Song 179: “Kick Out the Jams” by the MC5 (Public Clean Version)

A history of folk music in 500 songs.

Song 179

Kick Out the Jams by the MC5.

Before we begin, this episode contains some brief mention of child sexual abuse, as well as discussion of hard drug use and of political and police violence, as well as brief mentions of death by cancer.

If you're likely to be upset by those subjects, you may wish to skip this episode or read the transcript.

Also, this episode would simply not be possible without the repeated mention of a word which would, if I used it on the main feed, cause the podcast to lose its clean rating.

For this reason, I have made an unexpagated version of the podcast available to my Patreon backers, but on the main feed I've replaced that word whenever it comes up, in what I hope is a way that lets you understand what's being said and isn't too jarring.

So, let's look at the brief, tragic story of the MC5,

or to put it another way.

Morton Feldman.

The story of the MC5 begins in Detroit with a young boy who was born Wayne Cambs.

His birth father, who had come back from the war suffering from PTSD, had abandoned the family when Wayne was quite young.

And by the time he turned 10, Wayne had started stealing from shops and was well on his way to becoming what was then known as a juvenile delinquent.

Things only got worse for Wayne when his mother remarried.

Her new husband, Herschel, was an abusive monster who sexually abused both Wayne and his sister, and who she eventually and rightly divorced.

And Wayne despised him even more than he did his birth father.

But he did learn one important lesson.

As he recounts in his autobiography, Herschel played guitar and sang.

I did, however, he said, see Herschel use the power of music to win my mother over.

This affected me deeply.

Here was a guy I didn't like and I couldn't understand what my mother saw in him.

but she was falling for him.

I was jealous of the affection I saw in her eyes as he sang to her.

I thought he was getting between me and my mom.

At the same time, I was intrigued with the seduction I was witnessing in my living room.

I didn't know what was going on, but it made an impression on me.

I was only ten, but I could see how it worked.

Wayne soon persuaded Herschel to buy him a guitar, and after initially wanting to be a solo performer, Ala Elvis, he realised that what he really wanted to do was to play in a band with other people.

The first record he talks about really inspiring him as a guitarist is Dwayne Eddy's Rebel Rouser.

But he was also influenced by surf instrumental groups like The Ventures, records like Jorgen Ingman's version of Apache, and especially Chuck Berry.

By the time he was 14, it was so obvious that he was going to become a musician that his mother sat him down to have a serious talk about the subject, saying, I want you to do what you want to do with your life.

I want you to do what makes you happy.

But being a musician is a very hard life.

To be a professional musician means that you'll be working in bars and nightclubs at night and sleeping during the day.

Plus, musicians are around drinking and drugs and loose women.

It's a hard life.

Astonishingly, this did not have the desired effect of putting young Wayne off from becoming a musician.

His first band as a teenager was not particularly good, so he started looking for better musicians.

As he told the story later, someone told me about a juvenile delinquent they knew who played bongos.

I thought, any good band needs a bongo player.

I met this kid Fred Smith and he was real interested in music and a good-looking kid, a tough kid.

Knew how to fight.

Very popular.

bright.

Smith turned out not only to play bongos, but to own a guitar which he couldn't play.

Wayne started to teach Smith the rudiments of guitar and they played together, with Smith on rhythm and Wayne on lead, while Wayne was still playing with his band, the Bounty Hunters.

Smith joined another band, the Vibratones, and both bands started getting some gigs.

At this point, their ambitions were, as Smith would later put it, Screwing girls and, let's see, we wanted to be rich.

And maybe bigger than that, there was one type of music, rock and roll music, the type Chuck Berry played, and we wanted to play that because we loved it.

Eventually, the best members of the Vibratones and the Bounty Hunters joined forces to form a new band, initially keeping the Bounty Hunters' name.

The initial line-up of this group had Wayne Cambs on guitar, Fred Smith on bass, and Leo LeDuc on drums.

Smith, though, didn't enjoy playing bass and wanted to switch back to guitar.

At first, they brought in the elder brother of one of Wayne's friends.

Bob Derminer was someone that Wayne looked up to.

He was four years older than Wayne and Fred and thought of himself as a beatnik, or as close as Detroit could get.

He was a science fiction fanatic like Wayne, and he had introduced Wayne to Zen Buddhism, which he thought was much more relevant to his life than any other religion he'd come across.

But he had been dismissive of rock and roll music.

He was into the blues and into jazz.

He was a particular fan of Sun Ra and of John Coltrane.

Derminer had though come round to rock and roll after hearing the Rolling Stones in early 1964 and seeing how influenced they were by the blues.

Since my little red rooster's been gone,

He particularly liked the stones because he played a little harmonica, and they made the harmonica into a cool instrument.

Dermina seems to have considered playing harmonica for the group, and then made himself the group's manager for a while, having read about the Rolling Stones manager Andrew Oldham and the way that he was portrayed as the mind behind the group.

And then after a fist fight with Smith, he became the bass player, because they liked his attitude in the fight.

He didn't last last long in the role though, getting sacked after three weeks because he couldn't actually play the bass, but he recommended his friend Pat Burroughs to replace him.

However, he was soon back in the band.

Fred Smith decided that what the group needed was somebody nutty, and Derminer was the nuttiest person they knew, so he became the group's new lead singer, even though, as everyone involved would note when discussing it, he was very far from the kind of rock front man that was becoming popular at the time.

The kind of singer you wanted if you were a garage band was someone thin and handsome, with an air of mystery about them and with good hair, which at that time meant very straight hair.

Derminer was fat and had frizzy hair which he couldn't get to straighten, and was a little goofy looking.

However, soon after joining the band, Bob Derminer stopped being Bob Derminer.

He was sick of having a name which people couldn't pronounce or spell, and he became Bob Tyner, taking his surname from McCoy Tyner, the pianist with John Coltrane's band.

He also gave Fred Smith the nickname Sonic and suggested that Wayne change his surname because Cambs was another clunky name.

Wayne was absolutely in favour of this because it would be a way to dissociate himself from his hated birth father.

When he became as big as Elvis or the Beatles, his birthfather wouldn't know about it because it wouldn't be his name.

Like Tyner, Wayne took the surname of a renowned pianist, but his was a very different one.

Tyner suggested he name himself after Floyd Kramer.

The great Nashville session player who redefined country piano, played on almost every hit out of Nashville in the late 50s and early 60s, including Elvis's, and had his own solo instrumental hits like Last Date.

Wayne Kramer, though, spelled his surname with a K rather than a C, like Floyd did, partly to keep his old initial and partly because of a cinema, Kramer's, where he used to go to watch science fiction films.

It was a film that, more than anything, gave the new band inspiration.

Wayne Kramer had seen an adverb for The Tammy Show, a multi-act concert film we've talked about in previous previous episodes, and went along to the drive-in to watch it borrowing his mother's car.

The film, presented by Jan and Dean, who also sang the theme song we just heard, had a couple of acts Kramer wasn't interested in.

He found Billy J.

Kramer and Jerry and the Pacemakers a little dull, but the rest of the line-up blew his mind.

As he described them in his autobiography, My main man Chuck Berry played his ass off.

The Motown Artists slammed.

Leslie Gore was intense, and The Beach Boys were big favourites of mine.

But there were two acts that impressed him more than any.

He was already a big fan of the Rolling Stones, but he hadn't realized how impressive they were live.

And what's more, they had the same lineup as his band.

None of the big horn sections and keyboards that a lot of the other acts had.

He knew his band could do this.

you made me proud, you done me wrong.

Dirt my nose open,

last old eyes.

They were done

now, I've done it.

On the other hand, James Brown showed him a whole new world of performance that he could never previously have imagined.

He said of Brown's performance in his autobiography, I was mystified by the powerful sanctified performance ritual of Brown's Cape Act, with the spirit overtaking the utterly spent singer, driving him onward to give more and more.

Was this real?

Was this an act?

Was he having a psychotic break?

Whatever it was, I couldn't take my eyes off of him.

I wanted to be him.

The next night, he insisted the group's bass player, Patrick Burroughs, come with him to see the film.

They went back the next night, and the next.

In total, Kramer saw the Tammy show six nights in a row at the drive-in.

After his third time, he'd run out of money, but the cashier recognised him from the previous nights and started just letting him in free.

The group now had a direction they were going to go in.

They were going to make music that was as exciting as the stones and have a live show that made people's jaws drop the way James Browns did.

Everyone in the group had a place in that.

Pat Burroughs and drummer Bob Gaspar, who had replaced LaDuck, were a tight rhythm section who could play all the soul covers that made up the repertoire of a working band as well as anyone.

Fred Smith was dedicated to being the the best rhythm player he could.

Tyner later said of him, Fred understood the automatic transmission of playing rhythm.

One of the highest callings in music is to play rhythm because as a rhythm player you control the dynamics.

Kramer, meanwhile, was the practical nuts and bolts planner, as well as being the lead guitarist.

He was the one who would book the band's early gigs and the one who had an idea of where they were going to go as a band.

the one who saw them becoming the next Rolling Stones and had an idea of how to get there.

Tyner, on the other hand, saw it as his role to be Rob Tyner as loudly as he could.

While the rest of the band were from blue-collar families living in white-flight suburbs and saw their greatest goals in life as sleeping with women, getting drunk, committing petty crimes, and driving cool cars, he saw himself as an intellectual with interest in spirituality and literature and saw the tension between himself and the other members, who he said were fundamentally conservative.

and had a suburban mentality.

Tyner later said, Wayne was really obsessed with how do you do this stuff, how do you get a sound?

He was the one with all the practical questions.

I was more into asking, how weird could we get.

I wasn't interested in procedural stuff.

There's a certain security in doing things the right way, but at that time I thought it was way too early to start worrying about the right flicking way.

Doing things right meant eliminating all the interesting ideas.

But that's why it was also good that Wayne tried to keep things organised.

We were a good balance.

If it would have depended on me, I doubt we would have been successful.

Given that attitude, that he named himself after the pianist and some of the most far-out jazz to have been recorded at that point, while he suggested Kramer name himself after a commercially successful Nashville session pianist, seems to have been something of a dig against his opposite half in the group.

We can hear what this early version of the band sounded like in one of the few recordings of the group from 1965, then playing James Brown's I Don't Mind.

I don't mind

your new love.

I don't mind

when you're breaking up.

I love.

I know.

The group soon changed their name, and it was Tyner who suggested they become the MC5.

MC, in Tyner's telling, stood both for Motor City, because they were from Detroit, and for the MC at E equals MC squared.

