The Brewery – A Midwest Music Landmark

 

Dave DiMartino's review of the Stooges, 1974

There’s an excellent story this week in a local  weekly in Michigan about a club that hosted some of the best bands of the 70s. While that sounds like classic rock Hell, wait a second.  Iggy and the Stooges, Captain Beefheart, Bloodrock, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, pre-fame Aerosmith and Kiss, post-fame T.Rex and Big Star all raged at a place called the Brewery in Lansing, Michigan.

From the story: “Tuesday night was tequila night, 25-cent shots. People were shitfaced drunk,” recalled [co-owner Rick] Becker. “I shouldn’t say everyone, most people kept their acts together. But three quarters of the people in there couldn’t legally drive and they didn’t.”

“It is reasonable to say that the City of Lansing has had more than its share of problems at the location of the Brewery,” reads a letter written in July 1974 to the city council by Gerald Graves, who was then mayor of the small town.  He included a list of complaints at the Brewery between 1972 and that date.

In 1972 it numbered 64, in 1973 it hit 96. By mid-74, it was at 29.

Rock and roll and crime. Yes, there’s a big dose of stupid in there. But at least it’s a loud stupid.

This was when there were no decibel meters and no bored cops looking to beef up their quotas and city coffers with drunk driving stops. People smoked. The whole place was built on reckless freedom, and is there any better kind?

Still more from the story: Forty years later, it’s easy to recognize the significance of the Brewery and what occurred on its 50-foot stage, but at the time many of the bands were still on the verge of breaking. The venue saw early gigs from Aerosmith, Rush, Joe Walsh, Peter Frampton and a beardless ZZ Top, to only name a few.

When a still-budding KISS played the Brewery on Oct. 21, 1974, State News reviewer Kevin Carver complemented the band for its “excellent” showmanship but wasn’t impressed with the “unnecessary spitting and drooling of ‘blood’ by bass guitarist Gene Simmons.”

When the Stooges played there, the student newspaper at nearby Michigan State University, the State News, ran photos that had the professors wondering what was going on. I remember my dad, who was a journalism professor at MSU, bringing home the issue and opening it up and wishing that I was old enough to enter the doors and see the Stooges play. Three weeks later, they’d do their last show ever at the Michigan Palace.

When Dave DiMartino reviewed Aerosmith’s show, he displayed why he would go on to become a star rock critic: “There is an air of stardom about this band, one that cannot go unnoticed for long. Given a little time, this relatively young band will probably make it in a very big way.”

The place turned into the Silver Dollar Saloon, as noted in the story, and hosted more stars; I saw the Tubes on their first U.S. tour in the fall of 1975. Rush came along a couple weeks later, making their 4^th or 5^th stop. Patti Smith played there in the spring of 1976 on her first U.S. tour, which is when the place began winding down.

The story has a great kicker:  

“Every major town has some place that was amazing in its time,” [State News reporter Jack] Bodnar said. “Over the course of decades, you realize it was the pinnacle. There were a lot of places that delivered music, but the Brewery was totally unique, as far as the groups that came through and the vibe. It was probably the greatest bar that’s ever been in East Lansing or Lansing.”

An understatement to be sure. Many towns had them, these little local joints where even big-label bands played, back when rock and roll was still the people’s music.

Bashara pushes appeal forward, sends email insisting he is innocent

I received another email from Bob Bashara this week, the fourth since he was sentenced to life in prison in January.
He continues to maintain his innocence and notes that he has filed some motions that he hopes will bring what he insists is truth to the situation.

In a previous email I asked him about the 472 phone calls between he and Joe Gentz, the man who confessed to killing Jane Bashara.  The calls took place, according to testimony, between August 2011 through January 2012.

Bashara says that almost 70 percent of those calls were under 25 to 35 seconds, which would indicate there was no connection made.

According to Stan Brue, the federal agent who analyzed the phone records for the prosecution, the calls originated with Gentz two-thirds of the time through December 2011. In January, Bashara made 67 calls to Gentz as opposed to 32 from Gentz to Bashara.  Jane was murdered January 24, 2012.

His appeal is moving through the system and it will take a long time.

The trial transcripts are trickling in, including the 40 days of trial. The analysis of them will be part of the work of Ronald Ambrose, who is Bashara’s appellate lawyer. 

