‘Eddy was his own scene’: A pivotal member of the Phoenix underground remembered – The Arizona Republic

Alan Bishop of underground avant-garde rock legends Sun City Girls is reflecting on Eddy Detroit, the longtime friend he lost to suicide on June 15.

"Eddy was his own scene," Bishop says when asked what made the willfully eccentric folk-punk icon stand out on the local scene.

"He was like a comedian or an actor creating his own realities and he truly understood what many never realize that unless you are a dreamer, you went absolutely nowhere in this world."

Detroit went many places in this world, whether busking on the streets of London, where he moved in the late '60s, drumming for the Church of Satan while livingin Hollywood or reading tarot cards by phone through the Psychic Friends Network, famously hostedby Dionne Warwick.

Born Edward Michael Dunn in 1952, Detroit, whose stage name is a tribute to his hometown, had been living in Phoenix since the spring of 1981.

It was in the course of recruiting musicians for 1982's "Immortal God's,"a debut album of exotica-tinged psychedelic folk, that the outsider artist met Bishop, one of several luminaries from the local underground to appear on the album.

"A friend suggested we meet up," Bishop recalls. "He saw my Tyrannosaurus Rex albums sitting in front of a speaker and we hit it off immediately."

Bishop would've worked with anyone who was unique.

"At the beginning of the '80s, the only 'progressive'music was independent or underground," Bishop says.

"So when you found someone who wasnt buying all the over-produced (expletive), well, you gravitated towards them."

A talented percussionist whose aesthetic was heavily influenced by Martin Denny and '60s exotica, Detroit was known to join Sun City Girls on stage and in the studio, appearing on several of their more than 50 albums.

The day Detroit died, Sun City Girls posted a video on Facebook, filmed in 1983,of Detroit in his element, leading his friends in an unhinged, shambolic performance of "Beelzeebub," the opening track on his first album, that at times suggests a manpossessed by Yoko Ono.

It's beyond electrifying, far more punkish and chaotic than the version on the album.

"Eddy was someone I always rooted for," Bishop says.

"He had an obsessive sincerity that ran through all his songs and his lifestyle. He never stopped believing in what he did and was always excited by a new project, usually seeing them to completion. Ill miss his crazy humor, his observations, and his stubbornness to remain off the grid."

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Michael Pistrui of Fat Gray Cat, another Valley band that often benefited from Detroit's percussion skills, refers to 1982's "Immortal God's" as "literally an Arizona punk-rock all-star record."

In addition to Bishop, it features the talents of Charlie Gocher ofSun City Girls, Dan Clark of the Feederz and Victory Acres, and Mary Clark, alsoof Victory Acres.

"He was part of the Mad Gardens scene," Pistrui says, referring the legendary Phoenix punk performance space that shared a name with New York City's Madison Square Garden.

"Tony (Victor of Placebo Records) said that Eddy just showed up one night and said that he was half man and half goat and wanted to play his bongos. So Tony started letting him play between the bands. He started playing with the Poet's Corners guys that did kind of a jazz punk-rock thing. And then he started playing with Sun City Girls."

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Cris Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets thinks of Detroit as a pivotal memberof the early '80s Arizona music scene.

"He called himself Eddy Detroit," Kirkwood says.

"But he really seemed to fit in with a certain kind of crusty Phoenix underground vibe that I thought Mighty Sphincter kind of embodied and us and Sun City Girls, this sort of feel that Phoenix managed to spark at a particular point."

At the same time, he says, with a laugh, Detroit was "his own unique creature."

Kirkwood points to how freely and enthusiastically Detroit would talk about his foot fetish and other points of interest people tend to downplay in casual conversation.

"You gotta love someone who's that open to break that ground of it's OK to be who you are," Kirkwoodsays. "He was just kind of fearless. That's why his albums are sought after to the degree that they are by people who like that sort of thing."

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Kirkwood was thrilled to have an opportunity to make a record with Detroit a few years back when he produced an album by a band called Moonlight Magic, a Phoenix-based lounge actdoing instrumental '60s-style exotica, bossa nova, samba and lounge music.

By then, Detroit had done a series of exotica-themed local bands Banana Boat, the Tropical Island, Mondo Exotica and the Garden.

"What a fun record to make," he says of "Phoenixotica," an album released in 2018.

"This is part of what punk rock is, right? Just that grab bag of 'If I say it's art, it is.'"

Ruth Wilson and Jaime Paul Lamb of Moonlight Magic both say there would be no Moonlight Magic if it weren't for their desire to build a band around Detroit.

"He was such a stellar drummer in that arena," Wilson says, "with bossa novas andthose Latin beats. He was the master."

He was trained in jazz, playingtraditional grip, although his first band, in Detroit, was a rock 'n' roll cover band calledthe Premieres.

"I don't think he could even hold the sticks like your typical rock bonehead just clubbing away at the drums as hard as he can," Lamb says.

"Eddy was a realdrummer, and I mean a trap set drummer, but he was also an amazing hand percussionist. Just an incredible, incredible musician."

So incredible, in fact, that when he parted ways with Moonlight Magic, Wilson figured that might be the end for that whole project.

"I thought, 'How are you gonna find a drummer to replace Eddy Detroit?" she says.

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A lot of times, when someone dies, Lamb says, you'll hear a lot of talk about how that particular person was "one in a million" or words to that effect.

