The battle that was taking place on Buster Drive in Warren was but a small sideshow to the images playing on the nightly news and would soon be eclipsed by the devastating violence that would erupt a few miles away in Detroit in July. But what would transpire over the coming days and months and years on Buster Drive would actually have profound consequences for race relations in America and shape the national political landscape in ways that are still being felt today.

A telegenic housing secretary with presidential ambitions would use the Baileys’ plight to launch a bold plan to desgregate all of America’s suburbs.

Local officials in Warren, stoked by the rage of their white constituents, would stymie his efforts, even though it meant forfeiting millions of dollars of federal aid.

A Republican president facing reelection would torpedo his secretary’s plan, empowering the white middle-class voters he considered crucial to his victory.

Those voters, in turn, would make this corner of suburban Detroit the unofficial capital of America’s white middle class, and shape the strategy of presidential hopefuls of both parties for decades to come.

Ultimately, the whites-only fortress of Warren and surrounding Macomb County would crumble, overwhelmed by the consequences of self-defeating choices made decades before. Like suburbs across the country, it would become more diverse—and increasingly Democratic. But it would retain the scars of unhealed racial fault lines first laid down in 1967—a de facto segregation that would make Macomb County a prime target for populist conservatives bent on appealing to white working-class voters. Few suburbs would suffer the same headline-making unrest or the targeted federal scrutiny as Warren. But its prominent role in the massive demographic and political shifts of the last half century would ensure it remained an important bellwether heading into the 2024 presidential election when, once again, Macomb County would find itself a political battleground for the nation’s all-important suburban vote. 

But before any of that could happen, the Baileys had to outlast the mob.

Fewer than 1,700 children have died from COVID-19 in the U.S., according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some advocates, researchers and doctors told Andscape that there is a misconception that children have been spared the worst of COVID-19 because relatively few of them have died from the disease. But the deaths of their caregivers have caused hundreds of thousands of children to lose their main source of financial, emotional and developmental support.

These three children are part of a large Detroit family whose mother and father died only hours apart after contracting COVID-19 nearly two years ago. Their maternal grandmother had died of COVID-19 a few months earlier and their 25-year-old first cousin was killed in a car crash weeks later.

Then in spring 2012, Tomeka was at a birthday party, poking around the county’s property tax auction website with a friend. “I was helping somebody else look for houses,” she says. She was seen as an expert among her peers in making the dream of home ownership come true.

Then she saw a listing – for her own house.

The white two-and-a-half bedroom BanglaTown bungalow was listed on the Wayne County tax foreclosure auction website.

She had only owned the house for two years and knew – everyone in Detroit did then – that it was supposed to take three years before the county can foreclose on a property. She says she was on a payment plan, and making regular payments on her back taxes. She admits she’d been having trouble receiving all her mail at the new house, but wouldn’t the treasurer’s office have alerted her to the pending foreclosure when she dropped off another property tax payment?

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Michael A. Gonzales | Longreads | October 2019 | 23 minutes (5,959 words)

In the 1970s, Random House editor Toni Morrison was on a mission to change the face of African American literature. As one of the few Black editors at a major publishing house in the position to green-light writers, Morrison, as the New York Times noted in a 1977 profile, “sat behind a desk stacked stacked high with correspondence and typed loose leaf manuscripts” and signed a group of Black poets, biographers, and novelists who would lay a new literary foundation throughout the decade and into the early ’80s. The stirring, often haunting works of Toni Cade Bambara (The Salt Eaters), Henry Dumas (Jonoah and the Green Stone), Quincy Troupe (Giant Talk: An Anthology of Third World Writings), and Angela Davis (Angela Davis: An Autobiography) were met with academic acceptance and critical acclaim. Those authors became celebrated “new voices,” but one book Morrison edited during that era slipped through the literary cracks and virtually disappeared. 

Mostly forgotten and long out-of-print, Fish Tales by Nettie Jones is an often shocking, sexually charged novel that has retained the sharpness of its cutting edge in the 36 years since its release. Jones came to Morrison’s attention via another writer of her prose posse, Corregidora author Gayl Jones (no relation), whom Nettie cited as a friend and mentor during the three years it took to finish her book. Fish Tales was published in 1983, the same year Morrison, who had already written four novels including The Bluest Eye and Sula, quit her job to devote herself full-time to writing. Although Random House balked at buying Jones’s book, Morrison, already an empress in the literary world, persuaded the publisher that the work was worthy. “Toni was acquiring strong writers,” said literary agent Marie Dutton Brown, who, in the 1970s held a similar editorial position  at Doubleday. “There was no formulaic fiction on her roster. Toni saw something in Nettie that she thought was worthy of publication.”

Get the Longreads Top 5 Email

Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.

Sign up now

Fish Tales is a 175-page chronicle of Detroit native Lewis Jones, a spirited but troubled party girl who, at 32, is too old to be called a girl, but still behaves like one. After her unrequited lover’s new wife teaches her “to disconnect [her] brain from [her] pussy,” Lewis begins diving into situations without considering the often-chaotic consequences of her actions. She splits her high times between the Motor City and Manhattan during the scotch-on-the-rocks, sexually liberated, drug-saturated, disco-blasting 1970s. Lewis gets her freak on while looking for love from all the wrong people, including her flawed doctor husband Woody, who becomes her patron and funds her bi-state misadventures, a homosexual hustler friend Kitty-Kat, and the snide quadriplegic Brook, the sometimes-mean object of her fire and desire. 

* * *

In the few interviews Jones did in the 1980s, she always maintained that Fish Tales was a truthful interpretation of her own wild life in Detroit and New York. Born on January 1, 1941, in Arlington, Georgia, she relocated to Detroit when she was 5. She was the oldest child and had a younger sister; together, they took a train with their grandmother and arrived at the majestic Michigan Central Station. Her mother, who was already in the city, welcomed them at the terminal. 

“That station was so beautiful,” 78-year-old Nettie Jones told me in the spring from her Brooklyn apartment. “I came with the migrants to work in the factories. I never heard anyone say they came to Detroit to get their children a better education. They all say, ‘Did you hear how much money they paying at Ford?’” Living on Pulford Street, Jones’s family was working-class and her mother was biracial. She has fond memories of roller skating with her sister at the Arcadia Ballroom roller rink, visiting her grandmother’s grocery store, watching movies that included Carmen Jones and Imitation of Life, seeing Billie Holiday at the Paradise Theatre, and visiting Uncle Dix in the Black Bottom when her mama walked her to piano lessons. “He always had a plate of fried fish waiting for us,” she remembered. 

In high school, she became friends with the bougie bunch who usually stayed away from kids who weren’t part of their prosperous posse. “I met up with some of those fancy Negroes and they thought I was one of them because I had light skin and blue eyes,” she said. “They were the children of doctors and businessmen, the old Detroiters. They were the Negroes that were doing very well. There was a separation between us and them, but I did get to see into their houses. In my dreams I was going to become a principal in Detroit and buy a big house and a Cadillac. As you know, Detroit is known for its big houses and Cadillacs.” 

Two stellar books, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class by Lawrence Otis Graham and Negroland by Margo Jefferson, tell the story of the Black bourgeoisie that she refers to. Jones was attracted to that lifestyle, but she still rejected the rules and protocols that went along with it. When Jones was 17, in 1958, she gave birth to her daughter Lynne and married the baby’s father, Frank Stafford; they divorced three or four years later. Still, she continued with her education and, after graduating from Central High, attended Wayne State where she got a degree in 1962. 

In 1963, she married Frank Harris and relocated to Montreal while he was in dental school. After Harris became an orthodontist, the family moved back to Detroit. Jones taught high school. “I’ve been a teacher in my mind since I was a child,” Jones said. “I taught reading, but I failed as a secondary school teacher in Detroit. The whole system was collapsing. Things were falling apart.” It was during this period that Jones began plotting her escape from Detroit, though she wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted to do.

* * *

Aside from keeping a journal, Jones did little writing during those years. As a lover of movies, she’d originally conceived Fish Tales as a screenplay, which might explain why it’s written, as literary critic William O’Rourke noted in 1989, in episodic chapters “comprising of short scenes, the hearts of vignettes.” Jones later described the book as a textual collage. “That was a word I picked up from [artist] Romare Bearden. He said, ‘Black artists are collages, because we certainly make something out of nothing.’ I heard him say that one Sunday during a lecture at the Metropolitan Museum, and it stayed with me,” she said. Much as it did for Bearden, the collage method became the medium through which Jones could depict her own fractured experience. 

To open Fish Tales, Jones uses a Jean Toomer quote as an epigraph: “The human fish is intricate and hidden; the appearance of his fins are deceptive.” Yet fish in the context of this novel is a derogatory term some gay men used about women and the supposed smell of vaginas. This becomes clear when Lewis’s best friend, Kitty-Kat, talks about a drag queen who used sardine oil on herself to “smell like an authentic girl.” Lewis meets Kitty-Kat one lonely Christmas when she calls “Dial Your Desire” looking for companionship. Throughout the book, with Kitty keeping her company, Lewis is intoxicated, and her bad behavior, directed toward friends and strangers alike, often leads to “grand drunken scenes” that are decadent, thrilling, and sad. 

Things get worse in the second half when our human hurricane falls in love with Brook. Disabled during a prep school wrestling match, he’s tall and handsome with a number of women fighting over him. “Do you think that you are the first woman that ever did anything for me? Loved me? Wanted me?” he screams at Lewis during one of their many arguments. 

* * *

The poet Brittany Dennison learned about Fish Tales in 2018 through a friend who found it on a list of books that Toni Morrison edited. Dennison, who has since read the book twice, said of the novel, “As soon as Lewis transitions from sex to love, that’s when things fall apart.” Dennison quickly became a fan of Nettie Jones, though others in her lit circle weren’t as generous. “They were kind of blindsided by the amount of fast living that is in the book, but none of that bothered me. The sex and drugs were a part of Lewis’ journey, but I never felt that the writer was trying to be raw just to shock the reader. Nettie’s writing is natural and honest.” 

When the recently released Toni Morrison documentary The Pieces I Am flashes covers of various books she edited on screen, Fish Tales isn’t shown. It’s as though even the woman who’d introduced Jones’s writing to the world had pushed it to the rear of her memory. Still, a small group of readers, both those from back in the day and recent recruits, are fans of the avant-garde Black erotica tale that takes them zooming down, as the jacket copy promises, “life in the fast lane.” 

In Darryl Pinckney’s essay “The Fast Lane,” published in the November 8, 1984, issue of the New York Review of Books, he critiqued Fish Tales alongside Jay McInerney’s influential Bright Lights, Big City. Pinckney, a noted literary critic and novelist of High Cotton (1992) and Black Deutschland (2016), wrote, “The city, as the theater of experience, the refuge, the hiding place, has in turn been replaced by an abstraction, the fast lane. In the fast lane the passive observer reduces everything — streets, people, rock lyrics, headlines — to landscape. Every night holds magical promises of renewal. But burnout is inevitable, like some law of physics. The hand — or drug — that raises the loser up will abandon him in mid-flight and he will crash.” As a survivor of that lifestyle, I can assure you the crashes can be deadly.

Bright Lights, Big City became the touchstone of ’80s fiction while Fish Tales, published by the same house, sank into obscurity. “McInerney’s second-person narrator loses everything, but the second chance is implied,”  Pinckney told me recently, 35 years after his review ran. “Nettie Jones’s book is much darker and it is a woman’s story, a Black woman’s story, as well. Her comedy is deadly, while his is charming. The books went together in my mind because of thinking about them as ‘fast lane’ novels, that aspect of city life, night time, clubs and drugs, as they were back then. You could say Jones’s scene was the scene McInerney’s scene came from. Hers is edgy and dangerous and his is cleaned up and expensive. Hers is closer in mood to certain gay novels of the late 1970s, a sort of victorious bohemianism, often ending in tragedy, because sin must be paid for by someone in American literature, at least in those days.”

Pinckney gave Fish Tales a mixed review. He was unhappy with its ending, which I thought kept in line with the unpredictability of the crazed characters. Upset, Jones contacted him, and the two went out for cocktails. “Nettie was grand, in a huge hat, just like the one Zora Neale Hurston is wearing in a famous photo,” Pinckey recalled via email. “She was grand, voluptuous, and beautiful. We went out, ran around, had a great time. I moved to Europe, but maybe that was only a part of why we lost touch. I heard from her again some years later. She was living with her daughter in New Jersey. I’m not sure, but I think she says she was writing something new.” Neither can remember if they ever discussed the review.

Jones’ second and last published book was Mischief Makers from 1989, but she has been working on a third novel for a number of years. “Nettie is like the female Ralph Ellison when it comes to finishing that book,” friend and fellow writer Dr. Glenda R. Taylor said. “I’ve read a lot of it over the years, but she’s been working on it for forever.” The book, which was originally titled Detroit: Beauty in This Beast, but is now called Puma, is one that Jones began in 1996. In the intervening years, she worked as a teacher, and little work was done on the manuscript. Recent illnesses have also hindered Jones’ writing.  

Help us fund our next story

We’ve published hundreds of original stories, all funded by you — including personal essays, reported features, and reading lists.

Become a member

Taylor and Jones met in the winter of 2009, and Taylor interviewed the novelist for a series of YouTube videos the following year. “I think what made me what to talk to her was that Nettie is unfiltered. She’s not always politically correct and she doesn’t mind saying it from the top of a mountain.” She prefers Jones’s second book, a period novel about three biracial sisters (Native American and Black) coming of age in the “beautiful wilderness” of Leelanau County, Michigan, and Detroit. “Truthfully, Fish Tales was a little jarring for me. Nettie was writing about subjects that I’d never read about before. I just couldn’t relate to the people in that book.”

* * *

While “eroticism is as old as humankind itself,” as Charles L. Blockson states in his essay “African-American Erotica and Other Curiosities,” it was not always openly depicted in our literature. When Fish Tales came out in 1983, there were no mainstream Black erotica markets. The groundbreaking Erotique Noire/Black Erotica edited by Miriam Decosta-Willis dropped in 1992, and a decade later, into the new millennium, Zane’s nasty novels became standard subway reading. In 2001, Carol Taylor began publishing her Brown Sugar collections, including stories by Nelson George, asha bandele, Rebecca Carroll, Miles Marshall Lewis, and myself.

While I believe that Fish Tales fit perfectly into the erotica category, there are others who thought it was smut. “Some people have tried to label Fish Tales pornographic, but I don’t agree,” Brittany Dennison said. “Jones wasn’t writing about hard cocks and bouncing breasts, but a sexuality that was much more true and real. Yes, there are times when the reader becomes a voyeur and the book can be disquieting and uncomfortable, like peeking through a window and seeing an orgy, but we see the world through Lewis’s eyes, and it’s honest and scary.” 

At the time of its release, some critics were dismayed by Lewis’s sexuality and so-called counterculture behavior as though Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and Clarence Major had never existed. One reviewer described Fish Tales as an “an excursion into perversion,” Jones recalled. “When I heard that I thought it was interesting. I suppose it was perversion, but it was also the truth.” 

Two years after it was published, Jones told the New York Times that Fish Tales, “dramatizes my reality blended with heavy shots of my fantasies and my fascinations.” While that could describe the writing process of many other novels, Jones’s honesty in conversation and on the page is blunt. To me, Lewis was written in the grand tradition of wild women in pop culture and real life artistic bohemia, ladies whose lights shine bright until the moment that darkness descends in the guise of liquor, sex, drugs, and mental illness. 

From the first time I read Lewis’s story, she reminded me of real and fictional “wild women,” including Zelda Fitzgerald, singer Betty Davis, Holly Golightly, Dorothy Parker, and blaxploitation princess Pam Grier as Coffy, code switching from lovestruck femme to blade-welding woman in a heartbeat. Certainly, both the writer and lead character shared a lust for life that could be as exhilarating and scary as a high-wire act on the sharp edge of a razor blade. Still, no matter how crazy Lewis was, there was an urbane complexity that made her, at least to me, attractive and interesting. 

Back in the ’80s, when I was a young man roaming free through the New York City nighttime landscape, those were the sort of Black women I was most attracted to. They were cool, chic, creative, and maybe a little crazy. These kinds of sisters — actresses, writers, bass players, nightclub doorwomen, or computer programmers — were never mentioned in the trendy texts of the times that included Bright Lights, Big City or Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York. But in real Big Apple life, they were always a part of the scene: at SoHo gallery openings; on Lower East Side and Greenwich Village subway platforms; on the dance floor of Danceteria, the Ritz, and the Garage; or throwing back shots at a Black Rock Coalition shows at CBGB’s and Wetlands.   

In 1985, a year after Bright Lights became my personal manifesto and author McInerney a literary hero, I fell in love and lived with a woman very much like Jones/Lewis for the next four years. She too was from Detroit and was smart, sarcastic, and sexy, but also overly critical and quite volatile. In 1989, after literally kicking me in the ass with her high-heeled shoes when I turned my back on her during an argument, we broke up. I flew solo for the next 24 months, until I met music publicist Lesley Pitts. A voracious reader, she introduced me to the short fiction of Flannery O’Connor, the essays of Fran Lebowitz, and Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales. 

Though I considered myself well-read, I’d never heard of Jones until Lesley mentioned her. She had lost her copy of Fish Tales by the time we met, and the book was then out of print. I went on a used bookstore treasure hunt and found it at the Strand. The book’s colorful cover, illustrated by George Corsillo, resembled a trendy clothing store ad for Trash & Vaudeville or Zoot in the East Village Eye. A dreamy pop art portrait showed a light-skinned Black woman floating through a glass of bubbly along with a fish, a pair of pink pumps, and a strand of pearls. The woman looked as though she was being waved into Area or the Michael Todd Room. That evening, I surprised Lesley with the book. “I can’t believe you found this,” she said. I felt like I’d passed a test. After rereading it, Lesley suggested that I check it out. 

* * *

Fish Tales was written, published, and marketed as “literary,” but a creepy, noir darkness floats through the text like a black cloud. During the writing process, Jones looked to friends such as Gayl Jones and Marie Brown for guidance. Decades later, Brown remembered, “I read through various drafts of Fish Tales, and it was a one-of-a-kind story. There are very few originals out here being published, but that’s not always a good thing in publishing, because people act like they don’t know how to market it or get it reviewed. From the beginning of reading Nettie’s work, I was aware that she wasn’t writing in the tradition, but she kept working. She was determined to get published.” 