"I will never, ever stop fighting for justice and the truth, until my hands are raw, blood comes from eyes and I take my last breath, " Bashara said at his sentencing hearing in January, when he received a mandatory life sentence for first-degree murder.

I’ve also talked on the phone with Gentz, who told me of his life as something of a wanderer. He said he worked as a civilian for the military for a while and as an AB, which is an able-bodied seaman in the Merchant Marines. As you can imagine, there's more to it than that. 

The book, Murder in Grosse Pointe Park: Privilege, Adultery and the Killing of Jane Bashara (Penguin/Berkley), is scheduled for a fall release.

BDSM community and the release of 50 Shades adaptation in the wake of Bashara

Film version of book release 2.13.15

The Detroit Free Press today has an excellent tie-in to the release of the film version of the book 50 Shades of Grey, which is charting at number two in Amazon's contemporary romance category this morning.

“Every time Grey's character took a hand or a belt to Steele's backside or bound her wrists, I thought about how he could be a Bashara in training — a younger, far more attractive version of the Grosse Pointe Park businessman sentenced to life in prison for hiring a hitman to kill his wife in 2012 because he wanted to live out his sadomasochistic fantasies unencumbered,” writes columnist Kristen Jordan Shamus.

As I worked on the upcoming book, Murder in Grosse Pointe Park: Adultery, Privilege, and the Killing of Jane Bashara (Penguin/Berkley, fall 2015), I spoke with numerous people tied to the lifestyle in and around Detroit’s BDSM and alternative lifestyle scene. All were critical of the way the lifestyle was used by the state as a motivation to murder. 

“Bob’s case put the lifestyle in an unfortunate light,” Rick Falcinelli, a longtime member of the scene, told me in January after he completed his testimony in Bashara’s two-month long trial. He said critics of the lifestyle are “going to get another boost…in February with the misinterpretations of a movie version of 50 Shades of Grey.”

“Ever since the book came out, we’ve been laughing," Falcinelli says. "It misrepresents the way people behave. The book is written for entertainment, not reality, and they write it to play to stereotype.”

Among the poorly portrayed elements is the main character, a wealthy guy named Christian Grey, who woos the lead female character.

“The book does not explain the mindset and motivation for” getting into the lifestyle, Falcinelli says.

Mindset and motivation for checking out the alternative lifestyle is explored in the Bashara book, which is slated for a September release. Why spoil the surprise?

The prosecution based much of its case on Bashara’s participation in the BDSM scene and his hopes to start a new life with his BDSM partner, Rachel Gillett. To do so with freedom, prosecutors said, he killed Jane, his wife of 26 years.

Kim Fowley: "I Used to Fuck Burn Victims in High School for Money"

  

Kim Fowley died this week after a robust and creative life. He was 75. I spoke with him in the summer of 2012 about Detroit, a city in which he had done a lot of business over the years.

Here’s something from the cutting room floor from Detroit Rock City: The Uncensored History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in America’s Loudest City.

He’s talking about coming to Detroit in the late 90s for a session.

Kim Fowley: Ben Edmonds calls me up and says, ‘Car City wants to bring you to Detroit because there’s been a contest between Car City and three other record stores  as to who is the weird, not yet dead, final underdog hero, and it’s you. Car City wants you to record a record. Are you willing to do it?’  I said, ‘For money.’  He said, ‘What do you want?’  I said, ‘Give me a thousand bucks and I’ll bring along some lyrics that I’ll record. We did it at Jim Diamond’s Ghetto Recorders.

