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Carson Interview 1

Cass Corridor Documentation Project

Oral History Project

Interviewee: David A. Carson

Relationship to : music historian, deejay

Interviewer: Jared Natzke

Date of Interview: April 7, 2011

Location: Purdy-Kresge Library, , Detroit, MI (by phone)

Natzke: This is Jared Natzke. I’m interviewing Mr. David Carson on April 7, 2011. He is the author of a few books about Detroit rock history: Grit, Noise, and Revolution is about Detroit and Rockin’ [Down] the Dial is his earlier book about rock deejays in Detroit. So

David, could you tell me a little bit about your background, about where you grew up?

Carson: Sure. I born in the city, in the city of Detroit, over on the east side, over by

Chryslers, and I kind of got moved to suburban Royal Oak as a child. But I kept ties with the east side. My grandmother continued to live over there in the flat that we had lived in. I always had ties to that part of town. [I] grew up in Royal Oak, went to Helen Keller Junior High School,

Dondero High School out there.

Carson Interview 2

Natzke: So you eventually got into radio. When you were growing up were there certain deejays that you listened to a lot, that you looked up to, that you kind of wanted to emulate?

Carson: Well, Detroit was always a really great radio town and it’s had some terrific stations and personalities, people who were on before I was listening to them whose reputations I was aware of. People like Ed McKenzie, who I had sort of flickering memories of from his television show. In the middle 1950s he had been the original “Jack the Bellboy.” He was the first big to be followed by teenagers because he did a lot of rebellious things on the air, and that type of thing. Later on there were people like Mickey Shorr, who was a bigger than life, very flamboyant guy on the radio. And of course Robin Seymour, you want to give Robin credit because he was probably one of the very first of the white deejays to program R&B records, which morphed into what was starting to be called “rock and roll” in 1954-55, that era. Then

Mickey Shorr, who was on WJBK and then WXYZ, and was a big top showman kind of thing, did a lot of controversial things, drew a lot of attention to himself. Huge reputation. Some of the other big people, other folks that my era would remember are Bud Davies from the early days of

CKLW radio and television, Joel Sebastian, Lee Alan, these were the big names in the early

1960s. “Lee Alan on the Horn,” he was another guy who knew how to get people listening to his radio show. Tom Clay, who was on WJBK in the late ‘50s and later at several other stations in the area, he sort of brought a more confidential tone to Top Forty radio rather than the “Hi guys and gals!” He was more speaking to the other person across the dial and that was something you noticed. He really communicated well, really sold the music. Joel Sebastian, Lee Alan kind of picked up on that and it’s the kind of thing where if they were playing a slow rock and roll ballad, rather than introduce it in a big way they would get very mellow on the air and would be Carson Interview 3 introducing that record as if they were tuned in to what it was all about and communicating that to you. It would be very interesting.

So radio went on like that through the ‘60s. We had a station, WKMH, that changed formats at the very end of 1963 and became WKNR, “Keener Radio,” and it had a shorter play list and a livelier, faster moving sound. They became the big station in the mid-‘60s. That’s probably when station image replaced individual personalities as the more dominant thing.

Rather than somebody saying, “Yeah I listen to Lee Alan” somebody would probably say, “I listen to Keener [WKNR].” “Keener” may have some great deejays on it, which it did, like Dick

Purtan, Bob Green, but the station itself had a more cohesive sound twenty-four hours a day.

Kids said these were the rock stations but in reality they were stations that played the that were the best sellers. So you had the hits and you had and the

Rolling Stones all being played alongside Petula Clark or Dean Martin or Frank Sinatra. If they had hit records that were at the Top Ten, it was all played together. So it was sort of a galvanizing effect and everybody was aware of all of the music. So that’s kind of where radio was up until 1968.

Natzke: That was my impression from your books, that especially AM radio became much more polished and formulaic going on. I know some of the FM stations had started to come along such as WABX, they kind of tried to mix things up and they were very different than the radio –

Carson: Well there was nowhere to go but up on FM in those days. Nobody listened to FM radio

(laughs) back –

Carson Interview 4

Natzke: You mentioned it was mostly elevator music, that’s what was being played –

Carson: Correct! Because people listening to it were either listening in doctors offices, in the elevators, or they were elderly people who wanted soft, quiet, Montovani type music and that type of thing. In fact, if you looked at a rating sheet of the stations being rated for listenership in

Detroit in 1965 there was one FM station that even showed up at the bottom (laughs). You could put all the rest of them together and they barely added up to a couple of percent of listeners. So stations didn’t even stay on the air, you could do anything on them. They were doing what AM radio had done years earlier. They might have a jazz show on for a couple of hours and then a classical music show and then a discussion program, just sort of a hodgepodge mishmash of things.

So in ‘68 a station called WABX, which had been on the air in town for about seven or eight years, had tried their hand at classical and played pop music, light jazz, they did have an excellent jazz show in the evening with a guy named Jim Rockwell who was well known. But aside from that they were going nowhere. Believe it or not, they didn’t even sign on the air until nine o’clock in the morning.

Natzke: (laughs) Yeah, nobody was listening.

Carson: Yeah (laughs). Why bother competing with the other stations? So that was the attitude.

