Detroit Rock City by Steve Miller

that time, in the early seventies, we were so far harder rock out there than anyone else—that’s why we didn’t fit in. When you think what was going on was kinda glittery, kinda gayish, kind of going taking the edge off of it, other bands of that era were not even close to rockin’ like we were. I’d say the biggest reason that stuff didn’t do well is because we were rocking too hard.
    Iggy Pop: What we were, we were just so special, we were just so out there, that at some point you could see jaws drop and you could see the thought go, “Oh my god,” and people would just walk away. The band was never dropped by CBS, despite what people say. I’m not at liberty to tell you what is correct. I just don’t want to get into it except to say that we were never formally dropped, and I have copies of all the paperwork. And there was an overture made to me to do a kind of, they described it to me, I could do a David Cassidy or sort of solo trip.
    Dennis Thompson: Don’t forget, Iggy was a valedictorian in high school. Smart. Fucking. Guy. The reason he’s rich today is because he’s a very smart man and got himself some very smart business people all the way down the line. He had his rough times. Michael Davis and I saved his life after he shot some heroin up in Michael’s house and we threw him in the bathtub with the ice cubes and shot him up with salt water.
    He met his maker a few more times than that.
    Iggy Pop: I don’t want to put a number on it, but a few times, yeah.

Riots in the Motor City

    Ted Nugent: When the riots of 1967 hit Detroit, I was behind the counter of the Capital School of Music, on Grand River, with a shotgun. It was a heartbreaker ’cause I saw my beloved birth city of Detroit goin’ up in flames at the hands of idiots.
    K. J. Knight: I went down to Grand River, where it was happening. They had the area blocked off, and we wanted to see the action. And it would be a chance for me to steal something. I was into snatch and grabs. But they blocked off the downtown area. You couldn’t get all the way down there. I tried. That kind of shit was right up my alley.
    Leni Sinclair: We had flown a flag about a week before the riots—around the middle of July—that had a black panther on it and the slogan “Burn Baby Burn.” It was hanging on our building at Trans-Love Energies on the John Lodge. We had no idea really what it meant. When the riots started and everything started burning, the cops came and knocked on the door. They thought we were conspirators or something, and we told them it was just a design. Then we sat on the roof of our apartment, watching the riots on TV.
    John Sinclair: It was just exhilarating. I thought, this was the greatest. We were at our Trans-Love Energies building at John Lodge and Warren. Right in the eye of the storm. We helped people loot stores. We got some bolts of cloth that the MC5 made into clothes and wore ’em for months. I like to point out different ones that we got from a store on Trumbull. If I saw ’em, I could point it out to you.
    Robin Sommers: I lived at East Grand Boulevard and John R in a commune called Broken Claw. The riots started on July 23, which was my birthday, and I lived in thefront room, and there was a wooden porch along the front of the house, and they had filled the room with balloons, and by the end of the evening they had started to pop in the heat. And there were fire trucks with soldiers going by, and we had to pop all of them in a hurry to make sure they didn’t alarm the soldiers and get us shot.
    Barry Kramer came by in his Firebird, and about five of us got in the car and drove over to the burning part of town. We drove down 20th or 18th or something, and this crowd of black guys started throwing bottles at us.
    Wayne Kramer: I was arrested and they were going to throw me in jail. It was the last day of the burning, and I had a telescope in my