Who has performed at the Roostertail Detroit: 20 acts we can document

The short answer, and how we checked it

Twenty acts have dated, documented appearances at the Roostertail. From Motown: the Four Tops, the Temptations, the Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder. From the supper club bill: George Carlin, Tony Bennett, Bobby Darin, Paul Anka, Frank Sinatra Jr., Frankie Valli. From the rock years upstairs: Bob Seger and the Last Heard, Bill Haley and His Comets, Rare Earth, Alice Cooper, Blue Oyster Cult, Eric Clapton, Bo Diddley. And Aretha Franklin, in 2004. Between them, 23 separate dates. The full table is below.

That is a shorter list than the one you will find in most write-ups of this place. That is the point. We started from the names people repeat, checked each one, and kept only the ones that came back with a date and a source attached.

Three kinds of evidence carry this page. First, a concert database: setlist.fm holds 77 entries for this room, and it is granular enough to log a nine-night residency one night at a time. Second, album credits, because five records were cut here and the sleeves say where. Third, contemporary print, including a December 1967 newspaper notice confirming a booking week and a 1999 column explaining how the club's longest residency came about.

Where those three disagree, we say so on the page. Where they say nothing at all, we say that too, in the second list further down.

Recorded live at Roostertail, Detroit, Michigan.

Printed on the cover of George Carlin's Take-Offs and Put-Ons, RCA Victor, 1967

Motown turned this room into a recording studio

The Supremes opened a two-week engagement on January 17, 1966. Detroit radio treated it as a homecoming. WXYZ disc jockeys Lee Alan and Danny Taylor broadcast their show live from the floor on opening night, interviewing the group and the audience on air. The run closed January 29.

Seven months later Motown came back with a series. Motown Mondays ran seven consecutive Monday nights, August 22 to October 3, 1966, two shows a night on the Upper Deck. Earl Van Dyke led the house band. Every set was taped and played back the following Saturday on WKNR. The Four Tops opened. The Temptations closed.

Three of those nights became records. The Four Tops taped August 22 and September 11 for Four Tops Live!, which went to the top of the domestic R&B chart. The Temptations taped October 3 for Temptations Live!, their only live album with David Ruffin, which held the Billboard pop chart for 51 weeks. The Supremes taped September 26, with Florence Ballard singing lead on "People," and that recording sat in a vault for 46 years before it surfaced on a 2012 reissue.

Two more albums came out of this room after the series ended. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles recorded here in 1968; the record went out that January and reached number seven on the Billboard R&B chart. On December 19, 1969, a nineteen-year-old Stevie Wonder taped Stevie Wonder Live. Scott Regen, the broadcaster who had emceed the 1966 series, is credited as MC on the sleeve.

Marvin Gaye played one of the seven 1966 Mondays, but no source we found pins which one. His dated appearance is August 27, 1967, when Motown brought its national distributors here for a showcase and put Gaye on a bill with the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Spinners, Tammi Terrell and Chris Clark.

Comedy, crooners, and one lucky substitution

In November 1966, seven weeks after the Motown series closed, RCA Victor sent George Carlin here for three nights: November 25, 26 and 27. The tapes became Take-Offs and Put-Ons, his first solo album, released in 1967 and nominated for a Grammy. The cover art prints the club's name and city, which makes it the single hardest piece of evidence on this page.

Tony Bennett holds the longest documented run here. Nine consecutive nights, June 7 to 15, 1968. He got the booking because somebody else lost it. A Supremes engagement had been set for the slot, and a disagreement between the club's management and Motown killed it. Bennett was dropped in as the replacement.

Bobby Darin played four dates across two years. September 7, 1967, then a return the following summer on June 27, July 3 and July 10, 1968. A partial set list survives from the July 10 show: three songs, standards plus his signature.

Paul Anka headlined the week of January 8, 1968, backed by 23 members of the house orchestra. That orchestra is why a single singer could headline here without bringing a band. A newspaper notice from December 22, 1967 announced both the week and the arrangement, which is also the check that proved the concert database reliable for this address.

Frankie Valli sang "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" here for the first time in 1967, shortly before Windsor radio put the record on the air. The Jersey Boys stage musical and the 2014 film both dramatize the moment, though the film recreated the room on a soundstage rather than shooting here.