They started fooling around, playing some of the music that you couldn’t hear on the AM Top

Forty stations. Because now you had people, not only the Beatles but other artists, putting out and putting more effort into the albums. Before that you had Bobby Rydell having a hit Carson Interview 5 record and then the would rush out a Bobby Rydell that would indeed include the hit record and twelve or eleven other cover versions: him doing a Bobby Vinton and a

Dion song (laughs). So there wasn’t much into it. But now you had people producing albums with original material or material that they had put a lot of thought into. But this music wasn’t available. You couldn’t hear it anywhere except over on your friend’s hi-fi or something. So

WABX started to program a little of this and it was a mix of and folk music and some of the more mature rock on a show called “Troubadour.” And the response was terrific so “why don’t we play some more?” I had done a little work over there myself, a little fill-in work, so I remember what the atmosphere was like at that time at and it was just ripe for a change. I think it was around February ‘68 they went full blast with that and there was this whole maturing audience of people who had grown up listening to the AM Top Forty rock stations that now were embracing this. “Wow, what is this music and all these album cuts?” And there didn’t have to be a jingle and a commercial between every record. There was still a big mass audience for AM Top

Forty radio. It was fast, it was exciting, they played the hits. But now there was something to serve a different audience, and that’s where that came along. And WABX, besides the music, they started to reflect more of the interests of that growing era, sort of the community of people, the political views and such.

Natzke: One of my favorite stories that you related in Grit, Noise, and Revolution was when

WABX got an advance copy of the [Beatles] “White Album” before anyone had heard it and were playing it live on the air. They received a call from from England to stop immediately. I thought that was very indicative of what kind of station WABX was.

Carson Interview 6

Carson: Yeah, that was an exciting time for them because before that, as one of my old friends who was working there at the time said, it was always one of the big AMs that got maybe an advance acetate of a new [Rolling] Stones single or something but here was an album they had their hands on. And they really promoted the heck out of it; people were pouring out of the clubs and everything else to get out to their cars to see, “What is it they’re going to have tonight?” And yeah, it was the “White Album” by the Beatles. It was a very exciting thing. But they would do things there, like the deejays could be creative and they would play sets and they might have a set where they would play three or four songs by a particular artist or three or four or five songs on a particular theme, whether it had to do with war or something else. It was a very creative period.

Natzke: Yeah, it seems like they gave them, the deejays, much more freedom than other stations.

Carson: It didn’t last too long (laughs), but it was kind of a golden era there.

Natzke: It was fun while it lasted. So getting back to your background a little bit, why did you want to get into radio in the first place? What was it about radio that appealed to you?

Carson: Well, I was just one of those kids who when I got my first transistor radio I just was hooked. I was listening to some of my favorite disc jockeys at night, Joel Sebastian primarily, on

WXYZ and I said “that’s something I would like to do.” I guess you have a feeling for something, an affinity for it. From then on that’s what I set my sights on. I was lucky that we had an actual FM radio station in Royal Oak tied to the school system. I was able to do some Carson Interview 7 programming on that. In fact, I did a show on that as early as 1965 that was kind of a harbinger of the later things they were doing at WABX. I was playing kind of a mix of some of the early

Bob Dylan records, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Jim Kweskin Jug Band, some early Van

Morrison when he was with was with Them. It was an interesting time that I got to do that. Yeah, so I just thought that it was a lot of fun, who wouldn’t like it? And might be a great way to meet too, (laughs) you know? Just the idea of being able to sit in a room behind a microphone and talk to people and try to put yourself in a state of mind that somebody’s actually listening to what you’re saying (laughs), which I’m sure they always are not. But that’s what you sort of tell yourself you’re doing and it was very appealing.

Natzke: So you actually went on to work at a country station for a while too, WEXL –

Carson: Yeah, I started on FM radio. Believe it or not I used to announce the “Middle East Hour

(laughs) in Detroit” at an FM station. A fellow named Faisal Arabu was the host of this program and he would come in and bring in the things and it was kind of like old time radio. He went in the live studio that we had to the right of the control room I was in and I would cue up his theme music and it was sort of very Arabic sounding. “Time for Detroit’s Middle East Hour, with your host Faisal Arabu!” “Thank you Dave,” and then he would do the show. At that time there was no inclination on my part of what the Middle East was, I thought he must be Egyptian or something (laughs). The thing about it, he was a terrific guy and one day he came in and said

“Dave, starting this week let’s drop the ‘Faisal.’ Introduce me as ‘Frank’ Arabu because I’m thinking about running for city council,” (laughs). I don’t know, maybe I should “Google” Frank

Arabu to see whatever happened to him. Yeah, then I worked at some other little stations in Carson Interview 8 outlying areas and eventually worked for WEXL, which was AM radio. I was doing the all night show there playing . Of course, people would say, “That’s great, but when are you going to get on ‘Keener’ [WKNR]? (laughs)” or, “When are you going to get on one of these other stations?” Eventually I left Detroit. I worked in Grand Rapids and Louisville, Kentucky. I worked in Flint [MI], but always kept close ties with my hometown.

Natzke: What caused you to eventually leave the radio industry?

Carson: I think I was just one of those people who got into it at such a young age, when I was fifteen (laughs), so by the time I was twenty-five things had changed a bit and I guess the prism I was looking at the world through had changed. So I just made some changes. I never really said,

“Hey, I’m leaving forever,” but it sort of turned out that way. All these years later it’s kind of strange, as things go full-circle, I work for a publication called Radio World that serves the radio industry today.

