Sally Can't Dance

The Zoo Crew has got Lou Reed's old party girl spinning on the turntable, and the version coming through the speakers is not the one Lou cut back in 1974. This is The Rockets taking "Sally Can't Dance" for a ride, straight off their 1980 album No Ballads, and the Zoo Freaks know a Motor City cover when they hear one. The record was cut and mixed at the Record Plant up in Sausalito, with Johnny Sandlin in the producer's chair, the same man who had been steering the Allman Brothers. Sandlin had already put the band on the radio with the previous year's "Oh Well," and No Ballads was the follow-up on RSO, the label that figured a Detroit outfit with a hit under its belt might keep climbing. The album parked at number 53 and hung around the charts for a stretch, while the single "Desire" scratched into the Hot 100. "Sally Can't Dance" was never the radio push. It was the deep cut the band kept in the set because it kicked.

Lou Reed wrote the song and put it on the album that carried the same name, his highest-charting record, a number 10 that arrived in September 1974. Reed later talked about that period like a man who had wandered into the wrong studio and stayed for the paycheck. Critics called the original a glossy, half-hearted swing at the crowd that had bought Transformer and Rock 'n' Roll Animal. The Rockets heard something else in it. Dave Gilbert, the singer who had come over from the Amboy Dukes, pushed the vocal out front while Johnny "Bee" Badanjek laid down that Detroit backbeat, the same pocket he had been hammering since the Mitch Ryder days. Jim McCarty and Dennis Robbins traded the guitar lines, and Lee Michaels sat in on organ for that cut and a couple of others. Anita Pointer of the Pointer Sisters added background vocals, which is a long way from the usual Detroit bar-band help. The whole thing clocks in around three minutes and fifty-five seconds, leaner and meaner than Reed's take, and fans who have lived with both versions tend to say the Rockets version swings harder. One Italian rock writer put it plain: they did it better than Lou, and for him that was a given.

The album title was a shot across the bow. After the 1979 record picked up airplay with "Turn Up the Radio" and "Can't Sleep," some folks in the business expected the next one to lean softer. No Ballads was the answer. Discogs notes and old Detroit write-ups treat the name as a sock to the candy-coated rock of the era and a return to the no-nonsense punch of the band's 1977 debut, Love Transfusion. Side one runs "Desire," "Don't Hold On," Tommy Talton's "Restless," then "Sally Can't Dance," and closes with Bee's "Takin' It Back," a Chuck Berry workout that sounds like the cousins of "Turn Up the Radio" got louder. Side two stays with originals, including Bee's "Sad Songs" and the Gilbert-McCarty closer "Troublemaker." Metro Times, looking back when the two RSO albums finally hit CD together, called No Ballads serviceably rock-solid and said "Desire" should have put the band on top of the AOR heap. The same piece noted both records sold around 400,000 copies. That is a working band's number, not a superstar's, and the Rockets lived with it.

They kept "Sally Can't Dance" in the live book. When the band recorded Live Rockets over four sold-out nights at the Royal Oak Music Theatre, December 26 through 29 of 1982, the Lou Reed cover was right there in the set between "Can't Sleep" and "Takin' It Back," with Shaun Murphy and Suzy Jennings on backup vocals and a saxophone in the mix for the first time. That live album was the last official chapter before the group played its final two shows at Pine Knob in late August 1983. Gilbert stayed a wild frontman to the end of the run. Bee later told the Oakland Press that Gilbert prowled the stage like a cat, handsome and charismatic, and also "a pretty wild guy," the Keith Moon of singers, pretty much in his own world. Gilbert had been born to deaf parents and would sign to the crowd between songs, a detail fans still bring up when they talk about those Royal Oak nights. He died of liver cancer in 2001 at 49. The band never pretended the ride was smooth. Personnel changed, the bass chair turned over more than once, and Dan Keylon was the man holding it down on No Ballads.

The way the band got started is pure Detroit bar talk. In 1972 Jim McCarty walked up to Johnny Bee and asked four words: "What are you doing?" The two of them had already torn through Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, and McCarty had gone on to Buddy Miles and three albums with Cactus, the heavy outfit built around Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice. Bee had drummed with Edgar Winter, Alice Cooper, Dr. John, and Bob Seger. That question lit an eleven-year fire. The first lineup had Bee singing from behind the kit, McCarty on lead guitar, John Fraga on bass, and Marc Marcano on keys. They played the Rainbow Room in Detroit, the People's Ballroom in Ann Arbor, and the Rock 'N Roll Farm in Wayne, almost nightly, until bands passing through town started asking where the hot room was. Bee remembered it later: the word was out, and everybody who came to Detroit knew they were the band to see. Manager Gary Lazar got them in front of Don Davis at United Sound, and Davis told them to find another singer. Gilbert came in, did a couple of tunes, and McCarty and Bee looked at each other and said the guy was unbelievable. From there the records stacked up, Love Transfusion, the RSO album everybody calls Turn Up the Radio, No Ballads, Back Talk, Rocket Roll, and the live set. They opened for Kiss, ZZ Top, and Seger, and toured with the J. Geils Band. In 2010 the Detroit Music Awards handed them a Distinguished Achievement Award, and a reunion drew about 10,000 people at the Stars and Stripes festival in Mt. Clemens. McCarty eventually went back to Cactus full time. Bee kept painting and drumming, and turned up on Alice Cooper's Detroit Stories years later.

If you want the long view on the two men who started it, Bee keeps his own scrapbook at johnny-bee.com, and the documentary project built around both of them lives at jimandthebee.com. Fans still gather on the Facebook page The Rockets Detroit Rock and Roll, and the page kept in Gilbert's honor is The Rockets Singer David Gilbert. A solid fan discography that walks through every album, including the No Ballads track list with "Sally Can't Dance" sitting in the fourth slot, is up at The Final Vinyl. The Zoo Crew will keep spinning the deep cuts for the Zoo Freaks over at THE ZOO, because a Detroit band that covered Lou Reed, put the Pointer Sisters on a hard-rock record, and named the album No Ballads still sounds like a good reason to leave the needle down.