When the NUGGETS album came out and inspired the bands THE CRAMPS, THE GORIES, THE DEMOLITION DOLL RODS and THE FLESHTONES. rock and roll music of the early and mid-1960'S was discovered by an audience eager to hear the garage hits, college bands and one-hit wonders. Missing in action in the revival is the legendary HIDEOUT record label. From Harper Woods, Michigan, this local label and teen club would chronicle the punk and garage roots of musicians that would, in the 1970's and 1980's. dominate the airwaves. Part of the reason that so little is known about the label is the music is so difficult to come by today. The 45's don't even show up on the e-bay auction site. The (now out of print) CD THE BEST OF HIDEOUT RECORDS is the first time we can hear what was growing from the club and the recordings are superbly restored. In fact, this may be the best sounding of all the compilation CDs of 1960's garage bands. But before I get ahead of myself, let's take a look at HIDEOUT RECORDS.

David Leone was a college student who all through his teenage years had wished he'd had a place to hang out. His dad passed away and left him $1000.00, which he used to raise seed money to rent a rectangular building at Eight Mile and Harper Road that was usually used for wedding parties. The idea was simple: on Friday nights rent the hall, put in bands and charge kids 16 and up a buck to see local bands. It was 1963, and it was long before raves, but the concept was the same. I spoke to David over the phone about those days.

MIKE: So, what did this wedding hall look like?

DAVID: It was a rectangular building. We had a ticket booth inside, and you entered the room and there was a bar against one wall and a four foot stage set up on the far right. That was it. We would put a sign up that said THE HIDEOUT outside and that's all we did to transform it.

MIKE: When I first started going to concerts in the 1960's there were often no monitors-

DAVE: Right! We had speaker amps and mics in the early days, no monitors or board system. In the 1960's jazz musicians had those things but rock didn't. There was a microphone that hung down from the ceiling but that was about it. In those days hiring a rock band to play a wedding party was never done, so the hall was set up for dee-jays but not live instruments.

When we started there weren't a lot of bands. Most of the music scene was black. The difference between Beatles fans and Stones fans back then was very pronounced. The Beatles fans had toys, dolls, everyone who liked them tried to dress like them. They were safe. The Stones would get arrested for pissing on a gas tank. I would say the crowd we got was Stones influenced and so were the bands. We appealed to the
bad kids, and there were lots of fights in the pre-hippie days.

The club saw it through the era to our closing in 1968 with the MC5. From booze to pot. From Stones-like swagger to hippie revolution. Mike, it almost seems like a different lifetime ago.

MIKE- I was in the counterculture of the 1960's as a teeny-bopper. That era was pre-women's liberation and I often tell people that straights were having sex the way gays do, lots of it and most of it without string's attached.

DAVE- Oh yeah. The room breathed sex. The pill was out and it was unbelievable.

MIKE- So what acts did you start with?

DAVE - There weren't lots of white rock bands, I found this band THE TREMOLOS and got them to change their name to a TV show I really liked back then, THE FUGITIVE. They became THE FUGITIVES and our house band. For the first year they played our Fridays for $50 or $60. The admission was only $1.00, remember, and everyone was happy with that.

At first we thought of calling the place THE LIBRARY so kids could tell their parents they were going to the library Friday night!

MIKE - How did kids find out about the club?

DAVE - Word of mouth. The first night we opened we had 80 people, and THE FUGITIVES did a version of "Louie Louie" with the line "Every night at ten, I fuck your girl again" and word started to spread that we did a dirty version of the song and there were no chaperones present. The next week we had 125 and then over 500 kids showed up. The attendance never went down again.

MIKE - THE FUGITIVES must have been working hard.

The second thing that happened after I opened THE HIDEOUT was that groupies began to appear.

MIKE - And this was probably pretty wild for you.

DAVE - Oh yes. I couldn't believe it. The sexual energy in the crowd was so strong. The back room, which was kind of a dressing room, was more often than not an orgy room. There was one groupie that I remember who would jack off the band members into her makeup compacts and close them and take it home. I wonder if she still has them. A couple of times, she did band members while they were on stage!