Natzke: What was the process like for writing your books? Both Rockin’ Down the Dial and

Grit, Noise, and Revolution, it’s clear from the notes in the books that you conducted a lot of interviews for these. So if you could just talk a little bit about what that was like –

Carson: Well, they were similar. At first I decided – I was originally working on a little article,

I thought, about Detroit radio and then it just expanded from there. I had written about thirty pages, or maybe I had thought about a book and just sat down and I sort of just emptied out everything, all my inner knowledge (laughs). In fact, I was saying to my wife, “Jeez, I don’t Carson Interview 9 think I’m going anywhere” and she said, “Well now you have to call people! (laughs) You have to do some research! Surely you can expand –.” And I said, “Well yeah, that makes sense. Let me try that.” I simply started, and this was before Google, I just started tracking down some of my radio heroes and people that I had remembered. I think the first person I called, for whatever reason, was Paul Winter, who people might remember as being affiliated with Channel 56 [PBS

WTVS] many years later. But Paul, Saul Wineman was his real name, but on the radio he was always Paul Winter and he was a great performer on WXYZ from about 1951 until the mid ‘60s and later to talk radio and other things. I called him, did an interview and talked, and from there I just started tracking down people, just conducting these interviews, starting to put it together. I was trying to get old photographs, crosschecking dates and information, verifying things, and that’s kind of how it went. It was a labor of love, I definitely spent several years on that project.

Natzke: Were most of the people you talked to pretty willing to work with you? Especially people that were in the bands, when you were writing Grit, Noise, and Revolution.

Carson: Well on the second book, besides interviews I also did a lot of research. There was more information also. Again, there was a lot that I didn’t know, that I learned through referencing other information and then tracking down people and talking. Yeah, most people were happy to talk. Like any time you’re interviewing people, every now and then you get one of those people: “So was it exciting? Can you tell me what it was like?” “Well, it was exciting. Yes, it was nice,” (laughs). So, that happens and it’s you’re job as an interviewer to try and draw out more information from them. Some of the people were terrific and had very encyclopedic memories of things that happened. It was great fun. I interviewed all the three surviving Carson Interview 10 members of the MC5 and they were all terrific, terrific interviews: , Michael

Davis, and Dennis Thompson. Jem Targal from Third Power was a great interview. I had nice memories of some of the rock concerts they played at. Some people you had to prod or you would wind up having to feed them some hints and they would go, “Really? I was there? I didn’t remember?” (laughs). “It’s all a blur to me. If you say so!” That was like putting together a mosaic, you know? There had been a number of articles written in magazines here and there, an article on the MC5. There had been some articles on , an article here and there on Russ

Gibb, who owned the . So you had a few of these things out there but no one had ever really put it together. So that’s kind of what I was doing: taking these things and trying to timeline it all out and create a narrative. I didn’t want to just do an encyclopedia of Detroit music. I could’ve done something like that: “Here’s a chapter on the MC5, here’s a chapter on

Bob Seger,” but I thought, “That’s boring,” (laughs). Here I was trying to show, “Here’s where the MC5 enter the story and now we’re leaving them because we’re going over to talk about

John Sinclair coming into the picture. Now we’re going to bring the MC5 back and here we’re completely moving away from that and going over to touch on this other thing that was going on.” So trying to put together, make it flow as one story.

Originally, when I did the first treatment for the book, I was going to start off with the story of and , where that late ‘60s era sort of began. I had virtually no Motown in the book because there was so much Motown available, so many books on Motown. The publisher, University of Press, they read it and they wanted to do it but they had some people weigh in on it and they said, “You can’t put out a book on Detroit music that doesn’t touch on Motown!” (laughs). Finally I said, “Ok, I’ll work it in, I’ll find a way to do that.” Then I decided, “Well, I’ll put one advance chapter where I talk about the early days Carson Interview 11 of Detroit music and the birth of Motown, this and that.” Well, from that it grew into – I got into some really juicy things; I think I wound up putting in three or four earlier chapters, all the way back to . It was pretty much a chapter on John Lee Hooker and blues in the ‘40s in Detroit then moving up through Fortune Records, the local R&B record labels, and the birth of

Motown. I tried to put in some different information that wasn’t available, and again, within the context of everything else that was going on. Besides Motown, there were other entrepreneurial record companies and record producers running around Detroit at that time. I think when people read that they kind of get to see what was going on when Berry Gordy started the company

[Motown]; who his competition was, what it was that he was doing that made him more successful than the others. Then I brought it up to introducing Mitch Ryder and the Detroit

Wheels and then on to the era of the teen nightclubs: The Hideout, the Crow’s Nest, and all those places as live music sort of started to – not totally replace, but be the preference over the old disc jockey record hop type thing. And then on to the Grande Ballroom and the more sophisticated things. It was strictly music, the big rock bands, and it became a school process. You were schooled in playing the small teen dances and you moved up to a little better places and for these bands if they could get to the Grande Ballroom or the Eastown Theater, those were the big prestigious gigs.

