Oral history of the 80s Detroit, Michigan, punk scene - part 4 of 10: John Brannon and Larissa Stickland

 This is just a part of a longer piece from Longreads on the Detroit punk scene in the 80s.

An Oral History of Detroit Punk Rock

In Detroit’s empty buildings and troubled streets, restless kids squatted, ran punk clubs, pressed their own records, and made their own magazine. They mostly stayed out of trouble.

Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White Stripes. Our thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.

by Steve Miller

Dave Rice: The upstarts were coming into the old guard’s headquarters. I use the image of the old guard being kind of crowded into the back half of the bar during a hardcore show looking like somebody farted, you know like “What is this horrible . . . oh my God.” Where the bald kids with bandanas on their legs were right up front. The hardcore thing was just deliberately nihilistic. And homophobic as fuck. Which, I mean—rightfully so—rubbed people the wrong way. But there were hilarious aspects, you know, I mean just the old punk scene was taking place largely at Bookie’s, which was an old gay club, so there was a lot of cross-over there. A lot of those people would come from that kind of Rocky Horror mind set, where even if you weren’t gay, you acted it.

Tex Newman (RUR, Shock Therapy, Country Bob and the Bloodfarmers, guitarist): There had always been a rivalry between the Elvis Costello people and us. And the big rock bands were also the enemy, and then the bands that wore their tiger-print pants. Bookie’s was punk rock, and the Freezer was for the hardcore shit.

 The Women's City Club in a 1962 Photo. Women City Club Will sill Building.

John Brannon (Negative Approach, Laughing Hyenas, Easy Action, vocalist): You want to talk about punk rock, I’m gonna go Stooges, MC5, real Detroit rock. Alice Cooper. The only thing that really carried that on after that was Sonic’s Rendezvous Band and Destroy All Monsters, which were all my heroes from the other bands. Anything else that claimed it was punk rock in Detroit was just a joke. So I lived through that whole ’79 to ’81 thing where new wave took over. So you got all these old Bookie’s bands, you’re all coked out, you’re wearing suits and skinny ties, doing Animals covers or some obscure Brit-sixties shit, and you think you’re fuckin’ punk rock. No, you’re not. No, you’re not.

Larissa [Strickland] and I were living in the City Club, the old women’s club on Elizabeth downtown, and it turned it into a squat. These little boys called the Guardian Angels moved in, which kind of turned into an abandoned building in the middle of Detroit where the crack industry started. It was the basis for New Jack City. As time goes on, people get greedy, you know, and all the cousins start moving in. And the thugs. Everybody’s like, “We’re taking over this building.” All the dope gangs moved in. Everybody in their right mind moved out. Me and Larissa were like, “Fuck it, we’re squatting.” The owner had bailed. He lost all his money and moved to Puerto Rico. Negative Approach practiced there on the third floor in a ballroom. We lived up on the sixth floor. Then it kind of came around, you know, “You’re cool, white boy, but you’re going to have to start paying us protection.” Larissa goes up and goes, “Fuck you, motherfucker!” Okay, that didn’t go over in the ’hood. They were shooting up the halls with shotguns. She had the gun down in her face. We were cool with the main dudes, but when the cousins and the thugs moved in, they didn’t have any respect for the scene. They were going to kill us. They blew the door out with a shotgun after Larissa told them to fuck off.

Chris Moore, AKA Opie (Negative Approach, Crossed Wire, drummer, guitarist, vocalist): This guy pulled a gun on us and said, “I’m sick of you guys making all this noise.” John cooled him down by talking to him.

John Brannon: I was cool for a minute holding off some of the dudes, and then it became a whole ten-story building full of thugs wanting to kill us.

Cass Corridor

Chris Moore: Before that, John and Larissa lived at the Clubhouse over in the Cass Corridor. But in the City Club they had this cool apartment. The windows were always open and this city noise was coming in, and they had all these records and artwork. I loved hanging out there and them showing me this great art and different music. I got a great education from both John and Larissa.

John Brannon: Me and Pete Zelewski would go to whatever punk gig, and we’re always like, “Who’s this chick?” Larissa stood out. Then we started going to see L-Seven shows. We had Negative Approach together, but they were doing all these big gigs. They opened for Bauhaus at Bookie’s. We met them at some big outdoor gig, and we got along. Then my mother kicked me out of the house. Fifty cents, I take the Jefferson bus, come downtown, walk about three miles over to the Clubhouse from Jefferson, knocked on her door, and was like, “’Sup?” And I’d only met her twice. I’m like, “Um, I need a place to stay.” She says, “Come on in.” I had nowhere to go. I lived with her for about a year first, but we were best friends at that time. Then we actually became a couple.

Sherrie Feight (Strange Fruit, Spastic Rhythm Tarts, vocalist): You’d go to Detroit for a show, you never knew what to wear. So you’d kind of wear what the guys were wearing. The first time I saw Larissa, I was like, “Oh my God.” She was in a slip and combat boots, her hair bleached out, with this milky white skin and those eyes. I wanted to be like her, but there was no way. I was this rich kid and she was from down on Cass; we were from different worlds.

Oral history of the 80s Detroit, Michigan, punk scene - part 5 of 10: Touch and Go Records

 This is just a part of a longer piece from Longreads on the Detroit punk scene in the 80s.