Matthew Smith: Ben Edmonds was talking to me about a story he was doing for Mojo about producers and he was talking to all the great producers. He said, ‘I gotta call Kim Fowley later.’  I just mentioned off hand to Ben Edmonds, I said, ‘Oh Kim Fowley, that’s a guy I’d like to work with.’ He said, ‘Well I just might tell him that.  You know you just might get a phone call or something.’  So 24 hours later I get a phone call.  ‘This is Kim Fowley.  What is it you want to do?  And don’t give me any bullshit.  What is it you have in mind?’  I just said, ‘Well I thought we could make a record together.’  ‘Well how much money can you come up with?’  I go, ‘I don’t know.  I might be able to raise a couple grand.’  ‘Well I want one thousand of it up front and the other thousand when I arrive at the airport.’  It happened that quickly. The next day I went into Car City Records, where I was working and I said, ‘Do you think the record store might want to kick in some money to help me make a Kim Fowley record and get all these Detroit people to play in it?’  They said yes.  A week later he showed up. Kim stayed at my house for a week.  He was in a bit of an intense frame of mind.  He was a bit confused or suspicious about our motives. He didn’t understand exactly why we wanted to do the record we wanted to do. By the time we got in the studio with all the musicians, it was almost like we were all under hypnosis.  John Nash, Bootsie, Troy Gregory, it was this all star local cast. Kim kept us up for days; he doesn’t sleep, he doesn’t eat.  Then after five hours, ‘I need a banana.’  He’d eat a banana and then he has energy for another six hours.  He hardly slept at all. 

Bob Mulrooney aka Bootsey X: He was looking for a new place to base himself and was moving from New Orleans. He liked me because I brought the chicks, some hot girls. The girls that ended up on the album cover. He said ‘I’m gonna rent a limo and you girls are going to show me Detroit.’ I said, I want a finder’s fee. They never showed him anything.

Kim Fowley: I brought seventy lyrics, and I used sixty-eight of ‘em.

Jim Diamond: Kim had people coming in, people from His Name is Alive, the Witches, Bob Mulrooney was playing drums and Mary from the Cobras was there. Kim said every song just had to be whoever is in the studio is fair game to be on the record. Kim would just make up stuff as it went on. He would make up lyrics and say, ‘Play this beat. Play something that sounds like this.’ And everyone would start playing and that would be the song. He told Bob, ‘play a beat like ooo-pappa-do. I want to hear that song oo-pappa doo, this old R &B song.’ And that would become a song. Everything was like that.  Everyone was drinking except Kim and it was total chaos. Then he did the show at the Magic Stick. 

Kim Fowley: It was the show that almost turned into fisticuffs.  I went on the Wayne State radio station and asked for lipstick lesbians to join me on stage. I had songs about shaved cunts and everything that I performed on radio; talking to the uterus, you know.  I said, ‘Come on bitches.  Come down and join me.’  Then I went to Noir Leather in Royal Oak and tried to get all those fetish chicks down there.  Remember I used to be a sex worker.  I used to fuck burn victims in high school for money.  So I understood ‘dirty bitches’, you know.  My mother was a lesbian.  I understand filth.  The Detroit Cobras thought I was a horrible human being for exploiting women.

Rachel Nagy: That guy is such a fucking egomaniac.  At the Magic Stick, he was doing this thing, ‘Come on everybody.  Come on stage.  Come on!  Let’s party!’  I’m like, ‘Okay.’  No one was going up.  I’m like, okay.  I will party. He starts trying to dance with me and I grabbed him.  Then he tried to push my head down and that’s when I tackled him. He was kind of pawing me and, well, baby, hey. He tried to push my shoulders down and I just fucking knocked him over. You know what, dude?  Fuck you.  You invite people up.  You want to party.  Then you want to get fucking sexual with me?

Jim Diamond: Next thing I know they ran up there and tackled him. We pulled Mary and Rachel off of him and then, he's a frail older guy, you know. He's like, ‘I had polio.’ They were laughing at first but I don't think they understood that he was a little, older guy who had polio. He didn't deserve to have fucked up chicks jumping on him, trying to strangle him.

Kim Fowley: I’m a cripple because I have the polio cane and whatnot, so they tried to pull me by the bad leg, Gene Vincent style, into the audience. The roadies were pulling me back.  I was caught between the two.  Rachel says, ‘You know I threw a punch at him or I did this or that.’  She’s a talented person who has her priorities incorrect and she never charted anywhere. Mary was on the album, funny enough.  Ben Edmonds took her side, whatever it was. You know, womanizer from out of town, crippled with a limp.  I mean who needed that?  Who cares, you know; I’ve been disliked by people before.

