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The old airplane hangar called Gilligans
in Buffalo is rocking
with excitement in 1969. The crowd of 2,000 people is stamping their feet
as the band charges out onto the stage. The long-haired musicians have
bullet holsters thrown over their shoulders. They look like they just
stepped out of the jungle. The Motor City Five (MC5)
jump right into their controversial song "Kick Out the Jams." The guitar
player and drummer are going wild. The lead singer, Rob Tyner, is
screaming out the lyrics as if his heart was on
By the end of only the first song, the band is sweating
profusely. They play with pure unbridled fanaticism. The band is putting
everything they have into the show. This isn't entertainment: these guys
are on a mission. They play their song "Ramblin' Rose" with reckless abandon as if their lives depend on it. During
the hour-and-a-half show, no one ignores the band or wanders off to
converse in the corner. The crowd stands spellbound during the entire
concert. Somehow people realize that they are in the presence of something extraordinary. Having seen the Rolling
Stones, The Who, Lynard Skynard, and J. Giels, I can say that none of
these bands were as intense or as driven as the MC5. The band came back
for an encore and dozens of people jumped up on-stage to dance with the
band. It's the wildest thing I ever saw. But
who are these guys anyway?
Trying to find out about this band is like an archaeologist
attempting to reconstruct an entire civilization from a few fragments of
pottery. The mentions in mainstream anthologies are almost nill.....with
one exception: The MC5 were on the cover of
Rolling Stone Magazine in
1969. Over the years I have found a few obscure articles about the band. The bits and pieces I've found sound like the script of
an Oliver Stone movie.
In some ways it's an unbelievable, almost frightening
story. Evidently The MC5 were just another band from Ann
Arbor, Michigan. What transformed them was what e
ventually led to their demise: the marriage of rock-and-roll and
politics. John Sinclair, founder of the radical White Panther Party,
adopted the band as the chosen leaders of his vision of a rock and roll
army. After an electrifying concert at the tumultuo
us Chicago Convention of 1968, the MC5 were signed to Elektra records.
Elektra felt they had the two premiere American rock bands on their label: The Doors and The MC5. The band's dynamic stage show was a sensation and they opened up several times for The
Who and Jimi Hendrix. Singer Rob Tyner said that the band was trying to
claim the unrestrained energy and optimism found among kids running freely
around the playground. Sinclair, however, saw the MC5 as more than just a
rock band.
Sinclair envisioned the MC5 leading the young people in America to
throw off the oppression of the corrupt military-industial establishment that spawned the Vietnam war. In Sinclair's utopian vision this rock and roll army would overturn the corrupt s
ystem of hypocrisy and injustice, and the men and women of the revolution
would celebrate by having sex in the streets.
Before anyone could roll over laughing at this seemingly naive
rhetoric something crazy was happening. Sinclair's dream of rock n' roll
revolution was coming true. Whenever the MC5 played in Detroit, their
concerts turned into full-scale riots. It wasn't just this band though. Riots erupted at other concerts by the Rolling
Stones,
The Doors, and The Jefferson Airplane. Some young people saw the world as
a black-and-white divide between the young freaks and the
establishment. The MC5 were a turbulent band in a turbulent era.
John Sinclair was arrested for possessing 2 marijuana cigarettes and
given a ten-year sentence. Hearing of this, John Lennon and Yoko Ono flew
to Ann Arbor to do a benefit concert for Sinclair. Abbie Hoffman decided
to jump on-stage at Woodstock to make an impassioned plea on Sinclair's
behalf. His timing couldn't have been
worse. The Who, an angry and frazzled British band, supposed to go on at
midnight, were kept up all night to play at dawn. Pete Townshend seeing a
frantic figure jump up on stage and grab his microphone instinctively whacked Hoffman with his guitar,
sending him flying off the stage.
Without Sinclair, the MC5 put out an album, "Back In The
U.S.A." but
broke up in 1972. Fred (Sonic) Smith formed The Sonic's
Rendezvous Band and
later married Patti Smith who wrote a song "Frederick" about him. He died
in 1995. Rob Tyner died in 1991.
John Sinclair is currently performing with his own band and doing
radio in New Orleans. The MC5 and The New York Dolls were considered the first real punk
bands of the late 60's. While in NYC in 1980, I saw Wayne Kramer and
Johnny
Thunders play together at a concert at The Ritz. They performed "Ramblin
Rose" and other tunes, but I don't believe that band played together very
long.
In more than 20 years Wayne Kramer came out with a new CD in 1995
The Hard Stuff (Epitaph). The imagery is full of the terror, hopelessness,
and desperation of the American urban landscape. The song "Edge of the Switchblade" describes the brief career of the MC5. These songs of survival get heavier than a suitcase of anvils. The last song is amusing as Kramer dreams of owning a sharkskin suit like Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. from the ratpack days. His dream is to achieve the ultimate cool by wearing "The Cadillac of Suits."
The politics of the 60's may seem anachronistic today, but the
sheer raw explosiveness of the MC5's music still holds up after all these
years. Atlantic, Warner-Elektra, and Receiver Records have reissued the
music of The MC5 on CD. Their live album, "Kick Out the Jams," taped at
The Grande Ballroom in Detroit captures
the excitement of their music. Henry Rollins thinks it may be the best
live recording of all time. Posters advertising the band in the 60's
described the band by altering Albert Einstein's famous mathematical
formula: E=MC5
UPDATE Kramer/Sinclair reunion: June 19, 1997
Last night at the Old West
Church in Boston John
Sinclair got up and read his poetry about the sacred White Buffalo, John
Coltrane,
and Thelonius Monk to a small crowd. Included there were poets Richard
Cambridge, John Wieners, Jessa Piaia, and known rascal Vermin Supreme
recounting his latest coup as a rabble-rousing guest on the Jerry
Springer Show. Wayne Kramer stopped in during
the last song and jammed but they left quickly because Wayne had a gig in Cambridge.
The bar in Cambridge is called T.T. the Bear's Place, and Wayne
appeared with 2 other members of his band. They did old songs like
Poison, Bad Seed, and songs from the newest CD "Citizen Wayne" and John Sinclair got up on-stage with Wayne, a rare
occurence. He said, "You may not remember us from the first time around,
but we're back!" Sinclair did a poem about the blues, "You can't learn the
blues, there's no school for it, it's a talent, something spiritual....."
Kramer and the
band kicked in with music. It was quite a sight seeing the
two of them together again, after all, they survived. Kramer came back to
do "Kick Out The Jams" as the encore.
In October 1997, Future/Now
Films
just won a film maker's grant to produce a
movie about The MC5 due out by 2000. The preview of the two-minute
trailer was screened at The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to a standing room
only audience.
In September 1998, John Sinclair performed at Squawk Coffeehouse in Cambridge's Harvard Square, Mass.
with his
local band of The Blues Scholars.