Carson Interview 1
Cass Corridor Documentation Project
Oral History Project
Interviewee: David A. Carson
Relationship to Cass Corridor: Detroit music historian, deejay
Interviewer: Jared Natzke
Date of Interview: April 7, 2011
Location: Purdy-Kresge Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI (by phone)
Natzke: This is Jared Natzke. I’m interviewing Mr. David Carson on April 7, 2011. He is the
author of a few books about Detroit rock history: Grit, Noise, and Revolution is about Detroit
rock and roll and Rockin’ [Down] the Dial is his earlier book about rock deejays in Detroit. So
David, could you tell me a little bit about your background, about where you grew up?
Carson: Sure. I was born in the city, in the city of Detroit, over on the east side, over by
Chryslers, and I kind of got moved to suburban Royal Oak as a child. But I kept ties with the east
side. My grandmother continued to live over there in the flat that we had lived in. I always had
ties to that part of town. [I] grew up in Royal Oak, went to Helen Keller Junior High School,
Dondero High School out there.
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Natzke: So you eventually got into radio. When you were growing up were there certain deejays
that you listened to a lot, that you looked up to, that you kind of wanted to emulate?
Carson: Well, Detroit was always a really great radio town and it’s had some terrific stations
and personalities, people who were on before I was listening to them whose reputations I was
aware of. People like Ed McKenzie, who I had sort of flickering memories of from his television
show. In the middle 1950s he had been the original “Jack the Bellboy.” He was the first big disc
jockey to be followed by teenagers because he did a lot of rebellious things on the air, and that
type of thing. Later on there were people like Mickey Shorr, who was a bigger than life, very
flamboyant guy on the radio. And of course Robin Seymour, you want to give Robin credit
because he was probably one of the very first of the white deejays to program R&B records,
which morphed into what was starting to be called “rock and roll” in 1954-55, that era. Then
Mickey Shorr, who was on WJBK and then WXYZ, and was a big top showman kind of thing,
did a lot of controversial things, drew a lot of attention to himself. Huge reputation. Some of the
other big people, other folks that my era would remember are Bud Davies from the early days of
CKLW radio and television, Joel Sebastian, Lee Alan, these were the big names in the early
1960s. “Lee Alan on the Horn,” he was another guy who knew how to get people listening to his
radio show. Tom Clay, who was on WJBK in the late ‘50s and later at several other stations in
the area, he sort of brought a more confidential tone to Top Forty radio rather than the “Hi guys
and gals!” He was more speaking to the other person across the dial and that was something you
noticed. He really communicated well, really sold the music. Joel Sebastian, Lee Alan kind of
picked up on that and it’s the kind of thing where if they were playing a slow rock and roll
ballad, rather than introduce it in a big way they would get very mellow on the air and would be
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introducing that record as if they were tuned in to what it was all about and communicating that
to you. It would be very interesting.
So radio went on like that through the ‘60s. We had a station, WKMH, that changed
formats at the very end of 1963 and became WKNR, “Keener Radio,” and it had a shorter play
list and a livelier, faster moving sound. They became the big station in the mid-‘60s. That’s
probably when station image replaced individual personalities as the more dominant thing.
Rather than somebody saying, “Yeah I listen to Lee Alan” somebody would probably say, “I
listen to Keener [WKNR].” “Keener” may have some great deejays on it, which it did, like Dick
Purtan, Bob Green, but the station itself had a more cohesive sound twenty-four hours a day.
Kids said these were the rock stations but in reality they were pop music stations that played the
songs that were the best sellers. So you had the Motown hits and you had the Beatles and the
Rolling Stones all being played alongside Petula Clark or Dean Martin or Frank Sinatra. If they
had hit records that were at the Top Ten, it was all played together. So it was sort of a
galvanizing effect and everybody was aware of all of the music. So that’s kind of where radio
was up until 1968.
Natzke: That was my impression from your books, that especially AM radio became much more
polished and formulaic going on. I know some of the FM stations had started to come along such
as WABX, they kind of tried to mix things up and they were very different than the radio –
Carson: Well there was nowhere to go but up on FM in those days. Nobody listened to FM radio
(laughs) back –
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Natzke: You mentioned it was mostly elevator music, that’s what was being played –
Carson: Correct! Because people listening to it were either listening in doctors offices, in the
elevators, or they were elderly people who wanted soft, quiet, Montovani type music and that
type of thing. In fact, if you looked at a rating sheet of the stations being rated for listenership in
Detroit in 1965 there was one FM station that even showed up at the bottom (laughs). You could
put all the rest of them together and they barely added up to a couple of percent of listeners. So
stations didn’t even stay on the air, you could do anything on them. They were doing what AM
radio had done years earlier. They might have a jazz show on for a couple of hours and then a
classical music show and then a discussion program, just sort of a hodgepodge mishmash of
things.
So in ‘68 a station called WABX, which had been on the air in town for about seven or
eight years, had tried their hand at classical and played pop music, light jazz, they did have an
excellent jazz show in the evening with a guy named Jim Rockwell who was well known. But
aside from that they were going nowhere. Believe it or not, they didn’t even sign on the air until
nine o’clock in the morning.
Natzke: (laughs) Yeah, nobody was listening.
Carson: Yeah (laughs). Why bother competing with the other stations? So that was the attitude.