Natzke: I thought that was really interesting, what you talked about in Grit, Noise, and

Revolution about this progression, how it kind of progressed from black R&B bands to white

R&B and then rock and roll sort of started coming out of both of those and then it started changing very rapidly and –

Carson Interview 12

Carson: Well, the whole era was an exciting era. When you really stop and think about from the time that released “Heartbreak Hotel” in 1956 and the Beatles released “Sergeant

Pepper” eleven years later, look at the span, look at all that went on in eleven short years. And again, you bring that down to the local level. If you read the book and see the kind of rock and roll bands, the Thunder Rocks and some of these early bands with the saxophones, the

Royaltones, that were playing in the late ‘50s at teen dances, from there it’s just a short hop, seven, eight, nine years and you’re with and the MC5 and Bob Seger System and the music has just progressed in such a way. Even thirty years later it doesn’t equal the impact of the changes that went on in that era. I think that’s what made it so exciting, you could really chart it out. It’s the same thing with the radio earlier, with the exception of the music they were playing, you could take a radio station today and you could play a recording of that station, an “air check” as they say, from fifteen, twenty years ago and it really doesn’t sound any different, you know, the presentation of the station. In the old days you could listen to a radio air check of Tom Clay in 1958 and then listen to a recording of a station in 1965 and, “Boy, I can tell how things have progressed in the production on the station and the presentation, the way it’s done.” It was the same with the music. That made it very exciting and made it an excellent story to tell with a beginning, a middle, and an end because that era, for both radio and music, did sort of come to an end in the early ‘70s.

Natzke: In Grit, Noise, and Revolution you talk a lot about some of the Detroit bands that didn’t really make it big on the national stage. Actually, it seems like the majority of the Detroit bands didn’t really manage to break out. Are there any of them that you would like to highlight briefly that you think were really talented but never quite made it? Carson Interview 13

Carson: Well, there were just so many but again, when we’re talking about these groups, if you were from Detroit they were a big deal. Besides the teen clubs, besides the Grande Ballroom, the

Eastown Theater, all that, this was an era between 1969-71 or ’72 where there were also just an unending number of outdoor rock concerts all over southeastern Michigan. There was a great need for music, for live music, so there were so many bands, and bands could make money by playing the gigs in the teen clubs, the Grande, and all these outdoor concerts. The big lineup, the superstar lineup of Michigan talent would’ve included the MC5 of course, Bob Seger with his

Bob Seger System, a band called , ’s group the Amboy Dukes, a band called

SRC. Those were probably the big five headliners. There were also who were very popular, out of Ann Arbor.

Natzke: Yeah, you said they were wildly popular for a while.

Carson: Wildly popular, although they came to an end a little earlier than that but they had some hit records. They were just a great group and they were promoted in a most professional way by a guy named Jeep Holland who was a producer and a booking agent. He knew how to do things, promotion on a small scale but in a big-time way. And of course there were . So these groups were just big and if you had a festival and these were your headliners, to people in southeastern Michigan you might as well have been saying, “Well, we’re having the Beatles, the

Rolling Stones, Cream,” (laughs). You could take that same lineup to an arena in Kansas City and they’d be going, “Who are these people?” for the most part. It was really strange. There were other bands, Savage Grace, the Third Power, the Frut, just too many to mention. Unfortunately, Carson Interview 14 they just, for various reasons, could not break out. Bob Seger was on a small local record label.

He had like three or four consecutive top ten records in Detroit (laughs).

Natzke: Yeah, he just could not make it on the national –

Carson: Yeah, but those records just wouldn’t make it out of Michigan. They didn’t have the business finesse and the promotional means to break him out. Frost signed a contract with

Vanguard Records, which was a national label, primarily more folk music oriented, but they just didn’t seem to have the faith in them or something. They would stock the records in Michigan and their albums were selling great, they had hit singles, but they would go out on the road and they would be in and there wouldn’t be any records. So that’s a problem that they had, that a lot of the acts had. Those would be just great groups and people who came to Detroit to play hated to have to follow these people because they were good groups, the MC5 especially.

But you really would not want to have to follow any of those groups onstage. There were a lot of national acts who maybe, for whatever reason, they had a better record label, better promotion, they had a hit record, their album was selling better, so they came to town and they were the top- billed act at the Grande Ballroom and they would be supported by one or two of these groups.

Well, once the MC5 would come up and burn down the stage practically, “Now let’s see what you got!” That resulted in their whole thing with the “,” when they would stand on the awnings and tell these bands, “Hey, you’re lame, man! You gotta kick out the jams or get off the stage!” Detroit was a tough audience because we had such great talent and great bands, it was very demanding. People worked hard for their money, they worked in the factories. If they went somewhere and you were paid to perform, you’d better deliver. Carson Interview 15

Natzke: So did you have a few favorites that you really enjoyed going to see back then that were big in the Detroit scene?

Carson: Personally, I liked the Rationals. They had some records out that I liked. I liked the group and I liked the way that they were promoted. I had been a Bob Seger fan, his early records:

“East Side Story,” “,” and all that. Those were favorites. Ted Nugent and the

Ambory Dukes did manage to come up with one big national hit with “Journey to the Center of the Mind,” which I thought was a great record, it surely deserved to be a top twenty hit in

Billboard, which it did. Third Power was another band that was kind of a power trio that really worked hard and put on a great show. It’s hard to find anybody to say anything bad about.

Natzke: In Grit, Noise, and Revolution you talk at length about the MC5. They’re widely regarded as being revolutionary in both their politics and their music. So what was it about their sound and their personas that made them so different from the bands that had come before?

Carson: They were just very loud (laughs) and they played very music. They just really attacked it and they had some great equipment. I played a little bit in a band as a teenager, you know? We would just plug into our amplifiers, stick the microphone into the same amp as the bass guitar (laughs) and play like that. They started getting into, with the help of somebody that was serving as a manager, they got into some of the really great new amplifiers and sound systems. So they were able to play at an earsplitting level, which they did. They really put on a show, they had a great front man in , and they really mixed – they were a Carson Interview 16 contemporary rock band but they also paid tribute to the past in that they did a lot onstage. They did some routines (laughs) onstage but at the same time they weren’t just an oldies band or something. But they were something to look at and they had different outfits that were colorful.

