardcore changed forever. John and Larissa were hanging out with Nick, and L-Seven and the Necros opened. It spawned the Laughing Hyenas.

John Brannon:
I have the board tape. I don't want to get sacrilegious here, but seeing the Birthday Party was better than the first time I ever saw Alice Cooper or Iggy. Because it was so fresh. It was the month they just put out the
Bad Seed
EP. Larissa and I had all those records, and I was writing what would be
Tied Down
. I'm listening to
Junkyard
and
Prayers on Fire
and thinking, “this is the shit, man!” I realized then that what you play and what you listen to can be two different things.

Dave Rice:
L-Seven opened, and I shook Roland Howard's hand afterward. But Nick Cave was out of it. He came off stage and came by in tears, all freaked out. I thought, “I'm not going to bother Mr. Cave.” He ended up hanging out with Scott Schuer and Larissa. Scott was driving Nick Cave around, looking to score, and Cave was searching under the seats. Scott had a seventies Impala, and Scott's like, “What are you looking for?” And Cave says, “Where's your shotgun? Doesn't everybody in Detroit have a shotgun?”

Scott Schuer (
L-Seven, guitarist
):
We ended up bringing Cave back to Larissa's apartment in the Judith on Willis Street. We both lived in that building at the time, but in different apartments. I think Cave had just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and seemed genuinely heartsick. I think we were just in the path of the train.

John Brannon:
Opie from Negative Approach played drums with L-Seven that night. We shared a practice space, and Opie knew all the songs, and Kory Clark had quit. That night I told all those Negative Approach dudes, “This is the future of rock and roll.” They all told me, “John, that band sucks. I hate this band.”

Margaret Dollrod (
Demolition Doll Rods, guitarist, vocalist
):
L-Seven were pussies. They called the cops on me one time because I wanted to get this guy's attention and he was dancing with another girl. I took my clothes off and I got on the stage thinking that maybe that would work. He was like, “What the fuck are you doing?” L-Seven called the cops, and they came to arrest me. The cops thought that I was dancing for the show, and they gave me a T-shirt. I went outside, and L-Seven was talking, “Yeah, we showed her. We called the cops.”

Dave Rice:
Larissa hadn't played guitar much before the Hyenas, just toward the end of the band when she just was hanging out with John and clinking out some Alice Cooper stuff or whatever. The next time I see her she's just killin'. Her tone, man. They were putting the Hyenas together, and L-Seven was done shortly after that. Around then I auditioned for PIL while I was living in Detroit, playing in the Linkletters. PIL were planning to do this tour, and he got me the audition in Pasadena at Perkins Palace. I flew myself out there. At that point it was an excuse to get out of Detroit, and I had a brother out there to stay with. I headed over to the audition, and here's Johnny Rotten in the front row with a big can of Fosters. When it was my turn, he said, “Dave from Detroit, play us some rock and roll.” So I played “This Is Not a Love Song” and “Swan Lake.” Martin Atkins was on drums, so it was pretty fuckin' cool. I didn't get the gig, and I don't think that tour ever happened. They were gonna do a tour and it got postponed, and then they did
Album
, so I can say I got bumped by Steve Vai.

EWolf (
photographer, Dirtbombs, drummer
):
There were so many different bands and so many different scenes by the mideighties. You had hardcore, and there were bands playing variations on it. Even some bands doing the more metal end of it like Ugly But Proud. There were bands that defied classification, like Sleep and Private Angst, Vertical Pillows. We did the
Angry Red Planet
EP for Corey when Touch and Go was still nothing. He had just started to do some things with the Butthole Surfers. Then he picked up the Didjits, and Big Black. I had been shooting music photography for some time, but without having any real plan. The Didjits came through town, and they stayed at my house. The next morning they got up and said, “Hey, you shoot pictures, don't you?” I said, “No. Yeah. Kind of.” They said,
“Well, we need some new publicity shots. Can you hook us up?” So I did it just as a favor. We did a session, and the photos came out great. I sent them the proofs, and Corey called me and said, “Man, we really liked the photos. We want to pay you for them so we can use them.” He just offered me some money and I figured, “Money? Okay.” Through Touch and Go once these photos went out, I guess anybody who was shooting photos who wasn't Charles Peterson or Michael Lavine at that point must have been shooting total shit, because everybody went gaga over these shots. I shot a lot of bands and record covers—Jesus Lizard, Atomic Fireballs, Iggy Pop, Lee Harvey Oswald Band. Stuff for Atlantic. I stopped counting at sixty-five covers.

John Brannon:
The next time Nick Cave came to town he stayed at my place at Cass and Willis across the street from the Clubhouse. I missed it all because I was doing the Tied Down tour with Negative Approach. It was '84 and
From Her to Eternity
has just come out. Larissa scored for him. He was like, “Fuck my band. I'm hanging out with you. Your boyfriend won't mind that I'm here?” She's like, “Oh, he's cool. He'd get a kick out of the fact you're even here.”

Sherrie Feight:
I saw her that night, and it really made me sad. She was all fucked up. I hated to see all that talent being wasted, and I knew that's where it was going.

John Brannon:
She's telling him, “This is like the area where you can walk a block and, you know, you could get a blowjob from a one-legged hooker. You cop dope two blocks away.” He looks through all my records and he put all the records into stacks, the ones he liked and the ones he didn't like. He put all the Detroit shit in one stack. All my Alice Cooper, Stooges, and shit. I get back and Larissa said, “I do remember he put all the Bowie stuff in the bad stack.” She said, “He pulled out your Ted Nugent first solo. That was in the good stack.” That was the start of the next phase for me. There wasn't a whole lot going on in Detroit other than hardcore. Nugent and Seger were no longer really part of Detroit and hadn't done a good record for years. There was a hair-metal scene, bands like Seduce, that didn't even sound like anything remotely Detroit.

