We had burned so many promoters by being late that the MC5 could not tour enough to survive. Our drinking and drugging, combined with no management, resulted in us arriving late for concerts so often that word was, don’t book them. When you’re an active drug user, securing your drugs is a top priority. Leaving town in time to make the gig was secondary. Too many times we would pull into the parking lot just as the kids were leaving. “Hey man, what’s happening here?” we’d ask. “The fucking MC5 was supposed to play, but they didn’t show up.” It was embarrassing and discouraging when it happened again and again and again.
The Phun City gig in England had sparked interest in the band in Europe. I met an agent who was willing to book a tour, and the dates started coming in.
We met Ronan O’Rahilly in London. Ronan had founded Radio Caroline, a pirate radio station, by outfitting a ship with radio transmitting gear and broadcasting unrestricted pop music to England from international waters. He was something of a legend, and he loved the MC5. It was Ronan’s film crew that had shot the Phun City show. Ronan had a great partner in “Big Jim” Houlihan. I adored this guy. He was a hard-drinking, fun-loving giant of a fellow who had once sparred with Muhammad Ali. We became the dynamic duo of Bayswater, drinking and carousing all over London.
When we flew over to England to begin the next tour, Michael missed the flight. He was making more money dealing than the tour was paying, and he showed up a few days later. We had already played a couple of shows with a fill-in bassist.
Steev Moorhouse and Fred Smith had been pen pals for years, and when it turned out he was a working bass player and was available, we drafted him into the band.
Michael’s playing and getting too high on the gig had been an ongoing irritation for Fred and me. I decided we needed to force Michael to shape up or leave the band. We had the meeting in my hotel room, where I asked Michael to convince us why he should remain in the band. He offered no arguments in his favor, and returned to Detroit.
I held out hope that with Ronan, we could resurrect the MC5. Steev was a solid player and would have been a fine replacement, but he had his own band and wanted to stick with them. We were in Germany when he had to leave our tour. I saw an ad on a bulletin board for an English bass player looking for work. I called Derek Hughes and he sounded competent, so he played bass for the rest of the tour.
Back in London, Ronan had us working on a musical score for his indie film Gold. The film was awful, but I didn’t care because I liked the challenge of writing music for film. It was just the four of us, Fred, Dennis, Rob, and me. I played bass and piano on the session, and we came up with some of the most progressive music we’d ever made. We had also recorded some music for the score of the Living Theater’s production of Paradise Now earlier in the year in New York City. I liked the process.
Ronan also got us booked on the first London Rock and Roll revival at Wembley Stadium. The lineup was stellar: Bill Haley & His Comets, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry, along with contemporary British acts like Screaming Lord Sutch, The Houseshakers, Joe Brown, Heinz Burt (with Wilko Johnson on guitar), Billy Fury, Roy Wood’s Wizzard, Gary Glitter, and others.
We had been working all week with Ronan’s friend Michael Joseph. Michael was an acting teacher who pioneered a new training technique using psychodrama. His goal was to teach us how to conjure up our emotions when we needed them in performance. We had been rethinking everything, trying to jump-start our career in Europe. I had decided that my long hair had lost its value as a statement, so I cut it all off. We were trying out various new ideas about how we looked onstage, and Fred was ready to debut his “Sonic Smith” superhero suit.
On gig day, I painted my skin with gold stage makeup and wore a black suit and sunglasses. Tyner bouffed his Afro out bigger than normal and filled it with glitter. Derek and Dennis looked relatively normal except for some face paint. Fred had transformed into “Sonic Smith.” When we ran out onstage, there was a collective groan from the 60,000 Teddy Boys filling Wembley. We started rocking, and it wasn’t going too badly when Tyner made the most strategic blunder in the annals of rock history. A beer can came flying in from the crowd, and he picked it up and threw it back. That simple act galvanized every one of those rockabilly fans. It was us versus them, and there was way more of them. Beer cans literally rained down on us.
If we had gone onstage in our street clothes, black leather jackets, Levis, and boots, they might have loved us. We were certainly rocking hard enough, but once they decided we were “rough trade from Venus,” it was all over.
I HAD DEVELOPED FRIENDSHIPS in Ladbroke Grove through Mick Farren. I had a girlfriend there, and became friendly with members of the London Hells Angels. I cultivated a drug operation with one who had access to large quantities of Mandrax, the English equivalent of Quaalude. I had friends over from Detroit, and between us we did some business. Dennis had made a heroin connection, and he and I started copping. Later we discovered Gerrard Street in Chinatown, where you would seek out the best-dressed Asian man hanging out in a doorway and he’d usually provide what you needed.
The drug use was covert, but the bad behavior persisted. Ronan rented us a band house out in Dollis Hill. After a night’s drinking, Fred and Dennis developed the habit of helping themselves to bottles of milk from people’s milk boxes. On the third night returning from the pub, they were arrested. This was a serious offense in Britain. The judge admonished them that they were taking food from babies’ mouths. That people in England had suffered through the great wars, and respected each other’s property. They got off with a fine.
Ronan convinced a European label to sign us. The deal was agreed in principle, but they wanted to see us perform live before making the final decision. We were booked to play a festival in Belgium, and that was where we’d show them what we could do. We had already popped the champagne and lit the cigars.
As the evening wore on, the schedule ran later and later. Since the MC5 was one of the headliners, our showtime was pushed back further and further. My involvement in the Mandrax business meant I had plenty of these little pills with me, and Tyner and I took a couple early on in the evening. As time went on, we took more, and then more. When we finally hit the stage at around 7:00 AM, we were so fucked up we could hardly function. I couldn’t feel my fingers on the guitar strings. Tyner was dancing clumsily all over the stage, and went to jump from the stage to a riser about five feet out. He misjudged the distance and fell down between them. We were unbelievably terrible, and the label deal disappeared.