They kind of came out of the tradition of , they really loved that stuff. They would go to see James Brown perform and that’s kind of what was on their minds, “We want to get out onstage and wow these people.” They would do backbends and knee drops and Rob Tyner would get down on the floor and spin around (laughs) and do God knows what. People felt, man, when they went to see “The Five” that they were really getting their money’s worth and like, “These guys are really working hard, they’re not trying to slip by,” or anything like that. And they were good musicians; they played loud and unleashed.

Their first album, which strangely was a live album, nobody put out a live album for their first release. I guess the record label they signed with at the time, Electra, somehow agreed that they were best when they were live and they made this decision to record them at the Grande

Ballroom and put that out. Technically, it was not the best recording for sure (laughs) and there were mistakes in there and screw-ups. themselves, Wayne Kramer even told me, they were under the impression that they going to get another shot. If they weren’t happy they were going to get another chance to record it again. The label said, “No, we’re happy with this. This is what’s going out.” But it was just wildly, crazy, unleashed, kinetic energy on there and people went wild. And it sold. It did well, I think it got up into the top forty albums in Billboard, and it kind of built their reputation: they are this tremendous live band and here they’re captured on disk. Now, they shot themselves in the foot and that became their only release for Electra. It’s kind of famously told how they wound up on another label and the next time they went completely the opposite direction with an album that was too structured and maybe a little too Carson Interview 17 thin. Although, that album did much better in Europe than the first one did. But that was it, that’s what built their reputation. They were a great live band and then when that album came out it was like, “Well it’s captured here,” with “Kick out the Jams” and all those songs on there.

Everybody would say, “When you go to see them you’re going to really see a show!”

After their affiliation with , who was a political activist in Detroit at the time and was their manager for a while, that added to the allure of “The Five.” Now there was this political side to them. Which personally to them it was like, “Well, this is part of showbiz, this is part of the band’s image.” They personally weren’t out to . I think they were on board with it, they weren’t phonies or fakes or anything, but their main goal was to be a great rock and roll band. Then all the political stuff got in the way and caused them to have problems, caused them to lose their record contract, and caused them to get appearances cancelled and the things that ultimately hurt you career-wise. But, at the time, it made for very exciting rock and roll.

Natzke: Yeah, sounds like it.

Carson: In other words, somebody could say, “Yeah, what a mess. God, the MC5, what a train wreck of a band, of a career!” But also you could say, “Yeah man, but at the time, wasn’t it great?”

Natzke: It was really fun to watch, yeah (laughs).

Carson Interview 18

Carson: Fun to watch, and who does everybody remember from that era when they want to talk about Detroit and Detroit rock in that era? “The Five,” man. That was the band.

Natzke: They definitely made an impression.

Carson: Yeah, exactly.

Natzke: So, the MC5 and the Stooges they’re often called precursors to punk. The term

“proto-punk” gets thrown around a lot talking about them. You may have heard about the band

Death; their so-called “lost” recordings have been getting some attention lately and they were kind of very early punk-sounding. So in your opinion what role do you think the Detroit rock scene played in the development of punk, even though the so-called punk bands didn’t eventually come out of Detroit?

Carson: I think in the book I related a story, and it was something I picked up from a magazine article from a British publication. Rob Tyner, who was the lead singer for the Five, had been in

England, invited over or something, he was writing an article, something for the [New] Musical

Express publication over there and that’s when he started picking up this information that some of these new rock bands, punk bands, were pointing to the MC5 as early inspiration. I think it’s just – if you maybe go on websites for British, European bands, punk bands, you see a lot references to the Five and to the Stooges and it’s pretty obvious when you look what they did.

That’s what you would say about the Five, is that they had that “Detroit attitude.” It came through in pictures and I think what happened in the ‘80s was just the next step from that. Things Carson Interview 19 had smoothed out a bit, right, in the rest of the ‘70s so I think those bands were reaching back a few years and looking at records and looking at what was going on. I think those were the bands, without a doubt, that inspired them.

Natzke: I like the sound of that, that Detroit gave punk its attitude (laughs).

Carson: Yeah, for sure. I think , the writer, was one of the first people who even came up with that term.

Natzke: Of course, yeah, in the magazine they coined the term “.”

Carson: Yeah, bunch of punks! (laughs) I think I was called a punk one time –

Natzke: So why do you think that the MC5, the Stooges, this band Death, why are they getting so much recognition and buzz now? Do you think this is praise that’s overdue for these bands, that they’re finally getting recognized?

Carson: I think this kind of thing goes in waves, you know? I think there’s been times a few years ago when the Five, if you were putting them on a graph as far as recognizability or referencing them, or whatever, you’ll see times when they were pretty high. Then it goes down for a bit and smoothes out then all of a sudden there’s a lot of press, a lot of activity; somebody new comes along and starts talking about them. Maybe there’s a release of a new compilation of material that’s out. Now, if they weren’t good, if what they were doing wasn’t really good, it Carson Interview 20 wouldn’t last. I think that the material is there, and people can go back and listen to it and they can read about the Stooges, read about the Five. That’s why a new generation, or every four years, every six, seven, eight years, ten years, somebody comes along and goes, “Yeah, I’ve discovered the MC5!” And also it’s probably kind of a cool thing when you latch on to somebody from the past and go, “Yeah, I’m hip to what they were doing way back then and I see the value in it, I see what effect it’s had on society and on music over the years.” I just think that kind of thing will continue. Some old rock bands, other people further back such as or whatever, they don’t go away. Everybody always knows about Chuck Berry but there’s probably times when he seems to be a little bit more in the news or you read more about him, and it’s the same thing with this. Although, this affects more directly this punk rock thing.

