reading

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(A Division of Music Sales Limited, 14-15 Berners Street, London W1T 3LJ)

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All of the following consented to talk to either Ben Blackwell or myself for this book.
Many thanks for their time and—in many cases—considerable hospitality.

Jim Diamond (The Dirtbombs, ex-Bantam Rooster, Ghetto Recorders) Jessica Espeleta (ex-Love As Laughter)

Dan Miller (Blanche, ex-Two Star Tabernacle, ex-Goober And The Peas) Bruce Milne (In-Fidelity Records) Rachel Nagy (singer, The Detroit Cobras)

Steve Nawara (The Wildbunch, ex-Electric Six, The Detroit Cobras) Pat Pantano (The Dirtbombs, The Come-Ons)

Thanks to Andrew Male, Keith Cameron, Stevie Chick, Steve Gullick, Jennifer Maerz, Nita at Goldstar, ‘Ma’ Blackwell; my interns Melissa, Bella and Richard (“The first eight minutes of this tape is really muffled, it sounds like the tape recorder is in a jacket pocket. Most of the conversation is fairly irrelevant, about going out with Jack White and Renée Z and getting written about”); all the people whose floors I kipped on in Detroit—Julie, Dave, Dion, Ben, Maureen, Wendy, Meg and Ko; my designer Andrew Clare; and my wonderful, loving and patient wife Charlotte Thackray

Major thanks to Ben Blackwell for his invaluable, unflagging assistance. This book would’ve been next to impossible without him.

Intro/The Big Three Killed My Baby

“I cannot get enough of watching live music. It’s what keeps me going. I cannot get over the fact how you can make so many different types of music with the same instruments. I am blown away by the magic of music every time”

“The underside of a chimp’s scrotum is decorated with a thin white stripe”

—sticker on the cash register in Young Soul Rebels Records And Tapes, Detroit, Michigan

—Dirtbombs drummer (and Jack White’s nephew) Ben Blackwell to audience at The Blind Pig, Ann Arbor MI, after having just simulated sex rolling around the stage with this book’s author, 9 January 2004

Rock’n’roll creates communities—cynical and manipulated in the case of corporate punk bands such as Good Charlotte and Blink 182: smaller yet more inclusive when it comes to disenfranchised individuals attempting to reinvest the music of their parents with a spark of energy with no thought for how much money might end up on the taxman’s table. Individual cities across America are some of the last places these communities can spring up unbidden— mainly because of the distances involved. Why play music? It’s goddamn fun, it keeps you off the streets and it allows underage musicians to drink in bars unhampered by The Man. If no one pays attention to what you do beyond a few choice friends, do you continue to do it anyway? Would Kylie Minogue or Dave Matthews exist in a vacuum?

In the late Eighties, in the Pacific Northwest of America, a handful of musicians hung out together, grew their hair and started searching through the same second-hand record bins: the isolation of Seattle allowed its artists time to develop, away from the media glare of trendier places like New York. (This was before the Microsoft and Amazon boom.) The resulting music gave a tired art form fresh life through its participants’ need for community. Sub Pop records took the music business by surprise: no one in control thought anyone cared anymore. The fact that music fans evidently did was something that needed to be dealt with, and packaged, fast. Hence grunge catwalk chic, and the manufactured bands that followed in the wake of Nirvana’s success—Stone Temple Pilots, Offspring et al.

Although it’s hard to imagine now, Seattle was once a deeply unfashionable music city— even though it had a strong lineage of Sixties garage bands to draw upon (The Sonics, Jimi Hendrix). Yet good music is always around, for those willing to search. All that ever changes is the focus. Any number of great Northwest bands got overlooked during the grunge circus: The Wipers, The U-Men, Some Velvet Sidewalk… If you look hard enough, every town or city has great music going on: some are more exposed than others.

Take Detroit, for example. No one wanted to come near the place: its reputation gained during the race riots of ‘67 saw to that. Yet Detroit was once called the Paris of the United States: during the Forties, the best jazz musicians would play in town, attracted by the money generated by the arms manufacturers. It was the first city to have freeways. The first four-cylinder, single-block, car engine was invented here. During the Arsenal Of Democracy in World War II, planes were being turned out at a rate of two an hour, tanks five a minute at the General Motors plant up on the 15 Mile. After the war finished, the work started to dry up. By the late Fifties, people were beginning to leave. The riots were the end spasm. Everyone who hadn’t left by ‘67 was gone by 1970. The final insult came when the automobile industry moved out during the Eighties; since then, matters have gone from bad to worse. The latest attempt by the city government to attract money has been the building of several mega-casinos downtown: not exactly a long-term solution.

