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for a good reason. Whenever I’d have a big band, I wanted to do two shows a night. Now, we had a ticket policy where if you came to the Grande and you got a ticket, you were there until 2:30 a.m. We were already violating the law with the number of people we were jamming in to the Grande. I think there was a legal thing of twelve to fifteen hundred, and we were packing two to three thousand in there a night. So I could have a big band and book them two shows, an early and a late. After the first show I put Sun Ra up. With Sun Ra, you can take the first five minutes and you’re wondering what’s going on. After about a half an hour you’re going, “This is shit! I can’t stand this!” People would leave. We’d practically empty out the place, and that allowed me to bring in more people. That was my strategy with Sun Ra. I never told him. We paid him. He was happy and he was getting the gig and people were hearing him. John Sinclair was happy because he loved Sun Ra.
    John Sinclair: In the spring of ’69 I brought in Sun Ra. We rented the house next door and they lived next to us. They were about the weirdest Negroes in America, there’s no getting around that. Sun Ra just wanted to make music and stun the audiences with his great ideas. I was happy any time I could get them a show.
    Russ Gibb: The Grande had such a great sound because there was horsehair in the plaster. We knew that they had done that at the Orchestra Hall and so we had them do it at the Grande. It absorbed the sound rather than having it bounce.
    Dennis Dunaway ( Alice Cooper, bassist ): It’s interesting how people called it the Grande, when I think it was really the Grand ballroom with just a European spelling. But they called it the Grande. The Grande was sort of our rival because we got a lot more gigs at the Eastown Theater. We related to the Eastown Theater a lot more. And the Stooges played the Eastown a lot more. We played with the Who there one time, and the place had this curtain, like a movie screen. So when we opened for the Who, they brought down the curtain so Keith’s drums were behind the curtain and then we were set up in front of the curtain. When we did “Black Juju,” I thought, “Wow, the drums sounded incredible tonight.” When we got done with our set, one of our roadies came and told us that Keith Moon went out to his kit and was playing right along with Neal through the whole song. That gave me the idea to stand behind the screen when the Who played. If that screen wasn’t there, I could have set my hand right on Keith Moon’s head. I watched the Who do their whole set there. Nobody could see me. The Who would come together between songs, and you’d think they’re discussing what they were going to do next. No. They were coming together going “Fuck you!” “No, fuck you!”
    Norm Liberman ( Frut, vocalist ): When people got tired of the Grande, we had places in Macomb County, which is north of Detroit. There were two geodesic domes out in the middle of nowhere, that was the Frut Palace. Every band that played there got $400, and we had every band in Detroit play there. My mother would take the money so that no one would steal it. I was standing there one night and my mother’s taking the money, and Alice Cooper says, “Mrs. Liberman, why don’t you let the guy over there inside?” “No, Alice, he can panhandle a little more before he comes in.”
    John Kosloskey, aka Kozmo ( Frut, bassist ): One of the guys around the Frut, his dad was the pastor at a local church in Mt. Clemens. The pastor wanted to have a gathering for the youth that would, you know, put them in the right direction. They had a hall at his church, and we played and gave everyone a hit of THC as they went in. We were exposing people to a lot of the creative things of the mind.
    Norm Liberman: We also had the Frut Cellar inside this old hotel in Mt.