Natzke: Getting back to talking about the Grande Ballroom a little bit, for a while that seemed to be, like, the center of it all: the rock, the counterculture movement, , and all sorts of the politics going around in that era too. So how did and John Sinclair, how did they make the Ballroom into such a cultural epicenter for Detroit?

Carson: Well, firstly they were sort of first (laughs) with the idea. Russ Gibb is sort of an enterprising, entrepreneurial person. I think probably everybody by now has heard the story.

Very briefly, he had a friend that he grew up with in the Detroit area who he went and just visited, a trip out in San Francisco about the time that Ballroom was getting started out there. They had the strobe lights going and all the posters and stuff and he said, “Hey, that would be a cool thing in Detroit! Detroit’s the kind of place this could –” So he came back with that in mind. He had sort of rented halls and put on deejay dances, that kind of thing, in the past Carson Interview 21 so he had some experience as a promoter. But this was like a whole new thing. So he was hunting around for a place and he finally found the Grande Ballroom, which had been a big

Tommy Dorsey kind of big band ballroom. I think it was a warehouse for old mattresses or something for a few years before that. And [Gibb] made a deal. Russ did not own it, someone else owned it; he sort of leased it from that person. It was his father-in-law, I believe. But that was it, and [Gibb] said, “This is just a wonderful atmosphere in here and this will be the kind of place,” I don’t know if he said that at the time but it quickly became that kind of place where people came and stood in front of the stage and listened. As opposed to what was going on before that where mainly the deejay kind of record hops, you’d have the disc jockey come out and play records, maybe bring a band along and they’d play a twenty-minute set and then they’d play some more records, give a few records away and say goodnight. Then you had some of these teen clubs that had maybe a couple of bands; a little more live music but the atmosphere was like a VFW hall, kind of vapid. So here you had, number one, a larger facility so you could get more people into it, which is exciting when you put more people together, a better stage, better sound, better atmosphere. It’s not like it took off overnight but it gradually – they opened up at the end of October of 1966 – it really was just local talent for almost a year before he was really able to start booking some national acts also. When people got down there and the smell of incense, the dark lighting, and the kind of Moorish architecture, it was like another world. You went up the stairs and you got up there, “Wow,” it just made it a very cool place. And there was nothing else like it. So, first on the scene, they kind of beat everybody to that kind of thing. It didn’t really last all that long. When we talk about it people think, “Oh yeah, the Grande was there for years.” In reality, it was only really in consistent operation from late ‘66 until about mid-‘69, and that’s when he closed it, opened some hybrid Grande Riviera Theater sort of thing, Carson Interview 22 then reopened the Grande for a month or so, and that was it. It was really all over at the Grande

Ballroom in late ‘69 but during those years played there, , Cream, the biggest acts in rock; the MC5 were the house band, opened for many of these people. All the other great Detroit bands would really compete and when they got there they really wanted to play great because they wanted to be asked back, they wanted to get back at the Grande. It was just the right place at the right time.

Oh, and I’m sorry, you asked me about John Sinclair. John contributed ideas to Russ

Gibb because he was more in tune with kids. The way Russ told it to me, it was kind of up to that point – and this was what I remember about the early and mid ‘60s – kids back then were kind of, well you had your frats and you had the greasers (laughs). But this was like, the people who were coming to the Grande, were like a different type of clientele. So Sinclair was able to kind of hip him to the new scene and what was going on and what bands might be good to book, what other things they could do in there to make the place cool. That’s what they would do. It just had a life of its own. Pretty soon, they did a lot of handbills and some posters, but they really didn’t need to do too much to get people to be coming down there after ‘67-’68.

Natzke: So even though the Ballroom was such an important venue, a lot of the Detroit rock scene, it seems, was shaped by stuff that was going on in the Cass Corridor neighborhood. So how did the nature of the art and the music scenes in the Corridor shape Detroit rock and roll?

Carson: Well, boy, that’s an interesting question there. Being a Detroiter and being a person who grew up out in the suburbs, to me that area was an area I visited often, went by, went through, went to parties down there, I don’t recall referring to it in those days as “Cass Corridor.” Carson Interview 23

It was usually like, “Yeah, there’s a party going on down around Wayne [State]. There’s something off of Cass [Ave.], down by Cass,” such and such. That was such an interesting area; it certainly wasn’t the garden spot, it didn’t have a lot of gloss. We all looked at it as kind of a place where anything went. You would see this cool housing, you could find artsy people but you could also find winos on the street and lower income whites and blacks. It was just a mosaic, there’s that word again. I don’t know if it was mosaic-y, it was just so mixed up from block to block. I do know that John Sinclair and also some people who played in rock bands and people who wanted to be around music and around art gravitated there. Maybe they lived – one of the artists, , who created a lot of the posters for the Grande, and he came from

Lincoln Park [MI]. He loved to take trips down to the Cass Corridor area with his buddies, go down there and drive around, visit some friends, go to some parties. It was like a whole different world from what he experienced in Lincoln Park and he made a point of eventually moving down there. He had an apartment down on Prentis [St]. The MC5, they wanted to get down there finally, they were living down on West Canfield [St]. John Sinclair and the Detroit Artists’

Workshop were set up over by the John Lodge [Expressway]. So it was this crazy area; you could find whatever. If you wanted to view it as a hotbed for revolutionary politics, it was that. If you wanted to look at it as, “Oh yeah, that’s kind of a seedy part of town,” it had some of that.