As Jack White told Guardian writer Keith Cameron in April 2003: “The city has never come back from the riots. It’s grey and desolate, a very un-modern American city. A lot of people in the richer suburbs will say, ‘I’ve never been below 10 Mile Road’. I used to work various jobs, and people’d go, ‘Where do you live?’ ‘Oh, I live in south-west Detroit, the Mexican neighbourhood’, and they’d be like, ‘You live down there?! Are you insane?!’ I’m like, ‘Well, I’ve lived there my whole life’. The animosity between the city and the suburbs is huge. It’s like two different worlds.

“The city still looks as it did 30 years ago,” Meg White agreed. “Basically there is no downtown. There’s nobody on the streets. Downtown Detroit has more vacant buildings over 10 storeys than any city in the world.”

If there’s a new surge in music—pop, rock, hip-hop, techno, call it what you will—it often comes from the last place people expect. Seattle, Scandinavia, Osaka, Detroit… The reasons are clear. Ultimately, someone looking towards music to help them escape or explain or expose their humdrum, utilitarian existence is not going to find solace in music put together by teams of advertising executives attempting to second-guess emotions they lost track of years ago. Artists need time to develop: what better place than the USA’s Gun Capital, one of the few cities left in America where it’s still possible to buy a pre-WW2 skyscraper for under $1 million?

“The auto companies have damaged this town almost beyond repair,” sighs Dirtbombs singer Mick Collins. “It could never be a nice urban area like Cleveland or Toronto. It’s the only big city east of the Mississippi that doesn’t have a mass transport system. Ten years ago, maybe, it could have been different. The good thing is that Detroit had a gigantic economy in the Fifties but when that all went away there was nothing left. There are not enough non-retail office workers downtown to support the city the size we have. Detroit is two-thirds bigger than it should be. There’s always the hope that we’ll get another five companies the size of Compuware to move downtown with retail outlets like Border’s and Hard Rock Café inside its building, but who are these stores helping? Not the people who live there.”

Detroit has long had a reputation for great music—insurrectionary music, even. Some of it was born straight off the factory production line (the inspired harmonies of Motown, techno music pioneers such as Derrick May and Jeff Mills): black music repackaged back to the more affluent whites. Some of it was inspired by the riots and even caged for helping fan the flames (John Sinclair of the MC5ⁱ). Ted Nugentⁱⁱ is from Detroit. So is Alice Cooperⁱⁱⁱ. So were the Pleasure Seekers, the all-female Sixties band that spawned Suzi Quatro, the leather-clad precursor of Joan Jett. Bob Seger’s working class creeds of dissent have their base in this depressed, rundown, racially segregated city. Eminem notoriously took the title of his hit movie from the 8 Mile highway that divides city from suburbs, underprivileged black kids from pampered white.

The goddamn kings of garage rock, Iggy Pop And The Stooges are from nearby Ann Arbor, for Chrissakes! How much more of a musical lineage do you need?

Yet until The White Stripes came along, Detroit rock was given short shrift by the mainstream music industry. As their singer Jack White remarked in the sleeve-notes to the 2001 compilation, Sympathetic Sounds Of Detroit (an album he recorded on eight-track in his own house, featuring likeminded bands such as The Von Bondies, The Dirtbombs, The Detroit Cobras and Bantam Rooster): “No suit from LA or New York is going to fly to Detroit to check out a band and hand out business cards”—a statement that holds true today, even in the wake of the Stripes’ success.

“Detroit’s horrible,” remarks local producer and bassist Jim Diamond. “Every time I go out of town I come back and say, ‘This place fucking sucks. I hate this.’ You know, there’s some one-legged guy outside my door saying ‘Gimme some change’ and I go ‘All I have are euros and pounds’ and he says, ‘I don’t care’, so I give it to him anyway. But yeah, it’s just really ugly here. And depressing.”

One-third of Detroit’s residents live below the official poverty line, according to a 2000 census, conducted the same year the population dropped below one million for the first time since 1920. The weather veers between freezing cold and unbearably hot. So people party hard when they can. No one’s going to pay attention to you, so you just get on with doing what the hell you like.

“Detroit isn’t nearly as dangerous as people think it is,” suggests local journalist and Paybacks singer, Wendy Case. “There again, we do drive everywhere.”

JACK’S VIEW

Ben Blackwell: What’s your favourite part of Detroit, and what part makes you saddest?

Jack White: My favourite part is that you can do whatever you want. There are no rules. But the sad part is that because of that, the city government is terrible. The employees are raping the city left and right. They have no idea how to run a town. All of the government is insane. They’re in such a fix. It feels like it’s always going to be that way.

BB: Do you think if it wasn’t that way you wouldn’t be able…

JW: Exactly. That’s the conundrum.

