Detroit Rock City (48 page)

Harold Richardson:
John was already a local legend in Ann Arbor. I was working at a pizza place and doing a delivery one night and saw John having sex with a chick; he had her bent over a car by the Blind Pig downtown. I went back and told the guys at work I just saw John Brannon fucking some chick, and we all jumped in my car and went back, and he was still fucking her. Of course we yelled at him. Heroin was everywhere around Detroit and Ann Arbor in those years. I started driving a cab, and I'd always have people jumping in the cab looking to score, and I always knew where to take them. Most of the cabdrivers I worked with were junkies and crackheads. Right before they put her away, I would take Eminem's wife, Kim, from Ann Arbor to Detroit so she could cop. Usually it would be a round trip, and I would wait around and she would call me. She was a pretty tough lady, and she would complain to me that white guys were never into her.

Preston Long:
Kevin, me, and Jim formed Mule and toured on a demo tape, with flyers that said Ex Hyenas. That was a time when you could play anywhere and people would come out. One of our first shows was in East Lansing with Urge Overkill somewhere on campus, and we didn't know what the fuck we were doing. We had borrowed amps, and I probably had a borrowed guitar, and by then Jim and Kevin were a pretty respected, established rhythm section, and there I was out front with this borrowed gear, and I sucked. I knew I wasn't a front man and I wasn't a guitar player. I heard about that shit for years, how bad I sucked. So I came back to Detroit and went down in the basement by myself and practiced the songs over and over and did all the stuff I couldn't do, like standing up and singing and playing. We had no ethics before that MSU show; I was like, “Fuck this. I am not showing up like that again.” When we worked on our first album with Steve Albini, Kurt Cobain had died about that time, and Albini had mostly good things to say about Kurt. He has a lot of bad shit to say about people, but he was smart enough to rein it in about Kurt.

We toured in a Volvo station wagon that had 220,000 miles on it that my sister had given me. Jim had this shitty little Chevy Monza. We toured in two cars, and we spent more money keeping the Volvo running than we were making. It broke
down in Montreal, Baltimore, Ohio somewhere, and I'd have to be the one to get up at six in the morning and find someone to fix it, and we would be puttering up to a gig, and it would die in front of the club. Inside we had to travel with all these hoses and things to fix it; we collected parts and had them in the cab, and the radio didn't work. A few gigs we showed up after everyone had left. That was the demo tape tour.

Jack White (
White Stripes, The Dead Weather, Raconteurs, solo, guitarist, vocalist
):
I didn't know anything about Detroit music—its identity—until I worked with Brian Muldoon and he was playing the Gories for me. My brothers weren't even into the Stooges or the MC5 or Motown. They were into a lot bigger stuff, like the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Who. The Muldoons lived next to us; they were a family of like seven or eight kids. We had a bunch of big Catholic families on the block. I'm the tenth child in my family, seventh son. So he was doing upholstery in the basement of that house, and I ended up doing upholstery in the basement of my house later on. As a total side note, there was a third upholsterer on the end of the block, this little German guy named Klomp, and he had been the first one. So that's why I named my upholstery shop Third Man Upholstery. But Brian's family was into all the punk: Iggy Pop, David Bowie stuff, Television—they were into all that. I had gotten the Stooges record out of the dumpster in the alley. His brother had gotten hold of the family house and threw a ton of records from the attic out in the garbage, and I just happened to be walking home that day and saw those, and I got the first Stooges record out of that trash and fell in love with it, you know. I recorded “I Wanna Be Your Dog” on a four-track—it was hilarious. It was sort of like, “Oh, okay, so that's supposed to be Iggy Pop, when he was younger or something?” I had known a little about Iggy Pop, but it was kind of funny. It was sort of one of those things people thought I was making it up later on, you know? A little too perfect.

