Originally published in American Music Press (August 1993)
Interview by Devorah Ostrov
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| MC5 (publicity photo) |
"Kick out the jams,
motherfuckers!" The introduction to the second track on the MC5's debut album — the thunderous tune that was surely destined to become a hit single — was loud, mean and clearly enunciated. It was the battle cry for a teenage revolution, a real-life
Wild in the Streets.
But the MC5 weren't stupid. They knew
that version of the song wouldn't get radio airplay, and as much as the band wanted to lead a revolution, the guys also wanted to be rock stars. They had a plan: the less offensive "brothers and sisters" would replace the expletive on the single. If you wanted to hear lead singer Rob Tyner shout an obscenity, you'd have to buy the LP. It was a good plan, but it didn't work. And the ensuing brouhaha ripped the group and its fan base apart.
* * *
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MC5 on the cover of Circus magazine
September 1969
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Detroit, Michigan, is an automobile factory town with all the charm that implies. The sky is eternally shrouded in grey smoke; the buildings scarred and ugly (a friend who grew up there remembers broken windows in every building from countless kids throwing countless rocks for countless years through them). Life is bleak and racial tensions run high.
All this somewhat explains why when the rest of the country was mellowing out with folk-inspired pop, America's "motor city" was generating high-energy, hard-driving rock 'n' roll groups like the Stooges, the Amboy Dukes, Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, Grand Funk Railroad — and toughest of 'em all, the MC5.
Rock historian and Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye expressed it best in a feature for
Cavalier magazine: "Where other cities have always had a collection of cultural currents to distract and push them in certain directions (both San Francisco and New York, for example, have had long intellectual and Bohemian traditions), Detroit had had practically nothing. Composed almost entirely of factory workers (and in Detroit,
everybody works for the factories), there was little but television culture around to divert the minds of its inhabitants…
"Since Detroit was not an intellectually inclined city, Detroiters shied away from any ideas of technical excellence or elaborate joinings of musical forms. Their music was primitive, built more on vibrations than on actual arrangements of notes. There was no art-rock here, no baroque trumpet breaks in the midst of sedately chorded songs, no classical rock, no raga rock, no Blood, Sweat and Tears jazz rock. Nobody could write long Musicology 101 theses on the parallel themes of love and death in the lyrics of any of the Detroit bands...
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Gary Grimshaw-designed poster for A Dance
Concert at the Grande Ballroom with the MC5
& the Chosen Few - October 7/8, 1966
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"Simply, what they were playing was loud, straight ahead, pile-driving music, performed with one finger in the air at all times. It was hard, and it was brash, and it was naïve, and it was strangely futuristic."
In 1962 (or maybe '63), Wayne Kramer's parents moved the family from Detroit to the blue-collar suburb of Lincoln Park ("downriver" as the locals called it). According to the guitarist, who was 14 or 15-years-old at the time, the relocation was part of his parents' "never-ending search for the American dream."
Over the phone, the now 45-year-old self-described "anarchist/ revolutionary/intellectual/rock 'n' roller" recalls how the move to Lincoln Park led to the formation of the MC5.
"I had already been playing music," he tells me, "so I started asking around if anybody knew anybody who played any instruments. And I discovered that there was a happening little rock 'n' roll scene, a lot of neighborhood bands, very competitive."
In 1964, the seeds of the MC5 were sown. "I met this juvenile delinquent named Fred [Sonic] Smith," says Kramer. "He had a band that he was in [the Vibratones], and I had this band called the Bounty Hunters. We decided to form a supergroup with the best members of both bands — that's when Fred and I started playing together."
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| MC5 - publicity photo |
"I'd known Rob Tyner..." he continues. "I used to hang out with his younger brother. Rob was a beatnik; he was into jazz. I used to try to explain to him how exciting rock 'n' roll could be: 'You're up there on stage with the lights! And the amps! And the kids!' He'd say, 'No, man, jazz is where it's at. You gotta be cool. Jazz and poetry.' One day I ran into him in the White Castle parking lot at one in the morning. He was drunk as a skunk playing the harmonica. I said, 'What are you playing the harmonica for? I thought you were a jazz guy.' He said, 'I've discovered this band — the Rolling Stones! Man, this shit is
happening!' I said, 'I'll come around and see ya tomorrow and we'll talk about it.'"
