Sonic's Rendezvous Band - Biography
By Oliver Hall
Sonic’s Rendezvous Band was an original American rock and roll group that synthesized the Stooges’ raw power with the MC5’s transcendental ecstasy. Led by MC5 guitarist and songwriter Fred “Sonic” Smith, the Detroit supergroup is best known for the 1978 single “City Slang” (1978 Orchidé), which was the band’s only official release for two decades.
Fred “Sonic” Smith was born Frederick Dewey Smith on September 13, 1949, somewhere in West Virginia. His family moved to the Lincoln Park suburb of Detroit to find work while Smith was a child. According to Ken Shimamoto’s extensive article on the website I-94 Bar, one of Smith’s first friends in Lincoln Park was Wayne Kramer (né Kambes), who taught Smith to play his first chords on the family guitar. Smith, Kramer, and singer Rob Tyner went on to form the radical rock group the MC5 in 1964.
Several months after the MC5 broke up in 1972, Smith started rehearsing with the MC5’s rhythm section, bassist Michael Davis and drummer Dennis Thompson. Tyner and Kramer declined the invitation, so the three formed a short-lived new group called Ascension. After Ascension, Smith started playing with Mitch Ryder’s former bassist, Ron Cooke. The duo dabbled in “a jazz-type rock improvisational jam thing” (Cooke’s words to Ken Shimamoto) that went by the jocular lounge-combo name of Sonic’s Rendezvous Band. Scott Morgan of the 1960’s Detroit soul-rock group the Rationals started playing with Smith and Cooke in 1974 and pushed them back towards the rock song form.
Morgan and Smith drove out to Los Angeles in hopes of finding a record deal, but turned around and drove back to Detroit after a few weeks. Once back in Detroit, they played one show as the Orchids, with Terry Trabandt on bass, Jeff Vail on drums, and Jerry Hopkins on saxophone. Scant attendance at the Orchids’ show suggested to Morgan that they should resurrect the Rendezvous Band name.
Sonic’s Rendezvous Band crystallized in 1975, when Smith and Morgan joined with drummer Scott “Rock Action” Asheton, formerly of the Stooges. Bassist Gary Rasmussen (The Up, Uprising) joined in 1976, replacing Ron Cooke. Rasmussen told Shimamoto that “Ron Cooke and Scott Asheton didn’t get along really,” and that Rasmussen replaced Cooke at Asheton’s suggestion. With Rasmussen and Asheton as the rhythm section, Sonic’s Rendezvous Band was a Detroit sensation comprised of members of the four most notable White Panther-affiliated groups of the 60s: the MC5, the Stooges, the Rationals, and The Up.
Sonic’s Rendezvous Band only released one single, but what a song it was! The self-released single “City Slang” (1978 Orchidé) came with a stereo mix of the song on one side and a mono mix on the other. Musically, “City Slang” condenses the Stooges’ and MC5’s material into a single punk performance of blinding intensity. Smith’s lyrics are a mystery; it seems likely that he is making them up on the spot, in the oracular style of some of Dylan’s Basement Tapes (2009 Sony) vocals, jiving in city slang. The words to “City Slang” remain to be decoded by punk scholars of the future.
Iggy Pop hired Asheton, Smith, and Rasmussen (but not Morgan) to back him on his 1978 European tour. The tour, recordings Morgan made while the other three were away, and the disputes they had about everything from management to what song should appear on the B-side of “City Slang,” exacerbated tensions between Morgan and Smith. Smith fell in love with punk poet Patti Smith in 1978, and the two were married in 1980, shortly after the breakup of Sonic’s Rendezvous Band.
Bootlegs proliferated in the absence of Sonic’s Rendezvous Band authorized material during the 1980s, while Fred and Patti focused their energies on domestic life. The Smiths collaborated on Patti’s comeback album, Dream of Life (1988 Arista). Fred “Sonic” Smith collapsed at their Michigan home in November of 1994 and died of heart failure in a Detroit hospital several days later. He was only 45.
Two Sonic’s Rendezvous Band recordings were issued by their former manager Freddie Brooks on his Detroit-based Mack Aborn Rhythmic Arts label. 1998’s Sweet Nothing (1998 – Mack Aborn Rhythmic Arts) is a live recording of an Ann Arbor show from 1978. 2000’s City Slang (2000 Mack Aborn Rhythmic Arts) includes a new mix of “City Slang,” the original 1978 stereo mix, and live performances recorded throughout 1979.
On September 11, 1999, Morgan, Asheton, and Rasmussen played a single reunion show as The Rendezvous Band in Detroit, with Deniz Tek of Radio Birdman in place of Smith. The show is captured on Gettin’ There Is Half the Fun: Live at the Magic Stick, Detroit (2000 Real O Mind).
In 2006, the UK label Easy Action released Sonic’s Rendezvous Band (2006 Easy Action), a six-CD box set of live, rehearsal, and studio recordings. Former manager Brooks addressed the Easy Action box in September of 2006 on the official band website, declaring “it can be stated unequivocally [that] the ‘estate of Fred Smith’ does not approve of nor do they support this fraudulent release.”