An Oral History of Detroit Punk Rock

In Detroit’s empty buildings and troubled streets, restless kids squatted, ran punk clubs, pressed their own records, and made their own magazine. They mostly stayed out of trouble.

Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White Stripes. Our thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.

by Steve Miller

Andy Wendler (Necros, McDonalds, guitarist): We went to see the Clash at the Motor City Roller Rink, and Joe Strummer kicked his roadie. He was pulling the typical rock-star nonsense—kicking his roadie in the chest because his guitar was messed up. We said, “Okay, this is cool. We love it.” When we saw hardcore, it was right away the idea that this is our thing. We were seven years younger than the guys from the Clash, and the first punk wave and stuff. We played little shows, like basement shows and party shows, then actually started playing real shows with the Fix in Lansing at Club DooBee before the Freezer happened. As record collectors, we had all the 27 and Coldcock singles, the Bookie’s bands and all that stuff. We liked it, but it wasn’t us. The one thing that set us apart was that we wanted to do our own thing, and that was always very clear to us. We weren’t gonna try to get in on the end of the Bookie’s thing; we were just gonna do our own thing. We were also too young. There were many times playing Bookie’s and other places with the Misfits, where we’d meet with the manager and he’d say, “Alright, just come in right before you play, or whatever, in the back door or something.” It was always that hassle.

Chris Panackia: Hardcore kids were cool because they didn’t bathe and they had no hair on their head. A lot of them squatted. The hardcore kids played the Freezer, the Clubhouse, Cobb’s Corner. They played places that were just inferior in every respect possible. Even a bathroom was a luxury. The bands wanted beer and to sell a few T-shirts, and that was good enough. They didn’t have any high hopes. One more thing about that whole hardcore thing is, who would have thought John Brannon would be revered by every punk rock, hardcore kid in the world as like the greatest punk rock lead singer ever? I was the only sound guy that helped those punk rock guys out. They would always say, “Yeah, Cool Chris always treated us good, man. You were always really good to us.” I didn’t want to be that rock sound guy—I was one of them.

Negative Approach playing The Freezer Theater

Corey Rusk (Touch and Go Records, owner; Necros, bassist): I was younger than the other guys in the Necros, so from the time they had driver’s licenses, we were going to Detroit, going to Ann Arbor to get records, or going to Detroit to try and sneak into a show, because we were underage. I quickly realized that my fake ID didn’t work all that often. Once I had a driver’s license, I could go on my own. It really wasn’t ever like I wanted to be a promoter. It seemed like if I put on a show at some rental hall, then it’s all ages and I get to see the band that I really wanna see. So I started renting out halls in the Detroit area when I was seventeen to put on shows of bands that I wanted to see.

John Brannon: It was all promoted on the phone. You call up one dude. He’d call up six dudes. We’d pass out flyers at the gigs. All this shit was word of mouth. No Internet. No MTV. No radio play. Everything was done with cassette tapes and letters, so you’re talking about creating something out of nothing. It started with fifteen people. We know the first five bands that began it all: the Fix, the Necros, the Meatmen, Negative Approach, L-Seven. You got another scene out of that scene when a bunch of those kids following those bands started magazines and bands and that shit became national. “Okay, we’re bored, we live in Detroit, we’re going to create nothing out of nothing.”

Tesco Vee: The Freezer is where a lot of the next part of Detroit music started. It was about fifty feet by twenty feet wide—just a shit hole. A beautiful shit hole. It was like a frat boy fraternity for hardcore. There were a few girls, but for the most part it was guys.

John Brannon: We never expected anything out of it except to write those songs and play the shows. The fact that Negative Approach were able to make records through Touch and Go Records and get the exposure through Touch and Go magazine was just great. We didn’t know it was going to turn out to be this whole thing.

Tesco Vee: Dave Stimson and I started a label, Touch and Go, named after the magazine we had. We had friends that were in the Necros and the Fix, and these bands were so fucking good and nobody’s going to put their records out, so I have to put them out. I felt like it had to be done. *We were part of something that was great, and we weren’t deluded into thinking our own little thing was great; it really was great. We had some really good bands, and the world needed to hear them. The Necros and the Fix were the two big bands, and then Negative Approach.

Andy Wendler: In the fall of ’80 we ran into Tim Story, who is now a Grammy award–winning producer and composer. But at the time he had a four-track in his basement, and that’s where three songs on the Necros’ first single came from. He just came over and brought his bike and his four-track over and a little mixer, and we just laid it down, and then that was it.

Tesco Vee: Those first records by the Fix and the Necros records sat in various shops. We’d drive them down to Ann Arbor and we’d run and look and, yep there’s still five. Still five Necros. Oh, we sold one Fix for $2. Now those records go for a couple of mortgage payments.

Corey Rusk: The first two Touch and Go releases, the Fix and Necros, were so limited, two hundred of the Fix and one hundred of the Necros. And that seemed like so many: we have five friends. You know, “We don’t know anybody beyond our five friends who would want this.”

Marc Barie: Corey took it from those two releases, the Fix and Necros, and Touch and Go became one of the biggest indie labels in the world. That doesn’t happen accidentally.