The Five was because there were five of them, and also a vague nod to the Dave Clark Five, who at that point were one of the biggest bands in the world.

Indeed, the gig that made the MC5 think they'd hit the big time was as support for the Dave Clark Five.

in December 1965.

They had hoped to support the Rolling Stones when they hit town, and had actually been booked, but then were replaced at the last moment by another band who hadn't in with the promoter.

They got to support another huge British band, and dressed in their band uniforms, green corduroy coats, Beetle boots, black trousers and waistcoats, and white shirts, they found themselves in front of 12,000 screaming fans.

For the most part, though, they were playing team parties and clubs, playing a set that drew heavily on cover versions of British and Irish acts cover versions of American Blues Records.

They would perform a version of Them's version of Big Joe Williams's Baby Please Don't Go, or the Who's version of Lightning Hopkins's Bald-Headed Woman.

They were particularly influenced by the Yardbirds, who are a huge influence on the whole burgeoning Detroit rock scene, and their technique of having a rave-up section, where in the middle of a straightforward blues cover, like their version of Bo Diddley's I'm a Man, they would start an instrumental section which would get faster and louder and become a wall of noise before dropping back to the original song.

That song, in that arrangement, would become another of the songs that made up the group's set list.

But slowly there was a problem growing with the kind of shows the group were doing.

They were basically playing two types of venue.

Clubs for teenagers, where they were slowly outgrowing the audience, and bars, where they were expected to play the top 40 hits for dancing.

Both types of venue were increasingly unwilling to book them, preferring bands like Billy Lee and the Rivieras, who later became Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels.

They didn't fit in in those venues, and Tyner decided that he wanted to push the band to get freakier.

He was by now studying at Wayne State University, where there was a substantial bohemian artsy population, and he wanted the group to start playing for that kind of audience, and to start making real art rather than dance music, what he would eventually call avant rock.

Burroughs, on the other hand, wanted no part of this whatsoever.

He wanted to play Motown-style bass lines and make money.

According to Kramer, he was a white suburban working-class kid who wanted to get a nice day job and do the right thing.

He either quit or was fired in 1965, and according to at least one source I've used for this episode, joined the Marines and went off to Vietnam.

His replacement, Mike Davis, couldn't actually play the bass when he joined, but at first that didn't matter, though according to many people who were around at the time, the other band members would eventually bully him about his musicianship.

He was asked to join the band for two main reasons.

The first was that he was very good looking.

According to Kramer's girlfriend of the time, Chris Hovnanian, Wayne looked goofy, Rob was overweight, and Fred was sort of ugly like a rolling stone.

Michael was handsome, incredibly handsome and nice.

It was too bad that's the only reason they hired him.

It was in fact one of two reasons they hired him.

The other was that he was living the lifestyle they wanted to live.

He was part of the arty clique around Wayne State and was a dope-smoking painter.

He played a little guitar, and so Kramer decided he could just teach him to play bass.

To start with, Davis would literally just play note for note what Kramer taught him.

Kramer later said of his playing, Michael had limited technical experience and facility, but he thought like an artist and he played like an artist, which meant that he ignored half the rules of how you're supposed to play and would go off on these weird musical tangents.

If you just listened to him, he sounded fine, but I would have preferred someone who had a more traditional approach.

But almost as soon as Davis joined the group, they started playing for the arty audiences that that Tyner had wanted.

On Davis' very first gig, at a party thrown by some Bohemian friends of Tyner's girlfriend, Tyner discovered the possibilities of using feedback with his mic, and soon the group were incorporating the sound into everything they did.

Around this time, they came up with their first original song.

Black to Calm is the song that people talk about more than any other, except Kick Out the Jams, when they talk about the MC5's live shows, even though it was never properly recorded and was not released in any form while the band was still together.

Black to Com took its title from How to Plug Wires into an Amplifier.

At the time one of the ports would be labelled COM for common, and that's where you had to plug the black ground wire in if you didn't want to blow up your amp.

The song was essentially the MC5's equivalent of Love's Revelation or The Stones's Going Home, a short blues intro to give the semblance of structure, followed by a very long freeform improvisatory jam that could last 10 or 15 minutes.

But it started to differentiate itself largely because of Bob Gaspar's antipathy to the band's new direction.

Like his rhythm section partner Burroughs, Gaspar was an excellent musician by all accounts, but he wanted to play short pop songs for dancing, and wanted nothing to do with this avant-rock idea of Tyner's.

At one show, Gaspar had stopped playing, taken his mic, and asked the audience, who here thinks this band is playing too damn loud?

and got no response.

He'd asked, baffled, you think it sounds okay?

And the audience had roared their approval.

He'd gone back to playing after that, but he was fundamentally opposed to the new direction the band were going in, and Black to Com was, to him, the epitome of everything he hated about the style.

At one show, after the band struck up Black to Com, Gaspar decided to protest by just sitting there and not playing at all.

Smith turned his amp up in response to play even louder.

and the band just continued without Gaspar playing.

After a couple of minutes of this, seeing that his protest wasn't making any difference, he joined in, and the whole band started playing even louder, kicking up a notch in response.

That would become the way they would play the song from that point on.

But as you might imagine, Gaspar wasn't long for the band, especially once they got a residency at a small bar called the Crystal Bar that actually encouraged their experimentation.

His place was taken by Dennis Tomich, the drummer from the Bounty Hunters, who had spent the previous year playing weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Tomich was vaguely horrified by the freaky nature of the the band members.

He was still a suburban conformist by nature, but he loved the music they were playing.

He was soon formally invested as a member of the band on stage at the Crystal Bar by being presented with a ceremonial toilet plunger and renamed Dennis Machine Gun Thompson because of his ultra-fast rat-at-tat playing style.

The group now had their classic line-up in place, the one that would be the MC5, the mix of personalities that would create their unique sound.

As Davis put it later, I was the ladies' man, that was my area.

Fred was the quiet tough guy, he was the Charles Bronson of the band.

Wayne was the show-off, the guy that was always in your face.

Wayne had to always have the spotlight on him, he was the one that was dancing the boogaloo out there.

Rob was our beacon of enlightenment, and Dennis was like a little caveman, he was bam-bam.

Sometime around this time, the group recorded their first single.

I've seen dates of 1966 and 1967 for when the record came out, and it did so little at the time it's hard to find reliable information about its release.

Kramer, in his autobiography, remembers that the session was directly before Edwin Starr's session for Stopper on Sight

in the same studio, and that Starr was rehearsing that in the next room while they were recording.

This is almost certainly incorrect.

Stopper on Sight came out in February 1966, but the song the MC5 were recording was a cover version of them's I Can Only Give You Everything.

I can give you more than what I've got.

I can't expect to give what I have not.

I

can only give you love until the sun goes down.

And

until the leaves of summer turn the shit.

That track was released on Them's second album in January 1966 in the UK, but not until April in the US.

And the single version wasn't released until August, if 45 Cat is to be believed.

It is of course just about possible that the group had had access to a promo copy of the album through a radio station or something, but it seems unlikely.

Though one thing that makes the January 1966 date seem slightly more plausible is that they always said that they planned to record another Them track, Gloria, but then the Shadows of Night released their hit version of it, and that came out in December 1965.

Gonna shout at every place.

Either way, the MC5's first single is a fairly straightforward copy of the Them record with a little more fuzz on the guitar and it sounds at points almost like the 13th floor elevators.

I can't feel them all over what I've got.

They expect to reveal what I am not

I

can only give you loving when the sun goes down

The B-side, one of the guys, was one of the first songs written by the group themselves.

Don't think about you and my girl,

we one of the guys,

we one

The bass riff on that sounds at points very like that on the Beatles Taxman.

And Revolver was released in August 1966, the same month as Them's single of I Can Only Give You Everything, suggesting that was the most likely date for this recording session.

If that is the case, then the MC5's first single was recorded the same month that they were first heard by the man who had become the Andrew Lou Golden figure for them that Rob Tyner had initially thought he might be, though John Sinclair was far from impressed with them at first.

Sinclair was a former graduate student in literature.

and a massive jazz fan who had the same attitudes about rock and roll music that Tyner had had a year or two earlier.

He dropped out of university when he realised he could make more money from selling dope, which he could get from his connections in the jazz world, to students, and used that to finance an arts collective, the Detroit Artists Workshop, which he later described as a neo-beatnik self-determination center for musicians, poets, photographers, painters, filmmakers, dope fiends, and lovers of all kinds.

Smith and Davis had moved into a flat above the rooms that were used by the artists' workshop, and Tyner in particular became impressed with what the organisation were doing, saying, I got blown away.

The very foundation of everything I understood was shaken by the intensity of John Sinclair.

In particular, he was impressed by the way that Sinclair, after a performance by some jazz musicians, got up on stage and berated the audience to collecting more money for the musicians, saying, you can't expect to come in here for free and listen to this beautiful music without giving up some money.

You got to pay to support the arts.

These people work really hard and they deserve some money for their labours.

At the time, while Tyner and Davis had interests in the intellectual world, most of the group weren't really interested in art or politics or how the two intersected, other than how it affected them on a moment-to-moment basis.

As Kramer later said, We knew the world generally sucked and we didn't want to be a part of it.

We wanted to do something else, which amounts to not wanting to get up in the morning and have a real job.

You know, it was, this sucks, that sucks, this is square, or this isn't any fun.

Working at Big Boy is not fun.

Playing in a band is fun.

Going to the drag strip is fun.

Riding around in the car drinking beer is fun.

It was just on a gut level.

That was our level of politics.

We wanted to make up different ways to be.

Sinclair, though, was very different.

He wanted to bring about a Maoist revolution through the medium of publishing small circulation zines about free jazz and poetry, and by smoking a lot of dope.

And he was at the centre of the counterculture in Detroit, and the group desperately wanted to impress him.

However, the police had certain objections to parts of this program,

notably the smoking a lot of dope part, and he had twice been arrested for possession of marijuana.

In February 1966, shortly after meeting the group members and before hearing them play, he was sentenced to six months in prison for his second conviction.

When he got out, there was a celebration for his release, an all-day festival of live jazz and poetry readings.

The MC5 had decided that they were going to perform at the event.

and brought along their instruments and waited until they got a chance to get up on stage and start playing.

Unfortunately, they didn't get that chance until, depending on which report you read, sometime between two and four in the morning.

At which point, almost as soon as they started playing at their earbleading volume, a neighbour came round with a shotgun, and Sinclair's wife wisely pulled the plug.