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Rob Tyner on the cover of Rolling Stone
January 1969
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"Rob was gonna play bass in the beginning," adds Kramer, "but that turned out to be a little too complicated. So, we got a bass player, and Rob became the singer."
Tyner also came up with their moniker. "He said it sounded kind of like a serial number," observes Kramer, "the whole industrial thing. MC5 was like XL7 shock absorber!"
(While it's generally accepted that the initials MC stand for "Motor City," Kramer reveals there are some other options. "We also filled in Morally Corrupt, Much Cock, Mustard and Catsup, Marijuana Cigarette, Mostly Cosmic... You could go on forever, y'know.")
An early lineup included drummer Bob Gaspar and bassist Pat Burrows, but the two almost immediately disagreed with the group's musical divergence into Free Jazz. "We had started to discover feedback," mentions Kramer, "and this concept we called Avant Rock, where we found we could go beyond the beat and beyond the key of the song into pure sound. Bob didn't like that at all; he thought it was noise. Pat wanted to do Motown."
In 1965, Michael Davis, an art student and friend of Tyner's from Wayne State University, replaced Burrows. "He could play folk guitar and sing Bob Dylan songs," says Kramer. "I said, 'If he can do that, I'll
teach him how to play the bass.'"
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"I Can Only Give You Everything"
b/w "One of the Guys"
AMG Records (1967)
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Gaspar's replacement was high school sophomore and former Bounty Hunters drummer Dennis Thompson. "We awarded him the official token of our esteem," laughs the guitarist, "which was the bathroom plunger."
(In a 1979 interview with
Goldmine, Thompson said that he and Davis joined the group just after they opened for the Dave Clark Five at Cobo Hall, which dates it to early December 1965.)
With a setlist that contained Chuck Berry, Little Richard and John Lee Hooker covers, the teenagers "played any place that a band could play," says Kramer. This included teen-clubs and parties at friends' houses, as well as gigs at the Crystal Bar on Michigan Avenue and local Battles of the Bands.
"We played in a few really exciting Battles of the Bands," states Kramer. "We had a great rivalry with another neighborhood band called the Satellites, and this culminated in a big playoff where we'd play a song, then they'd play a song, and then we'd play another song... They ended up declaring it a tie."
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The MC5 & fellow Detroit bands Frijid Pink
& Up play a benefit for John Sinclair at the
Grande Ballroom - Thursday, July 29, 1971
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But as they began writing more original material and heading, as Kramer puts it, "towards outer space," finding an audience that appreciated them became a challenge.
"They hated us!" exclaims Kramer when asked about the group's early audiences. "We'd save up our Avant Rock thing for the last song of the night, and we knew when we'd cleared the room that we were on to something. If we could force 500 teenagers
out of a room, we knew it was just a question of turning it around and we'd be forcing 'em
into the room!"
The summer of '67 found the Five still looking for an audience and beginning to flounder a bit. However, things picked up when they met John Sinclair. The charismatic 26-year-old had graduated from the University of Michigan-Flint College in 1964. He wrote for
Downbeat and was a self-styled poet-philosopher as well as a fervent admirer of saxophonist John Coltrane. "Sinclair was in charge of the beatnik community then," Thompson told
Goldmine. "He was the head man."
Sinclair became the MC5's manager because "he was the only guy that any of us would listen to," says Kramer. "We were basically unmanageable. We were such maniacs! We'd had disc jockeys try to manage us; we had one woman who was an international archery champion; my mother tried to manage us. [Apparently, even Tyner gave it a go.] But none of it worked 'cause we weren't good little soldiers that lined up and did the right thing. We were a little more …
volatile! John could break things down and make it all make sense for us: 'There's a good reason to do this.' John explained it, 'Bing bang boom it works like this.'"
