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 6 of 10: The scene and being a woman in the scene

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

Rob Michaels (Bored Youth, Allied, vocalist): Dave Rice and Larissa took me to see the Necros, and the next thing I knew I was friends with all those people. *At that time if you saw someone who looked punk at all, you would cross the street to talk to them—it was a fraternity.

70s Detroit band, Flirt (Courtesy of Rockee Berlin)

Keith Jackson (Shock Therapy, guitarist): That scene had girls, but they all died. It’s weird when you look at it, like these chicks that were hanging around all seemed to pass away over the years.

Hillary Waddles (scenester): There were girls, but we were all people’s girlfriends. It just wasn’t the time for that yet—girls didn’t get in bands; you didn’t get the sense that you could be anything but a groupie or a girlfriend.

Gloria Branzei (scenester): It was a little dick fest, and they didn’t like girls. They were too cool for that shit; it slowed them down.

Hillary Waddles: Those kids that got into the straight-edge nonsense really didn’t like girls, some of those guys from Ohio. I was terrified to be down there in that area, but we went. I was a bougie girl from northwest Detroit, and here were all these suburban kids with no survival instincts. I mean, I may have been from there too, but I still grew up in Detroit, and you pay attention.

Gloria Branzei: It was a really violent scene. I would kick someone’s ass for the hell of it. At that time girls and punk rock did not go together at all. It was just rock-and-roll chicks.

Tesco Vee: Washington, DC, had more girls in its scene, but it was a similar scene. In Detroit there were a hundred core kids that made up the entire scene.

Sherrie Feight: Going to shows in Detroit meant you were gonna get hit. I still have a scar on my leg from being in the mosh pit.

Jon Howard (scenester): There were a lot of people who knew about these older clubs before but couldn’t get in because they had ID checks. I knew about these places when I first started shopping for records at places like Sam’s Jams, but I was fifteen. My dad lived in San Francisco at the time, so the winter of ’81 I went to the Mabuhay and saw Dead Kennedys, Husker Du, Church Police, Toxic Rea-sons—all these great bands. I came back here, and we had the Freezer for all ages. It opened the door for music for a lot of people, so kids could see live bands now. And hardcore was the music that was their first experience.

Read the full piece here.

A public radio piece on punk flyers including some from Kansas City

This is an edited version of an article from WXPN, a public radio station, on punk flyers and people who are preserving them. 

A People’s History of Punk: Meet the local archivists working to preserve the past one flyer at a time

by Yoni Kroll

The show flyer occupies a weird space in DIY culture. At its most basic, it’s information: who’s playing, where the show is, and when things are going to kick off. And while you don’t need anything more than that, many flyers are of course highly decorated. They can be beautifully made – either by hand or on a computer, one is not inherently better than the other – or they can be downright ugly. But the thing is that no matter what they look like, flyers hold a special place in the culture. Not only are they an announcement and invitation but, when the music has long ended, they’re oftentimes the only documentation that will exist proving that the concert ever occurred.

Also, and this is important to point out, these are scraps of paper and almost all of them are going to end up in the trash.

If you polled a hundred punks – or really anyone involved in underground music – from different backgrounds, of different ages, from any corner of the world, you’d find that almost all of them have saved at least a few flyers from old shows. Maybe it was a gig with some big-name bands or bands that were legendary only to the few people who made it out that night. Maybe it’s that time they got to see their favorite. Maybe it’s something from a show that happened decades ago, well before they were even born.

These flyers are stored in shoe boxes, albums, framed behind glass, or just shoved haphazardly in a drawer somewhere, ripped and torn. Beyond the sense of history there’s a personal connection to the music and the scene that spawned it.

Anna Young | photo by Yoni Kroll

Anna Young from the West Philly two-piece band Hermit High Priestess has a collection of flyers going back to when she was a teenager in Kansas City, Missouri. Some of them are of shows she played, some she just attended, some she didn’t go to but thought it was important to hold on to the flyer. Surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly, not all of her memories associated with these pieces of paper are that positive.

“It’s strange I wanted to keep this stuff,” she admitted. “But I just couldn’t [throw it away].” The flyers are also the only real artifacts of the band she was in for many of those years, Toxic Shok, save for a handful of photos. Despite only being her personal archive – one she’s brought with her through multiple moves around the country over the past dozen years – it is very much a snapshot of the KCMO scene during the time she was involved....