You also had the down there to go to concerts at. I think people said it was a creative area and there were a lot of writers and musicians down there. As far as making a direct link to the Detroit rock scene, I don’t know. I can say the MC5 lived in the area, there were a few other people, but the rock scene in the late ‘60s was more of a state of mind, or whatever, that came out of various parts of the metropolitan area.

Carson Interview 24

Natzke: Was there any music scene, or scenes, that were specific to the Cass Corridor area? Or was it kind of tied to the rest of Detroit scene? Was there any kind of jazz or folk, avant-garde stuff going on?

Carson: Yeah, there were hangouts down there. You’d just go down to Verne’s Café and Bar on

Forest [Ave], between Cass [Ave] and Woodward [Ave], and it was kind of, depending on who was there, a pseudo-beatnik scene. Or you might run into somebody from the Communist Party hanging out down there, giving out pamphlets (laughs), that kind of thing. I’m trying to think what other – the old Cobb’s Corner Bar down there. But as far as – there were things spread out.

The Chessmate Club was definitely out of that area; that was some folk music club out on

Livernois [Ave]. Baker’s Keyboard [Lounge] jazz club. Things were all over Detroit. I think that’s probably why Creem magazine, when they came out, they were successful because they were pulling all that together into one place into a publication, and that’s how they developed a readership. They also covered politics too. The Fifth Estate newspaper, of course, predated

Creem and that was a little bit more Cass Corridor-focused because there was more political coverage in that publication. Of course, there were music concerts around Wayne State

[University] at Tartar Field and everything so that definitely was going on. But I would say that the area was viewed as an inspirational place. You were going to visit friends down there, you were going to talk politics, and listen to music, listen to jazz, listen to music maybe you weren’t going to be listening to (laughs) with your friends out in Royal Oak or someplace. Then there were a lot of people who wanted to live down there just to be a part of that scene. I think that’s why the members of the MC5 lived down there and they wanted to sample that atmosphere and be close to Sinclair and the Detroit Artists’ Workshop and all that. So it definitely had an impact Carson Interview 25 on music of that era and on the revolutionary scene, the whole thing. But as far as itself, making a direct link to all the music, it would be a little bit of a stretch on that.

Natzke: So from many of the stories in Grit, Noise, and Revolution, it seems that the Detroit

Police Department was especially hostile to the rock scene and counterculture movement. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that?

Carson: Yeah, well, hey, the Detroit Police Department, right. For the faint of heart, looking out your rearview mirror and seeing a Detroit Police Car behind you, that’s one thing you didn’t want to get involved with in those days. There was a lot of animosity there and they definitely were coming down hard on that perceived left-wing scene, and John Sinclair. They used people to infiltrate the rock scene and to try to get dirt on the movers and shakers within it, like John

Sinclair and others. They were targeted for sure and people in the scene definitely felt like, “We don’t have any fans in the Detroit Police Department.” They had files, the old Detroit

Red Squad had files on Sinclair and other people. It was not a pleasant time. Of course, coming up on the riots in Detroit in ‘67 there, it really brought out a lot of inadequacies. There were hardly any African-American officers on force in a city like Detroit. So there was a lot of bigotry and a lot of meanness. (Laughs) I hope nobody’s listening from the Detroit Police

Department right now. But yeah, that was part of the times and conservative views: “We’re going to take care of any of these troublemakers, rabble-rousers, these left-wing that are trying to lead our youth down a path of revolution.” That was kind of the view, that these were

“commies” and “pinkos” and that they were going to be blowing things up and who knows what they’re trying to accomplish so, “We need to keep a close eye on them.” Of course the MC5, Carson Interview 26 with their close affiliation with John Sinclair, received a lot of that attention also. But then again, all the other bands that played alongside the MC5 and were around that scene also received attention.

Natzke: Something I thought was interesting that you’ve written about was this disconnect between the white counterculture and the black civil rights movement, which were both kind of going on in Detroit at the time. Especially between the Black Panthers and John Sinclair and the

MC5’s affiliation with their . It seems like they were kind of regarded as a joke by the Black Panthers, even though they were professing this solidarity with them. It seems like the Black Panthers looked at them as not having a clue about what was really going on.

Carson: Yeah, that’s what it kind of seemed like. Some of it, like these are “Sunday hippies” or

“weekend hippies” or “weekend activists.” “They don’t know what’s going on, they don’t speak for us.” A lot of it was, I’m not knocking the era, but also I was there in those days and there were all the politics and there was, of course, the anti-Vietnam protesting going on. But also at times it got into the ridiculous (laughs) with Sinclair and his group with their manifesto of the things that they stood for. Sometimes I think that maybe they did themselves a little more harm because people would read some of that stuff and go, “Well this is silly! (laughs) We’re talking about serious issues here and you’re talking about blah, blah, blah.” So there was some of that.

John Sinclair, you have to remember, he was a fine writer. He was a jazz reviewer. He was a terrific promoter. People would say he was the “P.T. Barnum of the Revolution.” He was a great composer of press releases. He knew how to write stuff that people would want to read and would get people excited and would also be entertaining. To this day, he does that. So I’m not Carson Interview 27 taking anything away from him but I think some people who maybe were on the harder side of the line, the more militant groups, might have said, “Oh yeah, that’s a little goofy.” At the same time, I think he used some of that lighter rhetoric of his to bring people in and to get them to see the bigger message.