Jim Diamond: The next day they came over here and Kim and Ben Edmonds were going to do this thing called Abba Zabba, where Ben was going to ask him like A – Z different band and Kim would tell some story about them. Like it started out with Abba. And Kim would be like, ‘Those girls were a bunch of fucking whores who didn't deserve dog piss.’ He'd just say stuff like that about all these bands, and it was funny. Then Mary comes over and Kim goes on this long diatribe. I have some of it recorded because I had an open mic out there and I turned it on and Kim's going, ‘I'm casting a spell on you right now. Your dreams will never come true.’ and ‘usually when I come to a city, I hire a bull dog. That's someone who will murder people for me.’ and he went on to tell this story about how he was going to take care of her. It was crazy and it went on and it was just very quiet in there and very uncomfortable. Everyone was just silent and he's just telling how he usually likes to have people killed and he had guns.

Kim Fowley: Detroit became a music hotbed again because I had been there.

Bob Bashara: “What’s BDSM got to do with it?”

 

Flyer for Bashara's first business enterprise 

The Bashara trial is about to end, with closing statements coming Wednesday, and now we’ll see how the state did. It’s been almost three years since Jane Bashara was murdered, her life snuffed out in her garage under a boot on the foot of Joe Gentz, a man who says he was paid by Bob Bashara to kill Jane. 

Gentz is doing 17-to-28 for second-degree murder in the case.

For Bashara, the state wants a first-degree conviction, saying that without his actions, Jane would be alive. He's also charged with conspiracy to commit first degree murder, solicitation of murder, obstruction of justice and witness intimidation.

It’s been a drawn out trial, with 74 witnesses and typically graphic exhibits – a classic murder trial spiced with the BDSM world that Bashara admits he was part of during his last years with Jane.

“They’re using the fact that I had this alternative lifestyle as motive for me wanting to harm my wife,” Bashara told me one day last year. We spoke many times on the phone after he was sent for prison for soliciting the murder of Gentz. A lot of those conversations will show up in the book I’m wrapping up, Murder in Grosse Pointe Park: Privilege, Adultery and the Killing of Jane Bashara, which comes out on Penguin/Berkley in the fall.   

The state claims that he wanted Jane out of the way so he could have a life with his girlfriend, Rachel Gillett, who shared an affinity for the lifestyle with Bob. Also, the state claims that money issues were pressuring Bashara and Jane had a fat IRA that he would be privy to if she were to die.

“My wife was not inhibiting me,” he told me. “If I didn’t want to have Jane, I would have simply divorced her. But I had plenty of income and money was never an issue. I was paying for two kids going to college, had cars and they got whatever they wanted.  If [daughter] Jessie wanted a $500 pair of boots, Jane got them for her.”

Investigators found statements that showed a wide gulf between the income of Bob and Jane. She made close to six figures some years as a marketing consultant and he made barely $20,000 a year as a landlord and sales rep for a chemical company.

It’s not my job, but the defense failed to note that a self-employed individual should show a low adjusted income; better for taxes. I don’t know if that was the case with Bashara, but I’m sure that fact went by the jury in a state where so many people are desperately clinging to whatever employer will have them.

The state did, however, do a good job of exposing Bashara as a bad guy in terms of character. He cheated on his wife, who was clearly intent on working things out in a troubled marriage. He was a slumlord, and a hot-headed bully by a number of accounts. There was an episode in which his daughter found an incriminating text to one of his mistresses – yes, he had more than one - on his phone and he grabbed the phone, erased it, and handed it back to her: “What text?” he said, or something similar. That stuck with me as particularly mean-spirited. Who does that?

He was also head of the local Rotary Club. Do they let any angry man run that group? The club has done its best to erase all mentions of its connection to Bashara. Was he a great guy who did you wrong? Or did he do such a good job of glad-handing and bringing in money that they put up with him? It was never quite squared in trial. 

There were some lighter moments in a dark setting. He used to go out to the golf course in ritzy Grosse Pointe and do blow and smoke weed with a buddy, and we're talking in recent yeas. That he knocked back lines and joints on the golf course of the local country club was amusing to me; I’m sure he wasn’t the only one doing such a thing.

I wrote about the case at the outset of the trial for the Daily Beast.  We’re done. The jurors will do its best to figure it out after taking nine weeks out of their lives to listen to a parade of characters, some pissed off, some amusing and a few sad depressing. 

Bashara came into the courtroom on Monday whistling, ebullient. He’s apparently confident that the state failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he procured the murder. Hang on. It could get good.

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.