Oral history of the 80s Detroit, Michigan, punk scene - part 10 of 10: Why Be Something You're Not? TV show

   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

John Brannon: We started going on tour, and we’d have to sneak Opie out of the house because he was fifteen. Opie, Graham—those kids were still in high school. I’m sure, looking back, the parents probably realized what’s going on. Opie would tell his folks, “Oh, I’m going to spend the night at Graham’s house,” and then we’d go out. DC, Philly, and New York, and then be back in time for him to get to school.

Andy Wendler: We did our first real tour with the Misfits. We had made great friends with them, and Corey and Barry were pestering ’em like, “Hey, can we get on those bills?” I don’t really know why we got along with them so well, other than the fact that Jerry and Doyle might as well have been from Ohio. They were just such great, good-natured guys, and we really hit it off with them. Glenn, for whatever he’s become now, was incredibly articulate and artistically talented and had an eye for just really clever, almost iconic graphics. I don’t know—that really appealed to us. We were like, “Wow, they’re like the Ramones but scary.” On the Misfits tour we took Corey’s dad’s ratted-out old Suburban. It was tight, and we had to sleep on top of the gear in the back. It got horrible gas mileage, but it was cheaper than buying or renting something.

Corey Rusk: Russ [Gibb] started showing up at the Freezer. He was hanging out and absorbing it all. Maybe it reminded him of his youth in the sixties. He saw that I was involved in some of those shows at the Freezer. Honestly, I’m socially awkward, and it was more enjoyable to me to have a sort of take-charge attitude and be more like, “I’m gonna do a bunch of the work to make these shows happen, even though I’m not making any money from it.” You know, it’s not my club. I’d do a lot of the flyering, and Russ saw that in me and started trying to talk to me. I totally blew him off in the beginning, like, “Is this dude a cop, or what the fuck is he doing here? Why is there someone this old here?” I was sort of suspicious of him.

Russ Gibb (Grande Ballroom promoter): One of my ex-students came to me and said, “Have you heard Negative Approach?” I said, “No.” He said, “Well, there’s a place called the Freezer Theater.” So I went to see them, and they were rehearsing in some fucking little place on Cass somewhere; it looked like a little storefront or something. I saw them and I said, “Wow, this is interesting.” They’re doing things that the MC5 were doing. Now this is fifteen years later. You know, click, click, click, click. Of course I saw money!

John Brannon: He locked onto the scene and saw something that was going on, and he was really into the idea of the youth presenting their art. He had his students come out and tape all these TV shows, and they became the first kind of public access TV shows. And they were doing it on this extreme hard core punk.

Corey Rusk: I don’t think Russ needed to make a living teaching school. And here he was in 1981, teaching media at Dearborn High School. He put a bunch of his own money into helping fund Dearborn High School having its own high school TV studio and station that was probably as good as the local public television station set-up. You look at how forward thinking was this fucker? 1981 was the year that MTV started, and the bulk of America did not have cable TV then. You know, like MTV is a household word, now, but it just like this bizarre upstart concept in 1981, and so for Russ to really see that the future of music was in music video in 1981 and to put his money where his mouth was—to say, “I want the kids in my class to have this experience, because this will prepare them for what is gonna be the future.”

Russ Gibb: We started a show my students did, “Why Be Something That You’re Not?” It had a lot of the bands playing at the Freezer on it.

John Brannon: We were writing the soul music of the suburbs, and the Freezer was perfect. If you want to nail what soul music was for that time, the scene—even though it’s basically a white scene—it is our soul music, man. We’re creative, we’re bored, we’ve got nothing going on—man, we’re creating this shit. The whole thing about being in a band at that point, there was no separation between the kids and the audience and who’s on stage. It was music for the people.

Read the full piece here.

Oral history of the 80s Detroit, Michigan, punk scene - part 8 of 10: The City Club

  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

Corey Rusk: The Freezer was the all-ages reaction to the City Club situation. Somehow we managed to get into a lot of those City Club shows, though we were underage. But the Freezer was just so cool, it didn’t matter.

Brian Mullan: City Club was the old woman’s club off Elizabeth right downtown, a block off Woodward. It was one of Vince Bannon’s big to-dos. Any time there was a big show, whether the Dead Kennedys or the Exploited, the Cramps or whoever, the security guys would always beat up on the punks. So there was a backlash. Bannon was the Establishment, a businessman, and in retrospect I don’t begrudge him that.

Rob Miller (Bloodshot Records, cofounder): I had a humiliating night at City Club. I got a fake ID at the Lindell AC bar and tried to get into a Fear show with it, and the door guys, they laughed at me.

Chris Panackia: Vince was booking bands at City Club before it was opened. And he still was running Bookie’s. The fucking agents went crazy. He goes, “Oh, I got this great place,” and he wouldn’t tell them until they got there. About four or five hundred people in the ballroom could see the band at City Club, but you could put a lot more people in it. In a two-month span he did the Dead Kennedy’s, the Fear, the Cramps, the Rockettes, the Stray Cats, Duran Duran, Haircut 100, Killing Joke, Gun Club, Human League, Circle Jerks, Sparks, the Flesh Eaters, and Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark. It was the best place to be. The Circle Jerks show was during the Grand Prix downtown, and you got in free if you brought a helmet. One guy brought a helmet.