Bobby Harlow (
The Go, Conspiracy of Owls, vocalist
):
I was born in Miami and lived with my mother until I was twelve. Then I was raised by my grandparents. I was supposed to be named Robin after Robin Trower. I was going to get beaten to a pulp in school, so my grandparents talked my parents out of it. I could sing
all the Beatles songs when I was a kid. One day I got really high on acid and put on the
White Album
. I only had the first half, but I listened to it that day and something clicked.

Jack White:
When I was fourteen we skipped school and went to Harmony House at Trappers Alley, and I bought the
White Album
by the Beatles. The Robert Johnson box set was up on the wall; Columbia had just come out with that box set, and that picture of him on the cover legitimately was scary to me. I thought, “I have no interest in listening to that music; that's very scary.” So it took a couple years for that stuff to siphon through. When I got older, in my twenties, and all my friends worked at record stores, and all these record collectors and garage rockers, you know, a lot of them worked at record stores, so they had the ability to listen to so much music. I was jealous of them because you just don't have the time in the day to be able to do that, and when you have a job at a place like that, well, I started thinking maybe I should work at one of those places. That's when I made the decision to be careful of myself, to be careful collecting things like records and emulating other people.

Dan Kroha:
I met Jack hanging out at the Gold Dollar. At that point I was renting an apartment on Prentis. Doll Rods were kinda old hat by that time. When I first met Jack he's like, “Wow, you're Dan from the Gories? Wow! Really?!” He looked up to me so much that I didn't even notice that he was, like, this much taller than me.

Jack White:
I was sort of fumbling my way through, and I didn't know that the Gories still lived in town or whatever; by the time I skated into them, I was really impressed. I didn't know you could go to a show and maybe see one of them.

Margaret Dollrod:
After the Gories broke up, I told Danny, “I could do a band with you, but it's an all-girl band.” Because he was always going through my clothes, I was like, “Maybe you, like, want to be more flamboyant in your dress, maybe you want to be a girl.” He used to tell me when he was little that he'd put his hair behind his ears and wrap a towel around his legs like a mermaid. If we're friends, we help each other's dreams come true. So I said, “I don't know if I want to be the mermaids. But I wanna be your friend. So I'm having a girl band. You wanna be a girl in the band, you can be a girl in the band, but it's an all-girl band.” That was the Demolition Doll Rods.

Tom Potter (
Bantam Rooster, Dirtbombs, Detroit City Council, guitarist, vocalist
):
Dan was one of those guys where people would be like, “Dan's got to be a total fucking fag—he dresses like a girl.” I'm like, “No way, man. That dude gets more fuckin' ass than a toilet seat.” He always had chicks.

Dan Kroha:
Before that I had Rocket 455. I was one of the founding members of that band. It was named after a car that Margaret had, an Olds '88, a humongous two-door with the 455 engine. But Margaret came to me with that idea. Good name. Crazy, cool, weird song titles. Wants me to be a girl in it. This is something different. So I said, “Yeah! Alright, let's do this.” I'd wear her clothes. We would go to the thrift store almost every day. She had really good taste in weird stuff. We made a bedroom of the house we were in into a closet. All our clothes were together because I was really into clothes. I would start picking stuff out of her stuff and be like, “Okay, I want to wear this, I want to wear this.” It was the early nineties. There was a lot of freaky stuff coming out.

Jack White:
I went to a Doll Rods show up in Ferndale at Magic Bag, and I came outside, and I had bought the album in there,
Tasty
, and I was walking outside, and the Hentchmen were right there. Somehow I started talking to them, and they said, “Let me see the cover,” and they were laughing because it was Mick eating a hot dog on the cover. I said, “Oh, I didn't know that was Mick.” I didn't put two and two together. And then John Hentch asked me what I did, and I said, “I do upholstery,” and he goes, “Give me your card. I have some work for you.” That ended up with the White Stripes playing our first gig—we opened up for the Hentchmen the next day.

John Szymanski:
We met Jack and Meg outside, and we were playing at the Lager House a few weeks later and needed an opening band. So he told us about the White Stripes and it sounded cool. They said they had never played out, so this was their first weekend playing.