Brown has been a leading literary agent since 1984. She and Jones first met a few years before she began that career, when Brown was editing the short-lived Black women’s magazine Elan. They lived together briefly in Brown’s uptown Sugar Hill brownstone along with culinary writer Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor. Over the years, many artists and musicians have lived under Brown’s roof. “Marie Brown has nurtured many artists and musicians as an editor-agent-friend among other titles,” Jones said. “She gave me knowledge of that new world of publishing that I was entering. Marie let me stay with her in Harlem when she first moved there. So many famous people passed through. She advised me. She was ‘the other editor.’ I owe Marie big time as do many others.”

Brown’s now-grown daughter recalled to her mother that Jones made her put away her dolls because the toy’s faces disturbed her. “Nettie was not part of the New York literary world,” Brown said. “There were a group of women that included Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and others who socialized, worked together, and supported one another, but Nettie was an independent. Besides me and Gayl Jones, she had no friendships in that world.” 

Certainly that would explain why Jones hasn’t been anthologized, studied, or talked about as much as the others. While I’m not sure that Nettie Jones’s readership is large enough to be considered a cult, there’s something about her work that touches those of us who have read her. “Nettie didn’t get a lot of reviews and profiles when the books came out, but she became a word-of-mouth writer, the kind of writer that people tell their friends to read,” Brown said.  

* * *

“Some people are born writers, but that’s not me,” Jones told me. While we were on the phone, I looked at her big eyes in a Fern Logan photograph taken many years before our conversation. Her stylish attire reminded me of my mom’s friends during that same era. Jones appeared seductive and smart, but her eyes seemed as though they could stare into your soul. “I’m no Brontë sister or Ralph Ellison,” she said. “I wrote Fish Tales the way I did because I allowed myself to be free and to listen and to take down what I needed. Some writers are afraid of freedom, because they’re concerned with what mama may think. The first agent I had worked with Rosa Guy and Louise Meriwether, but she read three pages of Fish Tales and quit. I guess I was a little rough, but when Gayl got the book to Toni, she warned her about the language.” 

The Detroit section has two chapters that describe the city before and after the 1967 riot that devastated it in ways still being felt today. Jones was living in a lush apartment house where she witnessed the burning city from her 12th-floor window. “It was heartbreaking, but the riot is often used to illustrate when the city began to change. Detroit had begun to change long before that. The truth is much more complex,” she said. Jones received a master’s of education in 1971, and later that year relocated to New York to take graduate courses at the New School for Social Research. She also took classes in copywriting at the Fashion Institute of Technology. 

“Going to school was just an excuse to get to the city,” Jones said. “I wasn’t in love with either of my husbands. The first one I married because of the baby and the second one, we made a deal if I put him through school then it would be my turn. He didn’t mind me going to New York. My daughter refused to come with me on my adventure. She said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘OK, bye.’ She was 13, so of course I was a disgrace in the eyes of the neighbors. Family life wasn’t a happy place for me.” 

At 30 years old, Jones began life anew in the big city of dreams among the gleaming skyscrapers, wondrous museums, great restaurants, and those artistic feelings that began vibrating through her body once she settled down in a grand apartment on 21 West 9th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues, five flights up with a skylight. 

“Originally, I was staying on 21st Street, but the person I was renting from wasn’t paying, so the marshals came and kicked me out. My friend Jack Arnold Clark took me in as his roommate. He was the queen of queens, but I was in love with him. He was 6’5” and he made me throw away most of my clothes, because he says they were too Detroit,” Jones said. Although New York City was going through its rotten Big Apple phase of high crime, rampant decay, and near bankruptcy, Jones was living the damn near high life. “Jack was a master cook, and I would go to Jefferson Market for our food. Jack didn’t allow cans in the house or anything frozen. We had an interesting life, me and the charming queen.” 

In addition to the “gorgeous” life she was living with Jack. “I was just drinking scotch, but other people were smoking weed and sniffing coke,” she said. “That was when I began living the story that would become Fish Tales. I was living it, but I didn’t realize it at the time.” Her husband Frank came to visit often, but in 1976 the couple divorced, though they remained friends until his dying day. “I wanted a divorce, because I got tired of being an adulteress. He was probably being one too, because our sex life was not good. When you’re a couple, that’s vital.” 

Jones never finished her classes at the New School, and, with her newfound free time, began to write. “Since I was home, Jack suggested I needed a project and somehow I decided that project would be writing,” she said. Jones began writing regularly, but after an argument with Jack, the two friends had a falling out. “He was a psychiatrist, so he should have known that I was crazy. I had started writing a book that I dramatically threw into the flames of the fireplace when I left. Truthfully, I don’t think there was much.” 

After traveling back to Detroit, she met Todd Duncan, a professor at Wayne State University specializing in American literature who soon became her mentor, lover, and the inspiration for brilliant quadriplegic character Brook that Jones created for Fish Tales. In 1980, Duncan introduced Jones to Gayl Jones when the shy, complicated writer was teaching at the University of Michigan, five years after Morrison edited the manuscript that would become Corregidora. In an article Morrison penned for Mademoiselle, she wrote of Gayl’s work, “I shuddered before the awesome power of this young woman.” 

Jones shared her work with Gayl, and the two began a long friendship that would see them through several dramas in their lives. “When I read Gayl’s work I was inspired, because her books were so different,” Jones said. “Gayl didn’t tell me how to write, but she did advise me.” Known to be shy, Gayl accepted Jones for who she was. “Gayl never had any fear with me. I seem to have a way of getting close to people that others can’t get close too. She advised me to simply write and not throw away any of the pages. When Fish Tales was finished, she gave me a list of editors to contact. I think Toni was third on the list, so I didn’t contact her until I was rejected by the first two.” 

Without an agent at the time, Jones sent Morrison the manuscript in the mail and it was accepted. Another writer would have been enormously thankful for the opportunity to collaborate with the premier Black editor, but Jones wasn’t impressed with their working relationship. “Toni was my editor, but I only met her once, and that was only because my agent, Julian Bach, who I acquired after the book was sold, insisted,” she said. In addition, Jones felt she should’ve been paid more than $3,000 fee she was paid. “That’s $1,500 before publication and $1,500 after. Things were very different back then, and none of us was going to get rich publishing novels.” 

Jones later realized that their relationship could have been better. “I was not what she was used to handling, because I didn’t know she was the queen. Toni was a literary lion and I didn’t act accordingly, but if I knew then what I know now, I’d be, ‘Yes, yes’m, Ms. Morrison.’” We both laughed. While the Jones women remained friends, Gayl hasn’t published a book since 1998. A week after her novel, The Healing, was released, she and her Black militant husband Bob Higgins were involved in a stand-off with police after a decade spent in hiding. Higgins committed suicide while Gayl watched from across the room as she was being held by police. “I had eaten dinner with both of them at that same table,” Jones said. “She hasn’t published anything since, but I know she is still writing, because that’s all she knows how to do. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was publishing under an alias.”

* * *

The jacket copy for Fish Tales compared the book to William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, which Jones described as “disgusting.” Though far-fetched, it was a sign that she had strayed into a different landscape than her contemporaries. “I was sick and tired of these books that told the same damn story over and over,” she said. “I kept wondering, when do we move ahead and push our stories forward.” Fish Tales was not protest fiction, and Jones seemed guided by Albert Murray’s influential essays in The Omni-Americans. He thought the fictions of James Baldwin and the Black Arts Movement scribes portrayed “Negro” life as one-dimensional and narrow. In his mean-spirited and funny critique of Claude Brown’s bestselling ghetto classic Manchild in the Promised Land, he wrote, “The background experience of U.S. Negroes is a rich source of many things. But many people insist that it is the only source of frustration and crime, degradation, emasculation, and self-hatred.”

“There’s a real divide between what Nettie Jones and Gayl Jones were writing, compared to what Alice Walker and Toni Morrison were doing,” mystery writer and creator of the character Nanette Hayes, a jazz musician detective, Charlotte Carter said. “In Nettie’s work there is a dreamy quality to it that pulls you in as well as the feeling that there is nothing between you and Lewis’s voice.” While Jones’s writing was inspired by the minimalism of lost generation honcho Ernest Hemingway and the eroticism of D.H. Lawrence, Carter also saw a bit of Norman Mailer in the freaky-deaky prose. “Everything comes down to sex. It’s the thing that gives life to you, destroys you. It’s redemptive, it’s religion, it’s a yardstick to how liberal you are and how hip.” 

A few days later, when I was talking to Jones about the sex in her work, she laughed. “A lot of women writers were prudish,” she said. “Those writers were coming on like nuns. I knew I wasn’t the only one who had a baby at 17, not the only one who drank. They acted like they ain’t never spread their legs or turned their butts up.” 

 In the end, it was liquor that became Jones’ worst enemy.  “I think I would’ve been a lot more successful if I hadn’t been drunk all the time,” Jones said. Having had my own battles with the bottle, spending much of the ’90s “in my cups,” as the old folks used to say, I’m not here to pass judgment. No one aims to become an alcoholic, but with enough practice it can happen to anyone. “I cared for no one other than me and my God when I was intoxicated with Jack Barleycorn,” Jones said over email, referencing Jack London’s alcoholic memoirs. “God was going to love me anyway no matter what I did. Narcissism running rampant is a power for many successful human beings, but I have been sober for years after many years of striving to kick this monkey off my back.” 

In addition, she is being treated for manic depression, which she described as a  a chemical condition exacerbated by “memories of childhood molestation by a school teacher, statutory rape by my first husband and father of my child, rejection by my family, expulsion from school in the last semester of my secondary education, stress of always having to wipe out these head starts to madness by being extraordinary as a woman.”

Back in 1991, after I finished reading Fish Tales, I put it back on the shelf and didn’t think about it for two decades. Even in 2002, when I read Carter’s brilliant stand-alone noir Walking Bones (2002), a book that was influenced by Fish Tales and featured a protagonist named Nettie, I had, like so many others, forgotten. “I first read Fish Tales in the ’80s, and though it left a huge impression, I don’t remember thinking about it consciously when I was writing Walking Bones,” Carter said from her Lower East Side apartment. “Lewis was messed-up, articulate, bohemian, and free, and a part of that great artistic milieu that I was so caught-up in when I was younger. She was a Black woman in a world that most people don’t think of Black women in, and there isn’t much writing about us in that way. She was not the standard Black woman character.” 

The irony of Charlotte Carter’s last line — and a fact that I wasn’t aware of until recently — was that Jones, though Black herself, never set out to write an “African American book,” but instead was attempting to craft a “colorless” novel. “I wanted to present my characters as human beings, their character not determined by their color,” Jones said. In an effort to keep race out of the conversation, the fair-skinned, blue-eyed writer even opted to forgo her author’s photo. “I refused to have a photo of me, because I did not wish to have anyone not buy my book because of my race.” 

It was all for nothing because graphic designer George Corsillo hired a light-skinned woman to pose on the cover, and she became Lewis’s avatar. “I hated that cover and I actually went to Random House and asked it to be changed, but the production director literally begged me not to make this move. The book was in final production, so I gave in, but that picture defeated my desire to not include color on the cover or contents.” Most critics, with the exception of Darryl Pinckney, didn’t pick up on the “racial blurring” of Jones’s characters and, obviously judging the book by its cover, referred to Lewis as Black. 

“One of the remarkable aspects of this novel is that race doesn’t matter,” Pinckney wrote in 1984. “There is no sociology; even with descriptions of reddish hair on legs, curly heads, and broad noses it is hard to tell who has rhythm and who hasn’t.” Though Jones lived through the civil rights era in American politics and the Amiri Baraka–founded Black Arts Movement that included women writers Gwendolyn Brooks, Jayne Cortez, June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and Ntozake Shange, she refused to carry the banner for Blackness with the same zeal as her soul sistas. 

Jones is well aware of her own Blackness, but she’d prefer not to be referred to as African American. Old-school in that way that my own grandmother was, Jones still uses the words “Negro” and “colored” to describe herself. “Most people don’t say colored anymore. That has become an evil word,” she said. “I don’t use African American or Afro-American, because it’s too political and it’s too limiting. I’m not ashamed of any part of me, I just don’t want to give up the other parts. I’m not ashamed of my dark skin grandmother and I’m connected to all of those nice women in Congress. I’m from Detroit, which means I am of the world.”

After publishing Mischief Makers in 1989, Jones returned to the world of academia. She taught fiction at the University of Michigan and later at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She sometimes included fellow Detroit writer Donald Goines on the reading list. 

“I loved teaching, and the students loved me, because they were free. I didn’t ask them to do stupid things,” she said. Since retiring from academics in 2010, Jones has a had a few major medical setbacks, but “for me the research never ends,” she said. “That’s where we create our stories, our dances, our poetry, our journalism. Everything I look at, it’s like, how can I use that. At this point, I just do it automatically.” Meanwhile, she’s still writing, fighting, and observing the world through her piercing eyes. 

* * *

Essayist / short story writer Michael A. Gonzales has written about books for Catapult, Longreads, CrimeReads and The Paris Review. His fiction has appeared in The Root, Brown Sugar, Killens Review, Art Decades, Bronx Biannual, The Darker Mask and Black Pulp. In addition, Gonzales has written about music, visual art and film for The Village Voice, New York, Wax Poetics, HYCIDE, Pitchfork, Newark Bound and Vibe. Upcoming projects includes work in Sticking it to the Man: Revolution and Counter Culture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950-1980, edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre and Gimme the Loot, edited by Gabino Iglesias.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Fact checker: Steven Cohen

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | April 2019 | 48 minutes (8,041 words)

In 1973, East Coast rock promoter Howard Stein assembled a special New Year’s Eve concert at New York City’s Academy of Music. It was a four-band bill. Blue Öyster Cult headlined. Iggy and the Stooges played third, though the venue’s marquee only listed Iggy Pop, because Columbia Records had only signed Iggy, not the band. A New York glam band named Teenage Lust played second, and a new local band named KISS opened. This was KISS’s first show, having changed their name from Wicked Lester earlier that year. According to Paul Trynka’s Iggy Pop biography, Open Up and Bleed, Columbia Records recorded the Stooges’ show “with the idea of releasing it as a live album, but in January they’d decided it wasn’t worthy of release and that Iggy’s contract would not be renewed.” When I first read that sentence a few years ago, my heart skipped the proverbial beat and I scribbled on the page: Unreleased live show??? I was a devoted enough Stooges fan to know that if this is true, this shelved live album would be the only known full multitrack recording ever made of a vintage Stooges concert.

The Stooges existed from late 1967 to early 1974. They released three studio albums during their brief first life, wrote enough songs for a fourth, paved the way for metal and punk rock, influenced musicians from Davie Bowie to the Sex Pistols, popularized stage diving and crowd-surfing, and were so generally ahead of their time that they disbanded before the world finally came to appreciate their music. Their incendiary live shows were legendary. Iggy taunted listeners. He cut himself, danced, posed, got fondled and punched, and by dissolving the barrier between audience and performer, changed rock ‘n’ roll.

“We never knew what would happen,” Stooges guitarist James Williamson said in Open Up and Bleed. Musician Cub Koda, who witnessed many gigs, agreed. “[T]hey could do twenty minutes and be brilliant, then all of a sudden the set would go to hell in a handcart.” At the Goose Lake Festival in 1970, Iggy accidentally incited the inebriated crowd to tear down a fence. At the New York club Ungano’s in 1970, Iggy walked across tables, hung from exposed pipes in the club’s ceiling, did a backflip, and leapt back onstage. At Max’s Kansas City in 1973, he rolled on some glasses and kept performing as blood squirted from the wound. Stooges music scared people. Iggy both terrified and enchanted. The shirtless singer was the most beautiful specimen many listeners had ever seen. Yet one of rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest tragedies is the fact that no one seems to have recorded an entire original Stooges concert on high fidelity multitrack or professionally filmed an entire performance.

Since the band’s demise, devoted fans and opportunistic profiteers have done the only thing they could: gathered all live audience recordings, rehearsal and demo tapes, then released them as bootleg or semiofficial posthumous albums. The titles could fill a book: Metallic K.O.; A Thousand Lights: Live in 1970; the Heavy Liquid box set; Have Some Fun: Live at Ungano’s; You Don’t Want My Name… You Want My Action; More Power. New listeners rarely know where to start in the Stooges’ discography. All of this is historically important material. These murky live tracks and songs-in-progress offer glimpses of how the band’s fourth album could have sounded had they retained record label support. Most vintage Stooges concert recordings sound too awful to interest more than hardcore fans, because incredible performances are sunk in a swamp of low fidelity. Adding insult to injury, all the horrible bootleg covers with cheap fonts make the band look like camp horror rock better at chest cutting than songwriting, which undermines the band’s legacy as visionary rock ‘n’ rollers who set trends for decades. As one fan’s friend put it while listening to a bootleg: “[W]hy does everything you have by Iggy Pop sound like it was recorded up someone’s ass?” This is why a quality soundboard concert recording would be the ultimate Stooges score.

* * *

The Stooges story is as much about missed opportunities as musical genius. Rumors and what-if scenarios define the Stooges’ legacy. What if they’d recorded a follow-up to Raw Power? What if they’d released “Big Time Bum” as a single, as they’d told Motor City Rock and Roll News magazine they were going to in 1970? What if fans had a clear studio recording of their brief two-guitar line-up, instead of only audience recordings of it? What if, what if, what if. Instead, they never recorded “Big Time Bum” in the studio. They never properly documented their two-guitar lineup. They never released a fourth studio album until 2007, and it’s no Raw Power.

Rumors have long circulated about the amount of Stooges material that remains unreleased. Some fans speculate that Michigan photographer Leni Sinclair has uncirculated concert footage stored in her Detroit-area home. Others continue to believe Sinclair’s house burned down and took that footage with it, even though Sinclair has stated it wasn’t her house, but the People’s Ballroom, that burned, along with her color slides of the Stooges and MC5. Some fans think a few outtakes from the Raw Power era lurk in record company vaults. Others believe that guitarist James Williamson’s personal collection contains old unheard songs, or that the independent label Bomp! Records is sitting on some unreleased rehearsal tapes, for whatever reason. A Michigan musician even claims to have heard tapes of early Stooges home practices that his friend made back in the day. Much of this is wishful thinking, but the endless bootleg recordings and official reissues only fuel speculation.

