The first time we played at the Moravian Lounge ( or the “The Mo” as we called it) was in the fall of 1976. The gig was 5 sets a night, 5 days a week and we ended up staying there (the first time) for about 50 weeks. The Mo was in a suburb called Clinton Township in the outer ring of the Detroit Metropolitan area, not far from lake Sinclair in Macomb county. I had turned 18 the previous May and was already pretty indoctrinated to the bar band life.
Most of the area was farms until the 1960s but there were still plenty of farms and farmers around. The patrons of the bar were mostly people who worked in a nearby auto plant or family farms close by.
When you’re at the same place for too long you get to know more than you want to about the people you see every day, especially when the booze is free-flowing and you’re at a age when you’re thinking about sex 24 hours a day.
The bar was owned by the Kallikak family, and at this time was run by the middle brother named Teddy.
Teddy was a big guy who apparently didn’t have dental insurance, with a glass eye and a hot temper. When fights broke out, which they often did, he was the one that went into action. I never had a problem with him, but I heard him yelling “ready to go” many a time. There were lots of fights at the Mo.
His girlfriend was named Annie. She was a part-time waitress at the bar, but like many of the women who worked at “The Mo,” she also danced at a nearby “gentlemen’s” club a few nights a week, where the “real money” was.
She and Teddy used to get into it pretty good sometimes and he would knock her around and slap her. One night it got really bad. I had gone out to parking lot on a break and walked back in the kitchen entrance, past by his office door. They were screaming at one another. I could hear there was some kind of physical altercation happening, like pushing and shoving, then someone being slammed into a wall. She was crying and telling him to stop. It made me feel sick to my stomach.
The next day when I walked in she was tending bar, he wasn’t there yet. She had a big black eye that was covered in make-up, but it wasn’t hard not to notice even in the dark bar, especially for the people who heard the scuffle and knew Eddie. She looked like a scared ghost waiting for her attacker to walk through the door. He was a real fucking prince and I got the feeling she wished both he and she were dead. She must have been in a tough spot.
The first time we played at the Moravian Lounge the bar was owned by a guy named Louie. Louie was probably the more sane of the three brothers in the family. It was cleaner and smaller than Charlie Brown’s, a blue-collar place for sure, but not a biker bar. Initially, it was a one-week stint and seemed pretty normal. By the time the week was up, Dennis had made arrangements for us to come back for several months.
The Spiders
At the back of the bar, near the exit, were the regulars that the guys in the band referred to as “the spiders.” You didn’t want to get caught by the spiders in the spider’s web, because they were pretty much all nuts, and they could hold you there for a while talking crazy shit. They might even try to pick a fight or something. They were the five or six guys sitting on stools, the first people you would see if you went in the rear entrance, the guys who gave you the first impression of the bar, where you would decide if you were going to stay or not.
“The Spiders” were Eddie and his brother Tom, whom I referred to as “The Baby;” a guy they called “Adameyer” (real name Adam Meyer); a big younger guy named Ralph; and a couple of others who radiated the aura of evil; a must to avoid, they may have been Borg like on Star Trek.
“The Baby” had the same proportions as a giant toddler, built much in the same way as actor Tor Johnson of “Plan Nine From Outer Space” fame, only more toddleresque and less athletic. I never saw him do much except “baby walk” and “baby dance” occasionally. Babies are naturally a bit bow legged because of being in the cramped quarters of the womb. They also tend to bend their knees a bit to help themselves balance and support their body weight. “The Baby” had all of those characteristics and was a bit of a snappy dresser to boot.
Ralph was a big, athletic looking guy, who I’m guessing worked for GM. He had a really nice Chevy Malibu with a stick shift that he would occasionally squeal out of the parking lot in. He was a nice enough guy except when he wasn’t, and that was awful.
