1. Looking at You
“They were the two smartest, most talented guys I knew,” said MC5’s Wayne Kramer of fellow bandmates Rob Tyner and Fred “Sonic” Smith, in a key scene from unreleased documentary about the group called A True Testimonial. Longtime friends and hotshot teenage guitarists with rival Detroit rock’n’roll groups the Bounty Hunters and the Vibratones, Kramer and Smith joined forces with vocalist Tyner in 1964.
Spitballing ideas for their prospective rock’n’roll band at a local diner, Smith declared: “We’re going to be strong and arrogant and powerful – we’ll just do what we want, we’ll knock shit over if we wanna knock shit over,” sending his glass crashing to the ground. “That ain’t cool, that ain’t being powerful and arrogant,” replied Tyner. The conversation soon devolved into a fistfight in the parking lot, after which the trio drove around downtown Detroit until the early hours, debating what the MC5 should stand for, Smith realising that he couldn’t win through simple violence. The Motor City 5 (lineup completed by bassist Michael Davis and drummer Dennis Thompson) would make this knife-edge between violence and intellect their own, spicing up their bare-knuckled R&B assault with free-noise ambition born of their love for politicised avant jazz.
They had yet to master the riot-starting invective when they cut their second single Looking at You in 1968 – though Tyner attacks the lyric’s cocktail of lust, obsession and frustration with the same wild-eyed, gospelised overdrive he’d later apply to the group’s political sloganeering – but there was raw genius in its combination of brutish two-chord riffing and the guitarists’ wild and free soloing, trading blasts of feedback and fuzz-powered scree in earnest tribute to the “sheets of sound” practiced by heroes John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders.
2. Kick Out the Jams
“We did a lot of gigs that were not very rock’n’roll,” admitted Kramer of the group’s early days performing at high schools and playing covers at Polish weddings and jamming in Kramer’s mother’s basement.
Soon, however, the group were hired as house band at the Grande Ballroom, a musty old barn from the 1930s which promoter Russ Gibb had refashioned in the image of San Francisco hippy hangout the Fillmore and was fast becoming a meeting place for Detroit’s burgeoning “far-out” community. At the Grande, the group rehearsed all week and performed at the weekends, and it was here that they cultivated the attention of John Sinclair (described by Dennis Thompson as a “beatnik poet fucker”), who would become the MC5’s manager and who, inspired by the Black Panthers, started up his own White Panther Party, espousing freedom, justice and education, along with “dope, guns and fucking in the streets”.
By 1968, the MC5 caught the ear of Elektra Records’ Danny Fields, who signed them (and, at the MC5’s insistence, fellow Detroit proto-punks the Stooges). Elektra taped two nights of the group’s Grande Ballroom residency in late October 1968 for their debut album, Kick Out the Jams, which captured the electrifying chaos of the group’s shows, with guitars ringing out of tune, band-members hollering in unison and in discord, and songs seeming to collapse in on themselves, only to rise again, even wilder than before.
The lyrics of the album’s call-to-arms title anthem spoke to that fevered energy, with Tyner hollering about the sound abounding and resounding and rebounding off the ceiling, “driv[ing] you insane, leaping frenzy”, while his opening call to “Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!” provoked a showdown between Sinclair and the Elektra bigwigs, who wanted to censor the cursing. Department store chain Hudson’s refused to carry the album; the MC5 responded with a full-page magazine ad bearing the caption “Fuck Hudson’s”. The chain then banned all Elektra recordings from their stores, leading to the MC5’s expulsion from the label. Not for the last time, the group learned that the actions that would make them punk-rock legends might not prove compatible with commercial success.
3. Rocket Reducer No 62 (Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa)
Kick Out the Jams might have been the MC5’s signature anthem, but their fusion of gut-level pleasures and art-rock frontierism reached its apotheosis on Rocket Reducer No 62, which opened with feedback, chaos and Tyner’s Native American battle cries, surging into a brawny R&B groove that would have been at home on the Stax label, before giving way to extended guitar duels between Kramer and Smith and, for the song’s climactic 90 seconds, arpeggiated non-identical twin guitar solos playing at once, like some psych-rock attempt at Ornette Coleman’s free jazz concept. In 1968 it must have blown minds. Today, it sounds like the stepping stone between Wilson Pickett and Sonic Youth, bulldozing an expressway through your skull.