In 1990, CBS Records formed Legacy Recordings, its catalog division, to preserve and reissue its vast archival holdings, and following the sale of CBS’s labels to Sony Music, which included Columbia, Okeh, and Epic, Legacy was tasked with reissuing some of the most beloved and historically important jazz, blues, folk, gospel, and rock in history. It also started looking for material inside its vaults.

Get the Longreads Top 5 Email

Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s very best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning—and keep up with all our picks by subscribing to our daily update.

• Longreads Newsletters
• Daily Updates

Starting in 2011, Columbia/Legacy began releasing a string of Miles Davis albums composed of music from the vaults. The six-part Bootleg Series contained music from 30 years of Davis’s time on the label. After letting Iggy and the Stooges fail without label support in the early 1970s, Columbia now gave the Stooges the same archival treatment, because time had proven the band to be a valuable commodity.

When Columbia/Legacy released the 3-CD, limited deluxe edition box set of the Stooges’ Raw Power in 2010, it had some unique Stooges music, including three unreleased studio outtakes — “Doojiman,” “I’m Hungry,” and “Hey Peter” — the song “Head On” from their potential fourth album, and a full, great-sounding audience recording of a 1973 show in Georgia whose audio Columbia professionally cleaned up. And yet, somehow there was more great stuff lying around.

Three years after the box set came out, a mysterious entity named Boca Del Rey Discos released 1,000 copies of a vinyl bootleg called Etiqueta Negra de Lugo. The only album Boca ever released, the LP included a scorching, untitled instrumental studio track that fans had never heard. This was a big deal. Of all the bootlegs that had come out in the preceding 40 years, no other one had this song. Was it a Raw Power outtake? An abandoned song idea? Fans made guesses and wondered why the Stooges hadn’t released it on the Raw Power box set, too. The song was that good. It certainly sounded better than the throwaway “Hey Peter” and another alternate mix of whatever song got mixed a hundred times by three different people. So where did it come from?

The name Boca Del Rey Discos translates to Mouth of the King Records. “I would lay even money on these tapes emanating from James Williamson,” a commenter wrote on YouTube. “Why neither Columbia/Legacy nor Easy Action [Records] managed to find a way to prise them from his grasp is unknown — maybe they just didn’t bother to ask.”

“They recorded a lot with James,” another fan said on a message board in 2014. “Mostly demos and practice tapes, but there is even more that still hasn’t seen the light of day.” That’s a titillating, but unsubstantiated idea. Fans get info from other fans, recycling hearsay and circulating misinformation. With the Stooges, it’s hard to confirm anything. As James Williamson said to writer Joel Gausten more than a decade ago, “Basically, everybody’s dead except Iggy and I.”

With the truth locked inside a maze of blurry facts and hearsay as convoluted as the Stooges’ discography, it’s hard to know who to trust. Trynka’s Open Up and Bleed is one of the few sources of vetted information. After all, the book was fact-checked, so reading it, I believed the info about the Academy of Music recording had to be accurate, right?

Outside of the book, the most useful information about the Academy show is a mediocre audience recording, the setlist, and between eight and 11 minutes of mostly silent black-and-white 8 mm footage shot by a musician named Ivan Kral. The Stooges played eight songs at the Academy: “Raw Power,” “Rich Bitch,” “Wet My Bed,” “I Got Nothing,” “Cock In My Pocket,” “Search And Destroy,” “Gimme Danger,” “Heavy Liquid,” and possibly a ninth, “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” If anyone might know what happened to Columbia’s live recording, Danny Fields might.

Back in the late 1960s, Elektra Records hired Fields to be their talent scout and publicity director, but an important part of his skill set was being countercultural. “Danny was the company freak at Elektra Records,” photographer Leee Black Childers said in Please Kill Me. “His job was to keep the stupid record company executives somehow in touch with the street.”

The young long-haired Fields dropped LSD, smoked weed in his office, and told the stiffs what new bands to sign. When Fields first saw the Stooges, they were playing with the MC5 on the University of Michigan campus in 1968. The union was a large wooden hall with high ceilings and great sound. “You could get those big amps crankin’,” Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton remembered in the documentary Gimme Danger, “and this room just rang.” Fields fell instantly in love with the Stooges, calling their performance “the music I had been waiting to hear all my life.”

“I had this maternity dress on and a white face,” Iggy said in the book Please Kill Me, “and I was doing unattractive things, spitting on people, things like that.”

Help us fund our next story

We’ve published hundreds of original stories, all funded by you — including personal essays, reported features, and reading lists.

Become a member

“I went up to Iggy when he came offstage and I said, ‘I’m from Elektra Records.’ He just said, ‘Yeah.’ He didn’t believe me. He thought I was like some janitor or some weirdo, because no one had ever said ‘I’m from a record company’ to Iggy.”

Iggy recalled the moment. “So this guy, Danny Fields, says to me, ‘You’re a star!’ just like in the movies. He said he worked for Elektra, so I figured he cleaned up as a janitor or something. I didn’t believe it, you know, like, ‘Get away from me, man.’” The Stooges eventually listened, and Fields signed them to Elektra in 1968. He taped one of their 1970 Ungano’s shows from the audience, taped them playing New York’s Electric Circus in 1971, and some fans believe he may have shot silent 8 mm footage of them playing at St. Louis’s American Theater in 1973. He didn’t even remember that he had the unreleased Stooges outtake “Asthma Attack” in his storage unit for 40 years. Apparently, he’s forgotten a number of things, and he hadn’t heard of Columbia taping the 1973 Academy of Music show. “I’m afraid I know nothing of the live recording you’re referring to,” he wrote in an email. That was disappointing. If not him, then who? Fields asked his friend James Marshall, a former DJ at WFMU.

“CBS did record that night on a mobile truck, also the rehearsal the week before in their studio,” Marshall said via email, “but when they did the Raw Power box the producers hunted high and low and could not find the tapes, they were probably destroyed or stolen way back when. The live album wasn’t released as it was deemed subpar. I wasn’t at the show, but I have the Night of the Iguana bootleg, from audience cassette, and you can tell Iggy is really a mess onstage.” Asked for more details, Marshall later said he “can’t remember where he read about the rumor of the mobile truck” and never believed it anyway.

James Williamson remembers things differently.

Williamson doesn’t recall where or when the unreleased instrumental on Etiqueta Negra de Lugo was recorded, but he is certain it wasn’t from the Raw Power sessions. That makes sense. The band recorded lots of rehearsals in 1972 and ’73. He remembered that CBS recorded the band’s 1973 studio rehearsals, when the label was evaluating whether to renew their contract to release an album after Raw Power. Williamson was adamant about the ’73 Academy show. “First, I can assure you that there was no remote truck recording us for that show,” Williamson said via email. “As was painfully shown with the lack of video footage for both the Raw Power reissue by Sony and the Jim Jarmusch video, the only film footage existing of that shoot was a brief handheld 8 mm clip shot as an afterthought on a home camera. No one wanted to spend the money developing film of us and nobody felt we were significant enough to spend the money. So, had CBS wanted to spend the money for a remote truck, you can be assured they would have spent a little on filming us as well.”

Trynka’s book is the best Iggy biography we have, and he’s a stellar journalist, but Williamson actually played the Academy show, so he seems a more credible source. More than a decade had passed since Trynka did the reporting for his book, and he couldn’t remember who told him about the recording. “But having had a quick look,” he told me, “I don’t think I can find whoever first mentioned the official recording to me. It could have been [L.A. underground music producer] Kim Fowley or [Doors manager] Danny Sugerman, it’s over a dozen years ago now and I can’t remember!” He could say with confidence that his source “would have been a direct one, not a previous magazine story unless it was contemporary.” To help confirm details, he contacted the Stooges’ sound engineer Robert Czaykowski, aka Nite Bob, who did the sound for that show.

Nite Bob engineered sound for New York Dolls, Aerosmith, and Steely Dan. In 1973, he ran sound for much of the Stooges’ final tour. Part of his job was to make sure the guitars sounded clear and loud enough to destroy the audience with a sound the band called “the clang.” About the Academy recording, Nite Bob told Trynka, “I remember a truck being there, but I thought it was for Blue Öyster Cult.”

Like the Stooges, Blue Öyster Cult were signed to Columbia Records in 1973, and some fans believe that Columbia recorded BOC’s performance and locked the recording in the company vaults. BOC’s publicist Steve Schenck says that’s false. “That show was not recorded with a mobile truck,” he told me. “I was there.” In 1973, Schenck was working as what he called the band’s errand boy. To confirm his memory, he asked singer-guitarist Eric Bloom, the original drummer Albert Bouchard, and their old front-of-house sound engineer George Geranios. “We recorded many shows in ’74 for what became the double live album On Your Feed or On Your Knees,” Schenck said. No one remembers Columbia recording the ’73 Academy of Music show.

Steve Martin, Iggy Pop’s publicist, asked Iggy’s management team about the Academy recording, who asked Columbia Records and Iggy himself. “I checked,” Martin told me, “and as far as we all know, they do not exist and if they do, no one seems to know where.”

Shelved, lost, stolen, never made — how does one recording live so many different lives?

* * *

Music gets lost and found all the time, especially in the various storage areas people call vaults.

To many fans, record company vaults are mysterious, mythologized places where corporations hoard material, letting art languish and die, exposed to thieves and the ravages of time, and deprive the world of music. They can certainly be repositories of lost treasures that only see the light of day if considered sufficiently profitable. To record labels, vaults are places to store recordings and control assets, where executives can keep subpar music from release and protect its investments and artists’ reputations. The Blue Note jazz label did this all the time. During the 1950s and ’60s, Blue Note would record tons of sessions with its musicians, like organist Jimmy Smith, and stagger the releases so not to flood the market. But the label often kept certain sessions that they deemed less inspired performances.

Rather than in vaults, some recordings get stored in people’s basements, attics, or closets, where they’re forgotten, damaged, or stolen. A rare audience recording of the Stooges’ two-guitar lineup once existed. Members of the Detroit band Matt Gimmick snuck a tape recorder into the Palladium in Birmingham, Michigan, and reportedly recorded the Stooges’ performance in late 1970 or spring 1971. The set consisted of songs Iggy and James Williamson cowrote but never fully or ever recorded in the studio for an album. Back home, the young band listened to the tape over and over to learn how to play them, and they did something the Stooges never could: They released their own studio recordings of two of those songs. That LP is rare but at least it exists. Unfortunately, the band lost their recording of the Stooges’ Palladium show decades ago. Guitarist Alan Webber never made copies of the tape.

On the Stooges fan forum, a fan named Rupert confirmed a rumor that the band performed “1969” and “I Wanna Be Your Dog” on Philadelphia’s short-lived Hy Lit TV show in 1969. A friend of the band named Natalie Schlossman produced a zine back in the late 1960s and early ’70s called Popped. She attended numerous Stooges concerts, published her own concert photos, hooked the band up with taper Michael Tipton, who famously recorded the band’s last concert, and she was in the studio during their Hy Lit performance. “HY Lit was a very popular DJ for many years,” she told Rupert. “This show was locally aired only. Jeanne taped the show with one of those old reel-to-reel cameras. We were up in the sound booth looking down at the studio. I did view the tape afterward but the quality was not great.” This was among the band’s earliest TV performances. “I know you will ask,” she told the interviewer, “so I will tell you that the tape is not around now.”

The flipside to all this sad news is that lost music occasionally gets found. After years of requesting access to the Blue Note vault, twenty-seven year old jazz enthusiast Michael Cuscuna finally got in there in 1975. He not only found an alternate take of Thelonious Monk’s famous song “Well You Needn’t,” but numerous unissued, album-length recordings by jazz legends Lee Morgan, Hank Mobley, Grant Green, Tina Brooks, and Jimmy Smith. Hindsight proved many of the labels original assessments were wrong.

A live 1957 recording of John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk sat in the Library of Congress’s archives unnoticed for 48 years, before the library’s Magnetic Recording Laboratory supervisor Larry Appelbaum found it. For 60 years , Verve stored a live recording of Ella Fitzgerald performing at Zardi’s Jazzland in Hollywood, before releasing it in 2017 just after what would have been her 100th birthday. In 2017, a DJ and music historian named Amir Abdullah helped unearth a pristine radio broadcast of Charles Mingus playing a Detroit gallery in 1973. Reels containing previously unknown early live recordings of jazz guitar giant Wes Montgomery sat for decades in peoples’ houses, falling apart.

The demo cassettes for Jimi Hendrix’s Black Gold Suite album project, thought lost for decades, or possibly stolen, were simply sitting in drummer Mitch Mitchell’s house, sealed with Jimi’s headband.

At a New York City street sale in 2002, Montreal record store owner Warren Hill found a 75-cent record with a handwritten label that said “The Velvet Underground Att Mr -N- Dolph 4/25/66.” It turned out to be the second known copy of the Velvet Underground’s first studio recording session, known as the Scepter Studios acetate. Hill’s copy sold at auction for $25,200.

In 2009, archivist and author Jeff Gold found a previously unknown live recording of Bob Dylan performing at Brandeis University in 1963. It languished in the huge personal archives of Rolling Stone cofounder Ralph Gleason. After his wife Jean Gleason died, the Gleason family slowly and carefully sold some of Ralph’s collection to a select group of buyers. In a basement stuffed with tapes and ephemera, Gold found a previously unknown live recording of Bob Dylan playing Brandeis University right before he got famous. After Gold negotiated a deal with Dylan’s manager Jeff Rosen, the show was officially released as a live album two years later. “Still,” Gold said, “after all these years, to find an unknown Dylan tape, and one this good — I was astounded.” Everyone was.

Liner notes for the 2-CD rerelease of the Stooges’ self-titled debut album list Gold as a “tape researcher,” but he’s so much more. He’s a record collector, music historian, art director, author, and researcher whose passion has made his life a musical adventure. He’s worked for A&M Records and Warner Bros. Records. He created the Stooges oral history with Iggy Pop called Total Chaos: The Story of The Stooges / As Told by Iggy Pop. At his core, he’s a fan who collects, preserves, and sells rare records and related ephemera, everything from old record store signage to concert posters and lyrics, on his website Record Mecca. People constantly contact Gold about material they think is valuable and want him to assess.

“I get calls every day about stuff,” he told the Wall Street Journal. In 2014, a man invited him to look at two boxes labeled old records that remained in his sister’s Manhattan building on 124 W. Houston Street in Manhattan. “It looks like there’s about 150 of them,” he told Gold. “I think they’re all Bob Dylan.” Once Gold started meticulously listening and identifying their contents, he discovered the 149 acetates contained unreleased cover songs and works-in-progress during the making of the albums Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, and New Morning. Many of the songs had never been heard before. “As for the condition,” Gold said. “I think Bob played each of these once, twice, or maybe three times, and put them back in the sleeves. They sat boxed up in a closet for more than forty years , which is probably the ideal way of storing them.” These are the kinds of stories that give people hope that more Stooges material could still lurk in some cluttered basement: If someone could just find Columbia’s ’73 Academy recordings, or recover lost Stooges footage, their release would cause an uproar.

Around 2002, Danny Fields let Gold assess the contents of his personal archives and storage locker, and buy whatever interested him. Fields hadn’t paid his storage bill for a few months. “It didn’t seem to me he had any intention of paying his storage locker fees,” Gold told me. “My educated guess is I saved this from going into a dumpster.”

“Danny was one of those guys who saved everything,” Gold said, “so he had file cabinets full of stuff. You’d look up ‘1971,’ and there would be everything from postcards from Lou Reed to a Christmas card from his printer thanking him for his business, or dry cleaning receipts, or you name it, and it was indiscriminately saved. So I just sat on his floor for days and went through file by file, item by item, and pulled out anything that I was interested in buying from him.”

Gold paid the storage bill and spent a few days excavating its contents with flashlights. “So there were reel-to-reel tapes with no boxes, unlabeled. There were reel-to-reel tapes in boxes, labeled. There were cassettes. I couldn’t really tell what was what,” Gold said. Since it was Fields’s, he knew it was worth saving and would contain important material, so he made an offer based on his assessment, what he called “a grab bag situation.” “There were a couple of boxes of reel-to-reel tapes that said ‘The Stooges’ on ’em, and one that said ‘The Velvet Underground.’ There were cassettes. I could tell what maybe 25 percent of it was, but a lot of stuff was unlabeled. So it was kind of like, I guess it’s worth taking a shot, these are Danny’s tapes, so I figured, overall, it would all work out.”

He rented a studio in order to identify the contents of the reel-to-reel tapes. He found Fields’s audience recording of the Stooges playing Ungano’s in New York City in 1970, the earliest known live Stooges recording. He found a full copy of John Cale’s original rejected mix of the band’s debut self-titled album, along with uncut, extended versions of songs like “No Fun” and “Ann.” And he found one unreleased outtake called “Asthma Attack.” Unlike so much Stooges material, this track had never circulated publicly. Granted, it wasn’t good, but it was rare. Fields didn’t even know he had it.

“Fields was the band’s A&R guy,” Gold explained, “and got copies of everything there was. He wasn’t in the bootlegging world. He was in the throw-it-in-a-box-never-to-be-looked-at-again world. When I bought this stuff, it was before the Stooges had reunited. They were a band of fascination to record collectors and people like myself, but it wasn’t like anybody was gonna go make millions of dollars doing Stooges bootlegs. … I think he literally just saved everything, which was great, and if you’d ask him about something specific he’d say, ‘I don’t know.’”

Gold was Rhino Records’ first employee back when it started in L.A. in 1973. For years he urged his friends at Rhino to release the recordings he’d found, despite little general interest in the Stooges at the time. Eventually, Rhino bought it all for what Gold described as “some marginal amount of money.” For the 2010 rerelease of the Stooges’ debut album, Rhino released Cale’s mix and “Asthma Attack” in its super collectors “Handmade” series. “The live Stooges recordings we have are just what happened to be captured and then what happened to survive. Again, these Danny tapes happened to survive only because he kept everything and because I happened to show up and pay his bill. It wasn’t as if they were carefully protected for forty years because everybody knew this was important history. It was accidental history. That’s exactly what it is: accidental history.”