Sinclair barely got to hear a note, but he heard enough to write a piece for an underground paper dismissing jive rock and rollers.

China and Kramer decided that they needed to take matters into their own hands and go and talk to Sinclair, who played them some of the music he liked, the jazz pianist Cecil Taylor.

They explained that they loved the music he did too, Taylor and Sun Ra and Archie Shepp and John Coltrane, but they also loved rock and roll.

He was always talking about the people.

Well, weren't Tyner and Kramer people?

This argument was convincing enough that Sinclair came to see the band live, and he was overwhelmed, in particular by Black to Come.

He could see the links between what they were doing musically and the avant-garde jazz he liked, while at the same time seeing in these blue collar people making loud exciting music a possibility of the kind of populist success you could never get from jazz.

Within a short time, Sinclair had linked them up with the venue that was going to make them.

Russ Gibb was a teacher who'd been putting on dancers for years, but had his eyes on bigger things than sock ops.

Over the summer of 1966 he'd visited San Francisco, where he had friends in the burgeoning hippie scene, and he'd been amazed by the fillmore and decided he needed to do something like that.

He went to speak to Bill Graham about how he could open his own similar venue, and at first Graham was a little cautious, asking how far Detroit was from San Francisco.

When told it was about 1200 miles, he relaxed and explained to Gibb exactly what he'd need to do to make his own Fillmore clone.

Gibb found a space, an old ballroom now deserted, that had been built in the heyday of the Big Band era.

He persuaded the ballroom's owner to rent it for a nominal fee, and got to work starting up his own venue.

That ballroom had been named the Grand Ballroom, G-R-A-N-D-E, as in the French word, but people in Detroit having no truck with fancy foreign words, it was universally referred to as the Grandie.

Gibbard asked Sinclair to book the bands for the venue's opening night, and Sinclair booked the MC5 to headline, and an up-and-coming young band called the Chosen Few to support.

Unfortunately, the Chosen Few would soon split up as their parents wouldn't let them keep playing far away from home on school nights, but their bass player Ron Ashton was blown away by how good the MC5 were, and took notes for his next band.

The MC5 soon became the house band at the Grandy, headlining there regularly and also supporting all the major acts that came to Detroit when they played the venue.

The Grandy turned the group into the most exciting live act anyone had ever seen.

By all accounts they blew people like Cream or Big Brother and the Holding Company off stage when they supported them, partly because of their own stagecraft, but also because the Grandy had odd acoustics, and the MC5 had got used to tailoring their performance to the Grandy in particular.

It even got to the point that reportedly some bands had it written into their contracts that the MC5 wouldn't be their support act.

When Blood, Sweat and Tears did that, the replacement support act applied for them was Ron Ashton's new band, the Psychedelic Stooges, who the MC5 regarded as their little brother band.

The Stooges weren't the only local band to be influenced by the MC5.

There were some performers who they saw as their peers, at least some of the time, people like Bob Seeger.

But most of the time, the other musicians were learning from the group.

Ted Nugent, for example, said, It was seeing MC5 at the Grandy Ballroom that opened our eyes.

I can't describe in words what it meant to witness that band live.

Seeing them made us realize we had to play better, harder than anyone on the scene.

We began practicing like boys possessed.

In Detroit, you'd die if you played it like the record.

You had to add something.

We channelled the MC5 Beast.

You can hear how influenced Nugent was by the group by comparing his band the Amboy Dukes' first single, a version of Baby Please Don't Go from 1967.

With this live recording of the MC5 doing the same song in 1966.

The MC5 were obviously influenced by Them's version of the old Big Joe Williams song, but the Amboy Dukes are equally obviously influenced by the MC5.

In early 1967, in response to the changing mood of society and of the counterculture, John Sinclair changed the name of the Detroit Artists' Workshop.

It was now called Trans Love Energies, taking its name for a line in the Donovan song, The Fat Angel.

Fly, Trans Love Airways,

get you there on time.

Fly translove airways.

The main reason for the change was that Sinclair had started using LSD.

Before that point, he had been primarily interested in creating a space in which he and a small group of people he considered worthy could indulge their niche interests, and had no interest in getting outsiders involved.

Now, though, he wanted to turn the whole world on, and he was on a mission.

But famously, while 1967 was the summer of love for the hippies in London and the big coastal cities of America, in Detroit, summer 1967 saw the black riots against police brutality that had already hit other cities come to Detroit.

We've covered this in more detail in episodes about black Detroit-based artists, but in brief, the police raided an unlicensed bar in a black area of town, expecting to find a couple of dozen people drinking there.

They found more than 100 people there.

They decided to arrest them all, handcuffed and beat some of them, smashed the bar's jukebox, and kept all hundred or so people waiting outside while they called for more vans to take them away.

Soon a bigger crowd gathered, the police were outnumbered, and things turned violent.

The police overreacted, as the police were wont to do, and it essentially was the spark that lit a fuse connected to a barrel of gunpowder.

Black people had been oppressed in Detroit for decades, segregated to slum areas, abused by the almost completely white police force, and exploited by white business owners who gave different rates to black and white customers.

They had had enough, and what followed were days of looting and burning of white-owned businesses.

The National Guard were called in, and by the end of the weekend, 43 people had been killed, almost all of them black, and most of them murdered for stealing small items from shops.

7,200 people, almost all black, were arrested.

While the riots spread, some areas were sacrosanct.

Tim Buckley and his conger player Carter C.C.

Collins had been booked to play the Grandy that weekend.

While Buckley was ostensibly a folk singer, by this point his performances were going into long, extended jazz-influenced jams that weren't a million miles away from an acoustic version of the MC5.

Buckley and Collins had been staying with Vus Gibb, the Grandy's promoter, and had gone out of the area for a picnic on the first day after the riot started, before the extent of it became apparent.

They got back to Gibbs' house in Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit, segregated as most of the area was, a white area, to find half the city in flames, and the mayor of Dearborn giving the police carte blanche to shoot on sight anyone causing a disturbance.

They immediately decided that they needed to protect the Grandy and the expensive PA equipment in there from any arsonists or looters, so ignored the warnings to stay out of the area the Grandy was in and drove to the venue.

They were so scared that for the first half of the journey they had Collins, who was black, hide in the back seat with his head ducked below the window.

Then once they entered a black area they switched and had Collins drive while Buckley and Gibb crouched in the back.

They were amazed, when they got to the Grandy, to find that even though nearby buildings had been torched and there were people throwing petrol bombs nearby, the Grandy itself was completely untouched.

They recruited a couple of local kids to help them get the expensive PA system out in case anything happened, and asked them why the Grandy had been left untouched, and were told, Hey, you got music here, man.

Not a single window of the building was damaged in the rioting.

The events of the riots were of course later commemorated in songs, most notably John Lee Hooker's The Motor City is Burning.

Ain't a thing in the world that Johnny can do.

My

Soon after the riot, a couple of major changes happened to the group's relationship with John Sinclair.

The first was that when the Grateful Dead played the Grandie, Sinclair talked to Rock Scully, the Dead's manager, and realised that he could be a manager.

And so he took on that role with the MC5.

Though it was agreed that they wouldn't have anything so bourgeois and capitalist as a contract, because, after all, everyone trusted everyone, right?

Though, as Sinclair later said, it was sorta ironic that the Dead would play such a pivotal role in our story because the MC5 hated San Francisco music.

They thought I was Daffy for liking it.

They kinda liked Moby Grape a little bit.

But the Dead, they thought they were all just charlatans.

They just looked at them like they were some lower musical form because they were fans of more high-energy music.

Also, Sinclair decided he needed to get away from Detroit.

He'd been arrested for a third time in January 1967 for allegedly giving two joints to an undercover police officer.

His lawyers were busily trying to prevent the case from going to trial.

If convicted, under Michigan's three strikes rule for cannabis offences, he would serve 10 years in prison.

But he was feeling increasingly persecuted by the police.

This was reinforced by the response to the riots.

While the Detroit police were mostly engaged in their favoured hobbies of persecuting black people during the rioting, they did put some time aside for harassing hippies.

Kramer had had his home busted into by shotgun-toting cops, claiming that they thought a telescope he'd been looking through was a sniper sight and spent the night in jail, while Sinclair had also had police round to his apartment pointing guns in his face, though he apparently stood up to them and made them back down.

Trans Love Energies became a commune, and the MC5 were part of it.

Indeed, they soon became an essential part, with the money they earned from live shows becoming the principal source of income for the commune, which was run on very sexist lines, with the men going out to work, as activists, poets, or musicians, while the women were meant to cook, clean, and sew the MC5's stage costumes.

The political radicalism and drive for equality that was in all of Sinclair's rhetoric did not yet extend to seeing women as equal human beings.

And that commune moved first, briefly, to Traverse City in northern Michigan, then to Ann Arbor, closer to Detroit while still being away from it, and home of their little brother band, the Stooges.

In early 68, around the time of the move to Ann Arbor, the group recorded their second single, an original titled Looking at You.

When it happened,

something snapped inside, make me walk around.

John Sinclair was the credited producer, though by all accounts his production mostly consisted of tying the group to do what they always did on stage and keeping out of their way.

That single, like the first one, initially did nothing, but it meant Sinclair had something to use to promote the group when they got a more or less accidental big break.

1968 was, as you have probably been able to tell from these episodes even if you didn't already know it, a very politically turbulent year indeed, and one of the biggest protests of the year was at the Democratic Convention in Chicago.

Early in the year, there had been hoped hoped that Robert F.

Kennedy, the original, not the person of that name who is currently involved in the US government, would be made the Democratic candidate for the presidency.

Kennedy was the younger brother of John F.

Kennedy, and was young, charismatic, and as sympathetic to the views of the radicals in the counterculture as anyone with a reasonable chance of getting the nomination could be.

He was running for the nomination on a platform of economic redistribution, racial equality, and a negotiated peace in Vietnam.

There were two other candidates for the nomination, Eugene McCarthy, a senator from the left of the party who was even more counterculturally approved, and Hubert Humphrey, the vice president to the sitting president Lyndon Johnson.

Johnson had decided not to run for re-election when he realised how unpopular his Vietnam policy was among young voters, but Humphrey was, in effect, the continuity Johnson candidate.

Then Robert Kennedy was assassinated, and the race for the nomination changed.

McCarthy soaked up most of the support that Kennedy had been getting, but Kennedy had had some appeal to the Democratic Party establishment, and McCarthy didn't.

Support coalesced around Humphrey, with very little chance of anyone else getting the nomination, and this led to a number of groups of protesters against the war congregating to protest the convention, as well as protesters from civil rights organisations, protesting continued racism in American politics.