Although it was pre-women's lib, the women were the aggressive ones. You could spot the groupies from the other girls, because they would come on to the bands the way guys came on to women. No subtlety whatsoever. Those were amazing times.

MIKE - So, how did the label start?

DAVE - It was a thank you live album of sorts. I pressed three hundred copies of THE FUGITIVES LIVE AT DAVE'S HIDEOUT and we sold out in one night! There were ten songs, we did the album on two tracks. On one track we had already recorded the songs, and we put a crowd of kids together and recorded them making the live sounds. This was long before mobile sound trucks.

MIKE - Why only three hundred copies?

DAVE - I was so swamped with college and running the club. I just never got around to it. We could have sold thousands though. If you had told me then that people would be bidding $300, $400 and more for copies of the album thirty years later, or even that collectors would know about it, I wouldn't have believed you. I would have kept a box of them! The night before we put them on sale we got together a lot of the regulars and had a party mask taping the cover together!

MIKE - And that's when other acts began to come to the club?

DAVE - Right. So often I would help put the people together, or write the band a song to record on what was now the HIDEOUT label.

MIKE - My favorite punk anthem on THE BEST OF HIDEOUT RECORDS has to be the UNDERDOGS singing "Get Down on Your Knees". It's a real if-you-want-me-back-beg song.

DAVE - I wrote that. I was mad at one girlfriend or another.

MIKE - I love those angry punk anthems, especially when they have a hook.

DAVE - Mike, in those days calling someone punk would start a fight!

MIKE - So a real record label grew out of the club.

DAVE - Oh yes. When the Quatro sisters showed up at the club, Suzi, Patty and Arlene, I introduced them to Nancy Ball.

MIKE Nancy was called the Nico of America.

DAVE - She was the most beautiful woman you ever saw. In those days guys didn't really trust woman bands, so the girls had to be a little more outrageous than their male counterparts. And play better. I don't think there was a guy in the hall that didn't fall for her. I heard she left music to get married and have a family, but to this day I still remember her on stage, as the entire crowd watched her every move.

Suzi always had rock in her blood. She had attitude. I met her when she was a kid, just 14. We had her sell Cokes at the bar. Within a year I had helped them get instruments and THE PLEASURE SEEKERS were born.

MIKE - The song "Never Thought You'd Leave Me" is pure riot grrrl attitude thirty years before the fact.

MIKE - I think the most startling thing on THE BEST OF HIDEOUT RECORDS is the BOB SEGER AND THE LAST HERD material. This is not the Bob Seger I heard on the radio in the 1980's. His sound had changed radically from the music on this CD. I think "East Side Story" on the CD is a brilliant working class song that sets the stage for BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN years later. It really is a revelation.

DAVE - He was 19 when I met him. 19. He brought in his guitar and I immediately heard what a great song EAST SIDE STORY was. It blew me away. He wrote that as a kid!

DAVE - Yes. THE HIDEOUTS. Psychedelics hit the scene and they became THE MUSHROOMS.

MIKE - "Burned" is quite a number. Why did you leave THE HIDEOUT?

DAVE - I got drafted. I had made over $80,000 in the year before, pretty good for a college age kid. The crowds had swelled so large that we had to sell membership cards for a buck apiece - and we sold over 4000!

After a six month absence I discovered that the club was in hock for $160,000, the person I had picked to run the club had signed bands at the club up for his management company, and the club had gone to hell. It was all over.

MIKE - Why did you leave the music business?

I still do music though. Right now I manage a band called THE HOWLING DIABLOS. They played with SPONGE at Metro and SHAG at Cubby Bear in the Chicago area. So if the band plays in your area, come up and say hello!

THE BEST OF HIDEOUT RECORDS is no longer available. Check your used CD sources.

Cheers,                       
MICHAEL FLORES