Ben: Jack once said that you could park a bulldozer on your front lawn in Detroit and no one would care. But of course that’s the downside as well, all the empty houses and lots in the city that are in limbo. They are trying to make the city better by putting tons of tourist attractions downtown but meanwhile tons of people can’t find places to live in for affordable rent. It’s easy for the musician class to get by, but there’s real poverty in Detroit. The local weekly magazine has gone as far as having an Abandoned House of the Week column. Someone should just turn it all into farmland.

Dan Miller (Blanche): There’s a general feeling that living in Detroit is like living in the Wild West. You don’t necessarily have to follow the rules of traffic lights—stop signs and one-way streets are more of a suggestion. It’s not that different from a lot of cities. There are areas where it’s fine to go into where it’s safe. But people in Detroit like to perpetuate that myth. The worst thing is that there isn’t one place you can just get out of your car and go to a bunch of cool stores. And that’s why we’ve recently been voted America’s Fattest City again.

BB: You’ve lived there all your life, have you at least gotten used to it?

JW: People say “What’s it like?” or “I wanna come there” and I always say they’re probably not going to like it. When I come home from tour, we’ll go to some nice place, like Paris or Amsterdam, and Detroit looks like this grey, sickening thing. Why do I live here? Why? I don’t have to live here anymore and I do. It feels like I just can’t leave, there’s nothing I can do about it.

Ben: My feeling is, if you move out of Detroit you never really lived here to begin with. Detroit is a very broad term to describe this area: the city population is less than a million, but with outlying suburbs it’s closer to three million and a half [2000 consensus]. I could never see Jack moving away.

BB: It’s a weird, almost timewarp city… maybe it was you who said it, but Detroit seems like a Southern city stuck in the North.

JW: That’s very true.

Ben: Ever since the civil war, the South has been depressed economically— there’s little urban renewal or new buildings—and that’s how Detroit is. Detroit and Memphis are sister cities, both through their music and economic state.

The White Stripes play a free concert in Union Square Park, NYC, October 1, 2002. (DennisVan Tine/LFI)

JPG

It’s long been known among fans of US record labels like Sympathy For The Record Industry, In The Red and Estrus that during the Nineties—at a time when most rock bands were chasing the corporate dollar—Detroit remained true to the wellspring of rock music: the same earthy, gritty, fucked blues and two-minute songs that inspired artists as diverse as Leadbelly, the Stones, MC5, Jonathan Richman, Ramones, The Cramps and Nirvana^iv. It may only have been a handful of drunks, cheering down the front at Mick Collins’ Gories shows: it may only have been a couple of friends recording tracks on their front porch with a snow shovel and a handful of blues licks in between upholstery jobs, but Detroit never lost faith in the rock: the Rock That Knows How To Rock.

“You can’t move to Detroit, man,” comments Restrepo. “It’s bleak, it’s ugly—it’s not a bad place, but you can’t make a career here cos there are no businesses. So why is there such a healthy scene here? I don’t know. I was an army kid. I moved around all my fucking life. Detroit was a place I didn’t have to move from.”

Maybe it’s because Detroit is so damn cheap—outside of Pittsburgh, the cheapest town in the States to survive in.

“We have it pretty easy here,” The Detroit Cobras guitarist agrees. “We can drink ‘til two in the morning, we can have half-jobs. We can have nice places to live… Dave [Buick, owner Young Soul Rebels] couldn’t open his own business in New York. Well, he could, but he’d be starving. In New York, nobody’s got a place to rehearse and you got no car. Jim Diamond has a studio in Detroit across by the new stadium. That should be really high price property but it’s not. They could build a company across the street from me for what it costs to rent the space in LA for a month.

ALCOHOL

Mary Restrepo: When I do our guest list for The Detroit Cobras shows at The Magic Stick [second-floor pool hall and 600-capacity venue on Woodward Ave], it’s like an AA meeting.

Dave Buick (Italy Records): Pretty much every Detroit musician has come to a terribly blurry end passed out somewhere in my house.

Chris Handyside (Detroit journalist): When you drink, all things are level.

Dave Buick: The difference between how people drink in Detroit and how they drink in other places is that elsewhere they’re drinking to escape their dismal, lousy jobs and here we’re celebrating our lack of… having to work too hard.

“Also,” she adds, “because it’s such a small scene, you get influenced a lot by other people’s tastes. We’re like happy drunks. If somebody says ‘listen to this record’ we do, because we got nothing else to do.”

“Detroit’s got a weird work ethic,” suggests Matthew Smith, Detroit musician and producer. “The whole city revolves around people working in factories, and if you’re not punching the clock then you’re made to feel you’re a bum and you’re not contributing to society. Anyone who becomes an artist out of Detroit has got an inferiority complex. At the same time, everybody’s got this heavy work ethic. It’s a schizophrenic paradox. Insecure people working hard on what they’re doing.”