And there is a Sinatra in the record. Frank Sinatra Jr. played a single date, June 13, 1967. He is the only Sinatra who appears anywhere in this research, which matters more than it sounds. See below.

Tony Bennett broke all records at the Roostertail ... with his appearance by mistake.

Detroit Jewish News, Out and About, May 7, 1999

Upstairs, the bill got louder

Tom and Jerry Schoenith built the Upper Deck in 1965 as a separate room for a younger crowd. Roughly 400 seats indoors, 135 more on the terrace. It is the room that made the rock bookings possible, and most of the dates in this section happened in it.

Bob Seger and the Last Heard played the Upper Deck on August 28, 1967, about a year before "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man" broke him nationally. Bill Haley and His Comets played May 3, 1969. Rare Earth played May 25, 1969.

Alice Cooper played the Upper Deck on July 6, 1971, on the Love It to Death tour, with "I'm Eighteen" climbing. Eight songs are documented, opening with a cover of "Sun Arise" and closing with "Return of the Spiders." WRIF carried the show live, and that broadcast tape has circulated as a bootleg ever since. One caution on the date: pressings of the same recording are widely labelled March 1, 1971, and both dedicated sources we checked give July 6.

Blue Oyster Cult played February 4, 1973, on the Tyranny and Mutation tour. Ten songs are logged, which makes it the most completely documented rock set in the building's history.

Two later nights close the rock list. On March 30, 1978, the club hosted a surprise birthday party for Eric Clapton, who got up and jammed with a local band called the Detroit Rockets, joined by Detroit-born Marcy Levy, then touring in Clapton's own band. The Rockets' manager says Clapton liked it enough to introduce him to an executive at RSO Records, and the band got a contract out of it. Somebody taped the jam and collectors have passed it around since. This one was a private party, not a ticketed show, which is why it leaves a different kind of trail. Bo Diddley played July 31, 1983.

Aretha Franklin sang here on February 25, 2004, at a celebration of Levi Stubbs and the Four Tops. That is a real, dated appearance. It is also a 2004 one, and it does not belong to the 1960s it usually gets attached to.

The names we could not document

Twenty-two well-known names come up in stories about this room. We checked every one and found no dated record of an appearance. They are listed in full under the table.

The rock and soul list runs longest: the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, MC5, the Stooges, Grand Funk Railroad, Kiss, Ted Nugent, Parliament-Funkadelic, Deep Purple. The supper club list is Frank Sinatra Sr., Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie. The comedy list is Bob Hope, Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor.

We are not saying any of them were never in the building. We are saying something narrower and more useful: we looked, and nothing came back. How much that is worth depends entirely on how good the looking was, so here is the basis for it. The concert database for this room holds 77 entries. It logs Tony Bennett's nine nights as nine separate rows. It logs a lounge week. It logs a single Bo Diddley date in 1983 and a single Aretha Franklin date in 2004. A record that granular going quiet on Led Zeppelin is not nothing.

Alongside it we read the album credits for every record cut here, the full published biography of each comedian on the list, two long-form histories of the venue, a Motown historian's research archive, and a run of Detroit newspaper archive pages from the period. Not one of the twenty-two produced a date.

One name deserves its own paragraph. The story that Frank Sinatra played the Roostertail is the most persistent thing anyone says about this room, and the likeliest explanation for it is sitting in the confirmed table above. Frank Sinatra Jr. played here on June 13, 1967. One date, one Sinatra, and it is the son. Neither long-form history of this venue mentions a Sinatra at all, and the 77-entry database has no entry under the father's name. A search summary that once asserted otherwise was traced back to the articles it cited, and the claim is not in them.

What we would still like to find

This list will keep changing, and we would rather it grew for the right reason. Several strong leads went unread while the research ran: a recorded family interview that failed every attempt to open it, an on-camera history of the club that would not load, and the print runs of Detroit's daily papers, which are not searchable from a browser and sit on microfilm.

The specific gaps we would most like closed: the exact 1966 Monday dates for Jr. Walker and the All Stars, Martha and the Vandellas and Marvin Gaye, which no source pins beyond the August 29 to October 3 window. A day and month for Frankie Valli's 1967 night. And a primary source for any name on the second list, which would move it straight into the first.

If you have a ticket stub, a program, a photograph or a clipping, we want to see it. One dated piece of paper is enough to add a row. That is a lower bar than it sounds, and a considerably higher one than most of what gets repeated about this place.