They started fooling around, playing some of the music that you couldn’t hear on the AM Top
Forty stations. Because now you had people, not only the Beatles but other artists, putting out
albums and putting more effort into the albums. Before that you had Bobby Rydell having a hit
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record and then the record label would rush out a Bobby Rydell album that would indeed include
the hit record and twelve or eleven other cover versions: him doing a Bobby Vinton song and a
Dion song (laughs). So there wasn’t much into it. But now you had people producing albums
with original material or material that they had put a lot of thought into. But this music wasn’t
available. You couldn’t hear it anywhere except over on your friend’s hi-fi or something. So
WABX started to program a little of this and it was a mix of blues and folk music and some of
the more mature rock on a show called “Troubadour.” And the response was terrific so “why
don’t we play some more?” I had done a little work over there myself, a little fill-in work, so I
remember what the atmosphere was like at that time at and it was just ripe for a change. I think it
was around February ‘68 they went full blast with that and there was this whole maturing
audience of people who had grown up listening to the AM Top Forty rock stations that now were
embracing this. “Wow, what is this music and all these album cuts?” And there didn’t have to be
a jingle and a commercial between every record. There was still a big mass audience for AM Top
Forty radio. It was fast, it was exciting, they played the hits. But now there was something to
serve a different audience, and that’s where that came along. And WABX, besides the music,
they started to reflect more of the interests of that growing Woodstock era, sort of the community
of people, the political views and such.
Natzke: One of my favorite stories that you related in Grit, Noise, and Revolution was when
WABX got an advance copy of the [Beatles] “White Album” before anyone had heard it and
were playing it live on the air. They received a call from the record company from England to
stop immediately. I thought that was very indicative of what kind of station WABX was.
Carson Interview 6
Carson: Yeah, that was an exciting time for them because before that, as one of my old friends
who was working there at the time said, it was always one of the big AMs that got maybe an
advance acetate of a new [Rolling] Stones single or something but here was an album they had
their hands on. And they really promoted the heck out of it; people were pouring out of the clubs
and everything else to get out to their cars to see, “What is it they’re going to have tonight?” And
yeah, it was the “White Album” by the Beatles. It was a very exciting thing. But they would do
things there, like the deejays could be creative and they would play sets and they might have a
set where they would play three or four songs by a particular artist or three or four or five songs
on a particular theme, whether it had to do with war or something else. It was a very creative
period.
Natzke: Yeah, it seems like they gave them, the deejays, much more freedom than other stations.
Carson: It didn’t last too long (laughs), but it was kind of a golden era there.
Natzke: It was fun while it lasted. So getting back to your background a little bit, why did you
want to get into radio in the first place? What was it about radio that appealed to you?
Carson: Well, I was just one of those kids who when I got my first transistor radio I just was
hooked. I was listening to some of my favorite disc jockeys at night, Joel Sebastian primarily, on
WXYZ and I said “that’s something I would like to do.” I guess you have a feeling for
something, an affinity for it. From then on that’s what I set my sights on. I was lucky that we had
an actual FM radio station in Royal Oak tied to the school system. I was able to do some
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programming on that. In fact, I did a show on that as early as 1965 that was kind of a harbinger
of the later things they were doing at WABX. I was playing kind of a mix of some of the early
Bob Dylan records, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Jim Kweskin Jug Band, some early Van
Morrison when he was with was with Them. It was an interesting time that I got to do that. Yeah,
so I just thought that it was a lot of fun, who wouldn’t like it? And might be a great way to meet
some girls too, (laughs) you know? Just the idea of being able to sit in a room behind a
microphone and talk to people and try to put yourself in a state of mind that somebody’s actually
listening to what you’re saying (laughs), which I’m sure they always are not. But that’s what you
sort of tell yourself you’re doing and it was very appealing.
Natzke: So you actually went on to work at a country station for a while too, WEXL –
Carson: Yeah, I started on FM radio. Believe it or not I used to announce the “Middle East Hour
(laughs) in Detroit” at an FM station. A fellow named Faisal Arabu was the host of this program
and he would come in and bring in the things and it was kind of like old time radio. He went in
the live studio that we had to the right of the control room I was in and I would cue up his theme
music and it was sort of very Arabic sounding. “Time for Detroit’s Middle East Hour, with your
host Faisal Arabu!” “Thank you Dave,” and then he would do the show. At that time there was
no inclination on my part of what the Middle East was, I thought he must be Egyptian or
something (laughs). The thing about it, he was a terrific guy and one day he came in and said
“Dave, starting this week let’s drop the ‘Faisal.’ Introduce me as ‘Frank’ Arabu because I’m
thinking about running for city council,” (laughs). I don’t know, maybe I should “Google” Frank
Arabu to see whatever happened to him. Yeah, then I worked at some other little stations in
Carson Interview 8
outlying areas and eventually worked for WEXL, which was AM radio. I was doing the all night
show there playing country music. Of course, people would say, “That’s great, but when are you
going to get on ‘Keener’ [WKNR]? (laughs)” or, “When are you going to get on one of these
other stations?” Eventually I left Detroit. I worked in Grand Rapids and Louisville, Kentucky. I
worked in Flint [MI], but always kept close ties with my hometown.
Natzke: What caused you to eventually leave the radio industry?
Carson: I think I was just one of those people who got into it at such a young age, when I was
fifteen (laughs), so by the time I was twenty-five things had changed a bit and I guess the prism I
was looking at the world through had changed. So I just made some changes. I never really said,
“Hey, I’m leaving forever,” but it sort of turned out that way. All these years later it’s kind of
strange, as things go full-circle, I work for a publication called Radio World that serves the radio
industry today.
