Two Tickets to the Motor City
A brief flashback to some woefully misguided stage banter
Ugh, too many greats heading for the exit lately: Duane Eddy, Steve Albini (more on him in a future post), Richard Tandy of ELO, and now MC5 drummer Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson is no longer the last member of that crucial band still standing.
As I mentioned when his brother-in-arms Wayne Kramer passed away a few months back, The MC5 were hugely important to me, as was the sense of musical/spiritual connection I felt with them from having spent the bulk of my childhood just down the street from the White Panther Party HQ in Ann Arbor.
The MC5 and their “little brother band” The Stooges were enormously hip names to drop in the underground/college/alternative rock world of the mid/late 1980s, and for good reason. The untamed fire and fury of those bands’ records felt incredibly refreshing at a time when the vast majority of new records (even those by a significant number of college rock faves) were awash in ever-more-sterile sounds, and The MC5’s radical political consciousness — not to mention the tales of Iggy Pop’s unhinged onstage antics — had a real resonance in the buttoned-up Reagan/Bush era.
Of course, by the time my band Lava Sutra made its live debut with a gig at Chicago’s now-fabled Lounge Ax in early 1990, it had already become something of a cliché to invoke or cover either of those bands, or any of the other “high energy” Detroit acts of that era for that matter. We were definitely more influenced by The MC5 than The Stooges, and even covered the former’s “I Want You Right Now” onstage from time to time in our early days; but by 1991 we’d stopped wearing our fealty to the 5 on our sleeves, as much out of not wanting to be yet another hard-rocking alternative band claiming Detroit lineage. (“Black Sabbath meets Neil Diamond” was how we billed ourselves instead, at least for a while.)
In February 1991, our bassist Bob booked us a gig at Detroit’s Wayne State University, the site of (as I would learn a decade or so later, when I finally got to see the footage) a truly incendiary 1970 outdoor gig by The MC5. This one was indoors, however, on a stage located inside WSU’s Student Commons, which was basically a food court with a Burger King and a Baskin-Robbins. This lunchtime show was originally supposed to be part of a five-show Lava Sutra mini-tour through the Mitten State; all the other gigs on our itinerary had fallen through at more or less the last minute, but we’d decided to go ahead and play Wayne State anyway, just for the adventure. We stayed overnight in Ann Arbor at the home of a friend, then drove on to Detroit in the morning.
We drove into the Motor City cranking a cassette of Kick Out the Jams, and proceeded to get extremely lost; we finally had to pull over at the proverbial “lone phone booth in the middle of a completely desolate and burned-out neighborhood” and call the WSU booker to get directions. When we finally arrived, two things immediately became clear: One, the Commons stage featured a P.A. so dinky that even a lifeguard might have trouble calling kids out of the pool with it; and Two, absolutely no one was excited about having some Chicago rock band they’d never heard of serenade them during their lunch hour.
But hey, we were playing Detroit, and we were determined to have fun with it, even if the WSU students that were packing the Commons’ downstairs seating area refused to even look at us. Actually, scratch that — from our onstage vantage point, we quickly surmised that the WSU students seated in front of us were white, while the students looking down at us from the Commons’ upper level were Black. And after a few songs, the Black kids started getting into it; I mean, they were kind of mocking us and goofing on our big rock poses, but it was done in a good-natured way, and pretty soon we were “rocking out” in their direction and laughing right along with them. Hell, any kind of reaction was better than no reaction at all, but I also had the impression that they thought if their white counterparts didn’t like us (and it was pretty obvious that they did not), then we must be okay.
Our first-ever Detroit gig would not be complete, however, without our “Tribute to the Motor City”. Jason, my fellow Lava Sutra guitarist and vocalist had cooked up this scheme with me after seeing several British bands come through Chicago and announce from the stage, “Since we’re in Chicago, the ‘ome of the blues, we’d like to do a little number called ‘Oochie Coochie Mayne’!” So of course we’d have to do something like that in Detroit… albeit with a musical shoutout to a Motor City act that no one would be expecting.
A few months earlier, I’d had a moment of epiphany during a stoned late-night run to our nearby White Hen Pantry, when hearing Eddie Money’s “Think I’m In Love” blasting out of a ceiling speaker made me realize just how awesome both the man and the song were. I insisted that we work the tune up as a cover, and we all enjoyed playing it so much that it actually stayed in our set lists for a good while.
I also remembered that, somewhere in the distant past, I’d heard that Eddie had been a cop in Detroit in the days before he’d copped two tickets to rock stardom. Therefore, “Think I’m In Love” seemed like the perfect punchline for our “Tribute to the Motor City” shtick — people would think we were about to play “Kick Out the Jams,” and instead we’d kick out the Mahoney. Genius, right?
“And right now…” I bellowed into my microphone, Jason echoing me with a “Right now” of his own, just like on the Kick Out the Jams album. “Since we’re here in Detroit, we’d like to do our… TRIBUTE TO THE MOTOR CITY!!!” We slammed into “Think I’m In Love” for all we were worth; it sounded great, but it was clear that no one in the audience had gotten the joke.
Of course, the joke was entirely on us — as I would find out much later (this was several years before we could just look things up on the Internet), Eddie Money was from Brooklyn, had trained to be a cop in New York City, and had risen to musical fame in San Francisco. Detroit, though home to a sizable coterie of Money fans, was not connected to his life or career in any meaningful way.
In retrospect the revelation of my Money gaffe just added to the absurdity of the whole Wayne State show. The gig wasn’t totally a lost cause, though; several people did come up to us as we were packing our gear to say how much they’d enjoyed it, and one smooth older Black dude in a rasta cap and shades assured us that, “You had the ladies scratchin’!” So that was nice, I guess, as was our lunch stop at an A&W on our drive back to Chicago.
Anyway, here’s a real tribute to the Motor City — The MC5 performing in their prime at Wayne State’s Tartar Field. I’ve posted this clip before; but as it’s simply some of the greatest live rock footage ever lensed, it never hurts to watch it again.
Rest In Peace, Machine Gun. You were as powerful and deadly as your nickname.
I’m so glad I had already returned to New York when you “played”
Detroit. I would have really been worried.
While living in Ann Arbor i attended a Pointer Sister’s concert in Detroit Martin Mull was the opening act. The audience was almost entirely Black. Mull lasted about 3 minutes with jokes that no one laughed at. (I thought they were funny.) Then in desperation, Mull looking like a sorry loaf of Silvercup white bread started playing his guitar and singing. It took about 30 seconds for him to be hooted off the stage. But the Pointer Sisters never got such a welcome as when they came on dancing and singing in their matching fuchsia outfits. The audience went wild.
This story still cracks me up 😆