No Joe Gentz: Where is the state of Michigan hiding a convicted murderer?

Joseph John Gentz

Earlier this week, I was working on a story on the Bob Bashara murder trial for the Daily Beast and realized that on September 25, I had written a letter to Joe Gentz, the man who confessed to killing Jane Bashara in January 2012.

The letter came back a week later with the words “out for writ” written on the front of the unopened envelope, meaning he has been moved somewhere else awaiting a court date.  This was at least a week in advance of jury selection, a process Gentz would have no reason to attend. I called and emailed the Michigan Department of Corrections on Monday to inquire when Gentz was moved. Predictably, in a state where the citizens are viewed by government employees as a cash cow/annoyance, no response. 

Still, I thought perhaps the prosecution would want him to be closer to the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice in downtown Detroit, where the case is being heard.

I checked the Wayne County inmate search several times Tuesday and no Joe Gentz. I called the jail on Tuesday afternoon and asked. No, Joe Gentz was not in the jail.

I asked her to double check. Again, no Gentz.

At 1:30 a.m. Wednesday, I got an email from Russ Marlan from Michigan DOC:

“This prisoner is currently housed in the Wayne County Jail as his trial will begin shortly.  He will remain at the Wayne County Jail until the conclusion of this case.  You can contact the Wayne County Sheriff Department for additional information.”

Check the jail website again. No Gentz. So the question becomes, where is Joe Gentz? He’s been in trouble since being locked up in March 2012. He has defied guards, fought with fellow inmates and in general been disruptive.

Are they hiding him to ensure he stays out of trouble in the weeks leading up to the trial? Any recent trouble would be one more of many fallible points the defense can exploit in its cross-examination of Gentz. And how much is this secretive housing costing the taxpayer?

Fix video surfaces Fresno, 7/4/81

July 4, 1981, Fresno, Calif.

Funny how you remember things, and I was prompted by this footage from Fresno, Calif., to do so.

This is early in the set, we opened with “Signal”, part of which is seen here.  Then go into an unrecorded song that I can’t remember and another. We’d rewrite these and move parts, they were flexible elements of the set, setting up songs like “Rat Patrol” and “Off to War.”

The Fix came to play this July 4 show opening for the Dead Kennedys at the behest of Biafra, who was kindly good-mouthing our first single. We got into town, did a sound check and left.

Anything is better than hanging around a venue all night waiting to play. Nothing good comes of that.

We were staying at the home of Ralph, the singer from Capitol Punishment, a local band. His parents were out of town, he lived with his parents. Nice place. although it didn't take much to impress us. It was a place grown ups lived. (BTW, Ralph's bandmate, Dale, is doing a great job in recent years of documenting those years in Fresno) 

On the way back to the Belmont Ballroom, we stopped for some food. This was a part of the tour where we still had some money left over from playing Texas and Arizona. We ended up being late to get back, and the promoter was cool but you could tell he wanted us to get the fuck up there. Missed 7 Seconds, who opened. I look at this video and realize we stood real close together, the Michigan guys against this crowd. At one point, a guy came from behind me out of nowhere and launched himself off the stage as the crowd started to dig into the pit halfway through.

That night we went back to Ralph’s and had a pretty good party.  At one point we had a blackout, the kind where the electricity went down. A couple nights later we headed over to Reno to play against with 7 Seconds. About a week after that, we recorded Jan’s Rooms in LA at the Music Lab with Spot. We weren’t making any mistakes.

Jimmy Recca talks Stooges in a Detroit Rock City outtake

Jimmy Recca, former Stooge, in his inimitable, animated ramble, on writing “I Got a Right” and entering Stoogeland as the bassist. This is an outtake from Detroit Rock City: The Uncensored History of Rock 'n' Roll in America's Loudest City (Da Capo 2013)

Recca: I joined the band around February 1970. The song that was first recorded by the band the three of us, Ron [Asheton], James [Williamson]and myself as a way to break the ice and to get Ron to accept me as a bass player was “I Got A Right.” We all had the same input on it. We had a lot more songs, but my performance rights to those songs, well, that's why they never did any of those other songs after I left.

Also, they never reproduced them because they were too complex and James couldn't remember, to tell you the truth. He had very little to do with anything other than his parts, his riffs. He had his riffs, I had my riffs, Ron had his riffs. Nobody tries to write a person out of history when that's the way it is. I was there and those guys don't want to write me out of history because they don't want to go back to remember what they can't remember. The only thing they remember is that song, “I Got a Right.” Ron knew it and that's why Ron and I finally got along so well, he knew my ability in that band you know. It took at least seven rehearsals before Ron would even say a fucking word to me. He wouldn't even look at me. He didn't like me. He had that fucking rock star thing like ‘I don't have to accept you if I don't want to. Say whatever you want to. It doesn't matter what you say, we didn't join you, you joined us.’

And I think for the most part, none of it was going to fucking matter, nothing was going to come out of it. Ron started feeling the pangs of James hooking up with Scotty because Scotty and James were the same age and they kind of hung out together and James was getting into the band through Scotty [Asheton]  and Scotty was promoting him to come to rehearsal. Ron was not digging that at all. When things get to him, you know he's fucking caustic, man. But he would get over it eventually. So that's the way it was with James and him and that's how it went on.

Wayne Kramer talking about reading bad review of MC5 while tripping

Wayne Kramer still remembers reading Lester Bangs’ bad review of Kick Out The Jams in Rolling Stone. From the review: Most of the songs are barely distinguishable from each other in their primitive two-chord structures. You've heard all this before from such notables as the Seeds, Blue Cheer, Question Mark and the Mysterians, and the Kingsmen.

Wayne K: My entire motivation was a knee jerk reaction to the criticism I got from Lester Bangs. His review in Rolling Stone fucked me up.  I was on acid, I read the review on acid, and I’m young and creative and believing the hype, and my heart sank. He was a young writer, trying to make his bones, so he thought he’d say something provocative and contrary to the current consensus, as people were loving the MC5. And he was going to come out and say 'these guys talk a good game, but they can’t tune their own guitars.' Writers had been coming out on junkets and then writing glowing reviews about us, hired by the record label. It was paid for. Like most people, I thought you got in the paper on merit. That isn’t how it really works in the world. So I’m on acid, and I’m reading the review, and the guy is just ripping us apart. It got to me because I knew there were great weaknesses in the band and the music, the rhythm section in particular. The bass playing and the drumming.

"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.