At the Broad, the art behind Destroy All Monsters

Jim Shaw was chanting into a microphone while plinking touchscreen piano keys on an iPad. Deep electro-drones bellowed from a Moog synthesizer.

Surrounded by maze of cords, Cary Loren manned a drum pad that triggered distorted samples of Michigan-themed jingles and songs. When moved, he added a rattle, crash, or thump of an aged percussion instrument.

A video projection overhead in the Education Wing of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University showed "Soul Train" dancers from the 1990s spliced with B horror movies and television ads from long-gone Detroit-area businesses.

This was the music that angered and confused University of Michigan fraternity members in the 1970s, and it’s easy to see why.

It was also the opening of the Broad’s latest exhibit, “Michigan Stories: Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw.”

Kelley, who committed suicide in 2012, and Shaw were both members of the pioneering noise band Destroy All Monsters along with Loren and Lynn “Niagara” Rovner.

They were also Michiganders, and through paintings, sketches, sculptures, zines, sound, and video, the exhibit, which runs through Feb. 25, tells the story of how they turned their experiences here into art.

Detroit natives Kelley and Niagara, and Midland-born Shaw all attended art school at the University of Michigan. Loren, who was from Detroit, moved to Ann Arbor to live with Niagara after finishing an apprenticeship under legendary filmmaker Jack Smith in New York City.

They started hanging out and playing music in Kelley’s basement apartment in 1973.

Using horror movie soundtracks as inspiration, the mostly untrained musicians created eerie soundscapes using cheap instruments, secondhand electronics, and any other device capable of making noise.

They adopted the name Destroy All Monsters from a 1968 Godzilla film and played impromptu concerts around the University of Michigan campus. Intentionally abrasive, their shows on frat row were usually cut short by annoyed bystanders.

“We were not trying to emulate Destroy All Monsters,” Shaw wrote in an email, referring to the Nov. 17 performance at the Broad, but the show “was similar to our early performances in that we didn’t carefully choreograph the elements we were quoting.”

Kelley and Shaw left the band in 1976, when they moved to Los Angeles to attend California Institute of the Arts.

By 1978, Destroy All Monsters had become a proto-punk supergroup. They gained a cult following in England after acquiring former Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton and former MC5 bassist Michael Davis. Loren was forced out of the group. Niagara was the group’s only constant member through its various incarnations.

The original lineup of Destroy All Monsters has since achieved some notoriety thanks to the preservation efforts of Loren and Kelley and an endorsement from alternative rock icon Thurston Moore of the band Sonic Youth.

All four original members of Destroy All Monsters went on to become celebrated visual artists, but they mostly found fame outside of their home state.

"We’re reclaiming this art history,” said Steven Bridges, a co-curator of the Broad exhibit.

Kelley and Shaw, in particular, became synonymous with the Los Angeles art scene, but “the roots of their practice are based in Michigan,” Bridges said.

One piece in the exhibit is a 19-foot-long Kelley, Shaw, and Loren creation that depicts Motor City icons.

The mash-up features musicians such as George Clinton and Grand Funk Railroad, but also Milky the Clown, Vernors and the Renaissance Center. It’s called “Greetings from Detroit.”

Shaw left Michigan because job opportunities for artists were limited. But success wasn't guaranteed in Los Angeles.

He remembers reading about “Black Plate Specials”—a nickname given to Michigan transplants that referred to the state’s late 1970s black and white license plates—who moved to Los Angeles only to end up broke and homeless.

"LA was really a backwater, not a destination," Shaw said, "other than a place to go to grad school."

At the time, he couldn't see making it as an artist who was "not interested in making tasteful or abstract art.

"I thought I'd get by in special effects in Hollywood."

Ryan A. Huey is a PhD candidate in the Michigan State University Department of History. Contact him at ryanahuey@gmail.com.