Detroit Rock City (44 page)

John Brannon:
We get out of Detroit, and as soon as we moved to Ann Arbor that's when the horse kicked in. So we drove to Detroit to the same block we had lived in every day to get dope. We were aware of all the dealers. When we lived in Detroit that might have been like a once-a-month thing for Larissa. It was just a matter of time before that got worse. She wouldn't string out, but it would be like a pick-up now and then. Then the dope just eventually caught up with all of us—Kevin, Larissa and I. Of course I was already a derelict before I met her. But heroin didn't really come up until about '85 to '86.

Kevin Monroe:
I'm an adventurer. I like music as an adventure, and the drug thing was an adventure for me. I was into it, and I'm not afraid to do anything. I probably, in a lot of ways, revived a spirit in John and Larissa that probably shouldn't have been revived. Larissa didn't really introduce John to dope. Maybe on a small scale. It didn't go crazy until we were all together. I feel as much to blame if not more so as being an influence for that particular excursion. I was at least an extremely effective go-between. It wasn't Larissa with the connections at that time. Later on, yeah. Working with them, I started showing up with a lot more quantity of things and quality of things. Then it was different. Clearly different.

Rachel Nagy:
My dad worked for Ford; he was a heavy truck engineer. They moved him around, so I went to kindergarten in Australia, which was fucking awesome. Then we came back to Detroit and I went to school there. I was in second grade the first time I saw a
Hustler
magazine. It was in my school playground, which didn't have swings; it just had chains. And we used that picture for our little playhouse. It was great. I mean, it was disgusting. It was some girl with her legs spread. Welcome to Detroit. We lived different places in Detroit: 7 Mile, Evergreen, Woodbine. I went to church and school at 10 Mile and Nevada. It was a majority black church and school. Ford Headquarters is in Dearborn, so we eventually moved there, and that's when I left. I missed Detroit. I knew how to function there. There was, like, no rules. You could set your car on fire and nobody would give a shit. I mean, they'll rape you and murder you, oh well. But at least you can do what the fuck you want to do. When I left home it was, “Oh, she's not gonna graduate. She's gonna become a loser, blah, blah, blah.” I walked from the Cass Corridor to Edsel Ford, down 94, every day. I also caught rides, and then guys would pull down their pants and then I would stick a switchblade in their crotch. And then they would drive me all the way to school, as opposed to just part of the way. I graduated with honors. I didn't go to my graduation ceremony, either. Fuck all you all. You gotta remember you're fucking sixteen or seventeen years old—you can't get a decent job. So I stripped. I stripped on the seedy places on Michigan Avenue, where they didn't give a shit. Gold Diggers, Show Bar 51 or 52—you know, it was just run by old Jewish ladies. As long as you didn't drink,
they didn't care. You know what is really fucking pathetic? Those were the days when you could work a day shift and make $13.50 an hour. Cash. There was no contact. You didn't have to sit on anybody's lap. It was all tips. It was all just these regulars. It eventually turned into guys fucking girls in corners and you having to pay to work.

Mick Collins (
Dirtbombs, Gories, Blacktop, guitarist, vocalist
):
I was born in 1965 into a family with absolutely no musical background. And I'm talking about extended family: aren't any musicians or artists or anything. My first show was Bo Diddley at the Michigan State Fairgrounds. It was at around two o'clock in the afternoon, and I was about eight years old. My dad used to work on cars at an auto shop across the street from the state's largest record distributor on 6 Mile and Linwood. He worked on the car of a guy named Mr. Angott, who was part of this record distributor. Mr. Angott found out that my dad had five kids at the time—this would have been the midfifties—and he started giving my dad a box of records from the week. So when I came along a decade later, we had a basement full of rock 'n' roll 45s. We had hundreds of them, if not thousands. And by this time, you know, that kind of rock 'n' roll was totally outdated. So there was a record player down there, and what I did, when I was in kindergarten or whatever, I would sit down there and play records all day. By the time I was twelve I was spending my allowance on disco 12s. There was a record shop literally around the corner from my house. And when punk rock rolled around we were like, “We can do this! Let's give it a try,” and we gave it a try. I was not aware of any Detroit rock-and-roll legacy at that point. We didn't discover those bands for another decade probably. I didn't even want to lie about it—you know everyone wants to claim they were listening to the Stooges and MC5 before they were born. But I didn't hear about those bands until I was eighteen or nineteen.

John Szymanski, aka John Hentch (
The Hentchmen, organ, vocals
):
The legacy of Detroit rock and roll didn't affect us at all, me and my friends in high school. As far as music goes, it was hearing oldies radio, sixties stuff. Our parents were not rock and rollers, and that whole Detroit music thing didn't impact us at all; we were just aware of Motown.

Rachel Nagy:
I mean, there's this crowd, when you grow up in Detroit, your parents listen to shit. You hear it at house parties; you see people dancing in your house and that . . . entire “Well, that's what old fogies listen to.” It's not until later
on that you get into punk and metal and whatever else and then at some time, it dawns on you: Holy crap, this is where this all came from and this is way better, you know?

Jason Stollsteimer (
Von Bondies, Baby Killers, guitarist, vocalist
):
The MC5—did they ever actually live in Detroit? Because they're Downriver kids. That was always like a rumor in the younger people like, “They weren't even from Detroit.”

