Detroit Rock City Read Online Free

getting to the van, and I jumped in the van, and I hadn’t had breakfast and there was this jar full of cookies and I was really hungry. I ate about half the jar of cookies. Our bass player noticed a lot of those cookies were gone, so she asked, you know, “Who ate those cookies?” I said, “I did, I’m sorry, I’m really hungry,” Well, they were marijuana cookies, and by the time I got there I was so stoned I couldn’t get out of the car. I couldn’t put one foot in front of the other. One second I was in the car, and a second later I was up the stairs, and then a second later I was on the stage. The only thing I could hear was the bass drum, which sounded like it was in a huge cave. I knew everyone else was playing, and when I played the keyboard it was like the keys were undulating and it was like a river. I got scared after the set and went outside to the parking lot. I wanted to hide until I felt better. So I got underneath the van.
    Russ Gibb: Cream played at the Grande a couple of times. The first time they came through, Eric Clapton wanted to go shopping, and I took them to Dearborn around Michigan and Schaefer. There was a Montgomery Ward there and in the window store display was a corduroy jacket that was all faded from the sun. He really liked that, so we went in and they couldn’t understand why this English guy would want to buy that. But he got it, and then we walked out onto Michigan Avenue and some car went by with some guys in it, and they called out to him, “Are you a girl?” You know on the inside of Disraeli Gears , in that picture he’s wearing these chaps? He got those in Detroit too. Cream loved Detroit. They wanted to go swimming one night, and so we took them out to one of our lakes. At the time I had a portable phone, one of the first. It weighed twenty-one pounds, and only eleven people in the state of Michigan could be on that phone system at any given time. It cost $4,000—a lot of money. We’re in a boat, and Jack Bruce wanted to make a call and he dropped the fucking phone in the water. That’s $4,000 going down. We brought it home and took hairdryers to dry it out. And it worked.
    Rick Kraniak, aka Rick K ( booking agent ): When I was in high school, I had a part-time job in the Dearborn post office, and I would see all these Grande Post Cards that Russ would send to Blue Cheer, Jefferson Airplane, whoever. It was cool being able to read what he was saying to them.
    Leni Sinclair ( photographer, wife of John Sinclair ): Russ Gibb paid us $25 a night to do the light show every week at the Grande. There was Gary Grimshaw, RobinSommers, and me and two or three other people. The light stand was way up at the top of the room, so you could project it on all the walls on the stage. There was no air conditioning, so when the light show was on and all these lights going and all these machines going, the temperatures up there used to go to 120 degrees. We would always be sweating.
    Robin Sommers: It was Grimshaw, Leni, and Sigrid—who would later marry Fred Smith—with me. We made $25 a night at the Grande, and I never saw a penny because it went to Trans Love. We had four overhead projectors and four slide projectors, and there was a light stand built in there, twelve feet off the floor. The ballroom had a wooden dance floor, and all the way around was a fifteen-foot-wide ledge where you could sit or stand. There were also booths that were three steps up from the dance floor. The light stand was at one end; the place was a rectangle shape with corners cut off. We projected on walls and the stage behind the band, which played like in a bay. I had these slides with thin glass on them and special inks and colors, and I used this 1,500-watt overhead projector and put these slides in there. I put vegetable or baby oil in there and then water and then food coloring.
    Russ Gibb: The weirdest guy I ever booked was Sun Ra. But I loved him