“Part of it,” says Mick Collins, “is the cost of living is so low in South Michigan. If you’ve lived your whole life paying $300 for a two-bed apartment, you’re not gonna pay $1,200. There are no airs. A lot of these bands still know each other. Here, it’s not important that I’m somebody famous. I’m still Mick. If I went to LA I’d be ‘Mick Collins’—here, I’m just ‘Mick, the guy without a car’. The cost of living is extremely low. I can get by without having another job—I suppose if I needed more money to spend on a car or rent, I could get a job but I don’t have to. Detroit is isolated that’s why there are so many musicians here. There’s not a lot else to do. It’s more freewheeling around here. People are going to make the music they make and if you like it fine, if not tough.”

Detroit reminds me of the International Pop Underground capitol of America, Olympia WA (home to the Kill Rock Stars label, whose bands have often toured with The White Stripes)—from the outside, a half-finished, sprawling ugly dump of a city enlivened by some beautiful, crumbling, three-storey townhouses. Both cities have the same feeling of community among their musicians, the same sense of creating within a timewarp separate to whatever may exist in the outside world, the same wave of creativity, the same… Probably if you look at any musical community outside of major media centres, you’ll find a similar feeling, but the Olympia analogy seems particularly appropriate. Maybe it’s the fact both communities prefer to look towards the origins of rock’n’roll for their inspiration and favour stripped-back, analogue production and DIY sensibilities. Maybe it’s because both communities are limited in their choice of cool places to hang out in, and they believe in the adage that if there’s nothing happening you get out there and do the damn thing yourself.

“These are weird times,” says Matthew Smith, “and America’s more fucked-up than it’s ever been right now. This country is becoming just like the Soviet Union but nobody’s saying it. If you look at what people are doing musically, nobody has any comment or dialogue about what’s going on in the world. On one level, The White Stripes represent rebellious music, on another it’s like Norman Rockwell Americana. You’re writing a book on the last vestige of regional culture that lives in America. Everything’s homogenised. It’s mass hypnotism. Right now everything is just so controlled. It’s going to be interesting to see where this is going.”

DETROIT VS SEATTLE

Entertainment Weekly claimed Detroit was the new Seattle.

Why do you think all this attention’s been focused on Detroit?

Rich Hansen (promoter, The Lager House): The White Stripes.

Is that it?

Rich: Maybe people saw a ready-made marketable package;

“Look, it’s the next Seattle, I already have something to write about”. Sympathetic Sounds came out before White Blood Cells hit big, so there was already a pre-packaged thing with The White Stripes’ name on it saying, “Look at how great the other bands in our city are”. It wouldn’t have taken much research to find out there was a thriving music scene here.

Why is there a thriving music scene here?

Rich: People always attribute it to stuff like, “Oh, I didn’t have anything else to do;” like in Seattle they always say, “It rained all the time”. But I like to think that maybe those people had jobs and stuff, lived with their parents and were normal people. When I was 16, those people were heroes to me—not just Kurt Cobain. We were all turned on to that music when we were in high school together, and I wonder now if it’s happening again with Detroit. I like to think so.

The Dirtbombs

This interview was conducted in February 2002 for Careless Talk Costs Lives, during the Detroit band’s first headline tour of the UK, to promote their second album Ultraglide In Black. The line-up of The Dirtbombs is fluid—revolving around the charismatic figure of Mick Collins (ex-Gories, the band whose minimal, no-bass approach during the late Eighties is an acknowledged influence on The White Stripes). At the time, Bantam Rooster and Detroit City Council singer Tom Potter was filling in on guitar (and tour support). For the ‘bombs 2003-4 dates to support their third album Dangerous Magical Nurse, Tom was replaced by the fiery female singer of Ko And The Knockouts, Ko Shih.

“That would be Mick and I throwing a set of drums down the stairs at our studio,” bassist and producer Jim Diamond continues. “Throwing a computer out the window, and recording it. On the ground were two guys armed with baseball bats, who smashed the thing to bits—it’s all available on tape.”

God fucking damn it all, I want to dance. I want to feel the sweet sensation of the ground moving unsteadily beneath my feet, one leg barely in rhythm with the other, brow covered by a stickiness not caused by alcohol or age, mouth working wordlessly, head bobbing up and down, infused with the exhilaration of knowing that this—this moment, this song, this sudden collision of electricity and melody—is what it feels like to be truly, gloriously, wantonly alive. I want to feel shivers cascading to my heels. I want to keep blasting the volume up and up. I want to be able to leap up on rooftops and shout it in the proletariat and Islington’s grey, uncomprehending faces: THIS IS SOUL! I want every next moment to be as glorious as the one before, to listen to the Isleys and The Saints and The Troggs and half-a-dozen motorbikes braying in the deep shadows of night simultaneously.