I don’t think we were at “The Mo” for more than a couple of weeks when Dennis brought in Don Jones. It may even have been at the behest of Eddie the owner. Dennis knew Don from another oldies band called “Crunch and the Daddy Cools.” Don played sax, guitar, flute, and harmonica, and sang. I guess that made him an “all around man.” Musically, Don was icing on a cake, personality-wise, he brought a deep, dark, dropped-out-of-art-school sense of humor that we all took to right away. He also came from a slightly different place than we did, because he was kind of a “Jazz boy.” For decades he used to take horn lessons from the late, great Sam Sanders at Oakland University. Just like us, he took his music seriously, he was a quick study, and he was funny. Still is. I became friends with both he and his wife Leslie and about eight years after we met, I married Leslie’s sister Tammy.
The Pacer
Around the time we moved to the Moravian, Dennis bought an AMC Pacer station wagon. The Pacer was described by Motor Trend magazine in 1976 as “a flying fishbowl” and “George Jetson’s mode of transportation.” On CBS news, as the car debuted, it was declared “one of the fifteen ugliest cars ever made.” That said, it was still reliable transportation and not nearly as bad as some of the other gas guzzlers of that time; Dennis’s had a bitchin’ AM/FM/ Stereo 8-track player as well.
https://www.autobarnclassiccars.com/vehicles/218/1975-amc-pacer
https://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/farewell-from-keith/Content?oid=2170302
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMC_Pacer#cite_note-10
http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Station-Albums/WJR-50-Years.pdf
Riding in that car, the two tapes I remember listening to the most were Louis Jordan’s Greatest Hits and Al Green’s Greatest Hits Volume II. We used to also listen to The Fabulous Coachman on WDET, or sometimes Weekend Jazz Scene with Gene Elzy on WJR during breaks.
The Pacer became sort of the de facto clubhouse when it was parked at the Mo. Truth be told, after a while during the summer, we used to stop at the liquor store on the way to the bar so we could drink in the parking lot as opposed to hanging out in the bar.
When you play at the same place for a while, you can get REALLY sick of the songs on the juke box.
Dale Reed
Rick Beohms bought a Peavey PA while we were playing at Charlie Brown’s. It consisted of a powered eight-channel mixer, two cabinets loaded with two fifteen-inch speakers with a “hyperbolic horn,” and a hundred-foot snake, so the microphones were plugged in at the stage, but the sound man could be out in the audience.
Dale Reed was our sound man. He was a childhood friend of Dennis’s. For a while Dale wore roller skates when he mixed, I guess so he could get around the room better to check out the sound and look at girls. That, or it was just more fun that way. I’m sure he must have had a day gig, because I don’t think we paid him much of anything, but he was a very nice smiling sort of guy and a fine sound mixer. He married one the Moravian women, named Cindy. About a decade later, I heard Dale had committed suicide. I understand he had suffered with many long battles with depression over the years. The mind can be very cruel.
Stylin’
Brylcreem Dippity-Do
When Marshall joined the band back at the Stock Exchange we all went down to an old fashioned clothing store and bought matching suits with cummerbunds. Rick, Marshall, and I had grey suits and Dennis had a white suit and wore a black shirt and white tie. There are some pictures around still.
At some point we expanded our wardrobe further and got blue crushed-velvet suits. We also used to put Brylcreem or Dippity Do in our hair and slick it back like greasers. The first time I put Brylcreem in my hair I realized it was like putting lithium grease on your head, it took days to get it out. I preferred the water-soluble Dippity Do because it rinsed out with water, though Brylcreem did have kind of a recognizable old fashioned smell to it. At one point, my hair was long enough so I tied it back into a pony tail, like a greaser Mullet. Anyway, for a while , we looked supper club ready.
We always did pretty well at the Mo. There were always a least a couple of hours a night where there were people drinking and dancing unless there was a snowstorm or something. There was an ever-revolving cast of characters, especially girls to talk to, so that made nights more interesting and the time fly by. It’s always good to have a muse to perform to.
