Oral history of the 80s Detroit, Michigan, punk scene - part 9 of 10: Corey Rusk and 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

Corey Rusk: Sometime in late spring of ’81 I got a job at a lumberyard, specifically because I wanted to make some money so that the Necros could record another record. I had the idea of the Process of Elimination EP too. So I have to get some money together so I can record all these bands to get a compilation out documenting what’s going on. I was just an amped-up kid. I wanted to do shit. So I worked all summer, loading trucks and saving my money.

Tesco Vee: I officially handed Touch and Go Records over to Corey when I moved to DC in ’82, but he was handling it before that. The Process EP was when the passing of the torch went down. Corey called me up one day, and I realized that I had no interest in running a record label. I was doing it out of necessity, as a companion to the magazine. Corey was like, “I want to take it over,” and I said, “Go for it.” We were friends, and he thought, “This is what I want to do.” And this was a perfect, already established name. I was getting ready to pull up stakes and go to DC. I lost my teaching job, unemployment in Michigan was 16 percent, and I didn’t have money to pay the rent, much less put out records.

Chris Moore: People made fun of Corey behind his back because he was so serious and ambitious. He had such a drive to make something of this music that was happening. He wasn’t much fun, but he really looked out for us in a lot of ways.

Marc Barie: Corey’s dad was really interesting. He manufactured something for the auto industry. One day we were all around Maumee and he took us over there. The line workers looked at us like we were demented. We had all the punk rock chains and boots, and Todd Swalla had a Mohawk. I think Corey got his business sense from his dad, who made a lot of money.

Corey Rusk: I was living with my grandmother in Maumee, Ohio. I had a little recording studio in my basement and so I started recording bands for Touch and Go. All the crappy sounding records were recorded there—the Meatmen EP, the Negative Approach EP. The Blight thing was recorded there, and that was one of the better-sounding things that was recorded there. That was one of the first things that I did there that I thought, “Wow, this sounds really heavy and great.”

Chris Moore: We had the run of Corey’s house, and we had a skateboard ramp we built in the front yard or the driveway. We would record and skate all day and burn ourselves out on that. No one was into drugs or anything. The older guys drank beer, but we just skated.

Corey Rusk: I put bands up all the time, even when I lived with my grandmother. I brought Flipper back to my grandma’s house, which sounds like a potential disaster. But they were so nice to her; we all hung out and had pizza. Suicidal Tendencies also stayed at my grandmother’s. We all went swimming in the river, since the house was on the banks of the Maumee River.

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.