I want to dress in black, cool, studied, shades a matted mess on my shaking face, life a riot of colour (pink and gold and red). I want to conga with Billy Liar, dance on the graves of given-up friends and shout in their comatose skulls, leaven this existence with an enthusiasm that is all the more wonderful because it is so primal. I want to fuck the world and give birth to nobility, a new strain of life.

I have no sense of cool, no idea what’s right and wrong. Just two hours ago, I switched a (classic, but dull) Bob Dylan album for ELO’s (wrongly derided) Greatest Hits because the time for poetry and Lenny Kravitz resumes is long past. I want to DANCE! Dance like we do down at Chris King’s Girl Group night at the Hanbury Ballroom in Brighton, the sweet/harsh harmonies of The Royalettes and The Honey Bees and The Whyte Boots shimmering in the air. Dance, like that time in 1980 at a Ramones show when I pogo’d the entire breadth of the Electric Ballroom to embrace the only other shirtless person present, only to discover it was my brother, the man who’d turned me onto rock’n’roll in the first place. Dance, like there’s nothing corrupt in life whatsoever—just sinews and stutters and the occasional bittersweet burst of sex.

BEN’S FIRST DRUMKIT

Johnny Walker (Soledad Brothers): When I was a kid inToledo I would go to markets, set up and play. It’s a great way to learn how to work a crowd. One of the vendors would always give you lunch, a sandwich or something. I wanted to buy a Les Paul with Garbage Pail stickers all over the back from a pawnshop and the owner wanted $750 for it. I was like, “It’s got all these stickers on!” He’s in a wheelchair, and he’s screaming at me and I’m screaming at him, and my ma was totally horrified. We bought that blue satin flame drumkit that Ben Blackwell still plays from that same pawnshop.

Ben Blackwell: It was him, me, Jack and Meg. They wouldn’t allow me inside because they were worried the owner would screw me over. I’d saved up a bunch of money and I was ready to buy a drumkit. Toledo’s got good pawnshops and good drum shops.

“My name’s Patrick Pantano. I’m one of the drummers in The Dirtbombs, also a drummer in The Come-Ons. My definition of rock’n’roll is teenage angst put to beat music and everything else thrown in, just so long as it’s got some teen angst. An example of that would have to be this time when I was dancing at a soul music, beat music party and I broke my nose on a girl’s forehead while we were dancing. I was bleeding and I didn’t seem to care because I was so drunk. I had a great time, but my ass at that time was probably pretty rock.”

Pat turns to the rest of the ensemble, and challenges us to disagree. Murmurs of assent come from all around.

“I’m Mick Collins,” says the legendary Detroit frontman. “I don’t have a definition of rock’n’roll per se except that it’s music you can dance to that has lots of guitars in it. I used to be part of a teen social club years ago and we threw a party that was ‘New Wave’ music. There was this weird moment when I realised I was looking at 500 black kids doing the twist to ‘1-2 X-U’ by Wire. That was one of the defining moments of my life.”

“I’m Ben Blackwell and I drum with The Dirtbombs,” says the blue-eyed, blonde-haired boy on my right. “If your parents like it, it’s not rock’n’roll. I don’t know if I can give you an example involving my parents but last night was kind of fun.”

“We were just trying to have some fun, you know,” the drummer explains. “We were falling down on stage and everyone loved it. It’s like we’ve invented rock’n’roll.” “We’re not trying to destroy anything,” Jim adds.

“I’m Thomas Potter and I play guitar,” states another voice. “My definition of rock’n’roll is unbridled rhythm.”

“Of what?” asks Mr Bantam Rooster, confused. It’s a confusing situation. Seven of us round a small table, pre-show in Highbury’s Garage venue, no beer and the whiskey long since disappeared. None of us can figure out the lack of alcohol. These Detroit rockers have driven all the way from Birmingham where due to a calamitous misunderstanding they were served vegetarian fare, and they’re thirsty God damn it.

“A defining rock’n’roll moment,” Mick clarifies. He’s sharp, Mr Collins. He likes to have his affairs in order—at least, until the booze hits.

“That would be the times my wife had to drive me home from shows in a trailer while I puked out the window,” Tom muses.

“Do you have an affinity for ditches?” I ask, remembering the time I deliberately sought out one in Melbourne having read John Steinback’s The Grapes Of Wrath a few weeks before.