4. The American Ruse
Dropped by Elektra, the MC5 were swiftly signed by Atlantic Records, though manager Sinclair scarcely had time to savour their good fortune; arrested for possession of marijuana in 1969, he was put away for 10 years, despite protests from John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Atlantic paired the group with Rolling Stone critic-turned-record producer Jon Landau, who had little time for the group’s avant leanings.
The group’s second album Back in the USA was characterised by a baffling absence of low-end and a conscious fealty to rock’n’roll’s 1950s roots, opening with a cover of Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti and closing with Chuck Berry’s Back in the USA. The throwback riffs cloaked some sharp political broadsides, however, best of which was this sardonic stomper, which trained its aim on an America “in terminal stasis”, with its “Phony stars! Crummy cars! Cheap guitars!”, and cops who’ll beat you black and blue and knock your teeth in. “I’m sick to my guts of the American ruse!” hollers Tyner, calling on Smith to “Rock ’em back, Sonic!” before the guitarist fires off a solo that lampoons civil war marching song John Brown’s Body.
5. Shakin’ Street
The MC5’s politics seesawed between hopelessness and hope, dystopia and utopia. On the one hand there was the Man, stamping down on the youth (and, specifically, the MC5 themselves, who claimed the FBI were monitoring their activities and sending undercover cops to cause chaos at their shows), and on the other hand there were the Kids, chomping at the bit to make the world a better place.
The MC5 themselves had formed their Detroit commune, Trans-Love Energies, and their own religion, Zenta, with an eye to doing good works, but it was music that was their true utopia. Tyner ceded the microphone to Sonic for this affecting, laidback paean to rock’n’roll, his untutored drawl perfect for the song’s loose, semi-acoustic folk-rock stomp and its altruistic vision of a space “where all the kids meet”, and all they wanna do is “just keep on rockin’”. Perfect, because it’s simple. And simple, because it’s perfect.
6. Human Being Lawnmower
Amid an album of lockstep classic rock’n’roll sounds, Back in the USA’s penultimate track was a headfuck, with a freeform structure that seemed to morph into a different song every few bars, Kramer and Sonic swapping between proto-punk riffage, acid-blues squall and repurposed rock’n’roll ramalama, as Dennis Thompson beat martial tattoos on his snare drum. The song’s theme was the ever-insurgent military-industrial complex, foregrounded by the ever-deepening quagmire in Vietnam, into which any twentysomething MC5 fan might soon find themselves drafted, lending the song’s explosive climax – a blitz of drums and guitar, with Tyner howling a staccato “Chop! Chop! Chop! Chop! Chop! Chop! Chop! Chop!” as he evokes the war machine ending another young life – a nightmarish edge.
7. Sister Anne
After their evolution from radicalised garage-rock hellions to feedback-gargling avant gardists to razor-edged rock’n’roll revivalists, the group’s final album High Time presented a final stage in the MC5’s sound, beefing it up with girl-group backing singers, hammering honky-tonk pianos and wandering horn sections, delivering a widescreen, stadium-ready, weaponised boogie.
The first track off the album, Sister Anne, also seemed to signal a change in priorities for the group, ditching their usual agitprop concerns for a lascivious paean to a sexy nun that seemed drawn from the pages of a Robert Crumb comic, with Tyner’s firestarting holler put in service of “a liberated woman with her own solution” to “save a bitch’s soul from going down Satan’s hot way”. If Back in the USA had been a heartfelt tribute to Chuck Berry and all he invented, Sister Anne and its accompanying album put Chuck’s lessons to work, but in the MC5’s own voice – the duelling twin-guitar and harmonica breaks are sheer rock’n’roll poetry, while, with their low-end restored, the group’s rhythm section powers on like a well-tuned and thoroughly overdriven engine, as you might expect from the Motor City’s finest homegrown group.
8. Over and Over
If there was any sonic precedent for the more muscular, mature sound the MC5 purveyed on High Time, it was the Who’s similarly transitional Who’s Next, which saw that group’s auto-destructive sturm und drang morph into grand, powerful hard rock, restructuring rock’n’roll’s paradigm for the new decade. Over and Over, then, felt like the MC5’s answer to the epic Won’t Get Fooled Again, its steroidal stop-start riffs, hair-shaking crescendos and irresistible hard-rock pugilism put in the service of a lyric that was a summation of the Five’s entire political mission, and the turbulent times they chronicled and tried to affect. “Talkin’ bout solutions, bout how we need a revolution,” hollers Tyner, “While the cat next door spends all his time / Trying to think up new antisocial crimes.” The inference is clear: the MC5 are the righteous saviours of an America in turmoil, with the Man trying to clamp down on all their freedoms while funnelling the country’s youth into that human being lawnmower over in Vietnam.