These various groups contained a wide variety of people of different motivations, and one of the smaller but more widely publicised groups was centered around Abby Hoffman and Jerry Jerry Rubin, two hippie pranksters who had taken part in and helped organise various political pranks like throwing handfuls of dollar bills into the stock exchange to watch people scrabble for the money, and a famous attempt in 1967 to levitate the Pentagon in order to exorcise it.

After an anti-war march, roughly half the crowd, tens of thousands of people, encircled the Pentagon while Ed Sanders of the Fugs, later to write one of the first books on the Manson family, recited a magic spell to make it raise.

After that, but before the convention, Hoffman and Rubin, along with several others including the folk singer Judy Collins, had formed the Youth International Party, shortened to the Yippies, and the Yippies would be a major part of the protests at the convention.

Hoffman and Rubin would be among the Chicago seven arrested after riots outside the convention.

By all accounts, the police started beating protesters in order to incite a riot.

Then when they had successfully done so, arrested people they considered ringleaders for inciting it.

The Yippies staged several stunts during the convention, including nominating their own candidate, a pig called Pigasus, for president.

But before the riot, they had organised what was promised to be the greatest rock festival of all time, or so they claimed.

Their announcements of their festival of life in the Yippie Manifesto, which went out to the underground press, and which was signed by people like Arlo Guthrie, Phil Oaks, Country Joe MacDonald, The Fugs, Timothy Leary, and Alan Ginsburg, read in part:

Join us in Chicago in August for an international festival of youth, music, and theatre.

Rise up and abandon the creeping meatball.

Come all you rebels, youth spirits, rock minstrels, truth seekers, peacock freaks, poets, barricade jumpers, dancers, lovers and artists.

It is summer.

It is the last week of August and the National Death Party meets to bless Johnson.

We are there.

There are five hundred thousand of us dancing in the streets, throbbing with amplifiers and harmony.

We are making love in the parks.

We are reading, singing, laughing, printing newspapers, groping and making a mock convention, and celebrating the birth of a free America America in our own time.

Rumours ran wild about who the rock bands that would be playing at this festival would be.

Obviously, Dylan would show up, right?

The Stones had to be there.

Maybe even the Beatles would show up.

But not everyone was as enthusiastic about this festival.

Rolling Stone ran a headline saying, Musicians reject new political exploiters, with an article by Yan Wenner that read in part, What makes this otherwise transparent effort worthy of notice is that these leftover radical politicos will rise and fall in their ability to exploit the image and popularity of rock and roll.

Obviously, the MC5 were going to play this great festival.

John Sinclair was very tied into the counterculture.

But when they got to Chicago, they found that the reality of the festival was rather different from what the publicity said.

At one point, everybody wanted to come to Chicago, and then it got very scary, and then nobody wanted to come to Chicago, and 5,000 of the

300,000 showed up.

There's a song commemorating those who didn't show up.

I remember the chords:

Oh, where were you in Chicago?

You know, I didn't see you there.

I didn't see them crack your head or breathe the tear-gas air.

Oh, where were you in Chicago when the fight was being fought?

Oh, where were you in Chicago?

Cause I was in Detroit.

Phil Oakes, who we we'd just heard, was one of a small number of performers who actually played to a crowd that, as he said in that intro, numbered in the single-digit thousands rather than the half a million the Ippies had expected.

The rest of the performers were also folk singers and the like, and the MC5 were the only rock band to actually show up.

Apparently some other bands had confirmed, but once Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin had told the press that they were going to put LSD in the Chicago water supply, they decided they'd be better off not dealing with these people.

The event was so disorganised that there was no stage to perform on.

The silent footage of the show, surveillance footage taken by the Department of Defense apparently, shows the group performing on blankets or sheets laid on the grass while the audience sits down so people further back can see the band.

When Sinclair asked how they were going to power their equipment, Ed Sanders ran a cable to a hot dog vendor 50 yards away and asked him if they could plug in there.

But despite all that, the group performed and won over the crowd to the extent that Norman Mailer, probably America's most famous living author at the time, wrote about them in a national article about the convention, later reprinted in his book Miami and the Siege of Chicago, saying,

A young white singer with a cherubic face, perhaps 18, maybe 28, his hair in one huge puff ball teased out six to nine inches from his head, was taking off on an interplanetary, then galactic flight of song, halfway between the space music of Sun Ra and the flight of the bumblebee, the singer's head shaking at the climb like the blur of a buzzing fly, his sound an electric caterwauling of power come out of the wall, or the line in the grass, or the wet plates in the batteries, and the singer not bending it, but whirling it, burning it, flashing it down some arc of consciousness, the sound screaming up to a climax of vibrations like one rocket blasting out of itself, the force of the noise of vertigo in the cauldrons of inner space.

It was the roar of the beast in all nihilism, electric bass and drum driving behind out of their own non-stop to the end of mind.

Mailer didn't name the MC5, but everyone in the counterculture now knew that Norman Mailer had written about them, and that the MC5 had shown up when all those bigger acts had chickened out, that they walked the revolutionary walk, they didn't just talk the talk.

The group by this point were seriously trying to get a major record deal, and this was a big boost.

One of the places they tried was Apple Records, though they got no response, and when the white album came out, they took it personally.

Rob Tyner later said, We thought, wow, the Beatles would be perfect because we really liked those guys.

We had this notion of, gee, they'll sign us and everything will be lovely and we'll all get together and have tea.

But they listened to it and sent it back and said, hey man, this is not suitable for any kind of catalogue we're ever going to have.

Then on the White album they had songs with lyrics like, why don't we do it in the road?

and if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow.

I don't know if they were talking about us, but it felt like it.

Thankfully, the MC5 did not take their belief that the Beatles were secretly singing about them, as far as some other unsigned musicians we've looked at in this podcast.

However, it wouldn't be long until the group did get signed.

John Sinclair's writing about the group in Detroit Underground Papers was picked up on by the East Village Other, an underground paper in New York, and he travelled to New York with copies of the Looking at You single to play for Dennis Frawley and Bob Righteous Rudnick, two DJs who shared both a radio show and an East Village Other column.

They in turn introduced Sinclair to Danny Fields.

We've mentioned Danny Fields briefly before in the All You Need Is Love episode.

He was the managing editor of Datebook, the teen magazine that reprinted the Bigger Than Jesus story in 1966.

By 1968 though, he had a new job at Electro Records.

Officially his job was director of publicity, but unofficially his job was house hippie, a job that a lot of future big deals in the music industry had around this time.

Most of the executives at the big record companies had no understanding of what rock music was or what the teenagers liked.

So once they had a hit rock group and saw how much money that made compared to their other acts, they desperately looked around for someone who could tell them what the kids would buy.

As Frank Zappa puts it in his autobiography, someone who had the same hair.

In Elektra's case, they had until the mid-sixties been a label that specialised in rather polite left-wing folk music, people like Judy Collins, Phil Oaks, and Theodore Bickel.

They had dipped their toe in the water of rock music by signing the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

But they were, of course, managed by Albert Grossman and allowed to play at the Newport Folk Festival, and uncommercial enough that they fit in with Elektra's roster, their highest-charting album only made number 52.

They'd then signed Love, but Love had come through Herb Cohen, who managed people like Tim Buckley, another Elektra artist, and the Modern Folk Quartet, and had got his start in the folk music business.

And Love were never going to be a major commercial act.

But then Arthur Lee had suggested that they sign the Doors.

And The Doors had been a major commercial act.

And suddenly, Jack Holtzman was looking for a new Doors.

Danny Fields, on the other hand, did not want a new Dawes.

He'd started working for Elektra after having more or less accidentally become the Dawes' East Coast publicist.

And while he admired Jim Morrison as a star, he hated him as a human being and didn't have much time for what he saw as Morrison's poetic pretensions.

He wanted something more vital and also more eccentric.

Fields was part of the Warhol scene and a big fan of the Velvet Underground, and he wanted music that was more than just a charismatic star who thought he was a poet.

The first artist that Fields brought into Electra was David Peale, a street singer.

And Peale's album Have a Marijuana was released in 1968, featuring tracks like Show Me the Way to Get Stoned, Here Comes a Cop, I've Got Some Grass, and of course, I like marijuana.

marijuana

Mario marijuana

I like marijuana you like marijuana we like marijuana too

I want to be a hippie because

the album also contained a song titled Up Against the Wall based around a phrase that would come back to Hauntfields

Marty Feldman

Up Against the Wall Milton Friedman

Up Against

Milos Foreman

Michel Foucault

As well as working at Electra, Fields also had a show on WFMU, the same station that Forley and Mudnik's show was on.

And they played the MC5 single for him and introduced him to Sinclair.

He was impressed enough by Sinclair that he was willing to travel to Detroit to see the MC5 in action.

Fields later said, The band filled the Grandy Ballroom and played this great show.

Their clothes were amazing and the kids were screaming.

They were loud and fast and spun around on stage.

What else did you need to see?

I mean, if you worked for a record company, you'd go, wow.

It was quasi-fascist and enormously appealing for that reason.

It was a glimpse of things to come.

They'd say, wave your hand, or make a fist.

and everyone would do it.

If they'd say, say, oh, everyone would say, oh.

It was a forerunner of contemporary rock concerts, which I adored.

I just thought it was fabulous, such power.

They had a hype man named J.C.

Crawford doing a speech at the beginning, Brothers and Sisters, and all that.

It was a total package.

The MC5 had everything, and I was overwhelmed.

He was very impressed with the band, though rather less impressed with the communal life they were living, and the way the women were made to serve the men, saying they were treated like like slaves.

Then Wayne Kramer told him that he had to see another band, the MC5's little brother band, the Psychedelic Stooges, and as he said later, Musically I preferred the Stooges.

I thought they were more advanced and modern.

They were making the music I'd wanted to hear my whole life.

The MC5 were full of energy and the songs were catchy, more traditional.

The Stooges, on the other hand, were on the edge of the cliff of modern musical taste.

That, to me, was art.

Art to me was something I couldn't imagine in my mind.

The MC5 was a a well-rehearsed machine, but the Stooges were fooling around with something I thought was bigger than that.

But he was determined to sign both bands, because the MC5 had the potential to be the biggest band in the world, while the Stooges were precisely to his musical taste.

He phoned Jack Holtzman and got the OK to sign both.

As the MC5 were more famous locally, they would get a $20,000 advance, while the Stooges would get $5,000.