"ButEddy was a one-off," Lamb says."And he sort of represents a cycle that's now ended. He hadso much of that midcentury, kind of quirky, schmaltzy, kitschy exotica thing about him, but he also had this dark Velvet Underground underbelly to his thing."

You could hear that combination play out in the songs he wrote.

"The lyrics just exemplify the love of seediness he had under that 'Leave it to Beaver' veneer," Lamb says, pointing to his shared love of that wholesome family sitcom on the one hand and less wholesome B-movies like "Trip with the Teacher" and "The Ultimate Degenerate" on the other.

"He was deeply divided because he wasthis very pure, kind of naive midcentury guy, a real child of the '50s, whosort of embracedthis kind of juvenile delinquent culture. So he had this seedy beatnik side."

Being a productof midcentury culture made it difficult at times for him to feel at home in the 21st century.

"This world is not a world for Eddy Detroit," Lamb says.

"He hated computers. He had a dumb phone. Didn't know how to text or write an email. I think he was just too visceral for that.I mean, I think he half-heartedly tried to keep a foot in the Modern World. But unsuccessfully."

In recent years, Detroit was playing in the jazz trio Escargot Jazz.

And through it all, he kept performing and occasionally making records as Eddy Detroit.

His latest album, released in 2016, was "Shock-A-Lock-A-Lickum," a compilation ofrecordings made from 1979 to 2010.

The press materials accompanying the release said the songs "run the gamut of Detroit's musical landscape, from the UK acid-folk ofTyrannosaurus RexandThe Incredible String Bandthrough bongo-fueled satanic calypso to his new phase as a troubadour recounting tales of hobos, whores, and one-eyed jacks from the old west."

Lamb accompanied Detroit when he toured Europein support of that release and got to see him treated like a rock star, including a performance at the U.K. TUSK Festival.

"When you see an Eddy Detroit show in Phoenix, there are like five people there a couple punkers from Mad Gardens and whatever barflies just happen to be there," Lamb says.

"When we went to Europe, we played to enraptured arthouse venues. There were a bazillion people there, and many of them knew his entire catalogue, even words to tunes, if you can believe that. And Paris. We killed it in Paris."

Detroit, who was billed on a lot of the posters for that tour as 'US Tiki weirdo outsider,'was elated.

"He came back from that tourand he was on top of the world," Lamb says.

"That trip really made him feel loved and feel as though his work has had some sort of impact.So that wasa good way for him to sort of end his run in a lot of ways."

After that, he went back to what Lamb refers to as "workaday gigs" with his jazz comboand Moonlight Magic,doing an Eddy Detroit gig here and there.

"But there was nothing like that European tour," Lamb says. "He was so just really blown away with the response that he got over there."

About a week before his death, Detroit seemed really down about his health in his last conversation with Lamb. He'd been struggling with acute insomnia, chronic depression and diverticulitis.

"The only thing he was excited about in that phone call was he just picked up an old Les Baxter record that he didn't have before," Lamb recalls. "The exotica bandleader. Yeah. All of a sudden, he was back to old Eddy for a couple minutes."

A memorial held at a Knights of Columbus hall in Glendale on June 21 was packed with members of the local musicscene.

"It was so Eddy Detroit," Pistruisays.

"Hehad a unique way of living and breathing in all sorts of different musical circles. There were people there from the folk musicscene that play in parks and little coffee houses. There were people from the jazz side of things. There were punk rockers there. Bam Bam was there from JFA."

Lamb says theGin Blossoms mentioned him during their halftime performance at the Phoenix Suns game on Tuesday night.

"It doesn't take too much digging to know that Eddy was iconic here, despite hanging on a long time and being sort of low-key throughout on a simmer," Lamb says. "There was some true desert-fried originality in there."

He even ran his own performance space here in the '90s, a coffee house that lasted five years called the Grotto.

He was alsosomething of a raconteur, retelling stories of hisrun-ins with the rich and famous as a drummer for the Church of Satan when he lived in Hollywood around the same time he was playing all the legendary L.A. punk clubs as part of the Permanent Wave Band.

"He was just so full of stories," Wilson says. "And a lot of times, you'd heard these stories before, but he just insisted on telling them again and again. That was just Eddy."

There was the story of how he was there to witnessIggy Pop's first gig when Pop was still James Osterberg and drummingfora band called the Iguanas. Or he'd talk about joiningthe White Panther Party withthe MC5 and John Sinclair.

He even had a story about dropping off a demo tape at Apple Records just as Ringo Starr was finding out his band had broken up.

"Eddy liked to talk," Pistrui says.

"And a lot of people would be like, 'Yeah, right.' Then all of a sudden, there's a picture of Iggy Pop and there's Eddy in the picture."

Detroit was thrilled to find himself the subject of a Phoenix New Times cover story last year, Bishop says, seeing the cover treatment as a validation of his legacy.

"But all the crazy stories and wild times he experienced shouldnt cloud the fact that he wrote so many great songs, was a master percussionist and kept reinventing himself, learned to play the mandolin, continued his craft of performing and songwriting," Bishop says.

"And perhaps most importantly, he had the gift of being able to entertain or command attention without a prop, without an instrument, without electricity or a gimmick to fall back on as security. He was a real storyteller in a world where a vast majority pretend to be."

Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Follow him on Twitter @EdMasley.

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'Eddy was his own scene': A pivotal member of the Phoenix underground remembered - The Arizona Republic