Vince Bannon: In ’81 we architected what we were going to do and how we were going to open Clutch Cargo’s at the City Club, which is what it was. Clutch Cargo’s was the name of the production, and it was at the City Club.

Corey Rusk: We’d go to City Club because they got bands we wanted to see, plus we would be on some of those bills; Negative Approach played there a lot. The Freezer wasn’t there to put those larger places down. I would help organize those bands at the Freezer, though, and we started get-ting out-of-town touring bands that were open to playing different places. Like when the Misfits played at the Freezer. It was just such a huge time for music. At least to us.

Rob Michaels: There was no consciousness at all of “Hey, this is the town that the Stooges and MC5 were from.” There was this Stooges residue, and there were people we thought of as that. It wasn’t like people didn’t know about those records, but there was no sense of “Hey, this is Detroit and this is what came from here.” It was this sense of “We made this.”

Read the full piece here.

Oral history of the 80s Detroit, Michigan, punk scene - part 7 of 10: The Freezer and Cass Corridor

 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: The Freezer was on Cass and Willis in downtown Detroit. The guy who ran it was a speed freak, and we could get away with anything we wanted. It was right around the corner from where John and Larissa lived in the Club-house at that time, which was right between Cobb’s Corner and the old Willis Art Gallery.

Hillary Waddles: The Freezer was a crappy place. We went over to the Burger King to use the bathroom. No way I was gonna use the Freezer.

Cass Corridor by Steve Pepple

Corey Rusk: Even though it was so inner city, and at the time Cass Corridor was really, really bad, it seems to have gotten cleaned up over the years. At the time all the people living in the slummy areas where the rental halls were at were not accepted. Punk rock was not accepted and was not mainstream, and if you looked like a punk rocker, you weren’t cool; you were a freak. It’s amazing that all these white kids invaded all these inner-city neighborhoods for these punk rock shows, and whatever violence problems there were, were usually between the white kids.

Keith Jackson: A lot of us were from the suburbs, and we all wanted to be down-town where it was tough. And it was. There was no interference, which was fine. Cops never came around, and you were really on your own going to see bands. That stuff out of LA seemed phony to us; they would hang out and then go back to their parents’ homes, and it seemed pretty easy. But at the time in Detroit you could go to a show at a place on Zug Island, and there were no cops, no security. You would bring in generators into a burned-out building, and that was your club. I stabbed a dude in the ass one time at a Subhumans show at Zug Island. There was this huge fight that broke out, and I mean it just kept on going for most of the show. He punched my girlfriend and I had a four-inch blade I carried around, and I stabbed him in the ass.

Corey Rusk: We were probably mildly entertaining to the residents. They just looked at us like we were freaks too, and we weren’t the white people that they had problems with. We had no race problems.

Brian Mullan: Roaming the Cass Corridor at whatever ungodly hour, we all wore jackboots, had our hair cropped or shaven. …Nobody really got hurt down there because nobody had money. At the time I was taking the Jefferson bus to Nunzio’s to run sound. I made like $15 a show, and then I sold loose joints. I was just surviving.

Andy Wendler: We’d get fucked with occasionally, but we had numbers on our side. We were never there alone. There would be forty kids skateboarding down the middle of the street. John and Larissa had respect in the neighborhood, back when thieves used to abide by that kind of thing, because they lived in the neighborhood. So if you were with John and Larissa, you got a little bit of a pass. It was a big heroin neighborhood in those days, and they were amongst it. The guy who owned Cobb’s Corner got shot in the backroom one night. That was a money thing—he had it. One time the Detroit police pulled up at the Clubhouse and said, “What the hell are you kids doing? Go back to Roseville, you idiots. What are you doing down here?”

Cass and Henry in 1980 by Frank Smitka

Keith Jackson: One night I was with Kirk Morrison from Dead Heroes. City Club had just opened, and we were outside and we heard gunfire, which wasn’t unusual. But a bullet went through my jacket and shattered my collarbone. Some guys dragged me into Detroit Receiving by my arm and said, “Our friend got shot.” The cops actually came to the emergency room and talked to me. They said, “Were you returning fire?”

Tim Caldwell (artist): I was in jail one night, and a guy told me the cops came into the apartment building right by the Willis Gallery because he had let loose from the rooftop with a machine gun. He hid on top of the elevator while they searched the premises.

Dave Rice: I lived in a few different buildings around there, briefly in the Clubhouse with this guy Darryl. Darryl and his brother and this friend of ours, Jenny, were there, and a couple of guys came in with their shotgun and just, like, cleaned the place out of as much gear as they could carry. Okay, gotta get a new amp. Gotta get a new guitar. I always played like this slap-together pawnshop crap anyways, so it wasn’t like I lost a ’59 gold top or anything.

Gloria Branzei: Those guys thought they were scaring the people in the neighborhood, but they were fooling themselves. I was in the shooting dens, and I knew what they thought; they just thought we were fucking crazy. But they sure weren’t scared of us.

Read the full piece here.

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.