For both bands, this was more money than they had ever seen, although the MC5 didn't get to see much of it themselves as they had a commune to support.

It was decided that the group would record their first album as a live record at the Grandy Ballroom, because they worked best in front of an audience, because the sheer audience response would demonstrate that they were already a big deal, and because it was cheaper to record the album live than to spend months in the studio.

The group was signed to Elektra in the last week of September 1968.

and they recorded their debut album over two nights a little over a month later, the 30th of October and Halloween, with the band also doing a run-through of their set without an audience during the day of the 31st.

Wayne Kramer would always later express dissatisfaction with the sound of the album, saying he was playing a borrowed guitar that he couldn't keep in tune, and that nobody was playing as well as they could on their best nights.

But with all due respect to Kramer, I think from the other MC5 live recordings and footage that have surfaced since that, He was simply hearing the difference between how music sounds when you're playing it live in the moment and how it is when you hear recordings played back later.

The album in some ways is patterned after a James Brown show, and particularly Live at the Apollo, where Brown's show would start with his hype man, Danny Ray, introducing the show.

Here, Jesse Crawford, the head priest of a pseudo-religion known as Zenta, which apparently worshipped rock and roll music, gives an introduction in the persona of Brother J.C., parodying the speech of evangelical preachers.

revolution out there, brothers.

I want to hear another revolution.

Brothers and sisters, the time has come for each and every one of you to decide whether you are going to be the problem or whether you are going to be the solution.

You must choose, brothers.

You must choose.

It takes five seconds.

Five seconds of decision.

Five seconds to realize your purpose here on the planet.

It takes five seconds to realize that it's time to move.

It's time to get down with it.

Brothers, it's time to testify.

The opening song, Ramblin' Rose, was co-written by the Nashville songwriters Mary John Wilkin, who wrote Long Black Veil and One Day at a Time, and Fred Birch, whose most infamous song is Elvis Presley's Yoga Is as Yoga Does, and originally recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis, who had a very intense take on the song in 1962.

The more you beat it, the more it rolls.

You're down to ramble and roll.

But the MC5's version is based on an obscure soul version from three years later, recorded by Ted Taylor, a former member of the cadets, who sang the song in a shrieked falsetto.

Love is like a ramble and roll.

The more you feed it, the more it goes.

Ramble and roll is a ramble and rolls from our power.

The MC5's version of the song has Wayne Cramer on lead.

Rob Tyner didn't come out until after the first song.

And picks the tempo up enormously, but he's definitely imitating Taylor's vocal style.

After that song, Rob Tyner comes out and the band launch into the title track of the album, and their single Most Famous Song.

Tyner later explained the meaning of the title Kick Out the Jams, saying, The actual definition of Kick Out the Jams is all about a way of playing music it was originally a verb in the black and jazz communities to jam referred to the act of playing music when i would go to jazz clubs with my friend who was a tenor saxophonist the musicians had this bit where they would let people go up on stage and improvise the players would say things like kick out the jams or get off stage in other words kick ass or go home Years later I started saying it again because you'd go to the grandy ballroom and they'd have these bands playing that were so wimpy and lame that it made sense again.

He also, though, made it clear that the meaning of the title was meant to be ambiguous, that people could see in it what they wanted to see.

But it wasn't the title itself that made the song famous, for what Tyner always shouted in the intro.

Melvin Franklin.

Tyner later said, but let's face it, fun is fun.

Kick Out the Jams Millard Fillmore, one joke.

It was something that just started out as this little thing, but it became sort of a gimmick.

And that really did lessen the possibility of saying anything more.

Sometimes the crowd was just waiting for you to do that.

It was a trap on some levels, and it did make the music appear more superficial.

That said, even without the word in question, Kick Out the Jams is quite a remarkable recording for the time period.

Remembering that this was 1968 when heavy metal was being used to refer to everything from the birds to hapshash and the coloured coat, and had not yet become a coherent genre, and nearly a full decade before punk became a codified style.

The MC5 are often referred to as proto-punk, but that kind of label suggests an intentionality, that they knew that in ten years' time the Clash would be making records, and that, obviously, wasn't the case.

This was music in the context of 1968.

And in that context, it was revolutionary.

You gotta have it, baby, you can't do it about.

When you get the feeling of that, signal arms, I drink with my hands.

The album continues with a fairly standard MC5 set list of the time.

Three original numbers, Come Together, not the Beatles song of the same name, Rocket Reducer No.

62, Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa.

Rocket Reducer was a reference to sniffing glue, which according to Ron Ashton of the Stooges, they all did, other than Tyna, as part of MC5's eventual revolt against Sinclair.

They wanted to fight for their right to be blithering flanking idiots.

It was almost a for cue to John.

It was their way of saying they didn't want to be part of his hippie Sherbet anymore.

The other original on the album was Borderline, the B-side of their recent single, which was followed by a cover of John Lee Hooker's The Motor City is Burning about the previous year's riots.

the balloon for the body, babe.

There ain't no plan

in the world they can do.

You know the balls with the body, people.

There ain't no plane

that's what I like to do.

My hometown burns out to the power.

The last two tracks were a reworking of the Trogs's I Want You, retitled I Want You Right Now, and to finish a song called Starship, which was inspired by the great Afrofuturist jazz musician Sun Ra.

Sun Ra was one of those great originals who it would take an entire multi-episode story to explain in detail.

But briefly, he had been a music student when he had had a visionary experience, claiming to be transported to the planet Saturn by aliens, after which he had devoted his life intensely to music, and changed his name to Sun Ra after the ancient Egyptian god of the sun.

He'd played with Fletcher Henderson, Wyoni Harris and Coleman Hawkins among others, before recording his first album with Tom Wilson producing.

He had created an elaborate mythology for his band, the Sun Ra Orchestra, involving space travel and the Egyptian gods, and simultaneously took this very seriously and treated it as comedy in a way that appealed to the yippeeish side of the counterculture.

His extended abstract instrumental work was hugely influential on the MC5 and people in their circle, particularly Tyner and Sinclair.

The album from which that excerpt comes, The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra Volume 2, has as its liner notes a poem written by Sun Ra, which reads in part

Starship, Starship, take me, stretch our legs in time and space, take a passage through the vacuum, let me feel the stars burning on my face.

There is a land whose beauty is almost unimaginable to the human mind.

In a days we stand there and look further than the the ordinary eye can see.

The MC5 took that poem and set it to music, and it became the album's closing track, Starship.

On living, blazing fire.

Other songs were recorded during the two live shows, like Black to Come.

And the original idea was that they were going to make Kick Out the Jams a double album, but instead it was decided to use just the most listenable tracks.

Halloween, the day of the second recording for the album, is New Year's Eve in the Zenta pseudo-religion.

And the following day, the 1st of November, Zenta New New Year, the latest change of direction for what had been the Detroit Artists Workshop, and had become Trans Love Energies was announced.

They now had their own political party, the White Panther Party.

Supposedly formed after Huey P.

Newton, the leader of the radical Black Panther Party, was asked what white people could do to support the Black Panthers and said, form a White Panther Party, The White Panthers started almost as a joke in the Yippie style, and indeed early on said that they were going to work with the Yippies, who were of course a party of their own.

They had a 10-point programme of their own to match the Black Panther one.

But while the Black Panther's 10-point programme was, if hopelessly optimistic, fundamentally grounded in attempting to redress the monstrous historical injustices that had affected black Americans, the White Panther Party programme frankly reads more like the entitled Demands of a Spoiled Child, with a couple of real grievances thrown into the mix.

Their 10 points were:

1.

Full endorsement and support of Black Panther Party's 10-point programme.

2.

Total assault on the culture by any means necessary, including rock and roll, dope and frolicking in the streets.

3.

Free exchange of energy and materials.

We demand the end of money.

4.

Free food, clothes, housing, dope, music, bodies, medical care.

Everything free for everybody.

5.

Free access to information media.

Free technology from the greed creeps.

6.

Free time and space for all humans.

Dissolve all unnatural boundaries.

7.

Free all schools and all structures from corporate rule.

Turn the building over to the people at once.

8.

Free all prisoners everywhere.

They are our brothers.

9.

Free all soldiers at once.

No more conscripted armies.

10.

Free the people from their leaders.

Leaders suck.

All power to all the people.

Freedom means free everyone.

Notably, John Sinclair doesn't seem to have been including himself in that indictment of leaders.

The other sleeve of Kick Out the Jams saw three of the band members wearing White Panther Party badges, pinned through their skin to their bare chests.

Despite the band being largely unconcerned with politics in reality, they at least wanted to appear like they meant it, man, at least for the moment.

And some of the White Panthers really did mean it.

While, for example, the White Panther Party gave the title of Minister of Flinging in the streets to the MC5's roadie Steve Harnadek, They also gave the title of Minister of Defence to party co-founder Pun Plamondon, who had bombed a CIA office in Ann Arbor in September 1968 and was soon on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list as a result.

Plamandon would later get convicted for the bombing, and his conviction would later be overturned in a hugely important Supreme Court case that ruled that even national security and a presidential order wouldn't authorise illegal wiretapping, a ruling that had profound implications for the Watergate scandal that was happening at the same time.

Notably, Plamondon gets a credit in the liner notes to kick out the jams, and those credits make very interesting reading in the light of everything that people have said about the role of women in the organisation.

Of the 18 male names credited, only two, Leo and Matthew, aren't given surnames.

Of the nine women credited, mostly for making the band's costumes, only two are.

Magdalena Sinclair and Jeannie Plamondon.

All the others are just given their first names.

Supposedly, one of the groups that the White Panther Party was for was Liberated Women.

They seem to have had a very particular definition of liberated.

As the first single, Kick Out the Jams was released with the word Martin Freeman replaced with Brothers and Sisters.

The idea was to put that out on the single, but put the uncensored version on the album, which would come out when the single was a massive hit, as it undoubtedly would be, and blow everyone's minds by showing them the real thing.

This was a compromise the band and the record label were both happy with.

And at first it seemed like the plan was working.

The single rose to number two in Detroit and started taking off in other markets.

But despite their compromises, the word Michael Fabricant ended up destroying the MC5's career before it had begun, and it did so in multiple ways.

The trouble started when the group travelled eastwards to promote their new single and forthcoming album.

As part of that, they hooked up with left-wing community groups groups in the different cities they travelled to, and gave them free tickets for their shows and a bit of time on stage to espouse their philosophies.

In Boston, the group they connected with was called the Michael Flatleys, short for Up Against the Wall, Mere Pharaohs, a line taken from the poem Black People by Amarie Baraka.