Andy Wendler:
We came back from a tour, and a guy named Ken Waagner was in Detroit making a ton of money producing shows. Waagner started managing Seduce, but at first they were skeptical. They were doing live concerts on the radio, a local band at Harpo's thing, and they were making $300 to $400 a night. But they were selling out Harpo's and being on the radio. So Ken's like, “Well, let me
be your trial manager.” The very next night Ken comes out of the box office with $3,000. Wagner just went in there and said, “There are a thousand people in this club who paid five dollars a head to get in here tonight. You're not paying my band $300.” This is what the club scene was going like. There was money. The bands sure weren't making it.

John Brannon:
It was like everything had kind of hit a dead end, and there's this guy coming in first with the Birthday Party and then with the Bad Seeds, showing everyone what was going on. And we took that for sure. That Bad Seeds show was at St. Andrews, which was by then the big place to play in the city.

Chris Panackia:
Because you gotta remember, Bookie's, people just partied, and it was just fun and all that kind of stuff. But St. Andrews, it went to another level.

Vince Bannon:
We didn't make it to '83 at City Club. The guy who I had the joint venture with wanted to change the entire deal, so we walked out. We took everything to St. Andrews Hall and had a wonderful relationship there.

Chris Panackia:
Now you're talking about a twelve hundred–seat club with St. Andrews. You're talking about way more people to get involved in debauchery rather than seventy-five or one hundred. More money. It was the place to play. It was the number-one hall in North America all those years.

Andy Wendler:
We went on the
Tangled Up
tour that summer of '86, and we were finally making money. It was four months with Megadeth and four months with the Circle Jerks. We made anywhere between $5,000 and $25,000 a night. It was like, “Hey, here's some money.” Somebody would be like, “Oh man, my sneakers are bad,” and we'd say, “Okay, here's a hundred bucks. Go get sneakers and socks.” We played arenas. A week before this tour I was playing a gig in an eighty-seater. When we got back to Detroit the Hyenas were happening, and there was a whole new wave of hardcore: Almighty Lumberjacks of Death, all those guys. You know, all these new young hardcore bands were around, and I'd see 'em, and it wasn't my thing.

Jon Howard:
ALD, Feisty Cadavers, Son of Sam—I mean it got more into this like dirtbag, white trash, punk thing. It was more like what Scary Cary was doing at Graystone. It was like a little more chaotic and fucked up. No, it was more white trash, like Sex Pistols-y. The clubs were like Old Miami, Blondie's.

Mike Hard:
The clubs in Detroit had really gone in a direction. At the Old Miami you could score at eight o'clock and ten o'clock. The coke man is there. You go there at eight o'clock. You walk in, and there will be all these dudes sitting at the bar. Then the coke man will walk by them and he'll go into the bathroom. Then one at a time each guy—right into the bathroom. And the bathroom at fucking Old Miami was bad.

Margaret Dollrod:
I pissed in the street rather than use the bathroom at the Old Miami. Which wasn't really a stretch.

Mike Hard:
Or even do lines in there. But these motherfuckers are doing lines. There used to be a piece of wood in the Old Miami bathroom with, like, tile on it above the shitter? The guy who was running the place took that off and he put a piece of stainless steel there so they could do their lines without getting it fucking caught in the grout.

Charlie Wallace (
ADC, vocalist
):
We played the Hungry Brain, which was the basement of a retail store. The store was closed, but you go down to the basement and it was this huge, open floor. We pulled up and jumped out of the car and were swarmed by undercover cops, who were screaming at us, “Where are the needles?” We told them we're playing a show down the street, and they're like, “You guys are playing a show down here? Man, you're nuts.” These are the guys who just ran up to us asking about needles telling us this. They were sure the only reason four white guys are getting out of a car down there was to buy heroin.

Brian Mullan:
The Hungry Brain was this shithole to go hang out at after the Graystone closed, getting to the late eighties. Scary Cary took over booking shit at the Graystone and then did stuff at the Hungry Brain.

Norm Zebrowski (
Disinfect, vocalist
):
The Hungry Brain was one more Detroit venue in a really bad place. West Jefferson and Dearborn in Delray. Fucked up place—lotsa violence inside and out.

Mike Hard:
We played a place called the Bank one New Year's Eve. It was on Michigan Avenue. It was one of those big huge Detroit granite fucking banks that these kids bought, and right on top of the bar there were big old fucking nitrous tanks, nitrous balloons everywhere.

Lacy X (
Son of Sam, Hillside Stranglers, vocalist
):
There were bands like us, Son of Sam, that weren't in the Touch and Go clique. There was the Feisty Cadavers, Beer Whores, Almighty Lumberjacks of Death. The bands from '81 to '83 got more attention, but there was a big divide between that older scene and the one that had started.

Keith Jackson:
My pal Itchy and I were coming into Detroit from Farmington Hills, and it was hard to be accepted because there was this group of hardcore guys we called Russ's Army. It was after Russ Gibb. He might have been a legend for what he did with the Grande, but he was also a teacher and had all these students from Dearborn getting into the punk scene. Later he bought the Graystone, but those kids were just sort of his acolytes. I had already been hanging around at Bookie's, and I dug all the music there. But this was sort of a cliquish kinda hardcore thing, and the people in it were really clannish.