Music history, like the general historic record, is a frequently bizarre, hopeful blend of reality and fantasy. The deeper you delve into the Stooges, the more warped the stories get and the more you realize the role accidents play in preserving what little documents fans have.

Musician, music collector, and writer Ben Blackwell put me in touch with someone who had a story.

In 1982 or ’83, organist Dave Feeny answered an ad in Detroit’s Metro Times. A local show promoter named Gail Parenteau was selling a bunch of antiquated equipment that she’d inherited from the Magic Veil light show. Back in the ’60s, companies like Magic Veil would project colorful slides of swirling abstract images on top of bands playing concerts and across the venue walls. By the 1970s, punk pushed all that hippie stuff out of favor. But Feeny’s 1980s band the Hysteric Narcotics was part of a throwback music scene called the Paisley Underground that appreciated that psychedelic aesthetic. The band paid Parenteau a few hundred dollars for five or six boxes filled with half a dozen 16 mm film reels, approximately six projectors in various states of decay, hundreds of slides, and modified slide projectors. Terry Murphy, brother of the Hysteric Narcotics’ singer, owned a 16 mm movie projector, so the band played the reels to see what they’d bought. They found live Grand Funk Railroad footage, some live MC5. The tapes kept falling apart. On one of the reels they found clips of Iggy Pop dancing on stage. “At the moment we were bigger fans of MC5,” Feeny told me, “but of course we knew who the Stooges were.” When they first watched the Stooges reel, they had no idea how little archival Stooges footage existed, or where this footage was shot. What they’d found is some of the crispest and earliest surviving vintage Stooges concert footage. Leni Sinclair shot it at the July 1969 Delta Pops Festival at Delta Community College in University Center, Michigan. The show had been legendary, because Iggy lifted a female student from the crowd and carried her on his shoulder. She was the daughter of a high-ranking school administrator. The school threatened to withhold the band’s $300 payment, but the concert promoter intervened, the group got paid, and the promoter was banned from ever putting on another show at the campus. The audience watched nervously as Iggy lifted her up. You can see this in the film. “We didn’t know really the significance of it until later,” Feeny told me. “We just thought it was like, Oh it’s just more of this stuff from that era that she must have shot.”

Murphy transferred the film to VHS around 1983. Their friend Jim Shaw, owner of the beloved Detroit-area vintage clothing store Cinderella’s Attic, had a lot of friends, and as the footage circulated among fans and Detroit musicians, Shaw got a VHS copy to Sinclair in Ann Arbor. After he contacted her, she explained that she hadn’t intended to document the Stooges or use that footage for anything. She came to capture the MC5’s performance and was just testing out her equipment, which is why she only captured snippets of the Stooges. Jim Jarmusch used it in his 2016 documentary Gimme Danger. It’s some of the only vintage footage in the film. “That could’ve been half of it for all I know,” Feedy said. “Maybe they had a bunch more stuff as well, and that’s just the stuff that she kept.” Ben Blackwell heard this story through the collector grapevine.

Blackwell grew up in Detroit, buying records, playing drums, and listening to rock ‘n’ roll in what is arguably America’s most influential rock city. Blackwell is steeped in Detroit rock lore. The first place he drove when he got his license was Car City Records in St. Clair Shores, Michigan. After his uncle Jack White started Third Man Records in 2001, he eventually hired Blackwell to work in production and distribution. He’s spent a lot of time researching Michigan bands like the Stooges, deepening his historical knowledge and his connection to the network of collectors who sell and trade rare Stooges material. It was Blackwell who provided the crystal-clear vintage black-and-white footage that appears in Third Man’s promo to Gold’s book Total Chaos, and in Gimme Danger. Blackwell told me he “bought that from a local Detroit collector a few years back. No idea who shot it originally, but pretty certain that it’s from the Grande Ballroom.” Where did it come from?

“You know, the circle of Detroit rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia collectors is pretty small,” he said. “You buy things on eBay for a couple years and you start to get to know the players. And you start running a record label with Jack White’s name attached and the rest of the ones you haven’t met start to reach out to you. So I became aware of a collector who supposedly had some film. He hadn’t been able to watch them in forever, I promised him that I would share a DVD of the footage once I had it transferred and it was all pretty simple. As for where he got it … who knows. He never really made it clear. Shit passed through so many hands.”

Blackwell had other stories.

“I have heard anecdotes that the Iggy and the Stooges show at the St. Clair Shores Civic center with Bob Seger was professionally filmed,” he told me. “A friend of mine, who’s since passed away, said he went to a hotel party after the show and the crew who filmed the show set it up to playback for Iggy that night. With whatever drugs or women were at the party, Iggy was reportedly not distracted in the least; he wanted to see his own moves!”

As far-fetched as this scenario sounds, it is plausible. The Super 8 camera allowed amateur photographers to process their film quickly enough to view it after a concert, without editing. Similarly, Sony introduced the PortaPak and the EIAJ-1, two portable cameras that could record and be ready for viewing in a few hours. Even though PortaPaks were expensive, journalists and film collectives around the country had access to these cameras. But knowing that a professional, possibly multicamera, shoot of this show could once have existed makes the idea of its disappearance feel like even more of a loss.

Blackwell had another story: “Beyond that, some of the footage I have also came from a local Detroit record store. Third Man was working on an event to celebrate the Detroit Rock City book by Steve Miller a few years back. We were planning a panel discussion, sharing rare audio and I wanted to top it off with some film too. Years earlier I’d heard of some homeless guy bringing a box of stuff into the shop Record Graveyard that had two reels and a bunch of paper that seemed to belong to John Sinclair. Supposedly a letter of commendation from the governor from 1972 (or 1974?) made out to Sinclair. The guy said he’d found the box in an abandoned garage somewhere in Detroit. Jeff Garbus, who owns Record Graveyard, had held on to the reels for a few years, showed them at some benefits and events around Detroit, but when I asked him if he’d lend them to me for this Detroit Rock City event in Nashville, he said, ‘Just send me some records and consider them yours.’”

As unreal as the idea of film sitting in an abandoned garage sounds, in Detroit, it seems possible. In 2013, 31,000 buildings reportedly stood abandoned, from theaters to houses — people just walked away from foreclosures — and by 2013, 30 percent of the city had become vacant land, leveled by fire or demolition, only to return to woods and what locals call “urban prairie.” That’s a lot of space for things to get lost and found. What’s miraculous is that this film survived those mean Michigan winters and the city’s frequent arsons and demolitions, before finding their way to an archivist like Gold and Blackwell.

“To Jeff’s credit, a true collector can usually tell when it makes sense to let something go if it’s going to live at a better place,” Blackwell said. “I mean, passion is the ultimate drive. You have to love the stuff. You have to care about it. You can’t be in it for any expected PAYOFF. You have to care about the history, about telling the story, about uncovering an artifact or a recording that can help change the way that we tell our stories.”

James Marshall’s remembered rumor, Paul Trynka, and Nite Bob’s stories about the Academy recording were all incorrect. No board tape existed. But what if a Stooges board tape did exist and, before anyone remembered where they’d last put it, it got thrown out after a foreclosure, or stolen from a collector’s house, liquidated at a fire sale, or burned in one of the hundreds of actual fires that used to get set on Detroit’s notorious Devil’s Night? It seems vaguely possible.

If Columbia recorded the Academy of Music show, Jeff Gold would probably have heard of it. He told me, “I don’t know anything about that tape I’m afraid.” In fact, he doubts Columbia would have made it.

Consider the timeline. The Academy show happened on December 31, 1973. At some point either before the show or shortly after, Columbia dropped Iggy Pop, or at least didn’t renew his contract, which left the Stooges without a record label for the second time in their short life. If Columbia viewed the Stooges as a money pit, and recording on a mobile truck was expensive, why would the record label spend the money recording a band they already knew they didn’t want? Stooges photographer and friend Robert Matheu debunked the rumor using the same logic.

Blackwell hadn’t heard of this Academy of Music recording either, and he questioned its existence from the same economic perspective. “Putting on my record label hat,” he said, “Raw Power wasn’t performing well by any standards, Columbia surely wasn’t looking to sink MORE money into the band (they’d exclusively signed Iggy, remember?) and at that point, with the players being so mercurial based on whatever substances were available backstage each night, to drop the dough on a live album would’ve been a terrible decision by any label exec worth his salt.”

* * *

Maybe this isn’t such a loss after all. The show was documented in other forms than a multitrack, so we know it wasn’t one of the band’s better performances.

An English writer named Chris Charlesworth attended the Academy show and wrote about it for the popular U.K. weekly Melody Maker. “[The venue] had been described to me earlier as a 3,000 seater urinal which was a little cruel but it doesn`t figure in my personal favourite venue list after last night,” wrote Charlesworth. “The audience are of the more bizarre category, some dressed as flashily as the bands and others resembling down and outs seeking a warm retreat for a few hours away from the cold outside. Within two minutes of arriving a sallow looking youth has inquired whether I have any acid to sell. At the front door there’s a search: could be for a gun.”

Built as a movie theater by William Fox in 1927, the 3,600-seat Academy of Music stood in Manhattan’s East Village at East 14th Street and 3rd Avenue. It took its name from the opera house across the street after the Consolidated Gas Company demolished that building. Sid Bernstein, the promoter who booked the Beatles’ first U.S. tour, was the first person to book rock bands at the Academy, including the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, and Herman’s Hermits in the 1960s.

Howard Stein started booking rock shows at the Academy in 1971. He put Black Sabbath on a bill with Jeff Beck. He booked Foghat, King Crimson, Joe Cocker, Humble Pie, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Roxy Music, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. In 1971, Stein booked the Band there four nights in a row. Capitol Records recorded all four sets and released them as a 4-CD box set, featuring a set with Bob Dylan. Rolling Stone called the album an instant classic. Many fans consider these the Band’s definitive recordings. The room sounded that good. In December 1973, Lou Reed played the Academy of Music after leaving the Velvet Underground, and RCA released the official concert recording as Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal and Lou Reed Live. Ten days after Reed’s performance, the Stooges played.

KISS opened with a 30-minute set. “In that time,” bassist Gene Simmons remembered on Kissology, “I spit fire, caught my hair on fire — they thought it was part of the show — I threw something into the audience, which later resulted in an accident, which put somebody else on fire.”

“Variation of mood is not their forte, although what they play is effective enough,” Charlesworth wrote. “The closing number, ‘Firehouse,’ I think, ends with clouds of dry ice puffing from amps, flashing lights all round them and a display of fire-eating by the bass player. He even chucks a few loose flames out in the general direction of the audience and one fiery mass appears to land on an unfortunate youth`s head. He’s carried out holding his face in his hands but few seem to notice.”

Teenage Lust played after that. “We had a small Teenage Lust light-up-with-Christmas-lights kind of sign cut out of Styrofoam,” their singer Harold C. Black remembered. “[KISS] had the major, we’re talking Las Vegas–style light-bulb sign. And then KISS went on with the flames and the giant sign. It was like, if you pardon the expression, ’Oh, fuck.’ Not exactly what you wanted to go on after. And then [Simmons’s] hair went on fire and I’m like, ‘Is that part of the act? How is it that they did that?’ People in the front row said, ‘What the hell is this?’ They’d never seen anything like it before.”

Frontman Paul Stanley added, “The cheapest effect of all? I split my pants.” Breathing fire and splitting pants was nothing compared to the true, self-destructive chaos of the Stooges.

Like everyone else, KISS had heard raves about the Stooges’ wild shows. Stanley was unimpressed. “When it was time for the Stooges to play,” Stanley wrote in his memoir, Face the Music, “the band took the stage and started playing — without Iggy. Crew members had to carry Iggy down a flight of steps, drag him to the side of the stage, prop him up behind the curtains dangling there beside the stage, and then basically throw him onstage. Iggy could barely stand up, much less walk or jump. I suddenly realized why he did all those crazy contortions. Despite all the hype and legend, I thought the Stooges were awful.”

Charlesworth was equally unimpressed. “There are no changes since I last saw them in Los Angeles,” he wrote in Melody Maker. “At the Academy Iggy is contorting his features and screaming his head off behind a very basic and very noisy group. To be fair, I should point out that Iggy gets a hero’s welcome, but his particular writhing, his unintelligible vocals and his band’s total lack of any subtlety leave me cold as ice.”

Visually, there was nothing cold about Iggy’s performance. You can see for yourself.

That night, a musician named Ivan Kral captured part of the show on his 8 mm camera from the seventh row. Kral’s silent black-and-white footage shows close-ups of Iggy in tight shorts and tall leather boots, crawling on the stage between rows of light bulbs, leaning on a mic stand, bending over backward in a painful arch, and it shows brief grainy shots of James Williamson in a leather vest playing guitar. It’s some of the only known footage of the band in their heyday.

Kral was a musician whose band Luger played New York clubs like Max’s Kansas City in the early 1970s. Born in Czechoslovakia, his diplomat parents moved the family to the US by 1966. “I came from a country that banned rock ‘n’ roll,” Kral told Metromode. By ’66, Kral was already a rock ‘n’ roller. “We came to this country because my journalist father spoke publicly against the ‘damn commies’ to U Thant at a United Nations meeting. After the New York Times published it, the secret police were tailing us. My country was called the Czech Socialist Republic [from 1969 to 1990].” Fearing he’d be kidnapped by communist secret police if he left the country, he remained in the U.S. as a refugee, though he lived in fear of deportation. “I used my parent’s camera to film friends and the city. I figured the reel would be like my diary of America,” Kral said. “I thought I’d be able to share my home movies of the scene with my band mates in Prague. It’s all what I saw backstage. When I had to go onstage with Debbie [Harry] or Patti [Smith], I would just hand the camera to someone and ask them to continue filming,” he said in Metromode. Using his father’s Yashica Super 8 camera, he spent the early ’70s filming everyone in his New York rock circle: Television, the Ramones, the New York Dolls, Blondie, Talking Heads, Wayne County, most before they’d released their first albums. When the Stooges came to New York, he filmed them, too.

“The music was great. The performance was great,” Kral told one interviewer. “Sitting in the seventh row I filmed a guy who fell off the stage and let the audience carry him with their hands. It was original and he is an original.” ‘He’ meaning Iggy. “New Year’s Eve 1973 was chaos when Jim  hit the stage,” Kral said. “Audience went nuts. Trampled, I dropped my Super 8, cut my hand on broken glass reaching for it under the stampede. I was more worried about the film than the camera! I woke up the next morning with bloody gashes plus footprints on my coat.”

Kral recorded parts of the intro and four songs: “Raw Power,” “Wet My Bed,” “I Got Nothing,” and supposedly 28 seconds of “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” He shot fragments because he didn’t shoot anything for commercial release. When the bands got famous, though, he recognized the value of his footage, so he and filmmaker Amos Poe compiled edited version of this incredible footage onto two indie films: Night Lunch and Blank Generation. Neither of these includes the Stooges footage.

Another photographer attended that night: a native New Yorker named Roni Hoffman. Close friends with Blue Öyster Cult, she took the opportunity to photograph them and the Stooges from the side of the stage. She’d already seen the Stooges at Max’s that year, and her contact sheets from the Academy reveal a who’s-who of musicians and rock journalist royalty in attendance that night. Patti Smith hung out backstage with Todd Rundgren, Bebe Buell, Nick and Sunny Tosches, and Richard Meltzer, as well as a record company employee whose name she couldn’t remember. This was New York. Record executives lived in the city, so they came to their bands’ shows. That didn’t mean he was there to oversee recording. She didn’t remember any recording being made. She does remember the show, though. “It was memorable,” Hoffman told me. “Iggy’s always memorable.”

* * *

And yet, even after hearing all of this, many fans will continue to believe that Columbia’s recording still wallows in the CBS vaults, lost, damaged, or stolen. I guess you’ll just have to believe whichever story tells the one you want to hear. The story I hear isn’t the one I want, though. It’s the one the facts suggest. It’s just that sources remember different things, memory is fallible, and the last thing Stooges fans need is more fuel for the rumor mill. You’d think that would be the end of it.

Just when one rumor gets put to rest, Third Man Records cofounder Ben Blackwell sent me this email: “Furthermore, without being able to divulge too much more, I can say that I have uncovered a full show of the Dave Alexander lineup, recorded off of the soundboard. Yes, you read that correctly. It sounds REALLY good. There’s still lots of moving parts, hence my caginess, but really, this thing sounds SICK. It is quite possibly the best live recording we will ever hear of the Stooges, damn near fifty years after it was recorded.” Alexander was the band’s original bassist. He’d left the band in 1970 and died a few years after Raw Power came out. Blackwell couldn’t say anymore.

That’s the Stooges for you. Even decades after their demise, nothing about them is ever simple except their guitar chords. As Iggy told the audience at their fourth reunion show in 2003: “We are the mother fucking Stooges! We are a freak of fucking nature!” Naturally, the band filmed this performance professionally and recorded it through the soundboard. You can listen on YouTube. Maybe doing so has stripped it of its mystique.

***

Tom Maxwell contributed reporting to this story.

Aaron Gilbreath is a writer and editor at Longreads. He’s the author of This Is: Essays on Jazz, the personal essay collection Everything We Don’t Know, and the forthcoming Through the San Joaquin Valley: The Heart of California.

Editor: Tom Maxwell; Fact-checker: Matt Giles

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Jeff Gold has lived many lives. He was the first employee at Los Angeles’ Rhino Records back in 1976. He served as VP/Marketing and Creative Services at A&M Records, and as Executive Vice President/General Manager of Warner Bros, where he worked with everyone from Iggy Pop to Herb Alpert. He’s currently one of the most active, respected music archivists and record dealers in the world, a status he cements through frequent donations of historically important memorabilia to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He helped drummer Ringo Starr catalogue the first copy of The Beatles’ White Album, numbered #0000001, which sold for $790,000. While searching through the collection of Rolling Stone magazine cofounder Ralph Gleason, he found a previously unknown, live recording of Bob Dylan playing Brandeis University in 1963. And he also identified 149 acetates full of unreleased songs that Dylan made during the Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, and New Morning sessions — they’d sat in a Manhattan apartment for decades. Those are monumental musical discoveries!

At his core, Gold is a dedicated listener who’s collected records since his parents’ collection first enchanted him at the age seven or eight. He just loves music, and he’s turned that love into a multifaceted career. If you’re an Iggy and the Stooges fan, you have him to thank for a few things.