Jack White:
It was just baby steps and learning; it wasn't my scene. I'd only been in one band as a drummer, Goober and the Peas, and they weren't really part of that scene. They were part of a different part of the music scene. At the same time I was playing in coffee houses for a couple years there in Hamtramck, which is totally different from all that scene as well. Dan and the Rocket 455 came in there. Kroha had a Rocket 455 patch on the back of his jacket, and someone had
mentioned something having to do with the Gories, and I didn't know who he was or whatever. Later on, when I had met him, I remembered him from being in the coffee house with that jacket on, which was pretty funny.

John Szymanski:
Jack knew Neil from the Gold Dollar because of Goober and the Peas. I think the White Stripes played its first show there, then with us the next night at the Lager House.

Bobby Harlow:
The Gold Dollar was initially intended to be more of an art rock kind of thing. That was what it was supposed to be, but then rock-and-roll bands took over. Neil Yee, the owner, wanted, like, stuff that was a little more left field, a little more left center, and then what he ended up with was the Wild Bunch and the Hentchmen and the Cobras and the White Stripes that were doing more direct music.

Neil Yee (
owner, booker, Gold Dollar
):
I saw the building, the Gold Dollar, in 1994, and it was just this empty place that needed plumbing and electric, which I did a lot of myself with some friends. Still, it looked destroyed when I bought it, and it looked destroyed when I opened it.

There were people around there who were fighting against the bar, and I went in thinking it was going to be a losing proposition. I wasn't expecting big crowds, but I ended up doing better than the numbers in my business plan.

Harold Richardson:
People always talk about the Gold Dollar as this place the so-called garage thing started in Detroit. But they started by booking noise bands from Ann Arbor and shit.

Neil Yee:
I didn't picture the place as getting big. But it did get best known as this place for “garage” in Detroit, this focus on one style of music. But a lot of what I liked wasn't for the masses.

Jim Magas:
I played at the Gold Dollar as Magas and set up the first two US shows for Peaches. I had just started doing solo electronic stuff, and someone said I should meet Peaches because she was doing stuff like me. I e-mailed her and brought her to Chicago. Then I decided she'd be great to play in Detroit, and by now Brannon and Harold were doing Easy Action. I called John and he said, “Does she have a demo?” I told him, “Just trust me on this.” I put her at the Gold Dollar with Magas and Easy Action. We got $50 each. A couple years later Peaches and I played at the Magic Stick, and Marilyn Manson was there. She didn't need a demo.

Neil Yee:
Within weeks I got a call from Elvis Costello's keyboard player, who was in town doing a show at the Fox Theater, and they wanted to check the place out. I don't think he showed up. One of our door guys almost didn't let Alex Chilton in—we were strict about that. One of the guys from Sponge came around and said, “You know who I am. We have a top-ten song.” He says, “Well, then you must have $5.”

Harold Richardson:
We were one of the first rock bands to play the Gold Dollar. We moved to Detroit after a bunch of shows at the Dollar, since John and I were banned from the 8 Ball and the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor anyway. We were drugged out dudes, and John had a thing for one of the waitresses at the Pig, and she thought he was stalking her. Not long after we got back to Detroit our drummer, John LeMay, got busted for dope and so did Brannon. Brannon was living at the Beethoven Apartments on Third and Prentis, and he was copping over by Masonic, and he got busted with the dealer. They put him in the cell they called the David Ruffin suite because he had guitar picks in his pocket. The cops were like, “Oh, you're a musician? We'll put you in the David Ruffin suite.” At that time, late nineties, the Detroit scene was small, and everyone was excited that something was starting to go down. Eventually we got left behind when everyone else got big. The White Stripes were just starting, and no one liked them. But pretty soon we were doing tours, and people were asking about them. This was after that first single on Sympathy, and I got back and said to Jack, “You should go on the road; everyone's asking about you.” He was like, “Okay, okay, yeah.” He wasn't crazy about it at first. But in a few months they were huge. Once they got huge, everyone else did with this garage thing, and we were left with the rock thing. We weren't so popular.