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21. The Detroit Pop Festival Two popular Michigan bands were going through signi‹cant changes at the start of 1969. Both were managed by Jeep Holland, and were part of his A-Square management, record, and booking business. Although the Rationals had enjoyed a local hit in the early part of 1968, it had been a one-off on Capitol, arranged by Holland through an independent deal with the label. The band was in debt, owing several years of back taxes.1 Meanwhile, the members of the band were experiencing growing pains and felt that Jeep was the reason they “hadn’t become bigger.” Now all out of high school and living on their own, they had come to resent Holland’s “babysitter kind of management.”2 Rationals drummer Bill Figg felt that “Jeep was just handling too many bands and wasn’t doing a good job promoting his major act.”3 In›uenced by gigs they shared with the MC5 and the Stooges, the Rationals wanted to move away from the “white soul” sound that they had become identi‹ed with and start to write and perform some original material with a harder edge. Jeep also had not been able to interest Capitol in anymore of his productions.4 In April 1968, the group had approached Larry Feldman, manager of the Grande Ballroom, about taking over as their manager. “We knew Larry through the Grande, and I knew that he had a real good business sense,” recalls Bill Figg. “He knew how to handle money, and that was the one area that Jeep wasn’t good at.”5 Although Figg, Steve Correll, and Terry Trabandt wished to move on, Scott Morgan had reservations. He believed that Jeep “had done a lot” for the band. But at the same time he felt that Holland had become “out of touch” with the group, perhaps the result of being too busy with other acts and responsibilities.6 “The ‹rst thing Larry did after taking over management was to hire a CPA to ‹gure out our ‹nancial situation,” says Figg. “We 195 each owed ten thousand dollars to the government, and they were threatening to seize everything we owned. Larry worked out a payment schedule with the feds, and that took off some of the heat.”7 On their own, with Feldman on board, the Rationals recorded a single they had written together called “Guitar Army.” Capitol hadn’t thought much of it, so the song stayed on the shelf until January 1969, when the band put it out on the new local Genesis label. A “screaming rock and roll song with lyrics branded at the time as subversive,” it “was too much for some people,” according to Terry Trabandt.8 The last Rationals record the public had heard had been the soulful “I Need You” a year earlier . Now the band not only sounded different, but looked different as well, losing their trademark matching out‹ts and “boyish ” image. The Rationals’ split with Jeep Holland came in the footsteps of the Scot Richard Case, who had severed ties to A-Square several months earlier, in the summer of 1968. The group had complained that Jeep Holland had wanted to “exercise artistic control more and more strongly” at a time when they were becoming more serious about their music.9 The band replaced Holland with Pete Andrews, who owned a paint company in Ann Arbor and a rock club in Tawas. “Pete had been involved in some band stuff by booking Mother’s, and all the Hideout bands played there,” recalls Gary Quackenbush. “We chose him although he had no real experience being a band manager. He really kind of left us alone in some regards, which was good because we were pretty headstrong. But he could book a show—boy, could he book a show, and that’s really what he did.”10 Absorbing Andrews, and wishing not to focus on any individual member, the band changed their name to SRC. Producer John Rhys introduced them to Herb Hendler, vice president of Capitol Records’ publishing company, and soon the band signed with the label.11 They released their ‹rst album, produced by Rhys, in the fall. The self-titled LP featured Motor City–style rock with a psychedelic edge. One of the standout tracks was “Black Sheep,” which received substantial airplay on WABX. In the best Detroit tradition, the LP sold well in Michigan but nationally stalled at Grit, Noise, & Revolution 196...

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