While (OB, @eastbound2fkd on Instagram) very much has a collection now, he didn’t start off with that goal in mind. “Trying not to sound like an old man, but I started ‘collecting’ partly out of necessity,” he told The Key. “If I was at a show (or a record store) and picked up a flyer for a future gig I wanted to attend, I would keep the flyer in my room to remind me of the date, time, and location of the show.”...

Fast forward to July of 2014 and the realization that he had a “box of flyers in the attic doing nothing” and so, as he put it, “… it seemed like a good idea to post some pictures of them on Thursdays, as part of the #tbt hashtag that was popular at the time.” Though first he had to make sure they were all in chronological order, of course...

“I started collecting flyers when I first started going to punk/hardcore shows in 1995,” (Chris Delaware, @delaware90shc on Instagram) said. “At that time, I loved flyers. The artwork, the information, the band logos. Even shows that I knew I couldn’t attend, I still grabbed and held onto them.” He described himself as a “collector and hoarder of all things” including records, cassettes, VHS tapes of old shows, and other punk ephemera: “[I] really just have a habit of not throwing anything away.”

While he had already been posting video clips of old shows to his personal account, he started the @delaware90shc page in August of 2019 after realizing there was a greater interest in this sort of thing outside of the people he already knew. He also cited @eastbound2fkd as inspiration: “I started searching around and found OB’s page and thought, ‘Hey, this is a cool idea. I have a lot of these flyers too, but also a lot of others from the Newark/Wilmington Delaware scene that I was a part of.’”

Although there is an aspect of nostalgia to the project, Chris Delaware is also focused on the importance of historical documentation. As he explained, “… it’s all about the memories but [it’s] also a great way of documenting and archiving our DIY punk scene for sure. I’ve always loved hearing stories of shows from those older than me that I didn’t attend and also seeing old videos.”

That rings true for Young too but she also stressed the necessity for groups to be able to create their own historical narratives. “In general the history of people is changed and molded to fit whoever is writing it, whether that’s through the lens of white supremacy or through the lens of straightwashing,” she told The Key. “The people’s history is important. This stuff, these flyers, these shows, I don’t think that they’re that important to be honest with you. But it’s nice to be able to tell someone that they happened. And some of this art is amazing and some of it’s terrible but altogether it does make something big.”...

Taking a look at some of the posts, it’s easy to understand why they resonate with so many people. Not only are there bands represented that fans love and have a long history with – either from seeing them live or wanting to see them live – but the members of those groups are just as ever-present in the comments reminiscing about the show on the flyer pictured.

For Chris Delaware that’s one of the most crucial reasons he puts in the work. He brought up a house show in Bear, DE he helped put together as a teenager in 1998 for Dillinger Escape Plan, Boy Sets Fire, All Else Failed, and Burn The Priest (now known as Lamb Of God), bands that today fill huge venues all by themselves. When he posted the flyer and videos from the show he was able to hear from members of the bands two decades later and find out what it was like, as he put it, “from their point of view of playing a garage show for a bunch of kids.”

This speaks to the importance of the audience in music but also to the lack of a divide – at times literally and certainly always metaphorically – between audience and band in the DIY scene. Just focusing on the music alone doesn’t accurately give you the full picture of what happened in the past. Still images are oftentimes only of the bands, cutting out everyone else there and sometimes even identifiable aspects of the venues, and video footage is rare. But flyers and especially projects like these that give them cultural context very much help create a robust history by drawing connections between bands, spaces, promoters, and so on.

For Young, every single flyer she pulled out came with a story about that show or one of the bands or her experiences at the venue. “There’s some good memories in here and some really bad ones,” she said. “They definitely all make me feel complicated.” That’s certainly why she’s held on to this collection despite the fact that a good chunk of those stories are not particularly positive.

Although it might not be a full history of early aughts Kansas City, Missouri punk, it is her personal history and that’s a valid and necessary perspective when trying to get a better understanding of anything, especially when it comes to the arts. This is important whether you’re talking about punk in the Midwest or opera in Italy. Also, none of these scenes exist in a vacuum and so seeing what bands toured, where they toured, and who they played with is certainly significant.

While OB admitted to not curating the content he posts except to make sure that he’s posting shows that happened that day – “I just post any flyer I have that matches the date,” he said – he told The Key that by not only focusing on well-known bands or important shows it does give a greater sense of the scene. “I don’t consider myself a historian or archivist though, that sounds pretty academic,” he said. “I am just a punk rock enthusiast.”

Read the complete article here.

Labels: alternative scene, culture, flyers, history, Kansas City, Midwest, midwest punk scene, punk culture, punk scene, scene, WXPN