Occasionally “normal” people would come by; people out on dates coming in after dinner for drinks and dancing, parties of four and six, girls-night-out type of stuff. There was one older married couple who would come in pretty regularly and dance the Madison. I was never much of a dancer, but Dennis was astute enough in dance to recognize the Madison when he saw it. I always love to see couples who can really dance. I like the effort and commitment it reflects, and the pride they showed for each other. It’s a deep love. The original Version of Shake Rattle and Roll by Big Joe Turner, the one with the line, “Way you wear those dresses, the sun comes shinin’ through, I can’t believe my eyes, all that mess belongs to you. “ You know, the GOOD version. It swings at about 140 BPM, I bet you could do the Madison to that.
The Madison started in Columbus Ohio and was popular from the late 50s to the mid 60’s and it’s line dance, to get the whole dance floor goin’.
The jazz pianist Ray Bryant recorded "Madison Time" for Columbia Records in 1959.[3] Billboard stated that "The footwork for the Madison dance is carefully and clearly diagrammed for the terpers. Terpers is a word meaning dancers or entertainers.
That record is nothing but fabulous. It has a bunch hilarious call outs in it like “ the Double Cross, the Cleveland Box, The Basketball (with Wilt Chamberlain), the Big "M", the "T" Time, the Birdland, and The Rifleman. And my favorite "The Jackie Gleason" based on a tap dance move known as "Shuffle Off to Buffalo." The song is also featured in a scene of the John Waters movie Hairspray. It’s also VERY popular in Cambodia of all places. Talk about the power of soft diplomacy.
In September of 77’ my buddy Stew and I moved to go to an audio engineering school. It was life-altering. When I couldn’t figure out how to stay in NY after school was over, so I moved back to Detroit for a while.
The Robots Revisited
Don Jones, Dennis Quinn, Leon Chalnick
By 1978 though, the reality of “too much of a good thing” also created boom times for driving fatalities, unintended pregnancy, a decline in infant health, and violent crime by eighteen to twenty-one-year-olds.
In response, Michigan was the first state in the union to raise the drinking age to nineteen, then raised again a few months later to twenty-one.
Additionally, in 1978 unemployment started to rise after decades of nearly full employment and the value of the dollar fell against European currencies. From ’78 to ’79 the price of oil increased more than sixty percent. Generally speaking, things started to feel different around the country and in Detroit, nobody was feeling particularly optimistic.
When I returned to Detroit from NY in the summer of ’78, I found the age-old adage “you can’t go home again” to be true. With Denny and the Robots, the cast and feel were much different. When Marshall left he was replaced by Leon Chalnick. The guy who replaced me was named Bill Hammel, or Wild Bill Hammel, as they called him. The trumpet and trombone player were gone except on select weekends.
Legislation had just been passed at the behest of insurance companies to raise the drinking age back up to twenty-one. I vaguely remember standing in the audience at the Exit Inn with a guy named Dave Saffron and heard him and a friend talking about it. I remember it, because about thirty seconds into the conversation, some random person from out of the blue shoved Dave. Dave shoved him back and the guy fell to the ground. I think it surprised them both. It was a crazy place.
When I came back and saw them for the first time the guys were playing a gig at a placed called The Exit Inn on John R in Madison Heights.
I think it took about a night of me hanging around to convince Dennis to let me rejoin playing percussion and singing a few songs. Bill was more than generous about it. He and I actually split what would have been one band member’s pay for a couple of weeks. After we were done at the Exit Inn, Bill left for greener pastures; so did Rick Boehms, and Rick was replaced by Stewart Simon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._history_of_alcohol_minimum_purchase_age_by_state
https://study.com/academy/lesson/michigan-drinking-age-history.html
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/02/10/you-must-be-21-to-drink/lowering-the-drinking-age-has-serious-consequences
http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/1978.html
Other things were changing, too. Disco, which was seen before mostly as something to scorn, had arrived in the Midwest in all of its glittering glory. Venues with live music were installing house sound and disco balls at a devastating pace. It was a lot cheaper to buy a disco ball and disco-nightmare style lighting and hire a DJ, than to pay bands a living wage to a five piece band.