This group believed, among other things, that all art should be free, and they had successfully, for a while, persuaded Bill Graham to put on free shows every week at the Fillmore East.

They were also associated associated with Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol.

And Solanus apparently got the gun she used for the shooting from one of the leaders of the Michael Fallant.

The Max Fleischer's biggest contribution to the music world, other than cutting down the fences at Woodstock and making that festival free against its organisers' wishes, was when the lyrics to Jefferson Airplane's We Can Be Together were largely taken from a Mariella Frostruck pamphlet.

they say we are, we are.

And we are very proud of ourselves,

Matt Fraction.

In Boston, the MC5 hooked up with the Michael Fenton Stevens, who were raising money for the defence of one of their members who had stabbed a soldier.

As Wayne Kramer later described the group, they were the East Village equivalent of the White Panther Party, people who thought the Black Panthers were bad because they had guns and were ready to fight it out.

So their attitude was, we're bad, we've got guns and we're ready to fight it out.

And because of our phony political ideology that we were all sharing, they came to our gig, and we all started throwing around this militant rhetoric.

The group were on the same bill as the Velvet Underground.

There's some debate debate as to what night the max factor turned up.

I've seen it stated in different sources that it was the 12th or the 14th of December.

If it was the 12th, then we have a recording of the Velvets portion of the show from that night.

Both bands enjoyed each other's music, though saw very little similarity between what they were doing.

With Kramer saying, I seem to remember they went over real well and they had their fans, but it was two completely different things.

We were trying to be a show band, and we had these spangly clothes and sequins, and the velvets were very plain-looking with their New York dungarees.

After the MC5 set, though, Sinclair let the Mary Ford onto the stage to give their speech to fundraise for their friend's defence.

At which point they declared that the show should have been free, that Don Law, the promoter of the show, was a rip-off artist for charging money for gigs, and that the audience should burn down the venue because it wasn't big enough to contain their energies.

Understandably, Don Law, one of the two most important rock promoters in the northeastern US, was not very impressed with being called a rip-off artist and having people on stage advocating for his venue to be burned down.

He blacklisted the MC5 and refused ever to work with them again.

Lou Reed came out after the Michael Feinstein speech and said, according to Wayne Kramer, I'd just like to make one thing clear.

We have nothing to do with what went on earlier, and in fact we consider it very stupid.

This is our favourite place to play in the whole country, and we would hate to see anyone even try to destroy it.

Sterling Morrison of The Velvets later said, I have always liked the MC5 musically.

I didn't like their being associated with narrow political causes.

I consider music to be more important than politics, and much more important than pissant politicians like John Sinclair.

I thought they were surrounded by and exploited by leeches.

But still, there was always New York.

They were going to play the Fillmore East.

That was going to be great for the group, right?

Except that the Fillmore East was the Mitchell Froom's home turf.

And they had long-standing grievances with Bill Graham over the whole, not just making all the shows he put on free because of a half-baked gang of pseudo-radicals who wanted musicians to play for them without getting paid thing.

And they wanted to use the show to get back at Graham.

They assumed they'd be given the same right to go on stage and harangue the promoter that they'd been given in Boston.

But Sinclair was by this point getting a little worried that his band would desert him if he sabotaged all their big breaks.

At the same time though, he had to show radical solidarity.

He came up with a solution that made nobody happy.

The group group would only do the show, which was a free show but ticketed, with costs paid for by Elektra and the tickets given away as radio station promotions, if 500 of the tickets were given away to members of the Michael Famaday, who could then give them away to people they approved of.

Elektra very reluctantly agreed, and so did the Fillmore, except Kip Cohen, the venue manager, who decided not to give the Morgan Freeman any tickets.

Eventually they got a few dozen on the day, rather than the hundreds in advance they'd been promised, and they were going ballistic.

And then the MC5 turned up in a limousine.

Danny Fields had booked a limo because it was simply what you did.

If you've got to get a load of people, band, roadies, management and general hangers-on, all from the same hotel to the same gig venue, it was both more efficient and more comfortable than getting a load of cabs and made the band feel special, so why not?

But as far as the Mickfleetwood were concerned, it was a declaration of class war, and the MC5 were on the side of the man against the people.

They started attacking the band members, smashing the free promo singles they'd been given, and trying to wreck the limo.

They also decided to break down the Fillmore's doors, and one of them hit Bill Graham in the face with a heavy metal chain.

According to some reports, he very nearly lost his eyes.

Graham would have been apoplectic anyway, and would have blamed the group.

But to make matters worse, the person swinging the chain looked enough like Rob Tyner that Graham could not be persuaded that it wasn't Tyner.

Now, as well as Don Law, they had Bill Graham as a permanent enemy, and Graham was the most important promoter on the West and East Coasts.

And they'd done it all to win the support of a radical group who now thought of them as sellouts who were traitors to the revolution.

And then the album came out:

Maynard Ferguson.

The plan had been to release the album after the single had risen up the charts and started to fall.

But instead, the album came out at a point where the single was slowly rising up the lower reaches of the hot 100.

It would eventually make number 82.

But the album came out with the unexpurgated version of the song, and with liner notes by John Sinclair that included lines about how the MC5 is totally committed to the revolution.

They are a working model of the new paleo-cybernatic culture in action.

There is no separation.

They live together to work together, they eat together, fish together, get high together, and ends with Take it now and be one with it.

Kick out the jams, Matthew Fisher, and stay alive with the MC5.

Once the use of the word Marc Francois on the album version of the track got noticed, DJs stopped playing the single, and it stalled on its way up the charts.

There was still hope at first.

Before the album's release, they were given a five-page article in the cover of Rolling Stone, with lines like, The MC5 are attempting to politicise and liberate the minds of our culture.

The Commune is quite a successful endeavour, and it welcomes anyone who wants to participate and do their thing.

Chicks live with the Five and also provide the domestic energies to make clothing for concert wear, keep the place tidy, and make some of the most destroyed barbecue ribs and chicken that you can chomp on.

And ending with, if you hear of some notoriously freaky band coming to your town with a trail of policemen, narcs, freaks and gorillas, it'll be the MC5.

Don't just sit and watch, kick out the jams.

But as Kramer later said, my worst fears were realised after I read the Rolling Stone piece.

I had a full-blown panic attack.

I said, God damn man, if people believe this shaft that this guy's written and think that's who we really are.

I mean, nobody in their right mind would believe it, or could believe it.

It was just too outlandish.

I don't think the writer had ever smoked Reefer before, and we, of course, forced him to smoke Reefer non-stop for three days.

Then he went back and reconstructed the whole thing.

But the album was causing problems.

Many, many shops were refusing to stock it, and some people were even arrested for selling it.

So Elektra decided to pull the record and reissue it, with Brothers and Sisters replacing Marianne Faithful and without the liner notes.

Imagine releasing two different versions of a work just because of the the word Margot Fontaine.

Something like that could never happen today.

To this day, in fact, the album exists in two different versions.

My vinyl copy, a relatively recent pressing, has Mickey Finn on it, but when I bought an MP3 copy of the album to excerpt in this episode, the version of the title track on there, and on all the streaming services, is a version that fades in after the offending word.

If you want to get a digital copy of the track as originally released, you have to buy a Rarities compilation called called The Anthology 1965-72.

In particular, Hudson's, a chain whose flagship was the biggest department store in Michigan and second biggest in the world after Macy's in New York, refused to stock the album.

The group's response was to stop paying the higher purchase payments on the instruments they'd bought from the shop and to take out a full-page ad in the Ann Arbor Argus with the caption, Kick out the jams Martin Fry

and kick in the door if the store won't sell you the album on Electra.

Flip Hudson's.

To make matters worse, they put the Elektra logo on the advert and billed the record label for the cost of it.

The result was that Hudsons decided they were not going to stock any Elektra records anymore.

Not Theodore Bickel singing Yiddish folk songs, not the Doors, not Judy Collins, not Phil Oaks, none of them.

who I am,

and let me get me out of the jail.

Damn, dig me out the jail!

I done kick them out!

And then Rolling Stone turned on the group.

One of the few things John Sinclair ever said that I think was a sensible measured statement was when he was talking about Rolling Stone and said, As far as I'm concerned, things really began to splinter in rock culture when Rolling Stone set themselves up as the arbiter of what's supposed to be hip.

Before then, a new Otis Reading record, a Donovan record, a WHO record were all part of the same thing.

Then Rolling Stone started telling people, this is hip and this is not.

And Rolling Stone decided that the MC5 were definitely not hip.

They'd built the group up, now they were going to tear them down.

Lester Bangs, in his first ever review for the magazine, absolutely slaughtered Kick Out the Jams, saying,

About a month ago, the the MC5 received a cover article in Rolling Stone proclaiming them the new sensation, a group to break all barriers, kick out all jams, total energy thing, etc., etc., etc.

Never mind that they came on like a bunch of 16-year-old punks on a meth power trip.

These boys, so the line ran, could play the guitars like John Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders played Sax.

Well, the album is out now, and we can all judge for ourselves.

For my money, they come on more like Blue Cheer than Train and Sanders.

But then my money has already gone for a copy of this ridiculous, overbearing, pretentious album.

And maybe that's the idea, isn't it?

And musically, the group is intentionally crude and aggressively raw, which can make for powerful music except when it's used to conceal a paucity of ideas, as it is here.

Most of the songs are barely distinguishable from each other in their primitive two-chord structures.

You've heard all this before from such notables as The Seeds, Blue Cheer, Question Mark and the Mysterians, and The Kingsmen.

The difference here, the difference which will sell several hundred thousand copies of this album, is in the hype, the thick overlay of teenage revolution and total energy thing which conceals these scrapyard vistas of cliches and ugly noise.

Within a short while, Bangs would move to Detroit and become a convert to the MC Five's cause, declaring them the best band in the world, but the damage had been done.

So far the MC Five had alienated the gig promoters, the record label, the revolutionary leftists, and now the music press.

Who else was left?

Well, there was always the feminists.

The group's treatment of the women in their commune had already got them a certain amount of negative comment, as had Sinclair's line from the White Panther Manifesto, Flop God in the Ass, and Fly your woman till she can't stand up.

But things got much worse when, on a visit to the West Coast, where they very much did not impress the Bay Area hippies, a photo was taken of multiple members of the band having sex simultaneously with the same woman, and it was published in a counterculture paper.

By this point, the group's hopes of rock stardom were well and truly shattered.

Electra dropped the band and also sacked Danny Fields.