Natzke: What effects, if any, do you think the riots of 1967 had on the Detroit rock scene in general? Did the beginning of the “white flight” from Detroit, did that contribute to the breakup of the Detroit rock and roll scene? Or do you think it was still mostly drugs and bands breaking up and things like that?

Carson: Well, the end of the era came in ‘71 and ’72. So, if anything, the riots of ’67 may have bolstered things and sort of added to the revolutionary flavor of the times, along with the

Vietnam War and everything. So here you had the civil rights movement really brought home locally. Now, we’re just not seeing footage of Birmingham, , police hosing down innocent black people –

Natzke: Right, now it was here, it was in your backyard.

Carson: It’s right here in Detroit. “It’s us against the Detroit Police Department. It’s us against the system. Look, it’s innocent people here. Things are happening.” If anything, that really added a lot of the grit to the story for sure and things were really heating up. So really, things peaked in this era in about 1969, that’s when the big multi-act rock concerts, indoor and outdoor, really came on all through ’69 and ’70. But you’re right, the era started to wind down, for a number of Carson Interview 28 reasons, in ’71-’72: that change in business, a change in the way business was done; terrible use of drugs, the introduction of heroin into the scene; change in the drinking age, which changed who went to what clubs. All of a sudden there were fewer venues for bands to play in and the outdoor rock concerts faded away. That was the end of that era, a lot of things happened there.

Most things that can be defined as eras are defined as eras because they have an identifiable beginning and end. Although, as I wrote in the book, it doesn’t mean that it all ended at twelve midnight on one particular day, you know (laughs). Things definitely – you could sense the shift there, the interest in music. And bands breaking up; all these popular Detroit bands were finished: the Amboy Dukes, the MC5, and the Frost, the SRC, they all collapsed, just fell apart from within due to personality clashes, drug use, bad business, bad management. So they were all gone by ’72. That era just kind of ended with the closing of the Grande Ballroom, the closing of the Eastown Theater, all those teen clubs and you could feel it.

After that, some of the other bands came on but it was different. They were part of another scene. Also, as I wrote in the book, by the time five or six years went by, by the time you got to 1980, 1981, ’82, it was kind of easy to look back and visualize that 1965-1972 era and go,

“Yeah, that was the late ‘60s.” It went to ’72 but that was the late ‘60s. McGovern lost the election there, the war continued on a bit, and it was just the end of that. And times change. All of a sudden ’s in and rock with the and , I mean it’s just a different world. So a lot of people will say, “Well, that Detroit scene, that was a sham. That never really went anywhere.” And I say they’re wrong. For people in Michigan, it existed; it really took place during that era. Yeah, so a lot of them didn’t become big national stars, so what? They were good. It doesn’t mean they couldn’t have. It really was an exciting time and I Carson Interview 29 just can’t think of, since then, any era that you can point to like that with a combination of and social issues all sort of coming together.

Natzke: So how would you characterize the “Detroit sound?” Or is that even a thing you can do?

Is there even a cohesive style to Detroit rock? From my impression of what people think of when they think of Detroit rock, they think of hard-driving, in-your-face, aggressive, even experimental music.

Carson: I guess those are the terms you would use: high energy, aggressive, loud rock and roll.

Of those bands back then, each one was a little bit different. MC5 did their thing and then SRC had maybe a little more psychedelic edge to them, the Amboy Dukes had their own sound. But they were all loud and they all were showmen. They tried to put on a good show. And sure, were some of them inspired by more blues and R&B? Yeah, the MC5 would be. It’s tough, they’re generalities. But if somebody’s going to say, “What was Detroit rock like? What marks that?” you’d be saying, “Loud, high energy, aggressive music played well.”

Natzke: What would you say is the legacy of Detroit rock and roll? There continue to be bands coming out of Detroit. Some even make it big, such as . Do you see the development of bands like the White Stripes anchored in this historical legacy of Detroit rock or is it just something else entirely?

Carson: What I think is so interesting, along the way, every time there’s an article in a magazine or a newspaper about something having to do with music in Detroit, whether it’s or Carson Interview 30 here’s an article about the White Stripes or something, in that article, invariably (laughs), there will always be a paragraph that references that late ‘60s era in Detroit. Like, “From the city that gave you Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels and the MC5 and Bob Seger” and all of that. They always will mention that. So that is the legacy, that always lives on: those groups, that era. It ties it together. In interviews with Jack White, or whatever, he surely mentions that connection to the past. I mean, you can’t live on the past and it doesn’t mean anybody that comes out, “Hey, we’re the latest Detroit band. We’re from the same city that gave you Bob Seger and the MC5.” But that’s the legacy. If that means, “We expect a little more out of this group, we expect them to play a little better and play a little longer and put a little more heart and soul into it,” that could be. But I like to think that every now and then – and there have been a lot of great groups after this era that came along: the Rockets, the Gories, just a slew of bands. You like to think, “Well, there’s someone else coming around the corner.” It’s been a while. Eminem’s still out there, Jack

White’s left town, but I like to think something will be coming up and it’ll be the next great

Detroit rock band and there’ll be a story about them and they’ll invariably be talking about how this person was inspired or comes from the same heritage of Mitch Ryder and the MC5 and all that. That’s the legacy.

Natzke: Well thank you so much for talking to me today.

Carson: Hey, I appreciate it very much Jared.