Natzke: What was the process like for writing your books? Both Rockin’ Down the Dial and
Grit, Noise, and Revolution, it’s clear from the notes in the books that you conducted a lot of
interviews for these. So if you could just talk a little bit about what that was like –
Carson: Well, they were similar. At first I decided – I was originally working on a little article,
I thought, about Detroit radio and then it just expanded from there. I had written about thirty
pages, or maybe I had thought about a book and just sat down and I sort of just emptied out
everything, all my inner knowledge (laughs). In fact, I was saying to my wife, “Jeez, I don’t
Carson Interview 9
think I’m going anywhere” and she said, “Well now you have to call people! (laughs) You have
to do some research! Surely you can expand –.” And I said, “Well yeah, that makes sense. Let
me try that.” I simply started, and this was before Google, I just started tracking down some of
my radio heroes and people that I had remembered. I think the first person I called, for whatever
reason, was Paul Winter, who people might remember as being affiliated with Channel 56 [PBS
WTVS] many years later. But Paul, Saul Wineman was his real name, but on the radio he was
always Paul Winter and he was a great performer on WXYZ from about 1951 until the mid ‘60s
and later to talk radio and other things. I called him, did an interview and talked, and from there I
just started tracking down people, just conducting these interviews, starting to put it together. I
was trying to get old photographs, crosschecking dates and information, verifying things, and
that’s kind of how it went. It was a labor of love, I definitely spent several years on that project.
Natzke: Were most of the people you talked to pretty willing to work with you? Especially
people that were in the bands, when you were writing Grit, Noise, and Revolution.
Carson: Well on the second book, besides interviews I also did a lot of research. There was
more information also. Again, there was a lot that I didn’t know, that I learned through
referencing other information and then tracking down people and talking. Yeah, most people
were happy to talk. Like any time you’re interviewing people, every now and then you get one of
those people: “So was it exciting? Can you tell me what it was like?” “Well, it was exciting. Yes,
it was nice,” (laughs). So, that happens and it’s you’re job as an interviewer to try and draw out
more information from them. Some of the people were terrific and had very encyclopedic
memories of things that happened. It was great fun. I interviewed all the three surviving
Carson Interview 10
members of the MC5 and they were all terrific, terrific interviews: Wayne Kramer, Michael
Davis, and Dennis Thompson. Jem Targal from Third Power was a great interview. I had nice
memories of some of the rock concerts they played at. Some people you had to prod or you
would wind up having to feed them some hints and they would go, “Really? I was there? I didn’t
remember?” (laughs). “It’s all a blur to me. If you say so!” That was like putting together a
mosaic, you know? There had been a number of articles written in magazines here and there, an
article on the MC5. There had been some articles on Bob Seger, an article here and there on Russ
Gibb, who owned the Grande Ballroom. So you had a few of these things out there but no one
had ever really put it together. So that’s kind of what I was doing: taking these things and trying
to timeline it all out and create a narrative. I didn’t want to just do an encyclopedia of Detroit
music. I could’ve done something like that: “Here’s a chapter on the MC5, here’s a chapter on
Bob Seger,” but I thought, “That’s boring,” (laughs). Here I was trying to show, “Here’s where
the MC5 enter the story and now we’re leaving them because we’re going over to talk about
John Sinclair coming into the picture. Now we’re going to bring the MC5 back and here we’re
completely moving away from that and going over to touch on this other thing that was going
on.” So trying to put all that together, make it flow as one story.
Originally, when I did the first treatment for the book, I was going to start off with the
story of Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, where that late ‘60s era sort of began. I had
virtually no Motown in the book because there was so much Motown available, so many books
on Motown. The publisher, University of Michigan Press, they read it and they wanted to do it
but they had some people weigh in on it and they said, “You can’t put out a book on Detroit
music that doesn’t touch on Motown!” (laughs). Finally I said, “Ok, I’ll work it in, I’ll find a way
to do that.” Then I decided, “Well, I’ll put one advance chapter where I talk about the early days
Carson Interview 11
of Detroit music and the birth of Motown, this and that.” Well, from that it grew into – I got into
some really juicy things; I think I wound up putting in three or four earlier chapters, all the way
back to John Lee Hooker. It was pretty much a chapter on John Lee Hooker and blues in the ‘40s
in Detroit then moving up through Fortune Records, the local R&B record labels, and the birth of
Motown. I tried to put in some different information that wasn’t available, and again, within the
context of everything else that was going on. Besides Motown, there were other entrepreneurial
record companies and record producers running around Detroit at that time. I think when people
read that they kind of get to see what was going on when Berry Gordy started the company
[Motown]; who his competition was, what it was that he was doing that made him more
successful than the others. Then I brought it up to introducing Mitch Ryder and the Detroit
Wheels and then on to the era of the teen nightclubs: The Hideout, the Crow’s Nest, and all those
places as live music sort of started to – not totally replace, but be the preference over the old disc
jockey record hop type thing. And then on to the Grande Ballroom and the more sophisticated
things. It was strictly music, the big rock bands, and it became a school process. You were
schooled in playing the small teen dances and you moved up to a little better places and for these
bands if they could get to the Grande Ballroom or the Eastown Theater, those were the big
prestigious gigs.
Natzke: I thought that was really interesting, what you talked about in Grit, Noise, and
Revolution about this progression, how it kind of progressed from black R&B bands to white
R&B and then rock and roll sort of started coming out of both of those and then it started
changing very rapidly and –
Carson Interview 12
Carson: Well, the whole era was an exciting era. When you really stop and think about from the
time that Elvis Presley released “Heartbreak Hotel” in 1956 and the Beatles released “Sergeant
Pepper” eleven years later, look at the span, look at all that went on in eleven short years. And
again, you bring that down to the local level. If you read the book and see the kind of rock and
roll bands, the Thunder Rocks and some of these early bands with the saxophones, the
Royaltones, that were playing in the late ‘50s at teen dances, from there it’s just a short hop,
seven, eight, nine years and you’re with the Amboy Dukes and the MC5 and Bob Seger System
and the music has just progressed in such a way. Even thirty years later it doesn’t equal the
impact of the changes that went on in that era. I think that’s what made it so exciting, you could
really chart it out. It’s the same thing with the radio earlier, with the exception of the music they
were playing, you could take a radio station today and you could play a recording of that station,
an “air check” as they say, from fifteen, twenty years ago and it really doesn’t sound any
different, you know, the presentation of the station. In the old days you could listen to a radio air
check of Tom Clay in 1958 and then listen to a recording of a station in 1965 and, “Boy, I can
tell how things have progressed in the production on the station and the presentation, the way it’s
done.” It was the same with the music. That made it very exciting and made it an excellent story
to tell with a beginning, a middle, and an end because that era, for both radio and music, did sort
of come to an end in the early ‘70s.