But oddly, the group ended up with more money and on a bigger label.

And you know, I'm just gonna hear that band play.

Good night, good

There were a lot of radical changes for the group in a short period of time in mid-1969.

Danny Fields put the group in touch with John Landau, a journalist at Rolling Stone, who had seen the group live and become convinced that despite everything they were worth supporting.

Landau also wanted to go into record production himself, so he got in touch with his old friend at Atlantic Records, Jerry Wexler.

Atlantic was starting to move towards signing rock groups.

They'd just signed Led Zeppelin on Dusty Springfield's recommendation.

But Wexler knew nothing about that kind of music.

Landau told him that he should sign the MC5 and have Landau produce their next album.

He did, and the group got signed for $50,000, more than twice what Elektra had paid less than two weeks after being dropped.

Elektra would soon be bought by Warners, the company that had already bought Atlantic.

And so the end result of this was that Warners paid an extra $50,000 for a band that would have been signed to their label anyway if they'd not been dropped.

This $50,000 advance was paid to John Sinclair, as all their other money was.

But this started the group members thinking.

Primarily what they were thinking was that it would be nice to have some money themselves, and not be the only people earning any money for a 30-person commune, most of whom held them in contempt for being insufficiently committed to the revolution.

They also thought that maybe even they could perhaps not live in a 30-person commune.

Maybe they could just get a big house, Just for them?

Still all live together, but just the band and their partners, not a couple of dozen other people?

They did just that, and while they were not considering dropping Sinclair as their manager, soon their hand was forced.

The drugs charge that Sinclair had successfully been stalling for years finally came to court, and he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for having given two joints to an undercover cop.

Sinclair hadn't expected to go to prison, and had made no arrangements for what would happen with the band and his various other projects while he was inside.

The band obviously had to get another manager, and tried to have discussions about what kind of percentage they should forward to Sinclair to help with his appeals.

Would five or ten per cent.

be appropriate, perhaps?

This was seen as a total betrayal, and as them giving up on Sinclair and the Revolution rather than trying to have a career.

As Sinclair said to Kramer, You wanted to be bigger than the Beatles, I wanted to make you bigger than Chairman Mao.

One of the last things Sinclair did for the band before going to prison was to turn down the opportunity to play play Woodstock after hearing the list of acts who were going to be there and deciding it was too mainstream.

The group's second album, recorded with Landau Producing, was titled Back in the USA and was very, very different from the first album.

When the group met up with Landau, he told them his vision for the record.

They were going to record tight, concise songs with no extended meandering jams.

Of the 11 songs on the album, 9 are under 3 minutes.

They were going to play properly and record the instruments separately to show that they actually could play.

The album was going to show off the band's harmonies and the guitar playing of Fred Smith and Wayne Kramer.

The group went along with this at the time, but had vastly different opinions about it, essentially splitting between the front line and the rhythm section.

Tyner and Kramer, while both later saying that possibly the album did sound too clean, were keen at the time.

Kramer later said, I wanted to make a perfect record.

I wanted to answer all the criticism.

The guitars are going to be in tune.

The tempos are going to be right.

no excuses for anything to go wrong.

It was like a make it or break it.

Tyner, similarly, argued, People can say whatever they want about the second album, but there is a million years of experience between the first album and the second album.

Better or worse doesn't matter.

There was a discipline and a return to the basics.

We returned to the type of band we were in the early days when we flat out went for it.

We went back to being a tight band, which was good.

Not that we didn't know how to do that.

We had done it already, but then our souls got psychedelicised there for a long while.

It felt good to be back in the groove, back in the pocket.

Smith, on the other hand, was apparently less pleased, though not enough to be vocal about it.

Thompson, who was forced to play to a click track and play few or no fills, was utterly disgusted, calling Landau the hitler who came in and reduced a powerful MC5 into a goddamn wedding band.

Though even he would also credit Landau for telling the group they needed to tighten up, get back to being the hot rock and roll band they had been in the past, and actually be sober in the studio so they could play the parts well.

And Thompson was also pleased that they were finally getting away from Sinclair.

Of all the band, he had been the least keen on their manager.

Davis, on the other hand, didn't end up playing on the album at all.

Never the most technically skilled musician, he was also at this point the one who was most off the rails in his personal life.

He simply didn't rehearse enough to get anywhere close to the kind of precise playing that Landau's production style required, and Kramer ended up playing all the bass parts on the album.

Where Where Kick Out the Jams have been made up of loud, extended, experimental, improvisatory psychedelic tracks, but still somehow managed to presage punk music by nearly a decade, Back in the USA is a power-pop album through and through,

and one that sounds spookily like a lot of the music that a decade or so later would be called New Wave.

It's bookended by cover versions of 50s rock and roll songs, Chuck Berry's title track at the end, and Tootie Footy at the beginning.

Some of the songs have lyrics that are actually far more political than any of the actual songs on Kick Out the Jams, like The Human Being Lawnmower, the band's anti-Vietnam song, and The American Booze.

I'll forget ya.

69 American terminal stresses.

The air's so thick, it's like a drowning in molasses I'm sick and tired of paying these dues and I'm finally getting hit for the American ruse

But most of the songs are songs of teenage frustration and fun

Tonight is a chugging glamboogie about being bored in school and looking forward to hearing a band play live that night Let Me Try is a soul ballad patterned after Solomon Burke, with Rob Tyner's singing sounding surprisingly like Arthur Lee at points.

And then there's High School.

Dance to the rock and band.

They only want a little excitement.

They like to feel a little out of hand.

Cause they're going to high school, run, run, run.

My school just booms.

My school.

Hey, hey, hey, you better let them have the way.

And teenage lust.

Teenage Lust is driving

The album is at points quite staggeringly close in sound to the Ramones, and the trebly sound that Landau went for, in part because of his dislike of the rhythm section, sounds utterly unlike anything else that was being made at the time.

The record did nothing on the charts, only reaching number 137, and it split opinion among listeners much as it had within the band.

In Europe, where Kick Out the Jams had not been as successful, back in the USA was more well regarded, though it was still not a commercial success, and it was a huge influence on a generation of musicians.

Lemmy of Motorhead later said of the album, In a time of terrible manufactured music, back in the USA was rock and roll, untreated.

I used to sit and listen to that album for hours, listen to it through, then put it straight back on again.

On the back of it, the group were invited over to the UK to play a festival, Fun City, which was organised by the underground journalist Mick Farron, and which featured, among others, Legs Larry Smith of the Bonzo Dog Band, Steve Peregrine Tuck and Shag Rat, The Pink Fairies, Mungo Jerry, Matthew Southern Comfort and The Humble Bums, a folk duo consisting of Jerry Rafferty and Billy Connolly, before either was famous.

Billy Idol was at that festival and wrote about it in his autobiography, saying, Then suddenly, like a bolt out of the blue, came the MC5.

Floy, they were great.

They seemed to be playing with a verve and commitment I hadn't quite seen in any of the other bands that day.

The guitarists in spangled clothes standing at either side of the singer at certain points in the show would suddenly jump in the air and spin around while the vocalist with an afro exhorted the crowd to wake itself up and kick out the jams, Mick Fammon?

They were great, an alternative to the incense-burning, meditation-practicing, petuli-oiled calfdam-wearing peace and love hippies.

I didn't realise it then, but at 14 years old I had just witnessed the future of rock.

Mick Jones of the Clash was also at the festival, and was similarly impressed.

What was sadly less impressive was the money.

The festival had been organised by a a UK group associated with the White Panthers, and they seemingly had a similar level of fiscal ability.

It ended up getting made into a free festival late in the planning, and none of the bands performing got paid, though Farmin helped the group put together a short UK tour to make up the financial shortfall.

After the tour, the group recorded their third album, High Time.

arm.

If she died, she rivaled fumble there.

She'll every man's savior and mother too.

If you do what she says, she'll save hair from you.

She can.

I know she can.

I know she can.

She's my sister's friend.

This time, the group were produced by Atlantic staff engineer Jeffrey Haslam, who was in many ways the most sympathetic producer they ever had.

His credits as an engineer included albums by Arnette Coleman and Marsan Roland Kirk, The Velvet Underground's Loaded, and Gil Scott Evans' Pieces of a Man.

The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox and four parts without commercial interruptions.

The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John Mitchell, General Abrams, and Spyro Agnew to eat hog moths confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.

The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the shape of a war theater and will not star Natalie Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julio.

Haslam was a hands-off producer on the album, just taking care of the technical side of things and letting the band make the album they wanted to make.

And for most of them, High Time was the album that best encapsulated what they wanted to do.

The songs were longer than on Back in the USA.

While Back in the USA had got through 11 tracks in 28 minutes, High Time had only 8 tracks but lasted 42 minutes, and they were louder and heavier than the previous album.

It was a halfway point between the clean studio sound of Back in the USA and the heavy extended noise of Kick Out the Jams.

The main member of the band this time who found the record somewhat disappointing was Tyner.

For their writing on the first two albums, the group had all been credited equally, but the process had tended to be that the basic idea for the music would be worked up by Kramer and Smith as a team, and the band would fine-tune it together with Tyner coming up with the lyrics and vocal melody.

By now though, Smith was starting to come into his own as a songwriter, and writing a lot separately, which meant the other band members ended up doing so as well, and every song got a solo credit.

Of the eight songs on the album, Smith wrote four, Kramer two, and Tyner and Thompson one each.

And understandably, Tyner did not find this as creatively fulfilling as when he had been the group's sole lyricist.

At the time, the album got the best reviews the group had had to date, but these days it tends to be the least regarded of their records, falling in between the two stools of the live raw power of the first album and the power-pop concision of the second, though it also shows them going in interesting new directions, like the dissonant horns added to Skunk.

The album was unsuccessful, and the group was starting to be forgotten, even as bands like The Stooges and Alice Cooper, who they had influenced, were in turn now influencing a whole new generation of musicians.

Even John Sinclair was now more celebrated than the group he'd managed.

Famously, Abby Hoffman invaded the stage when the Who were playing Woodstock to protest Sinclair's imprisonment.

I think the politics of this event is about freeing John Sinclair from prison, who's facing 10

years for two joints of marijuana while we're all sitting here digging rock music.

That's the politics of the situation.

And I think we like ought to do something about John Sinclair and what the White Panthers are going through up there in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

And that's what ought to come out of this

conference.

And in December 1971, a few months after High Time came out, there was a gigantic benefit concert to support the campaign to free Sinclair, with appearances from Phil Oakes, Stevie Wonder, David Peel, the MC5's old friend Bob Seeger, the jazz musician Archie Shepp, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono, with Lennon writing a song about Sinclair for the event.

