![]() Photograph: Getty Imagesīy the late 60s, though, R&B was ceding ground to something heavier in the Detroit sound, under the influence of British bands who came over to play the Grande, such as the Kinks and the Who. View image in fullscreen Kick out the jams … Detroit’s MC5 in action. “You turned the radio on and that Motown sound was there all the time.” “Soul music ran through Detroit rock’n’roll,” Cooper says, remembering his childhood in the city. “Detroit wasn’t that segregated musically.” That was reflected in the music: the Rationals’ breakthrough singles were versions of the Holland-Dozier-Holland standard Leavin’ Here and Otis Redding’s Respect the MC5’s earliest recordings were soul covers, and they long remained part of their sets. “You could hear Patsy Cline and James Brown on the same station, so even the radio was integrated,” says Scott Morgan, singer with the Rationals. The Detroit groups evolved in their own ecosystem: the school dances, the clubs, the A-Square record label, the Detroit-founded Creem magazine, and the radio and TV station CKLW. LA was much more into jazzy rock’n’roll: the Doors and Love and Buffalo Springfield.” Cooper and his manager Shep Gordon knew the band had to go somewhere else, but at this point, the sound of Detroit – despite it being Cooper’s home town – was still a mystery to him: “I had never heard of Iggy and the Stooges, the MC5, or Suzi Quatro. “We played so many shows in LA and just got zero reaction it was hard, guitar-driven rock’n’roll, and LA was not into that. “LA and New York have got this attitude of: ‘OK, yeah, we’ve seen everything, blah blah blah,’” says Cooper. Their live show emptied rooms, and their first two albums – Pretties for You and Easy Action – were unfocused and messy. ![]() Over in Los Angeles, as the 60s stretched out, the original Alice Cooper band were flailing. View image in fullscreen Up all night … Scott Richardson, with the SRC in Ann Arbor, 1971. And this sense that anything was possible. It was kids coming out of themselves over the music, just freaking the fuck out at how amazing it was to have a live show, playing with that music and experiencing each other. “You were going to trip out, either with drugs or just the atmosphere. “It was an entirely new kind of music and vibe,” says Richardson, who later formed the Scot Richard Case, playing British invasion-style rock, and then “metaphysical psychedelia” with his next band the SRC. The Chosen Few were there for one of the key moments in Detroit rock history, in October 1966: the opening night of the Grande Ballroom, where perhaps the definitive Detroit rock’n’roll album, MC5’s Kick Out the Jams, was later recorded. My dad was incredibly astounded and pissed off at the same time.” “We were doing four sets a night, really, really slogging,” Richardson remembers. Scott Richardson was still in his senior year in high school when he formed the Chosen Few who featured future Stooges James Williamson and, later, Ron Asheton. Like the Wheels, the first wave of Detroit bands were startlingly young. It was kids coming out of themselves over the music … I’ve never felt that since Scott Richardson ![]() Every night we had to tear down the gear and go to another club on the base.” It wasn’t kids screaming or rioting. “We got a prop plane with moose hunters, sitting in their seats with their guns and their Elmer Fudd hats on, then had to drive 90 miles down a gravel road. We had 36 boxes of clothes” – and were soon packed off to play a navy base in Newfoundland. They were so young and green they took everything they owned – “If you go on the road, you carry one suitcase. And we got pretty big, pretty fast around here.”īadanjek was barely into his teens when the impresario Bob Crewe took them to New York to rename and drill them. “A lot of Motown acts were not on the national scene yet, so we were on some of the shows with them. They had been playing around Michigan as Billy Lee & the Rivieras, “in a lot of the black clubs because we were doing a lot of the soul songs”, Badanjek says. ![]() Across 19, as “British invasion” bands such as the Beatles were bringing high-energy guitar pop to the American masses, they had a series of Top 10 US hits with improbably exciting, viciously driven R&B singles – Jenny Take a Ride!, Little Latin Lupe Lu, Devil With a Blue Dress On – that still sound thrilling today. They weren’t just the first they were the biggest. “We were the first band,” says the drummer Johnny “Bee” Badanjek of Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. View image in fullscreen Take a ride … Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels with drummer ‘Bee’ Badanjek (second from right).
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