Detroit Rock City (53 page)

Long Gone John:
I went on an East Coast tour with the White Stripes and the Von Bondies. The Von Bondies record had just come out, and there was real severe friction between Jack and Jason. Jack did not like that guy, and he was jealous of Jason's relationship with Marcie. They were just friends, but they were in a band together. Even when Jack had nothing to do with Meg anymore, he did not like anyone else to be with Meg.

Jason Stollsteimer:
At the Magic Stick there was never a fight. I got sucker punched. I didn't go to the police. Because there were so many witnesses, it was the state of Michigan that filed against him. I never sued him. I never took Jack White to court. How many times in history have two people from the local scene
been that well documented? Within twenty-four hours he went to the police and said that I attacked him, which later he admitted he lied about that. He's, like, six-four, and I don't know how to throw a punch. I'm six-one, but he outweighed me by 70 pounds. He was, like, 210, like, six-four, and I was, like, six-foot-one, 140. It's like if a high school kid beat up a middle school kid. I've met more people that say there were witnesses to it than physically could have been there. “Oh man, I was there.” “No, you fuckin' weren't. You actually were playing a show that night in another city. I know you weren't there. Stop being an idiot.”

Jack White:
It was a bar fight with somebody who is very manipulative, and that's why everyone heard about it. Had I gotten in a fight with Dave Buick, you wouldn't have heard about it. Or John Krautner. He had a history of manipulation with everybody on the scene and especially me.

Marcie Bolen:
I was at the Magic Stick that night talking to Jack. We were broken up, but I gave him a present, a little stuffed baby duck, but he didn't want it. I was like, “All right. Fine. Whatever. Whatever. We're broken up. That's fine. I'll keep it myself.” Then he started going over to Jason. He was pissed, and I was like, “Oh man, something's going to go down.” I just knew he was in such a bad mood, and I was going over to Jason, “Stop. Don't do it.” Jack was yelling at him and I was hitting him on the back, “Don't, don't, don't, don't.” All of a sudden they were fighting. I had to walk away. And after that night Jack and I have never been friends again. He's like, “You didn't stick up for me. You told the lawyer that, what I did.” I'm like, “I just said what I saw.” What else can I do? He's like, “Fuck you. You should have stood up for me. That guy never stuck up for you.” I have been caught between Jack and the Von Bondies.

Tom Potter:
Shit, a year earlier no one would have cared about that whole thing.

John Krautner:
It was just a bar fight. Nothing more.

Jason Stollsteimer:
The only other thing that happened that night was press related. And everybody knew this. The next morning I had a cover of
Spin, Blender
—a four-page article in
Blender
—and
NME
. This was Von Bondies coverage, for advance of
Pawn Shoppe Heart
. They all got canceled because of the incident, and we never got them back. The record came out, and they were supposed to give me all this coverage. Our record review in
Spin
was five out of five. All the reviews were great, but every press blurb about it was only about the incident, not about the
band. Our record had already sold thirty to forty thousand copies in prerelease, and it actually killed our record sales. It did not help. It's a total lie if anybody says it helped. We were supposed to have a cover on
Blender
. And instead of having the photo that they were gonna have of the band, they had one of me with a black eye. All of our interviews turned into that. The thing that sucked—we had mutual friends, local guys, who said he knew that I had all that press. So for him to pick that day, the day before our biggest press day ever, still irks me. I still have my press sheet from
Sire
saying what all of our interviews are, and they all got canceled. December 13 or whatever it was. I couldn't do them. I couldn't see. I was still in the hospital. My whole face was swollen. I was unconscious after the first punch.

Jack White:
It took a while for me to understand that guy. I let him rehearse in my house for a long time. They asked me to produce their album, and I did, but they didn't want to put my name on the album. It was sort of like, “Well, we don't want people thinking. . . .” Well, why did you ask me to produce the record? That kind of stuff. Which, in its own essence, I don't give a damn about, but when someone starts getting insulting and saying things about you in the press, you're kind of like, “Wait a minute, dude, I did that for free, and you guys rehearsed in my house for free, and I took you guys on tour, and I could have picked some other band. I got you guys signed to Sympathy, all of that.” Stuff I wouldn't even have said out loud because it sounds so self-serving. I didn't give a damn about that until it came back negatively to me, and I was like, “Wait a minute, hold on a second, get out the scorecard here for a second.” It's also winning the fight, you know what I'm saying? It's like, I saw someone a couple days later who said, “You should have given yourself a bloody nose.”

Rachel Nagy:
Jack White is the only person in this whole scene that I'm glad he has made it. He is ambitious, he's clever, and he lifted up everybody in Detroit. Every interview he did, he lifted everybody up, including us. He helped a lot of people along the way, and a lot of people feel bad now, including Jason Stollsteimer from the Von Bondies. What did Jason do? Turned around and said, “Jack didn't do nothing for me.” Ahh! Fuck you, you dick. I would've fucking gutted him like a fucking bitch. Jack, when he started getting successful, everybody had that sour grapes: “Well, I could have done that. I should have done that.” Oh, really? Well, you didn't. I don't like everything Jack does, and quite frankly, I don't really enjoy his music. But I respect the fuck out of him.

Ko Melina:
I thought the Von Bondies were going to be the next big band, because Jack had heavily promoted them so much and taken them on tour so much, so it kind of seemed natural that they would be the next to get big.