Three days later Sinclair was freed and his conviction was ruled unconstitutional.

But despite offering to appear, the MC5 weren't allowed to play the event.

By this point, the band were falling apart.

Davis had started taking and dealing heroin, and had introduced the other members to it, though according to some reports, Kramer had been an occasional user earlier.

As Kramer later said, I can now vote the MC5 down to three or four things.

The first was when Electra rushed the first album out.

The second was when we lost John Sinclair as a manager.

And the third was when we couldn't get Landau to manage us.

Then dope, we discovered heroin and that proved to be our greatest downfall.

Not all the band used heroin.

According to Kramer, Fred used on occasion, but his drug of choice was alcohol, as was Tyner's.

Though Tyner, like Kramer, was also regularly using queer loots at this point.

But Kramer, Thompson, and Davis were all addicts, and in Davis's case he was making more money from dealing heroin than he was from playing in the band.

Tyner was also becoming increasingly estranged from the other band members due to their heroin use and his comparatively normal lifestyle.

The group kept missing gigs or turning up late, or when they did turn up they were too drugged to function properly.

They got blacklisted by more and more promoters, and their inability to function meant that High Time was dead as a commercial proposition, with the band unable to tour properly to promote it.

Atlantic dropped them, saying they weren't going to throw good money after bad.

The group struggled on, though.

A promoter in the UK who had been involved in the Fun City Festival had booked the group for a series of shows in Europe, and had also got interest from Phillips Records in the Netherlands, who were talking seriously about signing the band.

Davis, though, missed the plane to the UK.

He had increasingly not been bothering to show up at all.

Handily for the band, a friend of Smith's, Steve Morehouse, who happened to play bass, came came along to the first show of the tour and they persuaded him to play with them until Davis did show up.

When he showed up though, he was playing so badly and was so clearly apathetic about the whole business of being in the MC5

that the band soon sacked him and got Morehouse back in until they found a permanent replacement, Derek Hughes.

Morehouse played with the band on their appearance on Germany's Beat Club TV show.

channels

Thing out the channels Gotta give them a

turn

at one feeling

Things went from bad to worse.

For a showcase gig at a festival in Holland where the people from Phillips were coming to see if they were as worth signing as they'd been told The group were too drugged on quailudes to play properly and the deal fell through.

They were booked on the London Rock and Roll Show at Wembley Stadium, a massive all-day festival which combined 50s American greats like Bill Haley and the Comets, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, with British actors who recorded with Joe Meek like Hines and Screaming Lord Such, and a couple of the new glam acts who had just come into prominence, Gary Glitter and Moy Wood's new band Wizard, in their first live appearance.

To celebrate playing for such a prestigious event, the MC5 decided to forego what was by now their normal stage attire of leather and jeans, and instead to dress up in science fictional costumes inspired by Sun Ra to wow the audience.

Except they went out on stage to see 15,000 people all dressed the way the MC5 normally did, jeering at their ridiculous clothes.

One of the audience threw a beer can at Tyner, and he made the mistake of throwing it back.

which caused the audience en masse to throw beer cans at the group.

Even then though, the group were inspiring people.

Wilco Johnson, later one of the most influential guitarists in British punk music, was at the side of the stage watching Kramer and absorbing his style.

The group got back to the US demoralised and ready to quit.

And two of them did.

There was actually the prospect of another European tour, one with real money involved, with T V dates booked, and with everything actually properly arranged and catered for them.

But Thompson had had a series of wake-up calls.

He and Davis had been hanging out with Iggy Pop when Iggy had overdosed.

The two had saved his life.

Thompson had decided at that point that he wanted to go clean and get off heroin.

And he became even firmer in his intention when he discovered he had hepatitis from using a dirty needle.

He was hospitalised and told later he was days away from death.

He knew if he were to go back to the UK, the stress of touring and the availability of drugs on the rock scene would make him relapse.

He explained this to his bandmates and asked them to postpone the tour a month or two to let him get properly clean first.

But with the kind of logic that only comes from heroin addicts, Kramer just suggested that he should go back on heroin for the duration of the tour, and then he could always come off it again once he got back to the States.

Think of the money they could be making.

For some reason, the unassailable logic of this didn't get through to Thompson, and he decided not to go back on the drug that had nearly killed both him and his friend in recent weeks.

After Thompson left, Tynell left the band as well, just sick of the constant stress from years of failure.

He was older and more responsible than the other band members and just didn't want to keep doing something that was clearly making everyone poor and miserable.

Tyner left the group the same way he joined it, having a fistfight with Fred Smith, who hit him when he let the band know he was quitting.

By this point, Kramer was hanging out with gangsters, and Tyner and his wife started getting death threats from Kramer's associates and had to move house.

Kramer and Smith still went on the European tour.

with Hughes on bass and a British session drummer, Richie Dahmer, who had played with Michael Chapman and Lou Reed.

Darmer didn't know the songs at all, and Kramer and Smith had to do the vocals between them.

The songs were all in the wrong key for their voices because they were such self-taught musicians that they didn't know how to transpose a song.

According to Kramer, at the time they didn't know what a key was, and wrote everything in E because that had the most open strings.

The sets were sloppy mixtures of MC5 tracks and garage band covers, and they went down terribly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We got killed.

I can see.

There was one final actual MC5 gig.

On New Year's Eve, nineteen seventy two, the full proper line up of the band got together to play one last gig at the Grandy.

Only about 300 people showed up to a venue where a couple of years earlier they'd regularly got crowds of fifteen hundred.

And the band played so badly that Kramer walked off stage halfway through, unwilling to continue playing in such a sad parody of a band he'd loved.

The MC5 ended, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

The band members all tried in their different ways to continue with music careers, but with little success.

Smith, Thompson, and Davis formed a new band called Ascension, which initially was going to have Kramer involved before he decided he could no longer cope with Smith's increasingly intellectual attitude to his music.

Ascension was short-lived and never recorded, and Smith then formed Sonic's Rendezvous Band, which released one single.

Smith will be showing up in a future episode, not because of his own work, but as a muse and occasional collaborator to his more successful second wife, Patty Smith.

And the latter part of his life revolved around her and their children.

He died of heart failure in 1994.

Rob Tyner, meanwhile, became a rock journalist writing for Cream magazine, which at the time was being edited by Lester Bangs, the man who John Sinclair blamed for destroying the MC5's career, but who was now their biggest fan, and who became so close to Tyner that Tyner's third child was given the middle name Leslie after Bangs, whose birth name was actually Leslie.

Tyner mostly lived in the straight world, supported in large part by his wife, who became a bank manager.

He released a single in 1977, Till the Night Is Gone, backed by the members of the British punk band Eddie and the Hotbots.

chuck bill songs

Loud and strong

He formed a new band which he called the MC5, but changed to the Rob Tyner Band after his ex-bandmates objected.

He only recorded one solo album in 1990 and died of a heart attack in 1991.

Of the other band members, Davis and Kramer both ended up in prison for drug offences at the same time, though both eventually got clean.

Kramer's incarceration inspired the clash song Jail Guitar Doors.

Thompson, Davis and Kramer all spent a long time playing in the kinds of bands that get referred to as legendary, but never get around to making records and which split up quickly, often involving ex-members of the Stooges.

Kramer, though, did have a moderately successful career in his own right, playing with Was Not Was on their first couple of albums, playing sessions, and releasing a string of solo albums in the 90s.

He also recorded with John Sinclair, with whom he'd patched things up, and his band the Blues Scholars.

In 2003, the three surviving members of the group, Kramer, Davis, and Thompson, put on an MC5 show at London's 100 Club, sponsored by Levi's, who did it as part of a settlement after they put out clothes using the MC5 logo without permission, with special guests including Lemmy from Motorhead.

She got a heart and gold ready to make it so

down to go her way.

She cried,

You know she cried.

You know she cried.

The reunion went well enough that the trio started to tour as DKT slash MC5 with a rotating set of guest performers that soon stabilized into a permanent line-up with handsome Dick Manitoba on vocals and former Guns N' Moses rhythm guitarist Gilby Clark.

They toured from 2004 through 2012, when Davis died of liver failure and the band once again split up.

Six years later, in 2018, Kramer started a two-year tour as MC50, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Kick Out the Jams, with Don Woz and members of Soundgarden, Fugazi and Faith No More.

In 2022 there was another tour, under the band name We Are All MC5.

Kramer also decided to record a final MC5 album, Heavy Lifting.

Essentially a Kramer solo album in all but name, It was put together with a band of session players including Vicki Randall from the Tonight Show band, Don Woz and Abe Laborville Jr.

from Paul McCartney's band.

The only other surviving MC5 member, Dennis Thompson, only appeared on two tracks, Can't Be Found and Blind Eye.

I look away from it.

I don't see it.

I turn a blind eye

where the blind eye disappears.

I turn a blind eye.

That album was announced in December 2023, but by the time it was released, it was a posthumous release.

Kramer was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in January 2024 and died in February.

According to Donoz, he thought he was fine until 10 days before his death.

John Sinclair died in April 2024.

2024.

Just over a year earlier, Pun Plamondon, his White Panther co founder, had also died, and Sinclair had given a eulogy that focused so much on himself that he was heckled with reminders that he was meant to be talking about Pun.

And in May 2024, Dennis Thompson, the final surviving member of the band, died of a heart attack.

The MC5 had little in the way of commercial success, and seemed determined to sabotage the small amount they did have.

But in terms of cultural impact, there were few bands that had more effect.

Without the MC5, there would be no Stooges, no Alice Cooper, no White Stripes, no Rage Against the Machine.

Lemmy said his ambition for Motorhead was to be fast and vicious, just like the MC5.

The whole of hard rock and punk would be entirely different without the MC5 paving the way.

and the legacy of their provocation can be seen anytime there's a tabloid frenzy about some band saying something controversial and sweary.

The MC5 were fundamentally a bunch of adolescents who wanted to have sex, get stoned, stoned, play loud rock and roll music, and not have their parents tell them what to do, pretending to be revolutionaries because that seemed to be a fun thing to dress up as for a while.

But while they were carrying their pictures of Chairman Mao, they inadvertently started an actual cultural revolution, one that would still have ripples long after Jerry Rubin had given up on the Yippies political revolution and become a Wall Street stockbroker.

And in the end, anyway, all the 60s radicalism could be summed up in a couple of lines.

Let me be who I am, and let me kick out the jams.

Mother 3.

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