Detroit Rock City Read Free Page A

and it looked like they were going to take off. Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records called me when the record was taking off, and I connected him with Jeep Holland.
    Scott Morgan: Jeep turned us on to “Respect,” and he just played it one time and we said, “Well, yeah. I’d like to do that song.” It came out and it was a hit in Detroit.
    Robin Seymour: Jeep called me and said they asked Wexler for $5,000 up front and Atlantic said, “Heck no, we won’t pay it.” Wexler called me back and said, “What’s with these kids?” An unknown by the name of Aretha Franklin signed with Atlantic a week later, and her first hit was “Respect.” That would have put them on the map. The Rationals sold fifty thousand copies of “Respect” in Michigan alone. It was frustrating.
    Scott Morgan: Doing “Respect”—first it was Otis Redding in 1965, us in 1966, and Aretha Franklin in 1967. I think Aretha decided that if we could do it, she could do it better. Of course, she did.
    Scott Richardson ( SRC, Chosen Few vocalist ): In Detroit it was fall of ’67, and acid set it off like a bomb. Changed everything, all the music.
    Deniz Tek: Once the wave of high energy hit, in ’68 or ’69, I was seeing most of the bands at outdoor concerts in the summer time. In Ann Arbor in 1968 that was at West Park, this leafy green park where people might take their kids to throw a Frisbee. The place had a little concert shell, and I saw the MC5 play there one weekend. It got shut down because of noise, and the shows moved to GallupPark, which was over by the river. That was when it got pretty big; you’d have six or seven bands on a Sunday and sometimes have a national on the bill. I saw Janis Joplin there and I saw Johnny Winter.
    Steve Forgey ( scenester ): Everyone was in Detroit by 1968 because it was really cranking out better music than anywhere else in the US. You had jazz in New York, hippy music in San Francisco, peaceful rock-country in LA. In Detroit it was all upside down. I was living in Jackson, about forty-five miles west of Detroit for a while, and they had these shows in the park in the middle of town. Funkadelic, Nugent and the Amboy Dukes. Everybody played there except the MC5—that was where they drew the line. One afternoon they bring in Alice Cooper, just before the band got really big. I was just out of eleventh grade, you know, and I’d heard how cool they were. Me and my buddies get over to the park early to see them set up. They had this van and it’s pulling a U-Haul trailer, we think with the equipment in it. But it wasn’t. The road crew was in the van. The trailer gate opens up, and out come the guys in Alice Cooper, all in their stage clothes, hair all over the place. It was surreal, seeing them standing in broad daylight like that.
    David Teegarden ( Teegarden & Van Winkle, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, drummer, vocalist ): Detroit was a giant city to Skip and I when we moved there in 1967. I mean, we had lived in LA, and we were from Tulsa. In Oklahoma, musicians and players I learned from were all very much into southern blues, and Motown was part of the upbringing in Tulsa. I was like, “Let’s go to Detroit, that’s where Motown is,” not realizing that we were segregated from that whole scene. The whites were adamantly distressed about the rioting; it drew some lines there. We didn’t discuss Motown for a while.

Playground of Noise

    Russ Gibb: The Grande started in 1966, and within ten weeks it became a positive cash flow.
    John Sinclair ( MC5 manager, poet, the Blues Scholars ): The most we ever got there was $1,800, but Gibb paid us $125 a night usually. We were just so fucking offended at this $125, and they were making money hand over fist. They were bringing these bands from England, and they were giving them thousands of dollars. And we’re getting $125.
    Iggy Pop ( The Stooges, Iggy