Back in Detroit, the search for a permanent bassist was on. I was friendly with a good player named Ray Craig and he would have been a good fit, but Fred wanted to hold out for just the right guy. I was also friendly with Tony Newton, a first-call Motown session and road player, and asked him if he was interested. But he wanted to start his own group, The Eighth Day. He recommended his cousin, Charles Solomon.
Charles was, in my opinion, the perfect man for the MC5. In his midtwenties, he was a beautiful black man who dressed impeccably and could sing his ass off. He played bass in the James Jamerson style, but with rock power. For me, having a black man in the MC5 was a confirmation of everything we stood for as a band. And, as young Americans fighting the racist power structure, it would send a powerful message to the world that we were unified Detroiters.
Rob and Dennis were all for him, and I had never heard Dennis play as well as he did with Charles. But Fred rejected him, saying that he didn’t think Charles had enough experience to be in a band of our stature. Rob and Dennis acquiesced to Fred’s decision, and for me that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
After that, I couldn’t mount the necessary enthusiasm to go into battle again for this band. I had made new friends in the musician community in Detroit, and there were other people I could see myself playing with, with whom I could enjoy the work and have fun playing music again. I wanted to play funk and free jazz and do cover tunes, and just be a musician.
Now I didn’t care who played bass in the MC5. Derek Hughes did the next European tour, and I drank and drugged my way across the continent. I found a copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in a train station, and it became the guidebook for my consumption of everything I could get my hands on.
In the fall of 1972, one last tour of Europe was booked; our sixth or seventh trip. Six weeks in length. Good gigs: two weeks in Italy, TV in Scandinavia. Finally, we would be paid decent money. It was at this point that Rob Tyner decided to finally quit the group. I agreed with him because I knew he wasn’t happy being in the MC5. I was content to let him go. After all, if the guy doesn’t want to be in the band, why force him to stay? I knew we could hire another singer; maybe it would even improve the band.
I reasoned that if we did this tour, we would all have some cash to tide us over till we figured out what to do next. When Dennis heard that Tyner quit, he decided that he needed to stay home and detox. I suggested that he continue using for the tour and then do what he had to do after, but he had made his decision. He had also been busted embezzling from the band, and just had no heart left for it.
Fred went over to Rob’s house to persuade him to do the tour, and naturally it degenerated into a fistfight. I made an attempt the following night to reason with Rob, but he was ready to go to war with me with a golf club. He had made up his mind, and that was that. I got the message.
Rob had been quitting the MC5 every year for the last few years. In the beginning, we would hold these marathon fish-bowling sessions with him where he would attempt to convince us why he should leave, and we would quadruple-team him to stay. After the second go-round of this, I said I wouldn’t do it anymore. These brainwashing sessions were ugly. We would just tear him apart. True, I had been critical of him over the years for not living up to my impossible standards of what a lead singer should be, but Rob was a mercurial artist. Sometimes he would follow his feelings onstage and say or do the exact wrong thing, and I would jump on him for it. He was a tremendously talented man in an untenable situation, and he wanted out.
Life in the MC5 had ceased to be a rewarding experience for him a long time ago. Rob had a family, and other things he wanted to do. So, when he quit again this time, I had no objection except that he should honor his final touring commitments. He did not. “The center cannot hold.”
Fred and I went alone to Europe for the tour, and tried to salvage what we could of our professional reputations. We would have been better off staying in Detroit. We met Ritchie Dharma, the drummer Ronan had hired, in the dressing room of the first gig.
“You any good?” I asked him.
“You’ll find out,” he said.
He was, but we weren’t.
The tour was a disaster. Dates canceled one after the other. The two weeks of Italian dates canceled. Everybody was angry and disappointed in us. And onstage, we sucked. There were no rehearsals, so we had to come up with material that we could play that everybody might already know. Singing MC5 songs was almost completely out of the question. Neither Fred nor I had ever attempted to sing these songs, and had no idea how to go about it. We didn’t actually even know the lyrics to some of them. The material we played was simple three- or four-chord vamps with extended solos. We just tried as best we could to play for the contracted amount of time, to ensure we’d get paid. The performances had almost nothing to do with the MC5. We were a terrible representation of our former powerful stage show. Fred and I would have long talks in our hotel room, in which we tried to envision a future band with new players. We put on a brave face, but it was over. Hope is a great breakfast, but a lousy dinner.
THERE I WAS back in Detroit, a complete failure at 24. I had gone from truly unbelievable highs to pathetic and inconceivable lows in just four short years.
Tyner had quit, Thompson had quit, Davis was long gone, and there was nothing left to build on. I didn’t know any of this consciously. I believed I had everything under control. I was on top of it. Right on. But I was reeling from uncontrolled anxiety and fear. I was disconnected from who I was, and I didn’t know what would become of me. I sought shelter in any powder or potion that would slow things down and kill the pain for a little while. There were plenty to choose from, and I jumped into it with both feet.
An offer came in to play New Year’s Eve 1972 at the Grande Ballroom. We all agreed to do it, including Rob and Michael. I was beyond broke, and my dope habit was in full effect. The offer was for $500. Short as it was, I needed the money. We started out at the Grande making $125 a night, and had soared to a high of almost ten thousand at our peak. Now we were playing for 500 bucks. On New Year’s Eve.
There was no contact with each other before the gig. At the appointed time, we took the stage and tried to be the MC5. It wasn’t working. The tempos were all over the map. I had no idea what Michael was playing. Rob was doing the best he could to front this mess, and Fred and I just looked at each other in dismay. My memories of the night are all in black and white. Near the end of the set, I was overcome with sadness and went over to Fred. “I can’t take it anymore. I have to leave.”
He nodded in understanding, and I walked off the stage.