"American Band" came from pissed off...American band. Don Brewer explains

There are all kinds of stories about how the song "We're An American Band" came to be, and I had to ask Brewer, I'm sure for the hundredth time, about it. It never made it into the book, Detroit Rock City, but I'm always interested in all things Grand Funk, as everyone should be,

Don Brewer, drummer, Grand Funk, on writing the song, “We're An American Band”: There was some rumor goin’ around at times -- and I’ve seen it written, over and over, actually, I think I even saw it on Wikipedia –that we came up with the concept for “American Band” because we got into a fight with Humble Pie one night about who’s better, the English bands or the American bands. That wasn’t the case at all. I came up with that concept for “American Band” from us being sued by Terry Knight, traveling around from town to town, being sued at every city we were playing at, and I’m goin’, in my head I’m goin’, ‘we’re coming to your town, we’ll help you party it down. ‘That what I thought was happening, and then later the term came up -- popped into my head -- ‘we’re an American band.’ I needed a tag line for it. It had absolutely nothing to do with the English bands or anything.

Typical week in the life of Mitch Ryder’s great band, Detroit

Johnny Bee was among the best of the older subjects I interviewed for Detroit Rock City. Once he started telling stories, he didn’t seem to be able to stop, which is why he was included in quite a bit of the book. You can’t deny his greatness and his experience.

I decided to focus on the band Detroit because it represented Ryder’s last big chance to make it big. He made a great album and no one seemed to notice.

When I was interviewing Ray Goodman, who played with Mitch for a while, he mentioned he had some outtakes from the Detroit album sessions and we went into the control room of Goodman’s home studio. Sure enough, there were versions of songs with Johnny Bee singing, demos, and some covers I’d never heard, including a Sly and the Family Stone tune. I mentioned that it would be great to see that stuff released as a deluxe reissue double lp and connected Goodman up with Bob Ezrin, who produced the album. Maybe someone will have the good sense to organize that some day.

Johnny Badanjek, drummer Mitch Ryder, on Detroit (the band):

We played everywhere, anywhere, all the time. One summer, we played two sets on a Friday night in Detroit and we stayed up all night then headed to Carbondale, Illinois. Go to the hotel, a Howard Johnson's. They put us in back where the pool is and no one can see us. After Carbondale, we drive to St. Louis, play, go to another Howard Johnson's to finally sleep, then catch a 7 a.m. flight to go to Washington DC to play the May Day rally with the Beach Boys. There's like 200,000 people there. We play and Steve Hunter wears his Army uniform. Not a great idea for the time. We play and leave, we're going back to National Airport and the Army comes in and starts giving everyone shit, it got real violent. But we’re out of there. We got back to the airport and flew back to St. Louis and drove two more hours back to Carbondale, Illinois, and played two more sets without any sleep. We haven't gone to bed yet since before the May Day show. Then we went back to the hotel with 15 girls and everybody got naked and was using the sauna and swimming. This was how we were living. We had real bikers hanging around us all the time, you know, bikers love Mitch. They all wanted to hear “Devil With a Blue Dress On.” We were also playing a lot of Hell's Angels parties and all the outlaw clubs. We'd play and they'd all be fighting. It was like a crazy wedding party or something. We’d play for an hour and a half and we’d take a break and the whole place would break out in a riot. The guy in charge would go, “Play! Get up there and play! Maybe they'll stop.” The Outlaws, the Vigilantes, all these biker gangs, they’d have us in to play their parties.

Dennis Thompson of the MC5 on playing over the volume of Sonic Smith and Wayne Kramer

Dennis Thompson, drummer MC5: Well, I wasn’t impervious to the volume when the boys bought Marshalls.  You see, back in those days the PA systems in the clubs we played were very very primitive. And drummers were never mic’ed.  So the guys had Marshalls and they played hard and loud, the volume was on 10.  I had to develop a style of playing extremely hard for the drums to cut through that wall of electrical sound. I had blood blisters underneath my skin, calluses on every one of my fingers on my left hand.  They would all explode every time I played so my left hand was just raw meat.