Natzke: In Grit, Noise, and Revolution you talk a lot about some of the Detroit bands that didn’t
really make it big on the national stage. Actually, it seems like the majority of the Detroit bands
didn’t really manage to break out. Are there any of them that you would like to highlight briefly
that you think were really talented but never quite made it?
Carson Interview 13
Carson: Well, there were just so many but again, when we’re talking about these groups, if you
were from Detroit they were a big deal. Besides the teen clubs, besides the Grande Ballroom, the
Eastown Theater, all that, this was an era between 1969-71 or ’72 where there were also just an
unending number of outdoor rock concerts all over southeastern Michigan. There was a great
need for music, for live music, so there were so many bands, and bands could make money by
playing the gigs in the teen clubs, the Grande, and all these outdoor concerts. The big lineup, the
superstar lineup of Michigan talent would’ve included the MC5 of course, Bob Seger with his
Bob Seger System, a band called the Frost, Ted Nugent’s group the Amboy Dukes, a band called
SRC. Those were probably the big five headliners. There were also the Rationals who were very
popular, out of Ann Arbor.
Natzke: Yeah, you said they were wildly popular for a while.
Carson: Wildly popular, although they came to an end a little earlier than that but they had some
hit records. They were just a great group and they were promoted in a most professional way by
a guy named Jeep Holland who was a producer and a booking agent. He knew how to do things,
promotion on a small scale but in a big-time way. And of course there were the Stooges. So these
groups were just big and if you had a festival and these were your headliners, to people in
southeastern Michigan you might as well have been saying, “Well, we’re having the Beatles, the
Rolling Stones, Cream,” (laughs). You could take that same lineup to an arena in Kansas City
and they’d be going, “Who are these people?” for the most part. It was really strange. There were
other bands, Savage Grace, the Third Power, the Frut, just too many to mention. Unfortunately,
Carson Interview 14
they just, for various reasons, could not break out. Bob Seger was on a small local record label.
He had like three or four consecutive top ten records in Detroit (laughs).
Natzke: Yeah, he just could not make it on the national –
Carson: Yeah, but those records just wouldn’t make it out of Michigan. They didn’t have the
business finesse and the promotional means to break him out. Frost signed a contract with
Vanguard Records, which was a national label, primarily more folk music oriented, but they just
didn’t seem to have the faith in them or something. They would stock the records in Michigan
and their albums were selling great, they had hit singles, but they would go out on the road and
they would be in San Francisco and there wouldn’t be any records. So that’s a problem that they
had, that a lot of the acts had. Those would be just great groups and people who came to Detroit
to play hated to have to follow these people because they were good groups, the MC5 especially.
But you really would not want to have to follow any of those groups onstage. There were a lot of
national acts who maybe, for whatever reason, they had a better record label, better promotion,
they had a hit record, their album was selling better, so they came to town and they were the top-
billed act at the Grande Ballroom and they would be supported by one or two of these groups.
Well, once the MC5 would come up and burn down the stage practically, “Now let’s see what
you got!” That resulted in their whole thing with the “Kick out the Jams,” when they would stand
on the awnings and tell these bands, “Hey, you’re lame, man! You gotta kick out the jams or get
off the stage!” Detroit was a tough audience because we had such great talent and great bands, it
was very demanding. People worked hard for their money, they worked in the factories. If they
went somewhere and you were paid to perform, you’d better deliver.
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Natzke: So did you have a few favorites that you really enjoyed going to see back then that were
big in the Detroit scene?
Carson: Personally, I liked the Rationals. They had some records out that I liked. I liked the
group and I liked the way that they were promoted. I had been a Bob Seger fan, his early records:
“East Side Story,” “Heavy Music,” and all that. Those were favorites. Ted Nugent and the
Ambory Dukes did manage to come up with one big national hit with “Journey to the Center of
the Mind,” which I thought was a great record, it surely deserved to be a top twenty hit in
Billboard, which it did. Third Power was another band that was kind of a power trio that really
worked hard and put on a great show. It’s hard to find anybody to say anything bad about.
Natzke: In Grit, Noise, and Revolution you talk at length about the MC5. They’re widely
regarded as being revolutionary in both their politics and their music. So what was it about their
sound and their personas that made them so different from the bands that had come before?
Carson: They were just very loud (laughs) and they played very hard rock music. They just
really attacked it and they had some great equipment. I played a little bit in a band as a teenager,
you know? We would just plug into our amplifiers, stick the microphone into the same amp as
the bass guitar (laughs) and play like that. They started getting into, with the help of somebody
that was serving as a manager, they got into some of the really great new amplifiers and sound
systems. So they were able to play at an earsplitting level, which they did. They really put on a
show, they had a great front man in Rob Tyner, and they really mixed – they were a
Carson Interview 16
contemporary rock band but they also paid tribute to the past in that they did a lot onstage. They
did some routines (laughs) onstage but at the same time they weren’t just an oldies band or
something. But they were something to look at and they had different outfits that were colorful.