Various Stooges message boards have breathlessly wondered how an unknown Stooges outtake named “Asthma Attack” ended up on the 2010 deluxe reissue of their debut album, The Stooges. And there’s been whispers about who found John Cale’s original, rejected mixes of that album. We now know — Gold found them, waiting in Danny Fields’ unpaid storage locker. Gold’s diligence saved those recordings, along with the earliest known live Stooges recording: live at Ungano’s in 1970, from certain death.

Somehow, no one had formally asked Gold about how these recordings were discovered, so I did. I’m just an excited fan, too, and since a documentary impulse drives a lot of my writing, I wanted to save the story of Gold saving music, and share it with you, fellow Stooges fans.

***

Aaron Gilbreath: How did you get to look through Danny Fields’ storage unit?

Jeff Gold: Danny and I have a very close mutual friend. That guy knows that I am always looking for memorabilia to buy, and he hooked me up with Danny who had a lot of stuff he wanted to sell to raise some money. So I flew from Los Angeles to New York [around 2002]. Danny was one of those guys who saved everything, so he had file cabinets full of stuff. You’d look up ‘1971,’ and there would be everything from postcards from Lou Reed to a Christmas card from his printer thanking him for his business, or dry cleaning receipts, you name it, and it was indiscriminately saved. I just sat on his floor for days and went through it, file by file, item by item, and pulled out anything that I was interested in buying. I found lots of amazing stuff that Danny was very happy to convert to cash. I probably spent two and a half days at his place the first time, then came back a few months later for round two. While I was looking I said to him, ‘Hey, do you have a storage locker?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, I haven’t really paid the bills in a while, they’re bugging me.’ I said, ‘Danny, you have to pay the bills. If you don’t pay the bill, they open up the lock and sell the stuff at auction or, if it looks uninteresting, throw it away.’ He sounded very uninterested. I said, ‘How about I pay the bill and go look and see if there’s anything I can buy from you?’ He said sure. So he called the place up, which was maybe five blocks from his house, and told them that I was gonna come pay the bill, which was three or so months in arrears, and that I had permission to look in the locker. It was a funky storage locker. With no lights and no windows, this place was a dark jumble of boxes. I kind of looked around for a couple of hours and pulled stuff out.

I went a couple of times. The first time, I went alone, and the second time, I think the next day, I brought my friend Johan Kugelberg, a music historian, archivist, and author of the definitive book on the Velvet Underground. Johan wanted to buy stuff from Danny too, and we brought the right equipment: a hand truck and flashlights. Among many boxes of the same kind of stuff that Danny had in his apartment, I found a box of tapes. And it was literally a box of tapes. There were reel-to-reel tapes with no boxes, unlabeled. There were a couple of boxes of reel-to-reel tapes that said ‘the Stooges’ on ’em, and one that said ‘the Velvet Underground.’ There were cassettes. I could tell what maybe 25 percent of it was, but a lot of stuff was unlabeled. These are Danny’s tapes, so I figured, overall, it would all work out. So I went back to Danny’s house and showed him all this stuff I wanted to buy, and periodically he would pull a few things out that he wanted to keep, and that was fine. Then there was other stuff that he wanted me to make scans of for him, and that was fine. I don’t remember what the price was, but I remember saying, ‘Alright, based on what I can gather is in here, here’s what I can pay you for it.’ But it’s kind of a grab bag situation. We didn’t know what was on a lot of these tapes, and we didn’t know whether they’d be playable or not, because there is a problem that you probably are familiar with, with tapes from the sixties and seventies [that start to shed]. Do you know about that?

AG: Yes, they have to bake them in an oven to preserve the aging material, right?

JG: Yes, that’s exactly right. A couple of months after I bought all the stuff, I found a studio where I could listen to these tapes to figure out what was what. There were many reels that had no information on them. And there were boxes that were open or closed, but I had little confidence that what it said on the box was necessarily what was inside the box. And that was, in fact, the case a lot of the time. I spent I think two days in a recording studio, which is expensive, just listening to these things and trying to figure out what they were. It became very clear what they were: some of ’em I didn’t recognize at all, some of ’em sounds like Danny making a reel-to-reel copy of something. But in there were the John Cale mixes of the first Stooges album, unlabeled, as I recall. There was a tape Danny had recorded of John Sinclair, the MC5’s manager, having a meeting at Danny’s house, which Danny recorded. There was a transfer of Bridget Polk’s Max’s Kansas City Velvet Underground tape. There were some Velvet Underground rehearsal tapes from Max’s, too. What else? There was a demo from the New Order, which was Ron Asheton’s post-Stooges band. That’s the most interesting stuff. But I threw away probably 50 percent of it, because it was either impossible to identify and didn’t sound good, or I figured it was just some demo that somebody had sent to Danny at some point that just got thrown in a box.

Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up

AG: So at the end of this process, is this when you also found “Asthma Attack,” the outtake from the Stooges’ 1969 debut album?

JG: Yes. And I also found Danny’s live at Ungano’s tape. I went to Rhino Records — I was the first employee at the Rhino Records store — and said, ‘You guys should buy all this stuff and put it out.’ It was a long journey to convince them of that, but I did. With the Ungano’s tape I had to just kept pestering them. They were marginally interested. Anyway, I eventually sell Rhino the Ungano’s tapes for some marginal amount of money just because I think it’s very important that it get out there, because it’s the earliest known live tape of the Stooges.

AG: So all the sudden now you’ve got a bunch of this junk, 50 percent of which you’ve thrown away because it has no info or value. But you’ve found the earliest known live recording of the Stooges, you’ve got this outtake “Asthma Attack” that nobody has ever heard. Would you say that after recording the Ungano’s show 40 years earlier, Danny never knew that he even had this tape? Did he remember that he had this stuff in his locker?

JG: No, no. I think he literally just saved everything, which was great, and if you’d ask him about something specific he’d say, ‘I don’t know.’ It didn’t seem to me he had any intention of paying his storage locker fees. My educated guess is I saved this from going into a dumpster. Because anybody from a storage locker place looking into this would not have said, ‘Oh boy, we hit the lottery here.’ It was filled newspapers and magazines, which to me looked fascinating, but to somebody who didn’t know who Danny was, it would’ve just looked like a lot of junk.

I said, ‘Danny, you have to pay the bills. If you don’t pay the bill, they open up the lock and sell the stuff at auction or, if it looks uninteresting, throw it away.’

AG: And those people in the storage industry are used to dealing with stuff in unpaid units, so they’re used to dumping things in volume. I’m sure it would’ve been treated the same way.

JG: Yeah. I think they’re looking for furniture or things they can sell.

AG: So “Asthma Attack” was one of those rare Stooges songs that had somehow never circulated on bootlegs before, which is unusual considering how many early-70s Stooges rehearsal tapes and demos have circulated on bootlegs for decades.

JG: Fields was the band’s A&R guy [with Elektra Records] and had signed them and got copies of everything there was. He wasn’t in the bootlegging world. He was in the throw-it-in-a-box-never-to-be-looked-at-again world. When I bought this stuff, it was before the Stooges had reunited. They were a band of fascination to record collectors and people like myself, but nobody was gonna go make millions of dollars doing Stooges bootlegs. I mean, it didn’t occur to me. It didn’t seem like anybody had called Danny and bugged him to buy his stuff. It was a bit early in the band’s revival. Where were you fifteen, eighteen years ago? How old were you?

AG: Oh geez, eighteen years ago I was 25 but going through a deep blues and early jazz period, not listening to the Stooges anymore.

JG: They were a big time cult band, but the legend of the Stooges increased exponentially since then. For me, it was fantastic. I was way into the Stooges, as was Johan, but it wasn’t like I bought this stuff and thought I’d be sending my kids to college off of this, you know? It was super interesting to me. Here’s how uninteresting it was to Rhino, who was in the business of doing reissues. One of the people there said, ‘I don’t know why we should buy these John Cale mixes from you. We can just make our own mixes from the master tapes.’ And I’m saying, ‘No, no, no, this is legendary stuff!’ They were more interested in the Velvet Underground stuff. The Stooges stuff was me pushing more than them pulling, for sure. It took years for them to finally breakdown with the Ungano’s thing and say, ‘Okay, we’ll do it.’ So even then I was saying to these guys, who were friends of mine, ‘You should put out the first Stooges album as a double pack: the original John Cale mix on one disk, and the remix on a second disk.’ They still didn’t do that. They just selected tracks. So it wasn’t as if I had discovered the holy grail and people were lined up to buy it from me. I knew that it was historic and really interesting and needed to come out.

AG: What eventually convinced Rhino to release the John Cale mix and “Asthma Attack”?

JG: My persistence, probably. I’m not trying to be an egomaniac or anything, but I knew the people who were in charge there, and I just kept buggin’ ’em, saying, ‘This is important, this is important.’ The Stooges myth kept growing, and eventually they realized they could probably make some money on this.

Anyway, it wasn’t as if there was a big to-do around then Stooges then. People weren’t doing books on them and long retrospective articles.

AG: What were the Velvet Underground rehearsal tapes that you found in Fields’ box? Were those the Andy Warhol Factory rehearsals?

JG: No, they’re Max’s rehearsals. And I think probably some of it has still never made it out. But at some point you just go, well. I’m going through this right now with another record label and some other unreleased, really important stuff. It’s hard work convincing these men and women that there is a market for this stuff. I worked at a record company, so I understand that the artists who were signed to the label are more of a priority than this kind of thing, but this kind of thing is important, too.

AG: So you play the long game?

JG: I’m playing the long game, exactly. I’m gonna buy this stuff, I’m not worried about what I can do with it. Eventually I’ll be able to find someone who will put it out. It’s too important to be ignored.

AG: It’s interesting, because it’s like Rhino’s initial inability to understand the value of these recordings mirrors the world’s cold reception to the Stooges back in the seventies and even the eighties. People still didn’t get it.

JG: Yeah. You can imagine how when I did my book with Iggy, Total Chaos: The Story of The Stooges / As Told by Iggy Pop, I talked to him about this a lot. This was not something that he or the other band members saw coming. And he worked very, very hard to establish a solo career, which happily was successful, and I worked with him when I was at A&M. That was how I knew him. But I think that Ron and Scott Asheton never anticipated that they’d become huge rock stars when the Stooges reformed and headlined arenas around the world. That was mind-blowing.

AG: So even to the band it came as a shock that all the sudden people were taking interest in these Cale mixes and this weird avant-garde “Asthma Attack” outtake?

JG: Well, I wouldn’t say that. I don’t think it surprised Iggy, because he knew how much of that stuff was happening, and I don’t think it surprised the band. I think when the Stooges got back together, it surprised the band how much attention they got paid and how much credit they got for their innovation, and what a big audience there was for their work. Johan and I went to the first reunion show, which was at Coachella in 2003, and I thought it was gonna be a one-off. A few days before the show Iggy’s manager Art, who put it all together, and who I was friends with, called and said, ‘Yeah the rehearsals are going great,’ but nobody really knew what it was gonna be. Coachella was such an unbelievable triumph, the Stooges were so great, that I called or emailed Art the next day and said, ‘Well, this is clearly not a one-off. There’s a huge appetite for this.’ And he said, ‘Yeah they had a great time.’ It blew everybody away. So I think that helped. When I was working with Iggy in the mid-eighties, on Blah Blah Blah and Instinct, nobody cared about the Stooges. Nobody. I mean, I cared about the Stooges. I was excited to meet Iggy and hear his stories. He was a guy with a fair-to-middling solo career, which David Bowie had been very supportive of, and that was what got him signed to A&M, I’m sure. And I remember telling him at one point that I had seen the Stooges and he was surprised. He thought I was just some record business guy who wasn’t a fan, and I said to him, ‘No, I saw you play.’ Anyway, it wasn’t as if there was a big to-do around the Stooges then. People weren’t doing books on them and long retrospective articles.

AG: If it wasn’t a surprise, necessarily, because the band knew how innovative their stuff was, then did this resurgence of interest after Coachella create more of an environment where fans would be interested in more niche recordings like Ungano’s and the Cale mixes?

JG: Yes, absolutely. I think artists started talking. The White Stripes played right after the Stooges at Coachella. The White Stripes were big at the time. And I remember Jack White hanging around backstage [and he was] so excited to be with Iggy. He’s from Detroit. Wow. And you know, Jack has done a huge amount to promote the Stooges, including releasing my book at his Third Man Books, and talking about how important they were to him. A lot of other artists like Thurston Moore have done the same. Matt Groening curated the 2003 All Tomorrow’s Parties at the Queen Mary out here, and the reunited Stooges played with Sonic Youth. Thurston was so excited to be backstage with Iggy. So the people who liberally borrowed from the Stooges have been vocal about paying their debt. In my book Total Chaos, I interviewed Dave Grohl, Josh Homme, Joan Jett, and they all talked about this enormous debt they owed to Iggy and the Stooges. So that kind of stuff is what super-charged and accelerated the myth of the Stooges. Then when they got back together and started playing, and they were unbelievably great, far better than they’d ever been in terms of being able to be a solid band back in the early days. I think people were just blown away.

I mean, I saw the reunited Stooges three or four times, and I saw the real Stooges once, at the Whisky A Go Go in ’73, right after Raw Power came out. The real Stooges were shambolic, and Iggy kind of collapsed about twenty minutes into it, and that was the show. It was fascinating as a spectacle. I had never seen anything like it. It was interesting. It was gripping. It was something I’ll never forget. But as a rock show, it wasn’t great. The reunited Stooges were great. You went to see the original Stooges because you heard these stories about how Iggy would cut himself and spread peanut butter on himself and writhe on the floor. The show I saw wasn’t unbelievable music. Did you ever see them?

AG: I didn’t, unfortunately. I’ve seen Iggy solo but never caught the Stooges. I stood outside of Stubs in 2007 at South By Southwest and listened to them. But I got shooed away for getting too close to the fence. They sounded great, but it was frustrating not to get to see.

JG: They were unbelievable.

AG: They played a bit of the first album and I think all of Fun House.

JG: Yeah, well the Asheton brothers had waited their whole life to be recognized this way. It was amazing.

AG: So a lot of fans think another avant-garde lost early song named “I’m Sick,” from the same era as “Asthma Attack,” is floating around out there in someone’s collection or a company vault. Even though discoveries like yours give fans hope that Stooges stuff remains to be discovered, the Stooges rumor mill has always been too strong for fans’ own good. For instance, I heard that Danny Fields filmed them playing St. Louis’ American Theater in 1973 on an 8mm camera, and that he might have recorded audio of their 1971 Chicago show. Is any of that true?

JG: I never saw it. And I hit him at a time where he was looking for stuff to sell, so I think I would’ve.

AG: In the footnotes of his book Open Up and Bleed, Paul Trinka even mentions the ’71 Chicago recording too, and how bombastic it was. He doesn’t mention who recorded it, only “I have heard an as-yet-unreleased tape of their Chicago show that is far more brutal and impressive.”

JG: I’m sorry I don’t know. I read his book very, very carefully before I went and interviewed Iggy for my book, but the footnotes have not stayed with me.

AG: Fair enough. Also, I know that Fields recorded two shows at the Electric Circus in New York in ’71 that Easy Action Records ended up releasing, with the band’s approval. So it seems like Fields did record the band quite a bit. The reason this matters is because no professionally made multi-track recordings of an original Stooges concert seems to exist.

The live Stooges recordings we have are just what happened to be captured and then what happened to survive.

JG: Yeah. I don’t remember when they came out, but it was right about then. So most of Danny’s recordings that I had were on reel-to-reel. And that Ungano’s show was on reel-to-reel.

AG: I know that soundboard equipment back in the early seventies was not like it is now. Why do you think somebody like Fields, who had signed the band and was close, arguably too close, to them, wouldn’t have taken the opportunity to record them professionally himself? If he couldn’t convince the label to record them through a multi-track, why do you think he wouldn’t have had the club engineer do it professionally at Ungano’s or elsewhere?

JG: This was a real seat of the pants operation. These guys were just barely getting from gig to gig a lot of the time. You can see in my book, there’s some contracts and stuff. This wasn’t a big money, Fleetwood Mac touring operation. This was guys in a van or a truck at one point ─ and there’s a story in my book and other places online, where Scott Asheton was driving that truck while not completely paying attention and went under a too-small bridge in Ann Arbor, sheared off the top of it, and almost killed himself. If you’re Bob Dylan or Fleetwood Mac touring, and you’ve got four sound guys or a lighting guy and a sound guy and a PA mixer, it’s easy for them to throw a cassette deck on run a DAT through the board. But my impression of the Stooges is that this was a much more seat of the pants operation. They were still playing high schools and places like that. You read about the 1973 Academy of Music show in New York, but you can look at the tour schedules in my book and see that these guys were playing small, funky venues in between the bigger venues. I mean, they had cities where they were big, but when your band in one of 25 bands in a festival, your sound guy isn’t mixing your show. The festival guy is mixing it, and the last thing they want is you saying, ‘Hey, can I run a line from the board to my reel-to-reel?” And nobody was thinking about posterity either. The live Stooges recordings we have are just what happened to be captured and then what happened to survive. Again, these Danny tapes happened to survive only because he kept everything and because I happened to show up and pay his bill. It wasn’t as if they were carefully protected for forty years because everybody knew this was important history. It was accidental history. That’s exactly what it is: accidental history. That’s my line for you. It’s accidental history.

AG: That’s a damn good one.

JG: Yeah, and that’s exactly it. I’m gonna remember that line, too.

AG: Just pure luck, timing where your two interests overlapped. You wanted the tapes. He was selling them. You happened to connect. As you said, he was potentially a few months behind on his storage unit’s payments, so it’s a miracle you came along when you did.

JG: Obviously I can’t tell you with certainty how far behind his payments were. My only goal was to get down there and see if there was anything worth saving. This was in the context of boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff I’m buying, so it’s not, ‘Oh my god, look at these tapes, I can’t wait.’ It was more like, ‘Well yeah, I might as well buy these, there’s probably something interesting in there.’

AG: Rolling the dice. It reminds me of how you identified the Bob Dylan acetates, and identified the unknown recording of Dylan playing Brandeis in 1963. It’s just incredible. As a listener and a documentarian, I’m so glad someone like you exists to save this stuff.

JG: [laughs] Thank you.