What I didn’t like about it was that I couldn’t play anything more delicately. You know, something more on the lines of, you know, 32nd notes and double-stroke rolls and things that require your wrists and not your arms. I had to use wrists and arms and play really fuckin’ hard for the drums to cut through.  I would get comments all the time that, you know, ‘Dennis you gotta play a little louder. ‘

So I would just hit until I was just really, really playing hard.  I was breaking cymbals.  Sinclair used to be so pissed.  But I was breaking 22” cymbals, one a week.  I’d go through 20 or 30 drum pairs of drumsticks per two shows, three shows. We used to order them by the gross, 5B and 2S.  Big.  2S is lumber.  That’s how you learned how to play the rudiments, with the big fat sticks.  Heavy sticks, so it builds up your wrist.  I’d break a rim on the snare drum, bass drum pedals, bass drum heads, tom tom heads. Unbelievable shit that I wouldn’t do now because nowadays you’ve got the remote in-ears and I’ve got the sound just the way I want it, dialed in, ‘cuz I’ve got a 16 track mixer. But back then, like I said, the band’s putting out a loud, ferocious sound that you had to play over.

Niagara on Ron Asheton in the later years - Detroit Rock City outtake

NIAGARA (Destroy All Monsters, Dark Carnival) : Ronnie ended up being a millionaire when he died. He would call me and say ‘I’m almost there.’ He really lived it up.  He bought all these collections, the Nazi stuff.  He bought a ceremonial dagger for like $12,000. When things started back with Iggy, he had money and he would say ‘you like this furniture?’ And I’d be like, ‘no, no.’

Whenever he went up north with the Colonel, he would buy me things like a fur coat.

Even after we split, he would come over and we’d stay up all night and talk and he’d stay the night and get high. So he used to stay here a lot. Then he got his place up north, near the lake up by Saginaw.[Michigan]. We used to hang out at antique places and he’d come in and they’d say ‘Ronnie, I got something you might like.’

He bought a decent place, more modern, perfect for him. Ronnie did the right thing. He always said ‘I’m only going to live 10 more years.’

When I was with him we bought a '66 Cadillac. We must have had some money at that time, because I was with him then.  

When he died, Ronnie was supposed to go out with us, January 4 is the Colonel’s birthday. So he called him a few times, and Ron didn’t answer which was normal. Ronnie never answered his phone, he just let it go to voice mail. But now the voice mail was full and that never happened. So a couple days later, Colonel said to me, ‘this is bad, there’s something wrong.’

I thought Ronnie was going to die but I wasn’t sure this was it. So we called [Asheton girlfriend] Dara, who Ronnie bought a house for a few doors down.

We called her and said ‘go see Ronnie.’  She said, ‘we had a fight, fuck him, he’s a clown, I’m not going over there,’ and finally she said ‘ok.’

It was the middle of the night and she went and called us back and said he’s dead. He was in his bed. Ron was not taking care of himself and he would not go to a doctor. Those tours were really strenuous and he was always on stage doing his thing. One night he woke up and his nose was running and he put a Kleenex in it and when he woke up there was blood all over it.  Something had burst.

He had been diagnosed with high blood pressure, and he wasn’t fat, he had like, from waist down he was so skinny and he had been losing weight.

He was so skinny with the Stooges that he always looked bigger.

Anyway, he was smoking and drinking and taking the high blood pressure pills, which he ran out of and he wasn’t going to get more.

I was always telling him to think about it. Ronnie hated anything new and I never got him started back on the pills.

Feds response to Juggalo gang lawsuit: No damages

It has received no attention, but the federal government filed its initial response in April to the action filed earlier this year by the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan on behalf of Juggalos, who claim that their constitutional rights to expression and association were violated by when the FBI designated them as a gang in 2011.

“Plaintiffs lack standing to challenge a report known as the 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment, an intelligence assessment made by the National Gang Intelligence Center at the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the introduction to the response states, a common argument in such cases.

The response goes on to claim that the plaintiffs – four Juggalos and the two members of Insane Clown Posse – showed no direct damages due to the gang assessment.

It also claims that the alleged damages cited in the complaint, which was filed in January, did not come at the hands of the defendant. That would be a base-covering assertion, just in case the court didn't buy the 'no damages' thing. 

“To the extent the allegation of injury by the FBI’s intelligence analysis is plausible, any injury involves the conduct of independent third parties, not before the Court, who are not even regulated by the Defendant agencies,” the argument reads.

The defendant is the U.S. Department of Justice. Read the response here.

There is a highly dubious assertion near the end of the fed’s response, which is a fairly standard petition and asks that the case be dismissed.

“The [National Gang Intelligence Center] does not collect or maintain information that does not relate to criminal activity.”

This is quite a statement in light of Edward Snowden’s disclosures last year regarding surveillance conducted by the federal government on U.S. citizens, which includes accessing Google and Yahoo accounts.