They kind of came out of the tradition of James Brown, they really loved that stuff. They would
go to see James Brown perform and that’s kind of what was on their minds, “We want to get out
onstage and wow these people.” They would do backbends and knee drops and Rob Tyner would
get down on the floor and spin around (laughs) and do God knows what. People felt, man, when
they went to see “The Five” that they were really getting their money’s worth and like, “These
guys are really working hard, they’re not trying to slip by,” or anything like that. And they were
good musicians; they played loud and unleashed.
Their first album, which strangely was a live album, nobody put out a live album for their
first release. I guess the record label they signed with at the time, Electra, somehow agreed that
they were best when they were live and they made this decision to record them at the Grande
Ballroom and put that out. Technically, it was not the best recording for sure (laughs) and there
were mistakes in there and screw-ups. The band themselves, Wayne Kramer even told me, they
were under the impression that they going to get another shot. If they weren’t happy they were
going to get another chance to record it again. The label said, “No, we’re happy with this. This is
what’s going out.” But it was just wildly, crazy, unleashed, kinetic energy on there and people
went wild. And it sold. It did well, I think it got up into the top forty albums in Billboard, and it
kind of built their reputation: they are this tremendous live band and here they’re captured on
disk. Now, they shot themselves in the foot and that became their only release for Electra. It’s
kind of famously told how they wound up on another label and the next time they went
completely the opposite direction with an album that was too structured and maybe a little too
Carson Interview 17
thin. Although, that album did much better in Europe than the first one did. But that was it, that’s
what built their reputation. They were a great live band and then when that album came out it
was like, “Well it’s captured here,” with “Kick out the Jams” and all those songs on there.
Everybody would say, “When you go to see them you’re going to really see a show!”
After their affiliation with John Sinclair, who was a political activist in Detroit at the time
and was their manager for a while, that added to the allure of “The Five.” Now there was this
political side to them. Which personally to them it was like, “Well, this is part of showbiz, this is
part of the band’s image.” They personally weren’t out to change the world. I think they were on
board with it, they weren’t phonies or fakes or anything, but their main goal was to be a great
rock and roll band. Then all the political stuff got in the way and caused them to have problems,
caused them to lose their record contract, and caused them to get appearances cancelled and the
things that ultimately hurt you career-wise. But, at the time, it made for very exciting rock and
roll.
Natzke: Yeah, sounds like it.
Carson: In other words, somebody could say, “Yeah, what a mess. God, the MC5, what a train
wreck of a band, of a career!” But also you could say, “Yeah man, but at the time, wasn’t it
great?”
Natzke: It was really fun to watch, yeah (laughs).
Carson Interview 18
Carson: Fun to watch, and who does everybody remember from that era when they want to talk
about Detroit and Detroit rock in that era? “The Five,” man. That was the band.
Natzke: They definitely made an impression.
Carson: Yeah, exactly.
Natzke: So, the MC5 and the Stooges they’re often called precursors to punk. The term
“proto-punk” gets thrown around a lot talking about them. You may have heard about the band
Death; their so-called “lost” recordings have been getting some attention lately and they were
kind of very early punk-sounding. So in your opinion what role do you think the Detroit rock
scene played in the development of punk, even though the so-called punk bands didn’t
eventually come out of Detroit?
Carson: I think in the book I related a story, and it was something I picked up from a magazine
article from a British publication. Rob Tyner, who was the lead singer for the Five, had been in
England, invited over or something, he was writing an article, something for the [New] Musical
Express publication over there and that’s when he started picking up this information that some
of these new rock bands, punk bands, were pointing to the MC5 as early inspiration. I think it’s
just – if you maybe go on websites for British, European bands, punk bands, you see a lot
references to the Five and to the Stooges and it’s pretty obvious when you look what they did.
That’s what you would say about the Five, is that they had that “Detroit attitude.” It came
through in pictures and I think what happened in the ‘80s was just the next step from that. Things
Carson Interview 19
had smoothed out a bit, right, in the rest of the ‘70s so I think those bands were reaching back a
few years and looking at records and looking at what was going on. I think those were the bands,
without a doubt, that inspired them.
Natzke: I like the sound of that, that Detroit gave punk its attitude (laughs).
Carson: Yeah, for sure. I think Dave Marsh, the writer, was one of the first people who even
came up with that term.
Natzke: Of course, yeah, in the magazine Creem they coined the term “punk rock.”
Carson: Yeah, bunch of punks! (laughs) I think I was called a punk one time –
Natzke: So why do you think that the MC5, the Stooges, this band Death, why are they getting
so much recognition and buzz now? Do you think this is praise that’s overdue for these bands,
that they’re finally getting recognized?
Carson: I think this kind of thing goes in waves, you know? I think there’s been times a few
years ago when the Five, if you were putting them on a graph as far as recognizability or
referencing them, or whatever, you’ll see times when they were pretty high. Then it goes down
for a bit and smoothes out then all of a sudden there’s a lot of press, a lot of activity; somebody
new comes along and starts talking about them. Maybe there’s a release of a new compilation of
material that’s out. Now, if they weren’t good, if what they were doing wasn’t really good, it
Carson Interview 20
wouldn’t last. I think that the material is there, and people can go back and listen to it and they
can read about the Stooges, read about the Five. That’s why a new generation, or every four
years, every six, seven, eight years, ten years, somebody comes along and goes, “Yeah, I’ve
discovered the MC5!” And also it’s probably kind of a cool thing when you latch on to
somebody from the past and go, “Yeah, I’m hip to what they were doing way back then and I see
the value in it, I see what effect it’s had on society and on music over the years.” I just think that
kind of thing will continue. Some old rock bands, other people further back such as Chuck Berry
or whatever, they don’t go away. Everybody always knows about Chuck Berry but there’s
probably times when he seems to be a little bit more in the news or you read more about him,
and it’s the same thing with this. Although, this affects more directly this punk rock thing.