Sheila McClear | Longreads | January 2019 | 14 minutes (3,876 words)

Fannie Mae Davis migrated to Detroit from the South in 1955. By the time she started taking penny-bets from the neighbors, she was supporting five children and an ill husband who was unable to continue working at Detroit’s auto plants. The Numbers was an illegal underground betting scheme, a specific 3-digit system where players picked their own numbers. Born in Harlem in the 1920s, it spread throughout the country, mainly by way of African-American neighborhoods, although it was played by everyone and continues to be played in some communities today. It found particularly fertile ground in Detroit, due to booming industrial jobs and a large working- and middle-class African-American population. In 1970, police estimated that 1 in 15 Detroiters, or 100,000 people, played the Numbers every single day (except Sunday, when business was closed).

As the Numbers grew, so did Fannie Davis’s good fortune. As she climbed the ranks in bookmaking, from a bookmaker to a “banker,” she brought her family into the middle class and the American dream. Success came with a catch: she could tell no one outside her family how she made her money.

Even when Michigan started a legal lottery in 1972, Fannie found a way to keep the business going. Meanwhile, she was able to own property, raise her children in comfort, and provide them with an education. Still, she paid a price for her success in worry and instability, constantly girding herself against the next “hit” — a major payout for a winning number that could wipe her savings out completely.

Novelist Bridgett M. Davis, professor at Baruch college and Fannie’s youngest child, witnessed it all, and ever since she has fiercely protected her mother with her silence — until now. In her new memoir The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers, Davis paints a warm, loving portrait of her mother and their tight-knit family — not untouched by tragedy despite their good luck — and what it was like to grow up with the Numbers constantly playing in the background. “Three-eight-eight straight for a quarter. Uh huh. Four-seven-five straight for fifty cents. One ten boxed for a dollar…,” her mother would murmur into the phone every day. The book’s narrative shifts between family scenes set during some of Detroit’s most tumultuous years and a history of the Numbers, then and now, as well as what the game has meant for the African-American community over time.

*

Sheila McClear: This is the first time you told the story, in this book. How hard has it been to keep a secret like this your entire life?

Bridgett M. Davis: I hit a moment in my life and I really felt frustrated by it, and I think that had a lot to do with just getting older. Something shifted in my understanding and my thinking, and suddenly I thought, maybe I’m doing her a disservice by not telling the story.

I used to hide it because it was illegal and if we told anyone, it would put her at risk. Then I didn’t tell anyone because I was just used to not telling anyone. Then I worried what people would think about it. But then eventually, as the years kept going by, I realized, maybe it’s important for me to share this story. Maybe not telling is somehow not fully honoring what she pulled off, because it was born out of necessity, and she managed to figure out how to make a way out of no way.

So you went to your mother’s only surviving sister, your Aunt Florence, to ask permission to tell your mother’s story.

In 2010, my aunt was turning 80. And I decided that I would finally go to Detroit, sit down at her table, and ask her permission. Her immediate reaction was: Yeah, you should tell that story, and I’ll help you tell it, because people should know. I thought, well yeah, from her point of view, she’s just proud of her.

I hit a moment in my life…. something shifted in my understanding and my thinking, and suddenly I thought, maybe I’m doing her a disservice by not telling the story.

What was the world according to Fannie Davis, your mother?

She thought that God helps those who help themselves. She really believed that a work ethic was everything. That if you really wanted to achieve something in life, your job was to just do the work, to step forward and really try to achieve something for yourself. At the same time, she believed the people who were trying to improve their lives deserved help, and that was something really key to her life principles.

If you see others trying to better their lives, help them. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that my mother was defined by her generosity. Her identity was tied to her ability to be generous and to help other people. And so that is one distinctive way that she looked out onto the world.

Another characteristic about her worldview was that she believed that you should thrive in life, not just survive. That that was your right as a human being. And this was radical for a black woman who grew up, who was born in 1928, that came of age in the mid-century America. This idea that you were entitled to exactly what the Declaration of Independence promised, that pursuit of happiness, she took that seriously. A lot of black Americans at the time thought that they had to sacrifice, they whatever they could get was good enough, and that you shouldn’t ask for too much.

And her feeling was, I’m not better than anyone, but I’m as good as anyone.

Could you give a rundown as to how it worked in Detroit when your mother was an operator?

When she started out, it was a very small business. It was what they called a penny business, and she was taking very small bets for just a few cents per customer. It was a 500 to one payout. So a penny could turn into $5. That’s good money.

So people played their coins, as they say, and that was how she started, by taking in all these bets, taking their coins, and having a reserve, thanks to her brother, who loaned her that initial $100, in case someone did hit. Someone could place a bet for 15 cents, and they could end up with $75 possibly.

So that’s really how it works when you’re, as they call it, holding the business. When you are the banker, you have to have a stockpile of cash so that, whomever hits, you could pay them. Now, you’re collecting money every week from people who don’t hit, and your profit is the difference between what you collect and what you have to pay out in hits.

And so as the business grew, she morphed into a bookie, which is the middle woman, so to speak. So, now, there’s a really big banker who can pay off those hits, because the hits are now more because the bets are higher, and she’s collecting more money from people playing with her. Now they’re playing for 50 cents or a dollar or two dollars. That adds up. But the potential wins are higher too.

So she graduated to being her own banker at a higher level. And she took several people’s books… A book is simply someone who has several people placing their bets with them.

She went from turning her books over to a bigger person who took a cut of her money but protected her financially from big hits, to being independent and taking on her own financial risk, and eventually taking on the books of others.

Yeah, it is almost like a corporate structure, absolutely.

I’m interested in how you write about how bettors pick their numbers and the whole cottage industry that sprung up around that. There were tip sheets and dream books, semi-crooked storefront churches that gave out numbers. People spoke of hunches, which seem like a half logical, half magical way to settle on a number.

You know, there are numbers everywhere if you stop to think about it. Numbers pretty much dominate our lives. And if you are a gambler who is looking for that lucky combination of numbers, then all of that becomes a sign sometimes for you. Oh wow, seeing those three digits on that license plate tells me I should play that number. And you need that in a way because the odds are so great. Your odds are a thousand to one that you’ll hit this number, and there are myriad combinations. So there has to be some way for the bettor to think that they are mitigating the vast odds.

I think there are people who just simply believe in signs and move through the world that way. So if you’re playing numbers and you’re looking for signs, oh my goodness. You know, someone’s street address, someone’s birthday, the address to your favorite store. You go to the restaurant, the diner to have lunch and you look at your bill and you say, “Whoa, my bill came to $3.42.” So there’s that. And then there was dreaming. Ever since numbers have been around, people have managed to make that connection, that the numbers you dream are the best numbers. Somehow, it’s as though your subconscious or God or the spirit world is giving you these numbers. And some of that, as I speak about in the book, has to do with the power of dreams in black culture that really dates back to African culture.

You don’t have to literally dream digits, you could dream about something, and then you go to your handy dream book, the Numbers player’s bible basically, and look up what that dream plays for. And I don’t know if you’ve seen a dream book, but they’re fascinating. They’re filled with objects and things and places and people’s names and numbers assigned to them. So if you dreamed about fish — wow, that’s really lucky to dream about fish because in this dream book, fish might play for, I’m making up a number, 4-9-7. So you think, ‘Well, I’m playing that number today.’

Lotteries were banned… in part because African-Americans were acquiring money from the lotteries. The most famous one was Denmark Vesey who was a slave who bought his freedom in part with $1500 of winnings from a lottery in 1800.

During the time when your mom was running Numbers, there seemed to be a campaign in the 60s and 70s in the Detroit media against Numbers and Numbers players, along with many busts on operators. What was the misconception about people who played the Numbers?

There were a couple major misconceptions, and the first one was that only black folks played Numbers. Not true. White folks did like to play Numbers too. Whites played Numbers from the beginning. Often in the suburbs and the rural areas.

And clearly there were real Numbers operations that were run by whites in much of the history of the numbers. Blacks did not dominate or control the Numbers for very long before whites stepped in and began to take parts of those businesses away.

The other one is that people who play Numbers are being taken advantage of. That they’re somehow being duped and being sort of, having their money taken from them because they foolishly think that they’re going to win. So [that idea] takes away all of their agency.

Do you think this was a more racist misconception?

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, the idea was to tie this underground Numbers operation to black folks’ sort of degeneracy, because yes, it was illegal but a lot of things that are illegal are not necessarily wrong. Blacks did dominate in the playing of Numbers, and because blacks created  the Numbers and because blacks were making a lot of money within the community off of the Numbers, the idea was to really denigrate it and to say that they were being exploited, or that they were somehow inferior in character for even involving themselves in the Numbers.

Once the decision was made by these various states to legalize the Numbers, the narrative immediately shifted. Suddenly it wasn’t so bad. You were doing something that was legal now. So it’s fascinating that I witnessed that.

You talked about how Numbers operators in Detroit used their profits often in good ways for the community, and specifically for African-Americans.

Yeah, very few people know this, and I’m sure that it happened all over the country, but Detroit was unique. Detroit was, among other things, a real central place for the Civil Rights Movement, and so that just I think really emphasized the impact the Numbers men and women had there, mostly men. One of the key things they did was to help support these fledgling civil rights organizations. The NAACP and the National Urban League were often barely getting by, but that Numbers money really kept them afloat. The Numbers money helped to get behind certain black officials, politicians who were running for office.

And the most vivid example of how the Numbers really helped the community… I talk [in the book] about how blacks couldn’t get housing loans because of FHA [Federal Housing Administration] policy in this country, which a lot of people didn’t understand or realize, was absolutely policy. And so a lot of Numbers men would actually loan money to home buyers.

Is it true that the Numbers in Detroit were ultimately controlled by the Italian mafia?

Yes.

And the majority of number operators were black?

Yes. Well, it shifted. Blacks founded it. Blacks moved it through various cities, in part due to the Great Migration. They brought the numbers with them, so to speak, or back South. But sometime around the period when organized crime, the mafia, realized that they were going to lose some income because Prohibition was no more — they made good money during Prohibition — they began looking for other things. And they didn’t have to look far to see the kind of money that was being generated by the Numbers.

There were only two numbers men that were women in Detroit, and your mother was one, and I was surprised to learn that she wasn’t in competition with the other one. In fact, they helped each other.

They were friends. Yeah, there was no need to be competitive because there was enough business to go around. And they each had their own books, as they say, and they had their own loyal customers.

I guess from the outside it would seem odd, it would seem as though they’d be competitive, but they weren’t. They in fact were such a help to one another because both of them either had stockpiles of cash or needed an influx of cash for a particular hit, you know, to pay a hit off. And because they had that kind of cash flow, both of them knew they could depend on the other if they needed it. Pearl Massey was her name. She died not that long ago.

So the first state lottery to become legal was in 1964, and the Michigan Lottery became legal in 1972. However, your mother’s business held steady when the legal lottery started, and people kept playing the Numbers.

Right. Most people just grew up and there was always the lottery, but believe it or not, for well over a hundred years, it was illegal in the United States to have lotteries. They used to be legal way back in the beginning of the country’s sort of founding, and then for various reasons, some of which were racial, lotteries were banned. They were banned in part, I’ll just say very quickly, because African-Americans were acquiring money from the lotteries. The most famous one was Denmark Vesey [who] was a slave who bought his freedom in part with $1500 of winnings from a lottery [in 1800].

It dawned on her that you really can’t beat the house…. If you can’t beat them, you should join them… Her thing was, you want to be able to trust the winning numbers, okay, we’ll use those numbers that appear on TV every evening.

So when Michigan allowed the lottery to become legal in ’72, it was only a weekly lottery. So once a week, you could buy a ticket and the number is already on there, and you could take your chances for this weekly drawing. That was very different from the Numbers.

The Numbers was a daily game, and it had digits you could choose. Because, remember that whole mystical quality? You want to be able to say, ‘Oh, I dreamed about my grandfather, I have to play his name.’ People wanted those options. So because the legal lottery didn’t offer any of that initially, the Numbers were not threatened.

For five years, Michigan only had a weekly lottery… [but] their goal all along was to find some direct competition with the Numbers, and they found it. They came out with the the daily [called the Daily 3]. And then they just usurped the entire system. They didn’t even try to adjust it and change it. The state, all states, but Michigan in particular, just adopted the language of the Numbers, ran ads that said, “Play a hunch.”

It’s like the state just took the language that African Americans that had adopted….

Absolutely. To actually see the deliberate sort of approach to usurp this business that blacks had created was stunning, because there it was. There it was in the old newspaper ads that I found, saying exactly, “Play your birthday. Play your name.” It’s pretty crazy.

My mom was convinced that people would stay loyal to her, and for years, they did. But when that daily option came, well first of all, how easy is that to play the daily. They had ticket terminals everywhere — at corner stores. So it was easy and accessible. You didn’t have to hide a thing, because it was legal.

And the biggest thing [about the Daily Lottery] that created real competition for my mom and others is that they announced the winners on television every night.

Why was that competition?

Because the Numbers — anything that’s underground, informal, illegal — runs the risk of people exploiting it: changing winning numbers, not paying off a winning ticket.

It was pretty well understood that the Mafia knew how to fix numbers based on the amount of numbers people played, the various numbers people played. The mafia would then design a winner that had the least amount of people having played it, so it wasn’t on the up and up in the same way. People didn’t have to worry about that when they played the numbers with the state.

Your mom’s major coup was that she started accepting bets for both the legal lottery and the illegal Numbers. Why people would place bets with her for the legal lottery?

She came out with that idea in Vegas, and she said she just was on the floor and it dawned on her that you really can’t beat the house. For her that meant, there’s no way I’m going to beat the state on this. But at the same time, if you can’t beat them, you should join them.

Her thing was, you want to be able to trust the winning numbers, okay, we’ll use those numbers that appear on TV every evening.

So she didn’t use Numbers’ winning numbers anymore, which came from either horse-racing results or digits that were handed down by the syndicates and often fixed. She used the state’s winning numbers.

The Numbers started using the Lottery numbers. The one caveat [about the Numbers] had always been, Can we trust these numbers? Well once they’re on TV, everyone can.

And so, why not just go to the party store [“party store” is a Detroit name for a corner store or bodega -ed.] and play there as opposed to with Fannie? That’s the question. Well, Fannie will let you play on credit. Put your numbers in on Monday, you don’t have to pay me until Saturday. Fannie is going to offer you a bigger ratio payout. The state offers 500 to one, I’m going to offer you 600 to one.

That’s very canny.

Wasn’t that canny? Also, the state puts a cap on your winnings. Oh, you can only win up to $550 from the state. Well Fannie says, “I don’t have that cap. I can go higher.” I think what it was is if you won more than that, you had to have your check mailed to you. She said, “Listen, you can get your money the next day if you play with me.” You see?

The other advantage that my mother offered was that you didn’t pay taxes. When you won with her, you didn’t pay taxes on those winnings. That’s a big draw.

And also there was this sense of, ‘You can trust me, I’m going to ask you how your kids are doing, you know me, we have a relationship, you can sit and take as much time as you want.’

You were middle class but it was still tenuous because of the precariousness of your mom doing numbers.

Oh yeah.

You could have been wiped out in a hit.

Exactly.

Growing up, were you ever aware of that, or did your mom shield you from that?

That kind of precarious lifestyle was not overtly apparent. My mom was a domestic magician, with a brilliant sleight of hand, so that we always felt secure, and I never worried about our lives or where the next meal was coming from, or whether she could afford to keep us in our home. None of those were concerns of mine.

And yet, you can’t possibly grow up in a household where the business is so high risk and not intuit that sense of precariousness. And I saw it in small ways. My mom was stressed out a lot, and I saw it in her need to rest and step away from the vagaries of the business. We understood and intuited how much stress and pressure she was under. So I didn’t see it in literal ways. I saw it in all of these sort of intangibles.

You wrote that people in Detroit still play the Numbers. Why do people prefer it still?

I think it’s definitely an older population that still plays it. There’s loyalty. There’s a distrust of the state, and there’s community. It’s a ritual. It’s how you check in with one another. It’s really a way to literally help your neighbor. Older Detroiters are using a lot of that extra income to manage their lives in the city. All of those things are what lead to someone saying, “Yeah, I’m going to keep putting my numbers in with her. Why should I go and take [my money] to the party store and basically pay the state?”

You wrote that you played the Lottery regularly here in New York. Your mother called you lucky growing up. And today as an adult, what does the idea of luck mean to you?

That’s a great question. Well I think for my mom, luck was always about preparation meeting opportunity. I think for me, maybe because she sort of christened me a lucky person, I feel as though I inherited luck. I was just a lucky child for so many reasons, so I carry that sense of an internal good luck charm. I really believe that, and I think it’s important for me to honor it and be protective of it, and also to sort of take that luck and push it out to the world. That feels like a mission for me.

* * *

Sheila McClear is a freelance writer living in New York City. She is the author of the memoir The Last of the Live Nude Girls.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Steve Miller | Detroit Rock City | DaCapo Press | June 2013 | 39 minutes (7,835 words)

Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White Stripes. Our thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.

* * *

Don Was (Was (Not Was) bassist, vocalist; Traitors, vocalist, producer; Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Iggy Pop): So in the seventies I used to read the Village Voice, and I started seeing the ads for CBGB and these bands with the crazy names…and I told Jack [Tann, friend and local music producer] about it: “There must be some way to create something like that here. There must be bands like this here.” I formed a band called the Traitors, and Jack became a punk rock promoter, which wasn’t the way to approach music like that. It was supposed to look cooler than to go in like P. T. Barnum.

Mark Norton (Ramrods, 27 vocalist, journalist, Creem magazine): We were trying to figure out what was next. I called CBGB in ’75 or early ’76; there was a girl who tended bar there named Susan Palermo, she worked there for ages. And she would tell Hilly Kristal: “Hey, there’s this crazy guy from Detroit—he’s calling again.” I’d say, “Could you just put the phone down so I could listen to the groups?” I heard part of a set by the Talking Heads like that. It sounded like it was through a phone, but I was getting all excited, you know—this sounds like what I like. My phone bill was incredible, $200 bucks. In the summer of 1976 I went to New York City. I saw the second Dead Boys show at CBGB. I saw the Dictators. Handsome Dick and his girlfriend at the time, Jodi at the time, said, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m from Detroit.” They said, “Have you ever seen the Stooges?” “Yeah man, I saw them millions of times, the best shows, the ones in Detroit.” I was thinking, “none of these people have seen shit.’