I’m going to guess we at the Mo for 6 weeks. After that we bounced around between places like The White Lake inn, The Belanger House in Royal Oak, some clubs called The Back Seat North, South, East, and West spattered around metro Detroit, and of course the Mo. As I recall, though, the last time we came in to set up our gear at The Mo, there was a disco ball above the dance floor, and there was a DJ there on the nights bands didn’t play, and Eddie was trying to sell the bar.
We knew there were whole new music and cultural movements in the forms of Punk, and “New Wave” that lent themselves to live performance, and what we were doing in the “Oldies Band,” the nature of its nostalgic roots, made us hold-outs of a different era, much like the Big Bands were in the 1960s as Rock n’ Roll devastated their stronghold.
It was complicated, though. The “Nuggets” compilation put together by Lenny Kaye in 1972, the one that was seen by many as almost a blueprint for punk music, shit, we were playing most of those songs back at Charlie Brown’s. We were most certainly influenced by the same stuff as the guys in the Ramones and the Romantics; we just didn’t really have a unified vision to frame what we were doing in that way. We were framed as an “oldies band.”
Bookies
Coldcock- Photo by Sue Rynski
Don Jones and I started eyeballing what was happening at a club in Detroit called Bookies. Urban areas always lead, and that was certainly the case here.
The Mutants
At first we were inclined to dismiss the punk rockers and didn’t think they had the chops we did. We were fucking idiots. There were posers in that scene of course, like any, but there were people taking risks, making good records, and having success. The Romantics, Mutants, Coldcock, and the Sillies come to mind. Art and innovation are about taking from different baskets to create something new, and even if it was something strikingly similar to something old, it was marketed as something new. At least those bands were looking forward instead of backward.
In fact, my brothers Mitchell and John were more in tune to that scene than I was, but once I actually went down to Six Mile and checked out Bookies and the bands, I realized there was definitely a lot of common ground between us. The biggest difference, though, was that they were growing and we were dying. People weren’t so enamored by Fonzi anymore.
Adolescences young and old needed to dress up and act out on their own terms. They didn’t want Happy Days, they wanted fucking anarchy in the UK, they were bored, they needed to get jacked up and sweaty, they wanted to jump up and down in a swarm of chaos. This was the late 70s god dammit, they were sick of the old bullshit, they needed their own bullshit!
For the moment however, back at oldies bars, as the clock ticked down, there were places where musicians could play for weeks at the same joint and make decent money, but they were diminishing. There just wasn’t a big enough market to support it anymore. Those 50s and 60s songs we played had become “the standards” for the blue collar and older generation and they were holding on to it. I don’t think they were big on change. Those people didn’t go out as often as they once did, but those songs represented their roots, and they’ll never let em’ go.
Happy Birthday
I have a few vivid memories from that time. One is of Don and I both dressed up in drag for a Halloween gig at The White Lake Inn. I wore a tube top and one of Don’s wife Leslie’s skirts. I’m sure that outfit never fit her the same again. Leslie put a bunch of makeup on us and I doused myself with a bunch cologne. I’m guessing we were more Monty Python-looking than RuPaul. It was silly.
Another time, I had this yellow 72 VW Beetle that had a hole in the passenger-side floor. Don and I were driving home and at least one of us had an open beer in the car. When we saw the lights flashing in the rearview mirror, we dropped the bottles through the floor before getting pulled over. The cops had seen one of us take a drink before driving by them and had us get out of the car so they could search it. Naturally they didn’t find anything. Eventually one of them said, “Well, if I were working at that dump, I guess I’d drink too,” then let us go.