Dan Kroha (
Gories, Demolition Doll Rods, Rocket 455, guitarist, vocalist
):
From '82, '83, when I was seriously starting music, to play and really listen, to about '86, I wouldn't listen to the MC5 or the Stooges. I thought that was, like, hippie music, because anything from the late sixties to me was hippie music, and any guys with long hair were hippies. When hardcore was going on I was discovering, like, the sixties garage scene that was, like, concurrently popping up. Gun Club was the first punk band that did blues kinda stuff as far as in the late seventies, early eighties. I was really into the Who and stuff like that.
Quadrophenia
. I started trying to find other people that liked that music, and I started reaching out. I met these guys in Madison Heights that liked sixties stuff. They hung with some Rochester people, and one of them was Tom Lynch. He was at Hart Plaza one time for a show, and he was wearing a Martha and the Vandella's T-shirt. Mick Collins saw him with one of these shirts on, so Mick came up to Tom and said, “Hey man, where did you get that shirt?” They started to talk and they exchanged numbers.

Mick Collins:
I was wearing the Martha and the Vandellas T-shirt. King Sunny Ade played Hart Plaza in 1984. So my friends and I, we had to see that. We rode our bikes downtown, and there's three thousand people down there, so you can people watch. We were walking around Hart Plaza, and we see this guy in an English Beat T-shirt, and it wasn't the stock one; it wasn't the one that you see in all the magazines and catalogues—it was a different one. I was like, “Oh my god, we have to meet this guy and find out where he got this shirt from.” My friends were like, “No, do not tease the white people. Let's keep going and stay out of trouble. Let's keep walking and check out King Sunny Ade.” I went up to this guy and asked him where he got this shirt from, and he liked my Martha and the Vandellas T-shirt.

Dan Kroha:
One day I came over to Tom's, and he was talking on the phone to Mick, and he said, “You know this guy that I'm talking to on the phone lives in
Detroit. He might not live very far from you. You should talk to him.” I got on the phone and talked to Mick.

Peg O'Neill (
Gories, drummer
):
Growing up I was really into the sixties stuff. My mom was always playing music in the house, Motown and all that. We'd always listen to the oldies stations—Fats Domino and stuff like that—because it sounded different than anything else. I first saw Dan walking home from high school. I used to walk down Livernois on the way home from high school heading to Sam's Jams. He'd drive by on his scooter, and I was kind of this Who freak. I got this big book on them and started reading about mods and shit, and I started painting targets on my clothing. Then I see him on his scooter cruising down Livernois.

Dan Kroha:
I found a '73 Vespa in the paper. A little 125, and I went out and looked at it. It was in perfect condition. It was bright orange. It wasn't really the
Quadrophenia
thing I was looking for, but there weren't any others. It was a '73; it wasn't a '63. I bought it anyway and decorated it a little bit, and I wrote, “The Face” on the side of it. Peggy was walking home from Ferndale High, and she'd see me buzzing around with my Vespa, and I kinda caught her eye. Then we started on Saturdays to go to Dearborn to Off the Record.

Peg O'Neill:
I met Mick not long after that. Dan kept telling me, “You gotta meet this friend of mine.” Because you know how it was back then: if you saw someone that looked like you or might be into the same stuff you're into, you're just like, “Oh my God. It's someone just like me.” Dan was like, “Oh, you gotta meet my friend. He's really cool. He's into the same stuff we're into. He DJs, and he has these bands.”

EWolf:
Mick would DJ at places and use the moniker James McDermott. He wore a suit, looked very natty and almost ska-like. I caught him once at Cobb's Corner spinning, playing Mod stuff and old garage records.

Peg O'Neill:
It's hard to forget Mick's DJ name—James McDermott. So mod. One night Dan and I walked into Paycheck's and Mick played “Boom Boom” by John Lee Hooker. I was like, “Holy shit, this is gonna be great.” I just kept coming up to him, requesting it over and over. He probably thought I was annoying.

Mick Collins:
When we started the Gories, it was totally influenced by
Back from the Grave
comps. We heard those bands and that really was the moment we said,
“We can do this.” We heard
Back from the Grave
and
Nuggets
, and I think
Pebbles
was just coming out. And we thought: you know the goal was really just to say that we'd done it and maybe made a couple 45s, and you know, like, years down the road maybe we'd do a comp that was like
Back from the Grave
. That was the idea.

Dan Kroha:
Back from the Grave
had just come out, and all other comps were coming out. So we'd sit around and listen to them and drink Budweiser. We were beer drinkers, a little bit of weed. Some acid now and then. Very sixties style. We were hanging out in my bedroom, listening to records, and Mick was like, “Man, these songs only have like three chords in them.” He goes, “We can play this stuff.” I'm like, “Well, let's do it! We should do it then!'

Mick Collins:
We decided to start the Gories, and Peg was the drummer because she was sitting there. Peg and Dan were boyfriend-girlfriend and she was there while we were having this conversation. And the person we called wasn't home. Fred Munchinger from Fortune Maltese—we called him to be in the band, and he happened not to be home that night. So we got Peg to do it.

Dan Kroha:
She said, “No way, man, no. I've never played anything. I have no desire to get up on stage and do anything.” “No, you gotta do it,” we told her. “We're going to be the worst band you ever heard in your life.”

Peg O'Neill:
It took a while for them to convince me.

Dan Kroha:
Peg and I broke up before we ever played and almost never started the band.

Mick Collins:
When Dan and Peg broke up, that was the end of the band, and this was still 1986. We hadn't played a show yet. Peg announced that they just had broken up and that she was leaving the band, moving to Pittsburgh. So around July I get this phone call from Peg going, “Hey, when's practice?” and I was like, “What do you mean practice? You quit the band!” And at this point she was back in the band, and I was, like, bugged about it.