Natzke: Getting back to talking about the Grande Ballroom a little bit, for a while that seemed to
be, like, the center of it all: the rock, the counterculture movement, psychedelic art, and all sorts
of the politics going around in that era too. So how did Russ Gibb and John Sinclair, how did
they make the Ballroom into such a cultural epicenter for Detroit?
Carson: Well, firstly they were sort of first (laughs) with the idea. Russ Gibb is sort of an
enterprising, entrepreneurial person. I think probably everybody by now has heard the story.
Very briefly, he had a friend that he grew up with in the Detroit area who he went and just
visited, a trip out in San Francisco about the time that the Fillmore Ballroom was getting started
out there. They had the strobe lights going and all the posters and stuff and he said, “Hey, that
would be a cool thing in Detroit! Detroit’s the kind of place this could –” So he came back with
that in mind. He had sort of rented halls and put on deejay dances, that kind of thing, in the past
Carson Interview 21
so he had some experience as a promoter. But this was like a whole new thing. So he was
hunting around for a place and he finally found the Grande Ballroom, which had been a big
Tommy Dorsey kind of big band ballroom. I think it was a warehouse for old mattresses or
something for a few years before that. And [Gibb] made a deal. Russ did not own it, someone
else owned it; he sort of leased it from that person. It was his father-in-law, I believe. But that
was it, and [Gibb] said, “This is just a wonderful atmosphere in here and this will be the kind of
place,” I don’t know if he said that at the time but it quickly became that kind of place where
people came and stood in front of the stage and listened. As opposed to what was going on
before that where mainly the deejay kind of record hops, you’d have the disc jockey come out
and play records, maybe bring a band along and they’d play a twenty-minute set and then they’d
play some more records, give a few records away and say goodnight. Then you had some of
these teen clubs that had maybe a couple of bands; a little more live music but the atmosphere
was like a VFW hall, kind of vapid. So here you had, number one, a larger facility so you could
get more people into it, which is exciting when you put more people together, a better stage,
better sound, better atmosphere. It’s not like it took off overnight but it gradually – they opened
up at the end of October of 1966 – it really was just local talent for almost a year before he was
really able to start booking some national acts also. When people got down there and the smell of
incense, the dark lighting, and the kind of Moorish architecture, it was like another world. You
went up the stairs and you got up there, “Wow,” it just made it a very cool place. And there was
nothing else like it. So, first on the scene, they kind of beat everybody to that kind of thing. It
didn’t really last all that long. When we talk about it people think, “Oh yeah, the Grande was
there for years.” In reality, it was only really in consistent operation from late ‘66 until about
mid-‘69, and that’s when he closed it, opened some hybrid Grande Riviera Theater sort of thing,
Carson Interview 22
then reopened the Grande for a month or so, and that was it. It was really all over at the Grande
Ballroom in late ‘69 but during those years the Who played there, Janis Joplin, Cream, the
biggest acts in rock; the MC5 were the house band, opened for many of these people. All the
other great Detroit bands would really compete and when they got there they really wanted to
play great because they wanted to be asked back, they wanted to get back at the Grande. It was
just the right place at the right time.
Oh, and I’m sorry, you asked me about John Sinclair. John contributed ideas to Russ
Gibb because he was more in tune with kids. The way Russ told it to me, it was kind of up to that
point – and this was what I remember about the early and mid ‘60s – kids back then were kind
of, well you had your frats and you had the greasers (laughs). But this was like, the people who
were coming to the Grande, were like a different type of clientele. So Sinclair was able to kind of
hip him to the new scene and what was going on and what bands might be good to book, what
other things they could do in there to make the place cool. That’s what they would do. It just had
a life of its own. Pretty soon, they did a lot of handbills and some posters, but they really didn’t
need to do too much to get people to be coming down there after ‘67-’68.
Natzke: So even though the Ballroom was such an important venue, a lot of the Detroit rock
scene, it seems, was shaped by stuff that was going on in the Cass Corridor neighborhood. So
how did the nature of the art and the music scenes in the Corridor shape Detroit rock and roll?
Carson: Well, boy, that’s an interesting question there. Being a Detroiter and being a person
who grew up out in the suburbs, to me that area was an area I visited often, went by, went
through, went to parties down there, I don’t recall referring to it in those days as “Cass Corridor.”
Carson Interview 23
It was usually like, “Yeah, there’s a party going on down around Wayne [State]. There’s
something off of Cass [Ave.], down by Cass,” such and such. That was such an interesting area;
it certainly wasn’t the garden spot, it didn’t have a lot of gloss. We all looked at it as kind of a
place where anything went. You would see this cool housing, you could find artsy people but
you could also find winos on the street and lower income whites and blacks. It was just a mosaic,
there’s that word again. I don’t know if it was mosaic-y, it was just so mixed up from block to
block. I do know that John Sinclair and also some people who played in rock bands and people
who wanted to be around music and around art gravitated there. Maybe they lived – one of the
artists, Gary Grimshaw, who created a lot of the posters for the Grande, and he came from
Lincoln Park [MI]. He loved to take trips down to the Cass Corridor area with his buddies, go
down there and drive around, visit some friends, go to some parties. It was like a whole different
world from what he experienced in Lincoln Park and he made a point of eventually moving
down there. He had an apartment down on Prentis [St]. The MC5, they wanted to get down there
finally, they were living down on West Canfield [St]. John Sinclair and the Detroit Artists’
Workshop were set up over by the John Lodge [Expressway]. So it was this crazy area; you
could find whatever. If you wanted to view it as a hotbed for revolutionary politics, it was that. If
you wanted to look at it as, “Oh yeah, that’s kind of a seedy part of town,” it had some of that.