The big standout memory, though, was from May of 1979. The Spiders knew it was my birthday. They got a vision in their heads of laying me out under a row of beer tappers and giving me a soak at best and water (beer) boarding me at worst. I didn’t think that was such a good idea, so I slipped out the door after the last set and climbed up on the roof. I figured when they didn’t see me, they’d lose interest in their plan and go on their merry way. They didn’t seem that ambitious. I was wrong…WRONG!
I was up on the roof sitting behind a kitchen vent stack. I heard them come outside, then I thought I heard them go back inside. I figured I was safe. Then, the big guy Ralph must have gotten the idea to look for me up on the roof. He sees me, picks me up like a rag doll, tossing me off of the roof into the hands of the spiders. I started to fight back a bit and got my head smashed into a door jamb, as they carried back in the bar, which of course bled profusely. These guys, being focused on THEIR vision, didn’t give a shit about my head cut, but now they wanted to DROWN me under the taps.
At this point I’m in submission mode: there was not a fucking thing I could do but let the process play out. So, I got drenched in beer and eventually none other than Sally showed some humanity and bandaged up my head.
After that night I started thinking to myself, “I really got to get the fuck out of here and back to New York. What the hell am I doing here?”
Shortly after that, my mom asked John and I if we wanted to join her on a trip to New York and visit Marshall and Ione in Pelham. My mom is pretty smart. That was exactly what I needed.
I was talking to Don recently and he told me that after I left, Louie sold the bar. He remembered the last night they owned it, the Spiders and some of the customers went in the back room where the liquor dispensing system was, removed the gallon bottles from the system and carried them to where they were sitting, now drinking directly from the gallon bottles. Don and I laughed out loud talking about the people who may have walked in and thought it was “gallon night” at the Mo.
The walls of the stage area at the Mo were made up of one-square-foot pieces of mirrored glass.
At the end of the night, when the guys were breaking down gear, Rick noticed one of the mirror squares had a crack in it. He thought he should tell Eddie so he could replace it for the new owners. Then he went back up on the stage and was winding up some cords when BAM! BAM! BAM! Eddie had a fucking pistol and started firing at the mirrored squares. I guess it scared the crap out of everybody. Rick told me he went into shock.
Eddie was fucking nutz. After the bar had closed, Don heard from one of the guys who had worked there, that Eddie had shot and killed his brother Tom. I was not a bit surprised.
https://musicbusinessresearch.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/the-recession-in-the-music-industry-a-cause-analysis/
See You Again Tomorrow
A few months before Dennis was diagnosed with stage four cancer, we got together and tried to record a some music for my audiobook.. He told me a story about the Night Marshall left to move to NY and join the cast of Beatlemania. Marshall continued to play with Dennis for a while after I moved to NY to go to school.
After playing together for more than a year, Dennis and Marshall decided they wanted to make a record. Marshall wrote a song called “See You Again Tomorrow” and the flipside of the single was “Say Hello to Goodbye” penned by local songwriters Rick Cioffi and Fred Todd. Dennis booked time at historic United Sound Systems at 5840 2nd Ave. in Detroit, the site of the first recording for Berry Gordy's Tamla label in 1959, starting what would become Motown Records (“Come to Me” by Marv Johnson). Records by Charlie Parker, John Lee Hooker, and Aretha Franklin were recorded there as well.
For the session, Marshall brought in Dan Logan (bass), Gary Sussman (guitar), Steve Smeekens (piano). Dennis played drums, Don played sax, and Marshall acted as the producer. Dan, Gary, and Steve were from Marshall’s high school band.
Dennis recalled them snooping around the studio looking for ghosts and buried treasure when they came upon a celeste buried in a closet. As soon as they saw it they knew it HAD to be on the record and made some changes to the arrangement to accommodate it.
Robot’s Single
The session went on all night and Dennis had to drive Marshall to the airport to catch an early morning flight. It’s actually a really cool recording.
I saw on Discogs, where the 45 has sold for as much as $100. That’s pretty cool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Sound_Systems