Chris Panackia , aka Cool Chris (sound man at every locale in Detroit): The only people that could stand punk rock music were the gays, and Bookie’s was a drag bar, so they accepted them as “look at them. They’re different.” “They’re expressing themselves.” Bookie’s became the place that you could play. Bookie’s had its clique, and there were a lot of bands that weren’t in that clique. Such as Cinecyde. The Mutants really weren’t. Bookie’s bands were the 27, which is what the Ramrods became. Coldcock, the Sillies, the Algebra Mothers, RUR. Vince Bannon and Scott Campbell had…Bookie’s because it was handed to them basically. You know, “Okay, let’s do this punk rock music. We got a place.” To get a straight bar to allow these bands that drew flies to play at a Friday and Saturday night was nearly impossible. What bar owner is going to say, “Oh yeah, you guys can play your originals, wreck the place, and have no people”? Perfect for a bar owner. Loves that, right? There really wasn’t another venue.

Tesco Vee (Meatmen, Blight, vocalist, editor, Touch and Go magazine): We’d go to see everyone at Bookie’s, like the Revillos, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, Gang of Four, the Effigies, and the Misfits many times. You know it’s funny—all the Detroit bands would warm up all those national acts—the Mutants, the Algebra Mothers, Flirt, the Cubes, the Sillies. We talked about them a lot in Touch and Go. It was like new wavy stuff, but still it was new music, and we covered new music, and it was probably just to fill up the pages. That’s not very nice is it?

Steve McGuire (Traitors, bassist): When we hooked up with Don and they had this whole floor of an old Westinghouse factor at I-94 and Trumbull, with all this old equipment from United Sound and Sound Suite. It was our rehearsal place. I had quit high school and started living there and experimenting. When I first met Don I thought this was our ticket; we’re going to make it. I was so naive. There were blurbs of the Sex Pistols, and I thought the Traitors and the Sex Pistols were in a race, and whoever won would be kings.

Gary Reichel (Cinecyde, vocalist): They basically hired the bands and marched them down to one of the Birmingham salons to get the punk rock haircuts. They had a slick flyer to give to club owners. “And we’ll handle everything. The three bands will all tour. We’ll use the same equipment. You don’t have to worry about time between bands.” That’s how they were selling it. And they had bigger aspirations than that. They wanted to get them signed.

Mike Murphy (The Denizens, the Rushlw-King Combo, the Boners, Hysteric Narcotics): No band got famous out of that whole era except the Romantics, and that’s freaky. It’s not that the Romantics weren’t Detroit, but they were not representative of that scene at all. But maybe that’s why they did get signed. When they were first working they were getting on all the good bills and paid for a rehearsal space and they were on salary, which sure isn’t like the rest of the bands. We were poor. I was working at a 7-Eleven.

Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up

Mike Skill (The Romantics, guitarist, bassist): The Romantics played with the Pigs and the Traitors, with Don Was. It was some place in Oak Park at the school where Don’s dad was the principal.

Don Was: Yeah, my dad was a counselor at the junior high in Oak Park. We got him to book the Traitors and the Romantics just to have a chance to get out and play somewhere. It was disastrous. We got to play, but it was a huge incident for my dad.

Chris Panackia: The Romantics eventually would play three nights at Bookie’s and sell out every night. They played the Silverbird on a Monday night and didn’t announce the show until just before doors. This was right when “Tell It to Carrie” was starting to hit and people were just waiting for them to explode. When they announced it on the radio, 6 Mile and Telegraph became a parking lot. There were probably a thousand people there that couldn’t get in outside.

Bill Kozy (Speedball, guitarist): I was real young, and my pals from Warren Avenue took me and to the Silverbird when the Romantics did a surprise show. Beers were 25 cents. It was this rowdy rock crowd, but things were different than that. The Romantics’ fans looked like late-seventies rock people.

Mike Murphy: People kept saying someone will discover Detroit at that time, like they did in New York and Los Angeles, and it never happened. Then the bands imploded or were erratic, and it was kind of strange that nothing ever happened out of that whole time, the first wave of punk rock. Bands were going to New York and playing shows and showcases.

Katy Hait (Sillies, vocalist, photographer): These bands from other cities would come in—Teenage Head from Toronto, Skafish from Chicago—and we were just as good as those bands. We joked about it because Detroit was such an underdog. Bands from LA and New York would become famous even though they weren’t that great.

Kay Young (photographer): The music was really good, but no one hit like the Ramones or the Cramps did because Detroit was not New York. There were no record label scouts here.

Jerry Vile (The Boners, vocalist, artist, editor, White Noise, Orbit): The whole Detroit punk thing—nobody made it, and there are a lot of reasons. The record covers always looked like shit.

Vince Bannon (Bookie’s, City Club promoter; Coldcock, Sillies, guitarist): The Romantics were the only ones to pull out of Detroit in that era with any kind of substantial deal. You know it’s interesting: Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads told me that all these bands rolled into New York City because there were so many clubs besides CBGB that they would play. They could actually afford to live in the East Village and build a buzz. So you’re an A&R guy in New York, and this band is playing various buildings, and there’s a big buzz. Same thing in LA. The thing you have to remember is, what big bands came out of LA? The first punk rock bands were all signed to independents. It was out of New York where at that time the record capital was, and if you were to make it, you had to go and live in New York and do it. Also, anybody who really made it—from the biggest pop star to the rock-and-roll guy you think is totally underground—their ambition is through the roof. A lot of these guys that were from Detroit, they lived at their parents’ house, they go and play a gig, they come home, and Mom would make them breakfast in the morning.

David Keeps (Destroy All Monsters, manager): Bands from Bookie’s didn’t break out. The bands that did do something had heavy management, people who were willing to invest money in them to get them out of Detroit, like the Romantics. Also in Detroit you didn’t have these bands with money or commitment. You had to have both, and many didn’t. I don’t think anyone was poor; I think that they were mostly suburban kids living in their parents’ houses and didn’t have jobs. They weren’t like dole kids. It wasn’t as if you went to Bookie’s and all these people were from the projects or got ADC. There were kids who wanted to move out of their parents’ and lived in shitty neighborhoods.

Vince Bannon: In 1981 we architected what we were going to do and how we were going to open Clutch Cargo’s. Bookie’s was, I don’t know, getting done. I was in business with another guy, and he took good care of everything, from what our security would look like and so on. But again, we were under the radar. We would have grown exponentially if the media in Detroit would have been supporting what we were doing. In cities like LA you had like KROQ, so you talked to the promoters. It wouldn’t be economic reasons; it would be media reasons. But we couldn’t influence radio. When we moved away from Bookie’s was the same time radio became really corporate. The stations were owned by corporations; Lee Abrams and those guys came in and said, “If you want to grow your radio station in Detroit, play much more Rush and much more Bob Seger and much more Journey.”

People kept saying someone will discover Detroit at that time, like they did in New York and Los Angeles, and it never happened.

Mark Norton: We went through what I think is called the Middle Child Syndrome. As the middle child, we were fucked anyway. No one was interested in what we were doing. Everyone looked everywhere, but not in their own city or state for the latest trend. “Punk rock sucks.” It especially sucked coming from Detroit. I know where the Ramrods stand: we were and are the lost children between generations. We didn’t exist then, and we don’t really exist now—never did in the first place. We were a chimera, beat-down motherfuckers who knew right from the start in mid-’77, that knew every card in the house was stacked against us, and we liked it. The Ramrods set the stage for those who would know how to navigate the entire mess—hardcore. The hardcore guys came along and ripped the torch out of someone’s hands—it certainly wasn’t ours. We never had the torch in the first place. Bless you guys.

Skid Marx (Flirt, bassist): There were newer bands coming along, and there was a little bit of friction going on between the hardcore, younger punks and the Bookie’s crowd. There were new metal bands, too, that weren’t really Detroit bands or playing Detroit music.

Paul Zimmerman (White Noise, editor): One of the first hardcore bands I saw was Black Flag at Clutch Cargo’s. My wife-to-be and I had gone to a wedding, and we were dressed super-normal. We went in there, and their audience were all in uniforms, and we were like, “Uh oh.” They were all in black, and I’ve always liked black. I wore black to weddings, but that night I didn’t. So that night we were getting some funny looks, and finally she went to the bathroom and I heard this ruckus. These two girls in the bathroom go, “Look at Barbie. Come on, Barbie, huh, Barbie,” and she finally kicked one of the bathroom stalls open and went, “You want to fuck with Barbie? Come on, fuck with Barbie!”

Bob Mulrooney (Ramrods, Coldcock, Bootsey X and the Lovemasters, drummer, vocalist): There were a few hardcore shows at Bookie’s, and people were just going around grinding their heels into my shoes and just wanting to cause trouble. And they were all guys, and I don’t go out for that. I go out to look at girls, and there was no girls there. Hardcore was too negative. I like the look of the Gothic scene—not so much the records, but the Gothic chicks.

Gary Reichel: You’d hear that we were the old people and that we were resisting the new breed. But they never tried to be cool with us.

Dave Rice (L-Seven, guitarist, producer): Black Flag played Bookie’s in summer ’81 with Dez singing. The front was full of new kids. The back was where the older people stood wondering what was going on.

Brian Mullan (sound man, promoter): Bookie’s introduced me to what led me to hardcore. Actually it went backwards. A high school teacher of mine was sitting around with me and my twin brother after school doing an extra credit project. We went to school in a pretty shitty area, Benedict at Outer Drive and Southfield, so we were not having a whole lot of fun. The Catholic schools back then were about as good or bad as public school—no real difference. We grew up at 6 Mile and Greenfield. After the great white flight the house across the street was empty and a moving van pulled up one day and we were all happy: wow someone is moving into that house. The next day we woke up, and all the bricks were gone from the house, so we had to stare at a tar-paper shack for the next year. We all had paper routes for the News and Free Press. The News route was an afternoon route, and it was brutal because on Friday, they all knew you were out collecting. So some Fridays you’d get robbed and others you wouldn’t. Then we got smart and would collect Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so when they caught up to you Friday, their take wouldn’t be so great. So this teacher presented the question to us that day: “You guys aren’t having much fun are you?” “No, not really.” My brother and I had each other, but that was about it. He goes, “You didn’t hear this from me, but I think you guys need to go to this place, place called Bookie’s. It’s on 6 Mile before you get to Woodward.” My brother went before me, and he came back all jacked up and excited. “Man, I went to that place he told us about. It was crazy, man. The guitar player was wearing a wedding dress.” It turns out that it was the Damned. I went a couple weeks later, ’cause I lived on 6 Mile, took the 6 Mile bus. This guy Rob was working the door, and I’m thinking that I looked like I was twelve and there’s no way I’m gonna get in. But the guy just says, “Hey, man. How’s it going?” and he opens the door for me. There weren’t too many people around, and I didn’t know a soul. I was real nervous about going to this new place, and I looked up and there’s Gloria Love, who I didn’t know at the time, had never seen her. She was clad head to toe in leather, and she looked up at me, and she’s like, “Darling, we’ve been waiting for you.” She runs over and grabs my head and buries it in her breasts. I was still a virgin at the time. That’s very much a night that changed my life. That’s why I started going to Bookie’s, which pretty soon introduced me to hardcore when they booked Black Flag.

Dave Rice: The upstarts were coming into the old guard’s headquarters. I use the image of the old guard being kind of crowded into the back half of the bar during a hardcore show looking like somebody farted, you know like “What is this horrible . . . oh my God.” Where the bald kids with bandanas on their legs were right up front. The hardcore thing was just deliberately nihilistic. And homophobic as fuck. Which, I mean—rightfully so—rubbed people the wrong way. But there were hilarious aspects, you know, I mean just the old punk scene was taking place largely at Bookie’s, which was an old gay club, so there was a lot of cross-over there. A lot of those people would come from that kind of Rocky Horror mind set, where even if you weren’t gay, you acted it.

Tex Newman (RUR, Shock Therapy, Country Bob and the Bloodfarmers, guitarist): There had always been a rivalry between the Elvis Costello people and us. And the big rock bands were also the enemy, and then the bands that wore their tiger-print pants. Bookie’s was punk rock, and the Freezer was for the hardcore shit.

John Brannon (Negative Approach, Laughing Hyenas, Easy Action, vocalist): You want to talk about punk rock, I’m gonna go Stooges, MC5, real Detroit rock. Alice Cooper. The only thing that really carried that on after that was Sonic’s Rendezvous Band and Destroy All Monsters, which were all my heroes from the other bands. Anything else that claimed it was punk rock in Detroit was just a joke. So I lived through that whole ’79 to ’81 thing where new wave took over. So you got all these old Bookie’s bands, you’re all coked out, you’re wearing suits and skinny ties, doing Animals covers or some obscure Brit-sixties shit, and you think you’re fuckin’ punk rock. No, you’re not. No, you’re not.

Larissa [Strickland] and I were living in the City Club, the old women’s club on Elizabeth downtown, and it turned it into a squat. These little boys called the Guardian Angels moved in, which kind of turned into an abandoned building in the middle of Detroit where the crack industry started. It was the basis for New Jack City. As time goes on, people get greedy, you know, and all the cousins start moving in. And the thugs. Everybody’s like, “We’re taking over this building.” All the dope gangs moved in. Everybody in their right mind moved out. Me and Larissa were like, “Fuck it, we’re squatting.” The owner had bailed. He lost all his money and moved to Puerto Rico. Negative Approach practiced there on the third floor in a ballroom. We lived up on the sixth floor. Then it kind of came around, you know, “You’re cool, white boy, but you’re going to have to start paying us protection.” Larissa goes up and goes, “Fuck you, motherfucker!” Okay, that didn’t go over in the ’hood. They were shooting up the halls with shotguns. She had the gun down in her face. We were cool with the main dudes, but when the cousins and the thugs moved in, they didn’t have any respect for the scene. They were going to kill us. They blew the door out with a shotgun after Larissa told them to fuck off.

Chris Moore, AKA Opie (Negative Approach, Crossed Wire, drummer, guitarist, vocalist): This guy pulled a gun on us and said, “I’m sick of you guys making all this noise.” John cooled him down by talking to him.

John Brannon: I was cool for a minute holding off some of the dudes, and then it became a whole ten-story building full of thugs wanting to kill us.

Chris Moore: Before that, John and Larissa lived at the Clubhouse over in the Cass Corridor. But in the City Club they had this cool apartment. The windows were always open and this city noise was coming in, and they had all these records and artwork. I loved hanging out there and them showing me this great art and different music. I got a great education from both John and Larissa.

John Brannon: Me and Pete Zelewski would go to whatever punk gig, and we’re always like, “Who’s this chick?” Larissa stood out. Then we started going to see L-Seven shows. We had Negative Approach together, but they were doing all these big gigs. They opened for Bauhaus at Bookie’s. We met them at some big outdoor gig, and we got along. Then my mother kicked me out of the house. Fifty cents, I take the Jefferson bus, come downtown, walk about three miles over to the Clubhouse from Jefferson, knocked on her door, and was like, “’Sup?” And I’d only met her twice. I’m like, “Um, I need a place to stay.” She says, “Come on in.” I had nowhere to go. I lived with her for about a year first, but we were best friends at that time. Then we actually became a couple.

Sherrie Feight (Strange Fruit, Spastic Rhythm Tarts, vocalist): You’d go to Detroit for a show, you never knew what to wear. So you’d kind of wear what the guys were wearing. The first time I saw Larissa, I was like, “Oh my God.” She was in a slip and combat boots, her hair bleached out, with this milky white skin and those eyes. I wanted to be like her, but there was no way. I was this rich kid and she was from down on Cass; we were from different worlds.

Andy Wendler (Necros, McDonalds, guitarist): We went to see the Clash at the Motor City Roller Rink, and Joe Strummer kicked his roadie. He was pulling the typical rock-star nonsense—kicking his roadie in the chest because his guitar was messed up. We said, “Okay, this is cool. We love it.” When we saw hardcore, it was right away the idea that this is our thing. We were seven years younger than the guys from the Clash, and the first punk wave and stuff. We played little shows, like basement shows and party shows, then actually started playing real shows with the Fix in Lansing at Club DooBee before the Freezer happened. As record collectors, we had all the 27 and Coldcock singles, the Bookie’s bands and all that stuff. We liked it, but it wasn’t us. The one thing that set us apart was that we wanted to do our own thing, and that was always very clear to us. We weren’t gonna try to get in on the end of the Bookie’s thing; we were just gonna do our own thing. We were also too young. There were many times playing Bookie’s and other places with the Misfits, where we’d meet with the manager and he’d say, “Alright, just come in right before you play, or whatever, in the back door or something.” It was always that hassle.

Chris Panackia: Hardcore kids were cool because they didn’t bathe and they had no hair on their head. A lot of them squatted. The hardcore kids played the Freezer, the Clubhouse, Cobb’s Corner. They played places that were just inferior in every respect possible. Even a bathroom was a luxury. The bands wanted beer and to sell a few T-shirts, and that was good enough. They didn’t have any high hopes. One more thing about that whole hardcore thing is, who would have thought John Brannon would be revered by every punk rock, hardcore kid in the world as like the greatest punk rock lead singer ever? I was the only sound guy that helped those punk rock guys out. They would always say, “Yeah, Cool Chris always treated us good, man. You were always really good to us.” I didn’t want to be that rock sound guy—I was one of them.

Corey Rusk (Touch and Go Records, owner; Necros, bassist): I was younger than the other guys in the Necros, so from the time they had driver’s licenses, we were going to Detroit, going to Ann Arbor to get records, or going to Detroit to try and sneak into a show, because we were underage. I quickly realized that my fake ID didn’t work all that often. Once I had a driver’s license, I could go on my own. It really wasn’t ever like I wanted to be a promoter. It seemed like if I put on a show at some rental hall, then it’s all ages and I get to see the band that I really wanna see. So I started renting out halls in the Detroit area when I was seventeen to put on shows of bands that I wanted to see.

This guy pulled a gun on us and said, ‘I’m sick of you guys making all this noise.’