And while there’s no reason the group might think that their days were numbered, Tyner’s throat-shredding performance here is real now-or-never stuff, his finest-ever gospel testifying committed to tape as he sings of resistance: “I said, ‘No, I said, hang on a minute now,’ I said, ‘Let me outta here,’” he cries, the decent everyman trying to escape the nightmare of a country at war with its own youth, before delivering a series of howled “No!”s that could give Roger Daltrey’s scream on Won’t Get Fooled Again a run for its money.
9. Skunk (Sonically Speaking)
High Time closed with the group’s best, most ambitious and most exciting piece of music yet, a five-and-a-half-minute, Latin-influenced symphony of noise with duelling horn sections, an expanded rhythm section (featuring Detroit rock faces Bob Seger and Scott Morgan on extra percussion) and some of Sonic and Kramer’s fiercest, most heroic guitar-duelling, as Tyner howled and hollered into the melee about “Energy! Energy!” like some deranged Dr Frankenstein, setting his monster free. The track’s closing battle between electric guitar and bristling brass brought the group’s wild concept of punk-rock/jazz fusion to life, a coda prefaced by Tyner’s sign-off yell of “Baby, watch your step / You know you really ain’t seen nothing yet!” However, history would lend a poignancy to that ecstatic farewell.
In his liner notes for the CD reissue, Rolling Stone critic Dave Marsh wrote that High Time was “an album about the future, by a band that did not have one”. Behind the scenes, hard drugs were beginning to take hold, while the record’s commercial failure – “No sales and enormous debit”, Atlantic Records honcho Jerry Wexler told Rolling Stone, “they had run up $128,000 we’ll never see back” – soon saw the band once again without a record label. By 1973, they were done, following a farewell show at the Grande Ballroom on New Year’s Eve, and the years that followed would be tough ones for the MC5’s former members, spent fighting drug addiction, serving prison sentences for drug-dealing, and pursuing new projects (Fred Smith’s Sonic’s Rendezvous Band; Kramer’s Gang War, also featuring ill-fated New York Doll Johnny Thunders; and a fitful solo career for Rob Tyner) that never attained even the MC5’s modest commercial success. Tyner died in 1991 and Sonic followed three years later, both living just long enough to see the MC5’s legacy reappraised, and their recognition as pioneers and progenitors of punk rock.
10. Black to Comm
Described by Wayne Kramer as “our traditional room-clearing device” during their mid-60s party band days – a dirge of black noise that always sent revellers who’d overstayed their welcome fleeing in search of refuge – Black to Comm is in many ways the quintessential MC5 tune, though they never released (or perhaps even recorded) a studio version of the song, despite its presence in their setlist since their pre-fame days.
A wild vamp that took inspiration from the likes of Ray Charles’ What’d I Say, it’s two chords building and building into a declamatory, messianic, out-of-body experience, it exists now only on bootleg concert tapes of dubious sonic fidelity (and hardcore MC5 fandom demands familiarity with such illicit recordings), several of which can now be found on YouTube. And while it’s possible that there were nights when its bloody-minded stomp cleared the room, if you listen closely to those recordings you can sense band and audience making some revelatory connection, as the MC5 chase that skeletal groove for 10 or 12 minutes, or longer, finding space for head-scrambling guitar improv, wild harmonica excursions, testifying breakdowns and an ever-rising, infectious and almost unbearable sense of excitement.
And there’s something very proper in the fact that a band like the MC5, who promised so much – revolution, no less – and ultimately delivered, in the coldest light of day, so little (their recording career a commercial dud, their critical standing low until they were rediscovered in light of the punk movement they anticipated), find their purest expression in a song which, like the Grateful Dead’s ever-evolving Dark Star, was different every night they played it, which could never quite be pinned down on wax. And if too few were listening during the years that the MC5 were active, you can be sure wave after wave of bands returned to the source and drew potent inspiration in the decades that followed. Drugged-out Rugby rockers Spacemen 3 were listening particularly closely, and picked up the baton with a psychedelic one-chord barn-burner of their own, styled very closely on the MC5’s mythic anthem. Its title, appropriately, was Revolution.
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