“There aren’t too many ditches where we live in Detroit,” replies Pat, “but if there were, Tom would be…”

GHETTO RECORDERS

Jim Diamond’s Ghetto Recorders is situated in Cass Street, Detroit—just round the back of the State Theatre in a (relatively) affluent downtown area. It’s composed of one big white concrete room and one smaller one inside a crumbling warehouse—posters cover holes in walls and a faint smell of paraffin masks everything. There are no modern amenities like a shower, TV or leather sofa—just a filthy coach and a couple of overflowing ashtrays. Huddled up in between the BTO and Foreigner records are a bunch of mono Rolling Stones records and first edition Velvet Underground sides, and Jim’s self-penned book of poetry.

“I started listening to rock’n’roll music in 1969,” says Jim. “The Beatles made me want to play guitar—them, and Shocking Blue and Creedence Clearwater Revival— also Steppenwolf cos they scared me. I took classical guitar lessons when I was a kid, and saved up my lawn-mowing money when I was 14 to buy a Vox 12-string. In 1978, when I was 13, I bought an electric bass and joined a junior high band called Inferno. We did Ted Nugent, Kiss and Aerosmith covers.”

Tell me a story from your childhood.

“In ‘68 I was at a Brownie meeting… I was three, I was pretty excitable and there were these girls talking in this church basement, my sister, my mom, they’re all going ‘blahblahblahblahblah’, making all kinds of horrible racket. I was playing with a wooden train set and couldn’t stand the way they sounded like yapping crows, so I stood up and screamed, ‘SHUT UP!’ And everyone was silent and my mom took me upstairs and spanked me.”

What is your motivation?

“I like having a decent car that is not falling apart and I would like to buy a ‘69 Alfa Romeo at some point. But my motivation is to make records that I like and to work with bands that I like.”

Do you want your parents to be proud of you?

“I’m lucky because my parents have always been supportive, even though they don’t always understand what I do… I had a 48 input Neve board in a studio in Austin, all computerised and the faders would move. My dad was like ‘Whoa Jimbo! This is like a rocket ship in here! You know how to operate this?’ I always liked messing around with microphones and recording things as a kid. But I had these horrible bands to work with when I got out of college, Christian metal. I never really produced anything. I would just go, ‘Does that sound OK?’ I wanted to get my $6.50 an hour and go home. Owning my own studio sprang from that frustration.”

Ghetto Recorders is laidback. Loose. It’s not a purpose-built recording studio and two million dollars were not spent on making it look like your standard place with wood on the walls, and sound diffusers, and an isolation lounge with lovely soft lighting and someone running round getting drinks. It’s a studio for people to make music in. There’s a small room and a big room. If you’re looking for Electric Ladyland, it’s not that, and it’s not Trident or Olympic either. There’s just Jim and a converted chicken processing plant.

Dave Buick: Jim used to have a punching bag hanging up on a big industrial spring. Jack White ran up to it and grabbed it, and it went “boing” and rolled off. Jack was like, “Aw”.

Mick Collins: In late 1995, I was asked to help remix a Bootsey X And The Lovemasters album. So I go down to Tempermill Studios and the engineer is Jim Diamond, just moved in from Austin, Texas. He tells me he has an eight-track studio downtown. I’m like, “I’m supposed to be doing these recordings for Warner Bros but we had a tiff and I spent all the dough”. About six months later, they call me up to ask where the demos are, so I take a tour of Jim’s studio. The front part is his apartment and his kitchen. There’re some cool funky pieces of musical shit lying around—old gear, instruments that don’t work properly.

Jim: I had a painting of dogs playing roulette on the wall. That was what really attracted him to the studio.

Mick: I noticed the Arthur Sarnoff painting and it was the only one I’d ever seen that had female dogs in it. I thought that was a good omen.

Dave Buick: One of the important roles that Jim Diamond played was that he took the burden of recording off the band. Before he came along, a lot of bands were doing their own recording—and that can be a very tense, unpleasant experience. He’s super relaxed.

Jim: My massive porn collection consists of an overflowing milk crate filled with Seventies and early Eighties Playboys and Penthouses, the stuff that accompanied me well beyond puberty.

Mary Restrepo: If anybody deserves a prize for Detroit rock, it’s Jim. He puts in a lot of hours for his friends. He’s always on the computer looking at porn. I’ll come by, he’ll be like, “Look at this, Mary” and then he’ll hear the music stop and he’s like, “Try that one again, that sounded pretty good”. Porn makes him relax when he’s recording. The thing about Jim is, he can capture the sound of a band recording live.

Marco (Rocket 455): When that whole Seattle thing happened I felt those guys were stealing Detroit’s thunder. They took the whole Detroit rock aesthetic and had the advantage of centralised recording— and even photography—so people could latch on to it. Until Jim Diamond came to town, Detroit lacked that. Guitar players are not engineers. The product just didn’t come through.