No decision has been made regarding the motion to dismiss, although it would be an eyebrow raiser if any court were to let this one go away without more argument. The fun will come if it gets to discovery, where the feds will be required to disclose more information.

Iggy Pop talks about Jack White not recording the Stooges

photos, 2003, Mojo (www.mickhutson.com)

A largely unknown part of a book like Detroit Rock City is the portion that is never seen. In movies, it’s called the cutting room floor, and these days you can see what ended up on that floor through DVD extras. We aren’t smart enough to come up with that in the book world, and “updated” has little of the panache of an "extra." So what didn't make it into Detroit Rock City for any number of reasons? I'll be running some of these extras once a week or so over the summer. 

Check it out.

IGGY POP (on Jack White producing a post-reformation Stooges recording) : It was one of these things, it went back and forth two or three times. I heard he [White] wanted to do it and I thought that could work in the group’s favor for a couple of reasons, but I didn’t want to do a whole record, I just wanted to do a few tracks. That was mostly because I had already recorded some of that record, that record, this was around the time we did Skull Ring, and I needed to respect the fact that I had already recorded half of that record with my touring band, The Trolls.

I wasn’t going to tell them, or call them up “Hey I’m going to work with a bigger star than you and fuck all your work.”  I can’t do that to an artist. So I offered him a few tracks and Jack being Jack, said, “well I don’t want to do that, I want to do a whole thing.”  

Yes, of course and he wouldn’t want to be a part of something else, being a Jack White production. Let’s just say I felt where he was coming from.

At one point I felt I was just about ready to do it and we were having a conversation and the last thing he had to say was, “Okay I’ll call you up when I have time.”

I put down the phone and part of me was like, “fuck you kid.” I didn’t say anything because I’m not a confrontational person, so we didn’t do it at that point. And he had some good concepts, it would have been interesting. But I think what we would have ended up with would be a kinda indie reality show. He wanted to lock us in a house together and record the results. The idea was nobody would leave until we had an album done. I think had we agreed that very quickly cameras would have come into it.

It would have been interesting... At one point there was a lot of pressure from the record company, “What are you crazy, you’re not going to play with Jack White?” Blah blah blah. At one point I was ready to do it and I think he wasn’t. Then much later he was ready to do it and we had a lunch about it in Australia. But at that point I had a meeting with Ron and Scott and Ron said, “Look, for me that would be like all of the glory of it would be about Jack White and not about me.” And he made a gesture if someone was sitting on his head. And Scott said to me, “Yeah the way I see it, Jack White is a pot of gold and we don’t want to be part of his pot of gold.”

What I said to the guys is, “Hey look, that is absolutely fine with me. But as the leader of the group,” which I finally did become in this century, “I gotta let you know that if you do it with Jack, you’re going to sell more and get more attention, but it’s also true, due to market forces, the result will emphasize Jack’s participation.” I told them, “I have no opinion at all, I could go either way.” And so we didn’t, we ended up not doing it, which was fine with Jack and we’re friendly.

New Salvo in Bid for Interview Tapes of Manson Acolyte Watson

Stepped in to help

The Los Angeles Police Department has violated the California Public Records Act in turning back a bid to obtain the tapes of Manson henchman Tex Watson.  The remedy is a letter from esteemed lawyer Dean Wallraff of the California Public Records Access Project. Read it here. 

From the letter: You have violated the Public Records Act by failing to respond in writing with the determination required by Pub. Res. Code § 6253(c). You continue to violate it by failing to provide the documents Mr. Miller requested. There is no reason it should take over four months for you to provide what can’t amount to more than a handful of responsive documents.

Dean stepped in to help someone from out of state, and he has little to gain from this. This should be an example to all of the other so-called First Amendment groups out there who do very very little for the public. Dean is the fourth stop for me as I searched for some help on this. 

The tapes have a tale of their own. They were partly used for Watson’s little-read book, Will You Die for Me?, published on a small press in 1978.  The tapes were recorded in 1969 after Watson was arrested in Texas in connection with the Sharon Tate-LaBianca murders in LA.

The LAPD obtained the tapes a couple of years ago and contends they are being used to investigate some unsolved crimes.

The LAPD refused a request for the tapes themselves last year.  The department then disregarded an appeal letter.

It takes a lot of work to fight operations like the LAPD who profess to care about the public but also care about protecting their pensions and maintaining a team of bureaucrats to keep the public at bay.

It’s a worthwhile battle. I hope it doesn’t end up in court, as it’s the public’s money the department would spend to wage a defense.