Jason Stollsteimer:
I never defended myself in the press—what was the point? He was just becoming huge right then. You can't stand up to the local god. My lawyer said to me immediately, “Minimum $250,000 in damages because you were about to break. Your record just came out and you had all this press, and we can prove it.” I said, “I wanna make my own money.” I really didn't want his money. He went to court for criminal stuff; it wasn't civil. When they said, “Do you want to settle?” I go, “Settle what? I want him to say that he did it.” I've never said his band is bad. People say, “What do you think of the White Stripes?” I think they're an amazing band and very unique. I don't like the guy. After the album came out the interviewers asked about it every time. And if you notice, 90 percent of the interviews I never answered. The 10 percent that I did I regret.

Jim Diamond:
The White Stripes made it huge and then, to a much lesser degree, bands like the Cobras, the Electric Six, the Dirtbombs, out of that whole scene. The only thing that went awry with that was I felt that I should get a royalty off the first White Stripes record. Jack was like, “You're not getting a fucking dime. You didn't do shit.” I had some legal counsel that had some dollar signs in this person's eyes. So I sued, and my lawyer convinced me, “No, you don't want to just go after royalties. What we should do is, you are involved with copyright here. You are a coauthor of the sound recording.” He showed me all this case history and said, “No, you are a coauthor of the actual sound recording.” Not the writing of the song but the physical sound recording. I said, “That's not what I'm interested in. I just want, like, a fucking two points off the sales.” I spent $5,000 on depositions.

Eddie Baranek:
I was deposed. I called Jim and I said, “I love you Jim, but don't fucking involve me in this shit.” Friends of mine went down there to be deposed, and I said, “How is it?” They said, “There's a little pudgy guy who's a real asshole, and you do not want to be in a room with that guy. You will be there for a few hours, and he will just kill you.” That was Jack's lawyer. I didn't want to go down there. I don't have anything against Jack. Jack got successful. Like, whatever—he got his and that's good, you know. And it helped everyone else in this town.

Tyler Spencer:
I ran into Jack one day at Eastern Market and we had lunch. He told me he had two ideas about being sued. One was putting up billboards in Detroit that read, “Jim Diamond Sues His Friends.” The other was buying the building that Jim has his studio in and evicting him.

Jim Diamond:
I wish someone had sat down and said, “You know we shouldn't do this, Jim. It'll fuck up your reputation. It will make you look like a jerk. We
shouldn't go after copyright.” No one took into account this guy's a superstar and a millionaire and a very powerful person at this point. It shouldn't have been a jury trial. I was watching jurors sleep when I was there. I'm thinking, “Oh my God, this doesn't bode well.” Then they just saw this star who won a Grammy. His lawyer kept saying, “Well, this is a Grammy winner who worked with Loretta Lynn and such luminaries.” I was on some entertainment show called
Entertainment Justice
. It was one of those like 1:30-in-the-morning shows on Channel 50. My sister called me up and told me they had a picture of me and they described me as this worm crawling out of the woodwork, just some guy hanging around in the studio. It made me look like a schmuck to most of the public. I saw shit in the
NME
about how “Jim Diamond claims he wrote the songs now” or “He claims he created the White Stripes.” They don't know what coauthorship of a sound recording means. After I filed that lawsuit, my business just went, pssht. I mean garage rock was kind of done and then that. People didn't want to work with me.

Eddie Baranek:
I know that in his heart to this day that Jim didn't give a fuck about the credit. And the town was already divided in a way, and that just completely drove the stake. It was one of those things, “Oh, and you're still recording at Jim's?” This was from people who would be in a band with Jim. That would tour with Jim. Certain people. I would go, “You fucking lowlifes.” That's what I thought. They were siding with Jack because they don't want to get their little piece of the pie ruffled. So we still go into work the next day at Jim Diamond's. We still go to our studio because that's where I go. That's what I do.

Jim Diamond:
The jury determined that in August of 2001 Jack and I had a conversation, and he said I was never getting a dime. And that's what I basically lost on.

Jack White:
Jim Diamond was paid in full for the job he was asked to do, and that job was engineer our record. I have a paid receipt for it which was the only evidence we needed to show in court. The camera man for the film
Apocalypse Now
doesn't own part of the copyright of the film.

Mike E. Clark (
Insane Clown Posse, Kid Rock, producer
):
I didn't have a dad. I grew up in government housing on government cheese. My mom drank, a lot. I never got in trouble as a kid because I was afraid that if they called the cops, I knew they would call my mom, and I wouldn't know what condition she was in.

I got a job at GM and got laid off. I took some computer-assisted design classes and got a job and got laid off again. Then I saw recording courses, and I had already had all this shit downtown, and I just wanted to do live sound. That's what I wanted to do—a record or whatever. Music was my whole thing anyway. My mom was dying of cancer, in hospice at the time. I was like, “Mom, I'm going to take these recording courses.” She knew I was trying to find a job. She's like, “Do it.” You know, she wanted to be a singer when she was a kid, but she was too afraid to try. Now she totally had my back. I said, “I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I don't know what's going to happen.” I hated the automotive industry. I hated the nine to five. I hated everybody in it, you know. She asked, “How much is it?” I told her, “It's $500 to get in.” That's all she had left like in her account. But she's like, “I don't need it.” She gave me fucking her last $500 to get into these recording courses. I started learning and I would always go to shows and approach the bands, “You wanna record?” The first thing was the Viv Akauldren thing, and then the second one was Gangster Fun. We were in a little closet practically, recording at this place, the Disc, where the main studio was upstairs. They wouldn't let me up there. Eventually I started working the main studio. It was a rap studio, though, and the rappers didn't want to work with me.