Jim: I’ve been pretty lucky, because everyone I worked with never had much money because they would get those Sympathy [For The Record Industry] deals.

They’d get like $2-3,000 and go “Oh my god, we gotta make a record!” And I’d go, “OK, I’ll charge you $35 an hour”. I started at $25, and inched it up to $30, and then $35, and you could make a record for $2,000—or like $1,300 as in The Clone Defects’ case. So that got me to do it really quickly but well at the same time. People go, “How many records have you made? A million?” I go, “I don’t know… 50.” Everyone would only spend a couple of weeks on each one.”

Their singer, Mick Collins I already knew something about. He’s a 38-year-old dude, with a chequered past. I used to search out seven-inch singles from his bugged out punk band The Gories during the early Nineties, usually to little avail. The Gories were damn crude—a Detroit three-piece with no bass that ripped up the garage rock rulebook and barely bothered to staple the pages back together. Songs were dedicated to Thunderbird wine, nervous breakdowns and relentless three-chord thrash. Those singles have long disappeared in a haze of Riot Boy largesse, gone to some damn druggie hipster’s room with my third Ramones album and Go Team singles. Sigh.

Among others, Mick has helped out that demonic and unsavoury distillation of music’s misogynistic core Andre Williams. (Sample Andre stage banter: “See that pussy there? That’s some mighty fine pussy there.”) He was also in Blacktopⁱ—a killer, Birthday Party-inspired, outfit who released one album, I’ve Got A Baaad Feelin About This (In The Red, 1995). Mick is great at tearing it up to a heavy motor city beat. He possesses an energy, a naivety that is central to all great rock music—The Langley Schools Music Project, Them, James Brown, Meg White. Mick understands the need for simplicity, for some raw. Some nights, his guitar won’t even be plugged in.

Fuck, don’t you wish other bands… Limp Bizkit, U2… would take a tip from that?

Bassist Jim Diamond I knew about. Working out of his Ghetto Recorders studio, he’s engineered and produced many great Detroit punk records of the past five years—Slumber Party, The Von Bondies, the terrifyingly great Bantam Rooster, the sweet, sweet female-led sassiness of The Come-Ons, The Go, The Volebeats, The Gore Gore Girls, The Clone Defects, The Hentchmen, The Dirtys, The Witches, The White Stripes and many more. He’s stocky, full on and ROCKS.

After the interview, Ben (who by some considerable distance is the baby of the band) thanks me for introducing him to Nirvana. His email address boasts the moniker SUBPOPFAN1. But shit, time is wasting away and I need to give you a warning. 1998’s Horndog Fest, the debut Dirtbombs album originally conceived as three seven-inch singles, recorded with Jim at the controls before he joined the group full-time, sports a dire “funny animal” sleeve (what sort of retard cartoonist invests animals with sexuality?) and that in itself should be enough to alert you. Not that it did me, of course. I was committed. It’s not that the album is bad. Sure, it has balls. Just that it pales next to Ultraglide In Black, and why settle for second-best, ever?

“The first time I realised I wanted to play rock’n’roll,” recalls Tom. “Was when my mother bought me a Music Machine single, ‘Talk Talk’, when I was five. That was such a gnarly song it really got me going. When I was in fourth grade, some friends and I dressed up like Kiss and mimed through a talent show. All the kids at school were going crazy. I’m like, ‘I can live with this.’”

He smiles, shows his teeth. Someone has found the rider, sorted the band out with a Heineken, but not the critic. Fuck man. I’m the most talented one here.

MICK COLLINS

Ben Blackwell: Describe Mr Collins.

Jim Diamond: Mick Collins is talented with. you know, there’s some parameters there, I’m not gonna say “Oh my god! Mick Collins is a genius!” Mick Collins is a musically talented guy and I’ll tease him about this as long as I know him that he’s the inventor of punk-blues. And he’ll hate that and he’ll claim that he’s not garage.

BB: If Mick isn’t a genius, who would you claim is a genius?

JD: No one I know.

BB: Give us a genius on any level.

JD: I don’t know if there are any.

BB: Would you say Paul McCartney is a genius?

JD: No, I think he’s a good musician, he writes catchy songs… I guess Einstein is a genius.

JPG

Below: Mick Collins. (Courtesy of Steve Gullick CTCL Archive)

“Whenever I had to go to the dentist, my father would bribe me with a comic,” Pat recollects. “That progressed onto the Top 40 singles behind the counter at the store. I remember getting ‘Love Machine’ by The Miracles and thinking the drums were great.”

He chuckles at the memory. “Later, these kids at school were saying ‘we’re going to put together a band’ because one kid’s older brother was in a band and they had all the equipment at his house. I said, ‘I want to play the drums.’ We planned all week that on Saturday we were going to practice. We showed up at this kid’s house to pick up these instruments that we’d never played before, and these four girls showed up with soda pops and pizza for us. We made the connection that there is something immediately and strangely attractive about someone playing music.”