John Brannon: It was all promoted on the phone. You call up one dude. He’d call up six dudes. We’d pass out flyers at the gigs. All this shit was word of mouth. No Internet. No MTV. No radio play. Everything was done with cassette tapes and letters, so you’re talking about creating something out of nothing. It started with fifteen people. We know the first five bands that began it all: the Fix, the Necros, the Meatmen, Negative Approach, L-Seven. You got another scene out of that scene when a bunch of those kids following those bands started magazines and bands and that shit became national. “Okay, we’re bored, we live in Detroit, we’re going to create nothing out of nothing.”

Tesco Vee: The Freezer is where a lot of the next part of Detroit music started. It was about fifty feet by twenty feet wide—just a shit hole. A beautiful shit hole. It was like a frat boy fraternity for hardcore. There were a few girls, but for the most part it was guys.

John Brannon: We never expected anything out of it except to write those songs and play the shows. The fact that Negative Approach were able to make records through Touch and Go Records and get the exposure through Touch and Go magazine was just great. We didn’t know it was going to turn out to be this whole thing.

Tesco Vee: Dave Stimson and I started a label, Touch and Go, named after the magazine we had. We had friends that were in the Necros and the Fix, and these bands were so fucking good and nobody’s going to put their records out, so I have to put them out. I felt like it had to be done. *We were part of something that was great, and we weren’t deluded into thinking our own little thing was great; it really was great. We had some really good bands, and the world needed to hear them. The Necros and the Fix were the two big bands, and then Negative Approach.

Andy Wendler: In the fall of ’80 we ran into Tim Story, who is now a Grammy award–winning producer and composer. But at the time he had a four-track in his basement, and that’s where three songs on the Necros’ first single came from. He just came over and brought his bike and his four-track over and a little mixer, and we just laid it down, and then that was it.

Tesco Vee: Those first records by the Fix and the Necros records sat in various shops. We’d drive them down to Ann Arbor and we’d run and look and, yep there’s still five. Still five Necros. Oh, we sold one Fix for $2. Now those records go for a couple of mortgage payments.

Corey Rusk: The first two Touch and Go releases, the Fix and Necros, were so limited, two hundred of the Fix and one hundred of the Necros. And that seemed like so many: we have five friends. You know, “We don’t know anybody beyond our five friends who would want this.”

Marc Barie: Corey took it from those two releases, the Fix and Necros, and Touch and Go became one of the biggest indie labels in the world. That doesn’t happen accidentally.

Rob Michaels (Bored Youth, Allied, vocalist): Dave Rice and Larissa took me to see the Necros, and the next thing I knew I was friends with all those people. *At that time if you saw someone who looked punk at all, you would cross the street to talk to them—it was a fraternity.

Keith Jackson (Shock Therapy, guitarist): That scene had girls, but they all died. It’s weird when you look at it, like these chicks that were hanging around all seemed to pass away over the years.

Hillary Waddles (scenester): There were girls, but we were all people’s girlfriends. It just wasn’t the time for that yet—girls didn’t get in bands; you didn’t get the sense that you could be anything but a groupie or a girlfriend.

Gloria Branzei (scenester): It was a little dick fest, and they didn’t like girls. They were too cool for that shit; it slowed them down.

Hillary Waddles: Those kids that got into the straight-edge nonsense really didn’t like girls, some of those guys from Ohio. I was terrified to be down there in that area, but we went. I was a bougie girl from northwest Detroit, and here were all these suburban kids with no survival instincts. I mean, I may have been from there too, but I still grew up in Detroit, and you pay attention.

Gloria Branzei: It was a really violent scene. I would kick someone’s ass for the hell of it. At that time girls and punk rock did not go together at all. It was just rock-and-roll chicks.

Tesco Vee: Washington, DC, had more girls in its scene, but it was a similar scene. In Detroit there were a hundred core kids that made up the entire scene.

Sherrie Feight: Going to shows in Detroit meant you were gonna get hit. I still have a scar on my leg from being in the mosh pit.

Jon Howard (scenester): There were a lot of people who knew about these older clubs before but couldn’t get in because they had ID checks. I knew about these places when I first started shopping for records at places like Sam’s Jams, but I was fifteen. My dad lived in San Francisco at the time, so the winter of ’81 I went to the Mabuhay and saw Dead Kennedys, Husker Du, Church Police, Toxic Rea-sons—all these great bands. I came back here, and we had the Freezer for all ages. It opened the door for music for a lot of people, so kids could see live bands now. And hardcore was the music that was their first experience.

Andy Wendler: The Freezer was on Cass and Willis in downtown Detroit. The guy who ran it was a speed freak, and we could get away with anything we wanted. It was right around the corner from where John and Larissa lived in the Club-house at that time, which was right between Cobb’s Corner and the old Willis Art Gallery.

Hillary Waddles: The Freezer was a crappy place. We went over to the Burger King to use the bathroom. No way I was gonna use the Freezer.

Corey Rusk: Even though it was so inner city, and at the time Cass Corridor was really, really bad, it seems to have gotten cleaned up over the years. At the time all the people living in the slummy areas where the rental halls were at were not accepted. Punk rock was not accepted and was not mainstream, and if you looked like a punk rocker, you weren’t cool; you were a freak. It’s amazing that all these white kids invaded all these inner-city neighborhoods for these punk rock shows, and whatever violence problems there were, were usually between the white kids.

Keith Jackson: A lot of us were from the suburbs, and we all wanted to be down-town where it was tough. And it was. There was no interference, which was fine. Cops never came around, and you were really on your own going to see bands. That stuff out of LA seemed phony to us; they would hang out and then go back to their parents’ homes, and it seemed pretty easy. But at the time in Detroit you could go to a show at a place on Zug Island, and there were no cops, no security. You would bring in generators into a burned-out building, and that was your club. I stabbed a dude in the ass one time at a Subhumans show at Zug Island. There was this huge fight that broke out, and I mean it just kept on going for most of the show. He punched my girlfriend and I had a four-inch blade I carried around, and I stabbed him in the ass.

You would bring in generators into a burned-out building, and that was your club.

Corey Rusk: We were probably mildly entertaining to the residents. They just looked at us like we were freaks too, and we weren’t the white people that they had problems with. We had no race problems.

Brian Mullan: Roaming the Cass Corridor at whatever ungodly hour, we all wore jackboots, had our hair cropped or shaven. …Nobody really got hurt down there because nobody had money. At the time I was taking the Jefferson bus to Nunzio’s to run sound. I made like $15 a show, and then I sold loose joints. I was just surviving.

Andy Wendler: We’d get fucked with occasionally, but we had numbers on our side. We were never there alone. There would be forty kids skateboarding down the middle of the street. John and Larissa had respect in the neighborhood, back when thieves used to abide by that kind of thing, because they lived in the neighborhood. So if you were with John and Larissa, you got a little bit of a pass. It was a big heroin neighborhood in those days, and they were amongst it. The guy who owned Cobb’s Corner got shot in the backroom one night. That was a money thing—he had it. One time the Detroit police pulled up at the Clubhouse and said, “What the hell are you kids doing? Go back to Roseville, you idiots. What are you doing down here?”

Keith Jackson: One night I was with Kirk Morrison from Dead Heroes. City Club had just opened, and we were outside and we heard gunfire, which wasn’t unusual. But a bullet went through my jacket and shattered my collarbone. Some guys dragged me into Detroit Receiving by my arm and said, “Our friend got shot.” The cops actually came to the emergency room and talked to me. They said, “Were you returning fire?”

Tim Caldwell (artist): I was in jail one night, and a guy told me the cops came into the apartment building right by the Willis Gallery because he had let loose from the rooftop with a machine gun. He hid on top of the elevator while they searched the premises.

Dave Rice: I lived in a few different buildings around there, briefly in the Clubhouse with this guy Darryl. Darryl and his brother and this friend of ours, Jenny, were there, and a couple of guys came in with their shotgun and just, like, cleaned the place out of as much gear as they could carry. Okay, gotta get a new amp. Gotta get a new guitar. I always played like this slap-together pawnshop crap anyways, so it wasn’t like I lost a ’59 gold top or anything.

Gloria Branzei: Those guys thought they were scaring the people in the neighborhood, but they were fooling themselves. I was in the shooting dens, and I knew what they thought; they just thought we were fucking crazy. But they sure weren’t scared of us.

Corey Rusk: The Freezer was the all-ages reaction to the City Club situation. Somehow we managed to get into a lot of those City Club shows, though we were underage. But the Freezer was just so cool, it didn’t matter.

Brian Mullan: City Club was the old woman’s club off Elizabeth right downtown, a block off Woodward. It was one of Vince Bannon’s big to-dos. Any time there was a big show, whether the Dead Kennedys or the Exploited, the Cramps or whoever, the security guys would always beat up on the punks. So there was a backlash. Bannon was the Establishment, a businessman, and in retrospect I don’t begrudge him that.

Rob Miller (Bloodshot Records, cofounder): I had a humiliating night at City Club. I got a fake ID at the Lindell AC bar and tried to get into a Fear show with it, and the door guys, they laughed at me.

Chris Panackia: Vince was booking bands at City Club before it was opened. And he still was running Bookie’s. The fucking agents went crazy. He goes, “Oh, I got this great place,” and he wouldn’t tell them until they got there. About four or five hundred people in the ballroom could see the band at City Club, but you could put a lot more people in it. In a two-month span he did the Dead Kennedy’s, the Fear, the Cramps, the Rockettes, the Stray Cats, Duran Duran, Haircut 100, Killing Joke, Gun Club, Human League, Circle Jerks, Sparks, the Flesh Eaters, and Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark. It was the best place to be. The Circle Jerks show was during the Grand Prix downtown, and you got in free if you brought a helmet. One guy brought a helmet.

Vince Bannon: In ’81 we architected what we were going to do and how we were going to open Clutch Cargo’s at the City Club, which is what it was. Clutch Cargo’s was the name of the production, and it was at the City Club.

Corey Rusk: We’d go to City Club because they got bands we wanted to see, plus we would be on some of those bills; Negative Approach played there a lot. The Freezer wasn’t there to put those larger places down. I would help organize those bands at the Freezer, though, and we started get-ting out-of-town touring bands that were open to playing different places. Like when the Misfits played at the Freezer. It was just such a huge time for music. At least to us.

Rob Michaels: There was no consciousness at all of “Hey, this is the town that the Stooges and MC5 were from.” There was this Stooges residue, and there were people we thought of as that. It wasn’t like people didn’t know about those records, but there was no sense of “Hey, this is Detroit and this is what came from here.” It was this sense of “We made this.”

Corey Rusk: Sometime in late spring of ’81 I got a job at a lumberyard, specifically because I wanted to make some money so that the Necros could record another record. I had the idea of the Process of Elimination EP too. So I have to get some money together so I can record all these bands to get a compilation out documenting what’s going on. I was just an amped-up kid. I wanted to do shit. So I worked all summer, loading trucks and saving my money.

Tesco Vee: I officially handed Touch and Go Records over to Corey when I moved to DC in ’82, but he was handling it before that. The Process EP was when the passing of the torch went down. Corey called me up one day, and I realized that I had no interest in running a record label. I was doing it out of necessity, as a companion to the magazine. Corey was like, “I want to take it over,” and I said, “Go for it.” We were friends, and he thought, “This is what I want to do.” And this was a perfect, already established name. I was getting ready to pull up stakes and go to DC. I lost my teaching job, unemployment in Michigan was 16 percent, and I didn’t have money to pay the rent, much less put out records.

Chris Moore: People made fun of Corey behind his back because he was so serious and ambitious. He had such a drive to make something of this music that was happening. He wasn’t much fun, but he really looked out for us in a lot of ways.

Marc Barie: Corey’s dad was really interesting. He manufactured something for the auto industry. One day we were all around Maumee and he took us over there. The line workers looked at us like we were demented. We had all the punk rock chains and boots, and Todd Swalla had a Mohawk. I think Corey got his business sense from his dad, who made a lot of money.

I put bands up all the time, even when I lived with my grandmother. I brought Flipper back to my grandma’s house, which sounds like a potential disaster.

Corey Rusk: I was living with my grandmother in Maumee, Ohio. I had a little recording studio in my basement and so I started recording bands for Touch and Go. All the crappy sounding records were recorded there—the Meatmen EP, the Negative Approach EP. The Blight thing was recorded there, and that was one of the better-sounding things that was recorded there. That was one of the first things that I did there that I thought, “Wow, this sounds really heavy and great.”

Chris Moore: We had the run of Corey’s house, and we had a skateboard ramp we built in the front yard or the driveway. We would record and skate all day and burn ourselves out on that. No one was into drugs or anything. The older guys drank beer, but we just skated.

Corey Rusk: I put bands up all the time, even when I lived with my grandmother. I brought Flipper back to my grandma’s house, which sounds like a potential disaster. But they were so nice to her; we all hung out and had pizza. Suicidal Tendencies also stayed at my grandmother’s. We all went swimming in the river, since the house was on the banks of the Maumee River.

John Brannon: We started going on tour, and we’d have to sneak Opie out of the house because he was fifteen. Opie, Graham—those kids were still in high school. I’m sure, looking back, the parents probably realized what’s going on. Opie would tell his folks, “Oh, I’m going to spend the night at Graham’s house,” and then we’d go out. DC, Philly, and New York, and then be back in time for him to get to school.

Andy Wendler: We did our first real tour with the Misfits. We had made great friends with them, and Corey and Barry were pestering ’em like, “Hey, can we get on those bills?” I don’t really know why we got along with them so well, other than the fact that Jerry and Doyle might as well have been from Ohio. They were just such great, good-natured guys, and we really hit it off with them. Glenn, for whatever he’s become now, was incredibly articulate and artistically talented and had an eye for just really clever, almost iconic graphics. I don’t know—that really appealed to us. We were like, “Wow, they’re like the Ramones but scary.” On the Misfits tour we took Corey’s dad’s ratted-out old Suburban. It was tight, and we had to sleep on top of the gear in the back. It got horrible gas mileage, but it was cheaper than buying or renting something.

Corey Rusk: Russ [Gibb] started showing up at the Freezer. He was hanging out and absorbing it all. Maybe it reminded him of his youth in the sixties. He saw that I was involved in some of those shows at the Freezer. Honestly, I’m socially awkward, and it was more enjoyable to me to have a sort of take-charge attitude and be more like, “I’m gonna do a bunch of the work to make these shows happen, even though I’m not making any money from it.” You know, it’s not my club. I’d do a lot of the flyering, and Russ saw that in me and started trying to talk to me. I totally blew him off in the beginning, like, “Is this dude a cop, or what the fuck is he doing here? Why is there someone this old here?” I was sort of suspicious of him.

Russ Gibb (Grande Ballroom promoter): One of my ex-students came to me and said, “Have you heard Negative Approach?” I said, “No.” He said, “Well, there’s a place called the Freezer Theater.” So I went to see them, and they were rehearsing in some fucking little place on Cass somewhere; it looked like a little storefront or something. I saw them and I said, “Wow, this is interesting.” They’re doing things that the MC5 were doing. Now this is fifteen years later. You know, click, click, click, click. Of course I saw money!

John Brannon: He locked onto the scene and saw something that was going on, and he was really into the idea of the youth presenting their art. He had his students come out and tape all these TV shows, and they became the first kind of public access TV shows. And they were doing it on this extreme hard core punk.

Corey Rusk: I don’t think Russ needed to make a living teaching school. And here he was in 1981, teaching media at Dearborn High School. He put a bunch of his own money into helping fund Dearborn High School having its own high school TV studio and station that was probably as good as the local public television station set-up. You look at how forward thinking was this fucker? 1981 was the year that MTV started, and the bulk of America did not have cable TV then. You know, like MTV is a household word, now, but it just like this bizarre upstart concept in 1981, and so for Russ to really see that the future of music was in music video in 1981 and to put his money where his mouth was—to say, “I want the kids in my class to have this experience, because this will prepare them for what is gonna be the future.”

Russ Gibb: We started a show my students did, “Why Be Something That You’re Not?” It had a lot of the bands playing at the Freezer on it.

John Brannon: We were writing the soul music of the suburbs, and the Freezer was perfect. If you want to nail what soul music was for that time, the scene—even though it’s basically a white scene—it is our soul music, man. We’re creative, we’re bored, we’ve got nothing going on—man, we’re creating this shit. The whole thing about being in a band at that point, there was no separation between the kids and the audience and who’s on stage. It was music for the people.

***

Adapted from the book Detroit Rock City: The Uncensored History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in America’s Loudest City by Steve Miller. Copyright © 2013 by Steve Miller. Reprinted by permission of Da Capo Press, and imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, NY. All rights reserved.

Techno emerged in Detroit’s minority and queer communities as the city descended into decay in the late 1980s. A couple of decades later, after having reshaped electronic music and club culture around the world, the scene is alive — but changing. At Roads and Kingdoms, Akhil Kalepu writes a history of techno that goes all the way back to Motown. But he devotes special attention to a contemporary tension between the genre’s diverse, underground origins and an increasingly white, affluent scene in Detroit and beyond.

In Detroit, much of the electronic music world rejoiced when techno veteran Dimitri Hegemann of Berlin’s famed Tresor nightclub announced plans to open a branch in Packard Automotive Plant, a former DIY venue for the local rave scene. For many locals, though, it was yet another example of a white European taking something made by their predominantly black city: the gentrification of a genre seeping back into physical space.

Despite its genuine Detroit roots, Movement [Electronic Music Festival], too, has had its part to play in the gentrification of electronic music and, by extension, Detroit. The inaugural festival, held in 2000, was the brainchild of Carl Craig — a second-generation techno star in his own right — and Carol Marvin of the event production team Pop Culture Media. They saw Hart Plaza, dead in the center of Detroit’s beleaguered downtown, as the perfect place to host a techno festival, even if most of the city’s residents were unfamiliar with the scene.

Since those first years, Movement has gone from a free event to a paid one, passing through the hands of several directors along the way. Despite changes in leadership, Movement still plays an important role in the narrative of Detroit Rising, which is also the story of Detroit Gentrifying. Hart Plaza itself is now the centerpiece of one of Detroit’s many “revitalized” neighborhoods. As in similar urban zones across the U.S., rising rents have driven out a predominantly middle-class economy, replacing local businesses with high-end establishments and luxury apartments—the early stages of the trend that turned former underground capitals like New York, London, and Tokyo into velvet-rope and bottle-service cities. Growing electronic music scenes in Asia, Africa, and South America show promise, though most investment in those regions goes to venues that cater to the developing world’s growing elite.

Read the story