You also had the Masonic Temple down there to go to concerts at. I think people said it was a
creative area and there were a lot of writers and musicians down there. As far as making a direct
link to the Detroit rock scene, I don’t know. I can say the MC5 lived in the area, there were a few
other people, but the rock scene in the late ‘60s was more of a state of mind, or whatever, that
came out of various parts of the metropolitan area.
Carson Interview 24
Natzke: Was there any music scene, or scenes, that were specific to the Cass Corridor area? Or
was it kind of tied to the rest of Detroit scene? Was there any kind of jazz or folk, avant-garde
stuff going on?
Carson: Yeah, there were hangouts down there. You’d just go down to Verne’s Café and Bar on
Forest [Ave], between Cass [Ave] and Woodward [Ave], and it was kind of, depending on who
was there, a pseudo-beatnik scene. Or you might run into somebody from the Communist Party
hanging out down there, giving out pamphlets (laughs), that kind of thing. I’m trying to think
what other – the old Cobb’s Corner Bar down there. But as far as – there were things spread out.
The Chessmate Club was definitely out of that area; that was some folk music club out on
Livernois [Ave]. Baker’s Keyboard [Lounge] jazz club. Things were all over Detroit. I think
that’s probably why Creem magazine, when they came out, they were successful because they
were pulling all that together into one place into a publication, and that’s how they developed a
readership. They also covered politics too. The Fifth Estate newspaper, of course, predated
Creem and that was a little bit more Cass Corridor-focused because there was more political
coverage in that publication. Of course, there were music concerts around Wayne State
[University] at Tartar Field and everything so that definitely was going on. But I would say that
the area was viewed as an inspirational place. You were going to visit friends down there, you
were going to talk politics, and listen to music, listen to jazz, listen to music maybe you weren’t
going to be listening to (laughs) with your friends out in Royal Oak or someplace. Then there
were a lot of people who wanted to live down there just to be a part of that scene. I think that’s
why the members of the MC5 lived down there and they wanted to sample that atmosphere and
be close to Sinclair and the Detroit Artists’ Workshop and all that. So it definitely had an impact
Carson Interview 25
on music of that era and on the revolutionary scene, the whole thing. But as far as itself, making
a direct link to all the music, it would be a little bit of a stretch on that.
Natzke: So from many of the stories in Grit, Noise, and Revolution, it seems that the Detroit
Police Department was especially hostile to the rock scene and counterculture movement. Maybe
you could talk a little bit about that?
Carson: Yeah, well, hey, the Detroit Police Department, right. For the faint of heart, looking out
your rearview mirror and seeing a Detroit Police Car behind you, that’s one thing you didn’t
want to get involved with in those days. There was a lot of animosity there and they definitely
were coming down hard on that perceived left-wing scene, and John Sinclair. They used people
to infiltrate the rock scene and to try to get dirt on the movers and shakers within it, like John
Sinclair and others. They were targeted for sure and people in the rock music scene definitely felt
like, “We don’t have any fans in the Detroit Police Department.” They had files, the old Detroit
Red Squad had files on Sinclair and other people. It was not a pleasant time. Of course, coming
up on the riots in Detroit in ‘67 there, it really brought out a lot of inadequacies. There were
hardly any African-American officers on the police force in a city like Detroit. So there was a lot
of bigotry and a lot of meanness. (Laughs) I hope nobody’s listening from the Detroit Police
Department right now. But yeah, that was part of the times and conservative views: “We’re
going to take care of any of these troublemakers, rabble-rousers, these left-wing hippies that are
trying to lead our youth down a path of revolution.” That was kind of the view, that these were
“commies” and “pinkos” and that they were going to be blowing things up and who knows what
they’re trying to accomplish so, “We need to keep a close eye on them.” Of course the MC5,
Carson Interview 26
with their close affiliation with John Sinclair, received a lot of that attention also. But then again,
all the other bands that played alongside the MC5 and were around that scene also received
attention.
Natzke: Something I thought was interesting that you’ve written about was this disconnect
between the white counterculture and the black civil rights movement, which were both kind of
going on in Detroit at the time. Especially between the Black Panthers and John Sinclair and the
MC5’s affiliation with their White Panther Party. It seems like they were kind of regarded as a
joke by the Black Panthers, even though they were professing this solidarity with them. It seems
like the Black Panthers looked at them as not having a clue about what was really going on.
Carson: Yeah, that’s what it kind of seemed like. Some of it, like these are “Sunday hippies” or
“weekend hippies” or “weekend activists.” “They don’t know what’s going on, they don’t speak
for us.” A lot of it was, I’m not knocking the era, but also I was there in those days and there
were all the politics and there was, of course, the anti-Vietnam protesting going on. But also at
times it got into the ridiculous (laughs) with Sinclair and his group with their manifesto of the
things that they stood for. Sometimes I think that maybe they did themselves a little more harm
because people would read some of that stuff and go, “Well this is silly! (laughs) We’re talking
about serious issues here and you’re talking about blah, blah, blah.” So there was some of that.
John Sinclair, you have to remember, he was a fine writer. He was a jazz reviewer. He was a
terrific promoter. People would say he was the “P.T. Barnum of the Revolution.” He was a great
composer of press releases. He knew how to write stuff that people would want to read and
would get people excited and would also be entertaining. To this day, he does that. So I’m not
Carson Interview 27
taking anything away from him but I think some people who maybe were on the harder side of
the line, the more militant groups, might have said, “Oh yeah, that’s a little goofy.” At the same
time, I think he used some of that lighter rhetoric of his to bring people in and to get them to see
the bigger message.
