The MC5

It took me a long time to really get the MC5.  I mean, I snapped up Kick Out the Jams when I came across it at Recycled Records because it was, y'know, a fabled "proto-punk" classic of the Velvets, Stooges sort (and I knew I liked them)(the copy I found had a large round sticker with a cartoon of a safety pin that read "PUNK").  But when I got it home I found it kind of a surprise, kind of a letdown; a really noisy live album that sounded closer to early heavy metal than "punk," the political content which Dave Marsh et al always made so much about (comparing them to The Clash) sounded minimal, and the damn thing was so clattering and noisy and almost sloppy-sounding that it was hard to even pick out the good stuff.  I was puzzled, because so far I had loved all these critically-acclaimed punk progenitors, but Kick Out the Jams didn't quite do it for me.

I think maybe a year later I came across Back in the USA.  And I had problems with that one, too.  It was sooooo tight that the band sound constipated, and there was no bottom, the sound so thin it was like listening to a transistor radio (I'm not a fan of "arty" production - I want rock records to ROCK).  Some of the songs were really good, though.  A couple years after that I also picked up the Babes in Arms collection.  Again, some cool stuff there but again, I still wanted my socks knocked off and it wasn't happening.  In the end, I liked the MC5 okay, but I didn't love them.  And since I loved the Stooges, Dolls, Velvets, I wanted to love the MC5.

Various things happened over the years.  Dave Marsh's "The MC5: Back On Shakin' Street" helped me believe that there was still something in the MC5 that I needed to connect with, and introduced me to "Black To Comm" - even if all he did was describe it.  Clinton Heylin's From the Velvets to the Voidoids helped me understand the 5's free-jazz aspirations, and made them more interesting.  I picked up a few bootlegs along the way - all disappointing, all had their moments.

Then Wayne Kramer's great solo album The Hard Stuff came out.  I loved his version of "Poison" ("his" version is an odd way to put it, since he wrote the song in the first place).  Honestly, I felt The Hard Stuff was a realization of what the 5 had been striving for.  But it helped me to understand that concept - that they had been striving for something - and achieving it, too, at least part of the time.  I became a big Kramer fan and followed his career in the 90's.

Another big step to understanding was the MC5 retrospective in Addicted to Noise in the late 90's.  ATN may have been full of shit much of the time, but this issue was superb.  And the centerpiece was a long, long interview with Kramer where he spoke of the Detroit music scene, the MC5, the politics of the 60's, at length, with great honesty and insight.  He freely admitted the band's many mistakes, but also articulated, again, what they had tried to do.

Great kudos also go to Perfect Sound Forever's MC5 tribute, which helped me understand even further, and helped me really perceive the 5's influences and the context of the band and their music.  (I contributed a piece on Wayne's solo albums.)

Oh, and I finally, finally got High Time, which I think is the one 5 album where they finally cooked it up right and made a consistent, and good-sounding, album.  Can't believe I neglected that one all those years.

So nowadays, I do love the MC5.  But I love them more for their story than for their records.  This is not to say they didn't make some good records (none of them are bad).   I think what it points to is that the 5 (and Kramer, Thompson and Davis freely admit to this in interviews in Brett Callwood's rough but loving MC5: Sonically Speaking), that the MC5 were basically a live band.   They perfected a live show that was, by all accounts, overpowering - the equal of anything any of their brethren (such as role models The Who) were dishing out (perhaps even the superior of many).  But, unlike The Who, who had the benefit of entering the studio with a rock-solid producer and engineer from day one (Shel Talmy and Glyn Johns), allowing them to learn how to put themselves across effectively on vinyl.  Yes, Kit Lambert fucked up the records that followed until the band finally put their foot down, but they learned enough that even Lambert couldn't ruin them the way Landau did the 5.

The problem this created for them is that a great live show can't be recorded, really.  In other words, Kick Out the Jams probably was a total mindfuck if you were standing in front of the stage that night in late 1968, but the resultant album almost couldn't help but turn out something of a muddy mess (which it is - but admittedly a glorious one) once pressed into black grooves.  Maybe a sharp engineer like, again, Glyn Johns, could have polished it into the equal of Live At Leeds (I have heard numerous live Who recordings from the same era as KOTJ, and many of those are muddy and messy as well.  But The Who had better sound people, better equipment, and were a more disciplined group as well - another thing I suspect the 5 would freely admit).

In the case of album # 2, they fucked themselves by making what was probably the worst choice of producer they possibly could.  Now look, I happen to like Springsteen (he's overrated - that doesn't mean he isn't good) and Landau did a good job with him - ten years later.  If he'd given Back in the USA the kind of sound he gave Bruce on Darkness and The River, Back would at least sounded decent, not like the tinny shriek that it came out.

But it still wouldn't have served them.  Landau saw only one side of the band as valid (ass-kicking, basic rock and roll) and had no use for the other side (sprawling, free jazz-influenced science-fiction rock).  In so doing he did the band a great disservice, because the MC5 were about both those sides, and each side informed the other. By stripping away the part of the band that made "Starship" and "Black To Comm," he also stripped away the part that made "Kick Out the Jams" and "Ramblin' Rose" so exciting.  All they had learned from James Brown and Sun Ra was left behind.  The surviving band members, I should note, all have good things to say about Landau as a person and seem to agree that he did his best and did what he thought was right.  Nonetheless, he was a disastrous choice for them.  They should've taken a tip from the Stooges and gotten Don Gallucci.

What makes album #3 their best is that it manages to restore what Landau took away (energy free-form-freakout) while managing to also retain the handful of good things Landau brought to them (discipline, being in tune and in time).  The songs are among their smartest and sharpest and they still manage to capture their passion and imagination.  Its just a damn shame the band had to fall apart almost immediately after, since the surviving relics of the post-5 activities of the band members indicate they all still had it, and, had they not succumbed to drugs and despair, they no doubt would have gotten the hit records they so yearned for.

But they did.  And so the story ended.  It saddens me that I never even got to see a good reunion tour, thanks to the too-early demise of Tyner and Smith, and, since I missed DKT/MC5, I didn't even get to see a good tribute tour, though I hope that Kramer and Thompson will still do something in the future.

So, my hats off to the 5.  It took a while, but now, I do get them.  And I do love them.  And I love that Kramer and Thompson (and John Sinclair, too) are all still out there, fighting the good fight as best they can.  Praise the lord and pass the ammunition.

Essential Recordings

`66 Breakout (quasi-legal boot of the 5 in their early days - a must for "Black To Comm")
Kick Out the Jams
Back in the USA
High Time
Starship: Live at Sturgis Armory June 1968 (an essential bootleg for getting a larger picture of the 5's live show than KOTJ can give)
Live at the Saginaw Civic Centre, Jan. 1, 1970 (another essential bootleg - pretty decent sound and you get to hear what the songs from Back in the USA were really supposed to sound like)
Michigan Brand Nuggets a bootleg collection of singles from 60's-era Michigan acts.  The early Bob Seger cuts are awesome!  The 5, represented here by a powerful single version of "Borderline",  sound revelatory in this context.

One day I hope they'll do a boxed set with all three albums and this stuff as well.  It would be an essential box.

Essential Reading:

MC5: Sonically Speaking 
Mansion on the Hill (the 5 figure largely in this book)
Grit, Noise and Revolution

Essential Links:

MC5 Gateway
Perfect Sound Forever: MC5 Tribute
Dennis Thompson's Blog
Wayne Kramer's Industrial Amusement
Michael Davis' Blog
MC5.org