So what about you, Mr Collins? When did you first realise that rock’n’roll was going to be your life?

“I don’t have a moment,” the singer replies. “I knew that I wanted to play music. I don’t know that I ever really wanted to play rock’n’roll. It’s just the music I play. I was watching KC & The Sunshine Band on the Orange Bowl Jamboree, 1975. Orange Bowl is a college football game. Every night before the game, they had these extravaganzas or variety shows. So I was watching this four-piece horn section, doing their synchronised dancing. This was the greatest thing I’d ever seen. I’d never heard of lip-synching. So I begged and pleaded for a trombone and I got it. Of course, the next year, Kiss did ‘Rock And Roll All Night’ but I already had a trombone…”

“I was probably about nine,” recalls Baby Ben, “hanging out with my uncle who everyone here knows. He was playing a Deep Purple record. There was me, my brother and my uncle sitting there, we weren’t even playing music but I just had this idea that this was what it was like to be in a band, and we should be in a band. I never did anything musical until I heard Nirvana, though. I slowly got into it.”

“In high school,” he continues, “I said to my uncle ‘all my friends are playing guitars. I want to do that.’ He said, ‘fuck guitar. There are 10 guitar players on your block already. You should play drums.’ⁱⁱ He gave me a drum set and later that week I was in my basement, just messing around with it. And the same thing… girls showed up. It was totally unplanned but girls from down the street were like, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ Yeah, sure, check it out.”

“When did you know you wanted to play music, the defining moment?” says Mick.

“I never had a defining moment,” his co-producer states. “I was born to rock. In 1970, when I was five, I hung out with the older kids down the street who showed me dirty pictures: ‘Hey Jimmy, what do you think of these Playboys?’ I was like ‘oh, nice tits’. The older kids and I would get guitars, and we’d pantomime Beatles songs to the neighbour kids on the street.”

“My mother told me this,” he says. “She bought me a toy drum for Christmas when I was about three, and I was really excited. She said that within an hour of getting it, I took a cinder block and threw it at the drums. It went through the head and that was the end of it.”

“We used to joke that you can’t be in The Dirtbombs if you’ve got less than one thousand LPs,” Mick recalls. “I’ve got seven thousand, Jim’s got one, Tom’s got four, Ben’s got about two thousand. I’ve been buying records on my own probably since 1974 and in that time I’ve only ever sold two records and I’m sorry I sold them.”

“I was working in a record store and I quit my job so I decided I would sell half my record collection,” sighs Pat. “That was the only time. Our collections mean we have incredibly diverse interests. Our comfort music is stuff that none of the others like.”

“I like Seventies funk and hip-hop,” Tom counters, “and things like Rose Tattoo.”

“Rose Tattoo and AC/DC,” agrees Ben. “I like listening to girls sing, The Crystals, The Ronettes or newer stuff. I like Queens Of The Stone Age, but that’s not comfort music. I have a big affinity for Kim Deal. Her voice puts me at ease.”

“I go through phases,” Jim chimes in. “A lot of time I don’t listen to music at all but I like a lot of Fifties and Sixties Mexican music.”

“For me, it’s jazz and classical,” finishes Mick. “I like a lot of the romantic classical music.”

Back in the early Nineties, a line in the sand was quickly drawn when it came to grunge music. (I’m a big fan of hype, but you have to learn how to separate The Small Faces from Spencer Davis, The Gories from Jon Spencer, Ramones from The Clash.) On one side were bands with passion, instinct and soul—Nirvana, Mudhoney, (early) Afghan Whigs. On the other were Pearl Jam, and others far too heinous to name. Commentators and fans became confused, thought that one was the other and that the line was unnecessary. The line is always necessary. Radiohead may very well be well meaning fellows with their record collections in the right place but, fuck, do they make a God-awful noise. I have heard only one Andrew WK track, and that’s enough to assure me that he has as much to do with rock music as Busted. I do mean Busted, don’t I? That pre-packaged boy metal band. Or is that The Vines? It’s so hard to differentiate.

So we come to Detroit and New York City, and the fact that—because of the media’s tendency to only go for the people that cosy on up to it—NYC (like London and Sydney) finds it very difficult indeed to produce a half-decent rock band, because no one’s given any time to develop.

On the one side of the divide is The White Stripes and the righteous Detroit clan, led by the Dirtbombs and of course Ultraglide In Black, a collection of soul covers originally done by folk like Stevie Wonder and Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye, strained through the most intense guitar distortion and purified by noise, and why the self-billing invoice haven’t you bought a copy yet? Stop reading this now…

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