by Brian Baker
If Iggy Pop was indeed the Godfather of Punk, then the MC5 were his consiglieres. Compared to the Igman's glitter peanut butter and glass shard confrontations, the abrasive and concussively loud Five were positively thoughtful by contrast, but both were at the same extreme end of Detroit's broad spectrum in the mid '60s. While the Stooges were busy replicating the droning sound of a Ford assembly line with guitars and drums, the MC5 were taking Chuck Berry's beloved three chord monty and blowing it sky high, with distortion, politics, drugs, and anarchy, and throwing in a bit of Sun Ra for a jazzily metallic lark.
Boiled down to its most elemental terms, the Stooges were about the politics of emotion while the MC5 were about the emotion of politics. On the one hand, Iggy Pop was walking on the outstretched hands of his followers, imploring the faithful to let him be their dog, and on the other, Rob Tyner was shrieking to the establishment to let him be who he was, and defying them and us to kick out the jams. Both messages were visceral and potent and intensely personal despite their obvious differences in content, and both in their ways defined the tenor of the country just as surely as they shaped the tone of Detroit.
All of this happened against a backdrop of incredible social unrest and cultural upheaval. 1967 had been the Summer of Love, an idyllic period punctuated by the trippy brilliance of Sgt. Pepper, while 1968 was the Summer of Doubt, a turbulent and unstable flashpoint in history that was soundtracked by two of the most original and controversial bands ever documented in a studio. The MC5 in particular were forged in the fires of political revolution and hammered on the anvil of social consciousness, creating a raw and courageous new musical hybrid in a city which was poised on the brink of class war. Detroit was drenched in flammables and the MC5 stood defiantly in the spotlight with guitars screeching and drums pounding, ready, willing, and able to strike the match at a moment's notice.
The MC5's musical and political manifesto may seem almost quaint by today's standards, but don't forget that the Five set those standards back when there was no blueprint for punk's corporate headquarters. The MC5's vision of attitude over aptitude, the force of sheer volume over the persuasiveness of competent musicianship, and the introduction of blatant burn-baby-burn political rock sloganeering was light years ahead of its contemporaries. The MC5, in a very real sense, laid out the plans for punk's rise in years to come by having the courage of their convictions to present even the most innocuous songs in a ragingly demonstrative style that cut across every grain of the time.
The Five's fuse burned quickly, as they rose to national prominence on the strength of the incendiary live album Kick Out the Jams, a release that was both the band's shocking debut on Elektra as well as its label swan song.
After a pair of truly amazing releases for Atlantic (Back in the USA and High Time), the band's excesses got the better of them and the MC5 became a pack of ones. The die had already been indelibly cast, however, and the MC5 has ultimately become one of the most influential bands to ever emerge from the Detroit scene.
With help from original Fivers Michael Davis, Dennis Thompson, and, of course, guitar god Brother Wayne Kramer (as well as the families of the late Rob Tyner and Fred "Sonic" Smith), and input from former manager and White Panther party boss John Sinclair, Rhino has put together the definitive MC5 compilation. The Big Bang offers up the Five's shrieking mondo distorto and megarare early singles (especially the blistering "I Can Only Give You Everything" and "Looking at You") as well as manic offerings from all three
albums. Highlights abound at every feedback drenched turn, but the uncensored version of "Kick Out the Jams" is protopunk bliss, an anthem of earthshattering proportions that holds up as solid as foundational bedrock over three decades later. It is hard to imagine the bewilderment and outrage that was caused with the utterance of that single (and singular) expletive as Tyner exhorted the Halloween revelers at Detroit's Grande Ballroom to "kick out the jams, motherfuckers." The beauty of its presentation is not in the word's prurient appeal at a time when street language was just not in the vocabulary of musical artists, but in its throat-throttling delivery, an impassioned call to arms from a swaggering streetwise sargeant of the guard.
In today's
gangsta rap environment where listeners are numbed by a barrage of almost
cartoonish profanity, the MC5's "motherfucker" seems almost prosaic
by comparison, but again one must consider the context of the time in
attempting to convey the impact of the experience. Much lesser known
(and almost anticlimactic, then and now) but equally as impressive are
sonic garage levelers like "Tonight," "Shakin' Street," and the transcendent
"Sister Anne."
The MC5 drove a spike in the middle of the tracks and derailed the rock and roll train at a crucial moment in its development. Had the band been able to continue into the '70s, the resultant impact could have been nothing short of cataclysmic. "Skunk (Sonically Speaking)" and the previously unavailable "Thunder Express" show the Five's maturation process and hints at the top volume jazz exploits that could have followed. But the MC5 was a volatile and unpredictable entity and nothing could have kept those five highly charged components from flying apart, especially in light of the troubled times. Perhaps the most impressive facet of the MC5's brief but potent rock and roll candidacy was its purity of intent in the face of its aimless anarchy, its party-while-Detroit-burns agenda. Regardless of the politics of the moment, no garage band with amps turned up to glass melting proportions, from that moment to this, could ever do any better than to draw inspiration from the potent and relevant catalog of the MC5.
look into ChinMusic #3
gaze upon ChinMusic #2
all the way back to ChinMusic #1
"Kick out the bills, brothers and sisters!"
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