Looney Toons

The Gar Wood Mansion is just the place to have a Halloween party; it sits perched on the deadly Detroit River, tons of chemicals washing into Lake St. Clair every minute, built about 1925 by hydroplane racer and motor car Motor City magnate Gar Wood who was rich and famous and more than slightly decadent.

Hundred foot ballroom and fifty foot pool, vast expanses of bedroom and bath, servant’s quarters and for only $800 a month we’ll rent it to the hippies, who can keep it clean, ’cause there’ll always be someone else to rent it, if they don’t. And if not we’ll make it into a ‘nursing home’ and have plenty of time to dump the bodies in the river if no one shows up to get ’em.

Instead, some .‘musicians’ grab hold of it and throw parties to hype their Stone Front monstrosity. Their manager says that their drummer, Jerry Capone, is A1 Capone’s great-grandson. There were 2000 people at the Gar Wood party after the Stones concert in November. That got around the country quick enough and Leon Russell and Richie Havens and Mitch Ryder and Jethro Tull and all were gonna come. Only Leon showed, he apparently can’t miss a super-session.

This crowd was enough to make Edgar Allan Poe puke. Scary Halloween garb and some of ’em even wore regular clothes (for them) and made it worse. There were dudes with fictious humps on their backs and lots of kids with real monkies.

Slow down for a minute and think about it...

Everywhere else it’s the Sly and the Family Airplanes who sniff cocaine. Not in Detroit, here the teenybops have all got deep into it — lots of hippie — cocaine, which is what you might call the skag that is generally passed off on the unwary as coke. Here all the kids at the Eastown can make the scene, cause the scene is small even though it’s still too BIGTIME to bear.

I only wonder if there’ll be any difference between these kids od’s and Janis Joplin’s. I bet they won’t have even $4 in their hands, though.

In 1965 rock and roll meant something. It did right up to about 1967 or real early ’68. That’s also when dope stopped meaning anything. It’s been down hill ever since, even if most of us didn’t catch on til too late. Now all it means is that it’s so relatable anybody can figure out how to fuck people up behind the monster scene which will eventually eat its way through you and devour your heart. And Janis left $2500 so her friends could party, but they only spent $1600, it said in the newspapers. Oh, this is the golden era of rock and roll all right. Nelson Algren said that.

Why can’t I go to the Eastown anymore? Not because the music is so bad because the music has been bad for the last two years and I coped before. I used to wait to hear somebody ask for “Acid? Grass? Hash?” and ask ’em if they had any cocaine. They’d be flabbergasted. Now they say “Yeah,” and pull out the same brown shit. Shit means junk sometimes. Junk can mean heroin.

No, the kids are definitely sad and that probably means you’re sad (read lame) and that might mean that I’m lamest of all. The feeling sinks in with inevitable pain. The solution might be to get away from it but how can you get away from it? Well, then, the solution might be to stop it all together; but how do you do that?

I think we should find the strongest dude with the longest hair at the Eastown and cut the hair off and poke his eyes out and bring him in in a year or so and place his hands on the pillars in the front and let him bring it all down. Because that kind of decay just has to be wiped off the face of the earth, before it wipes you off, you know?

At the end of that party, just when I left (the party went on, though) the band struck into “Volunteers” and all the kids cheered, ’cause they thought it meant what it could never mean, not in the good old Gar Wood mansion and I looked up and saw the devil standing there all red and with his face painted red, ecstatically dancing and driving his subjects onward.

I had a real cool time.