Natzke: What effects, if any, do you think the riots of 1967 had on the Detroit rock scene in
general? Did the beginning of the “white flight” from Detroit, did that contribute to the breakup
of the Detroit rock and roll scene? Or do you think it was still mostly drugs and bands breaking
up and things like that?
Carson: Well, the end of the era came in ‘71 and ’72. So, if anything, the riots of ’67 may have
bolstered things and sort of added to the revolutionary flavor of the times, along with the
Vietnam War and everything. So here you had the civil rights movement really brought home
locally. Now, we’re just not seeing footage of Birmingham, Alabama, police hosing down
innocent black people –
Natzke: Right, now it was here, it was in your backyard.
Carson: It’s right here in Detroit. “It’s us against the Detroit Police Department. It’s us against
the system. Look, it’s innocent people here. Things are happening.” If anything, that really added
a lot of the grit to the story for sure and things were really heating up. So really, things peaked in
this era in about 1969, that’s when the big multi-act rock concerts, indoor and outdoor, really
came on all through ’69 and ’70. But you’re right, the era started to wind down, for a number of
Carson Interview 28
reasons, in ’71-’72: that change in business, a change in the way business was done; terrible use
of drugs, the introduction of heroin into the scene; change in the drinking age, which changed
who went to what clubs. All of a sudden there were fewer venues for bands to play in and the
outdoor rock concerts faded away. That was the end of that era, a lot of things happened there.
Most things that can be defined as eras are defined as eras because they have an identifiable
beginning and end. Although, as I wrote in the book, it doesn’t mean that it all ended at twelve
midnight on one particular day, you know (laughs). Things definitely – you could sense the shift
there, the interest in music. And bands breaking up; all these popular Detroit bands were
finished: the Amboy Dukes, the MC5, and the Frost, the SRC, they all collapsed, just fell apart
from within due to personality clashes, drug use, bad business, bad management. So they were
all gone by ’72. That era just kind of ended with the closing of the Grande Ballroom, the closing
of the Eastown Theater, all those teen clubs and you could feel it.
After that, some of the other bands came on but it was different. They were part of
another scene. Also, as I wrote in the book, by the time five or six years went by, by the time you
got to 1980, 1981, ’82, it was kind of easy to look back and visualize that 1965-1972 era and go,
“Yeah, that was the late ‘60s.” It went to ’72 but that was the late ‘60s. McGovern lost the
election there, the war continued on a bit, and it was just the end of that. And times change. All
of a sudden disco’s in and California rock with the Eagles and Jackson Browne, I mean it’s just a
different world. So a lot of people will say, “Well, that Detroit scene, that was a sham. That
never really went anywhere.” And I say they’re wrong. For people in Michigan, it existed; it
really took place during that era. Yeah, so a lot of them didn’t become big national stars, so
what? They were good. It doesn’t mean they couldn’t have. It really was an exciting time and I
Carson Interview 29
just can’t think of, since then, any era that you can point to like that with a combination of music
and politics and social issues all sort of coming together.
Natzke: So how would you characterize the “Detroit sound?” Or is that even a thing you can do?
Is there even a cohesive style to Detroit rock? From my impression of what people think of when
they think of Detroit rock, they think of hard-driving, in-your-face, aggressive, even
experimental music.
Carson: I guess those are the terms you would use: high energy, aggressive, loud rock and roll.
Of those bands back then, each one was a little bit different. MC5 did their thing and then SRC
had maybe a little more psychedelic edge to them, the Amboy Dukes had their own sound. But
they were all loud and they all were showmen. They tried to put on a good show. And sure, were
some of them inspired by more blues and R&B? Yeah, the MC5 would be. It’s tough, they’re
generalities. But if somebody’s going to say, “What was Detroit rock like? What marks that?”
you’d be saying, “Loud, high energy, aggressive music played well.”
Natzke: What would you say is the legacy of Detroit rock and roll? There continue to be bands
coming out of Detroit. Some even make it big, such as the White Stripes. Do you see the
development of bands like the White Stripes anchored in this historical legacy of Detroit rock or
is it just something else entirely?
Carson: What I think is so interesting, along the way, every time there’s an article in a magazine
or a newspaper about something having to do with music in Detroit, whether it’s Eminem or
Carson Interview 30
here’s an article about the White Stripes or something, in that article, invariably (laughs), there
will always be a paragraph that references that late ‘60s era in Detroit. Like, “From the city that
gave you Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels and the MC5 and Bob Seger” and all of that. They
always will mention that. So that is the legacy, that always lives on: those groups, that era. It ties
it together. In interviews with Jack White, or whatever, he surely mentions that connection to the
past. I mean, you can’t live on the past and it doesn’t mean anybody that comes out, “Hey, we’re
the latest Detroit band. We’re from the same city that gave you Bob Seger and the MC5.” But
that’s the legacy. If that means, “We expect a little more out of this group, we expect them to
play a little better and play a little longer and put a little more heart and soul into it,” that could
be. But I like to think that every now and then – and there have been a lot of great groups after
this era that came along: the Rockets, the Gories, just a slew of bands. You like to think, “Well,
there’s someone else coming around the corner.” It’s been a while. Eminem’s still out there, Jack
White’s left town, but I like to think something will be coming up and it’ll be the next great
Detroit rock band and there’ll be a story about them and they’ll invariably be talking about how
this person was inspired or comes from the same heritage of Mitch Ryder and the MC5 and all
that. That’s the legacy.
Natzke: Well thank you so much for talking to me today.
Carson: Hey, I appreciate it very much Jared.