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Gary Grimshaw-designed poster for the MC5
show at the Straight Theatre in San Francisco.
March 14-16, 1969
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Some years later, while he was in jail on a marijuana conviction, Sinclair detailed this chapter of the band's career in letters written to
ZigZag magazine: "When I first started working with the MC5 as their official manager in the late summer of 1967, they had just had all their equipment repossessed (all except for Dennis's drums) due to their failure to make any payments on it for an eight-month period … They rarely worked jobs, since few club owners would risk hiring them for dates; they had a reputation for not showing up, showing up late, playing too loud, not playing long enough, playing stuff the audience couldn't relate to, and so on. They had to borrow equipment and con somebody into driving them and their equipment to the gig, and when they got there they'd be wiped out, drunk, or otherwise incapacitated — although I must say that when they did get all this shaky shit together, they played the most exciting music in the history of rock 'n' roll..."
The band moved into Sinclair's communal house, dubbed Trans-Love Energies, which essentially became a support system for the Five: the commune accommodated publicists, graphic artists, the equipment crew, girlfriends and clothing designers. In addition to handling the group's business and instilling his rhetoric of a cultural revolution, Sinclair also turned the guys onto the music of John Coltrane, Sun Ra and Archie Shepp — "The entire wonderful world of angry black music," enthuses Kramer.
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| MC5 - publicity photo |
Over the following months, they put out a couple of locally released 45s which, Kramer says, "never did anything." AMG (the initials of owner Arnold Mark Geller), a short-lived Detroit label whose entire catalog can be counted on one hand, issued the MC5's first single — a cover of "I Can Only Give You Everything" b/w "One of the Guys." (AMG later reissued the A-side b/w "I Just Don't Know.") Another single, featuring early versions of "Looking at You" and "Borderline" was released on Jeep Holland's A-Square Records in 1968.
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| Atlantic advert for Back in the USA |
Of the "Looking at You" recording session, Kramer recollects: "John produced it. He had never produced a session before, but he kept the engineer from emasculating us. The way we played... In those days, people didn't record at that volume. We'd set up our stuff and get engineers going, 'Ooooh nooo! You jive rock 'n' roll punks! Turn that shit down! You can't record at that volume!' We'd say, 'No, this is how we get the
sound. This is where the sound is.'"
At the same time, Sinclair hooked the Five up with Michigan disc jockey "Uncle" Russ Gibb, who was operating a Fillmore-style concert hall in Detroit called the Grande Ballroom. The MC5 became the Grande's house band, opening for nationally known acts almost every weekend.
According to Thompson's
Goldmine interview: "First time we played the Grande Ballroom there were twenty people out there, bowl haircuts, frats, greaseballs … But week by week, it steadily built and built."
In his letters to
ZigZag, Sinclair wrote of the Grande: "It was a good situation, because to put famous recording bands on the same stage as the Detroit groups was enough to let the kids in the audience see that their own bands were as good, if not better, than well-known star bands — and the local bands were able to develop reputations and followings of their own, even though they had no records out on major labels."
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"Kick out the Jams" b/w "Motor City is Burning"
Issued through Disques Vogue France (1969)
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Of the MC5 performances, he added: "They blew other bands away completely … The biggest boost to the 5 and their fans was when the legendary Big Brother & the Holding Company rode into town on the biggest myth in the business and got wiped out by the 5 on the first night."
In
Cavalier, Lenny Kaye painted a picture of an MC5 show from this era: "Like a flash they're all onstage, guitars weaving, snatching at their amplifiers and letting out rumbles and howls of feedback, lots of hair and beautiful clothes. All in their places now, they stop for a moment, just standing there, holding the crest of energy until it breaks and when it does the electricity sort of cascades down like an avalanche, bass rumbling through the floor, the drums pounding pounding and the git-fiddles on each side of the stage wailing out, playing all notes at the same time. And that's not all, 'cause there's this vocal thing that comes over the roar, not really words but maybe sound patterns launched into some kind of cosmic space..."
The summer of '67 was particularly hot and turbulent in Detroit. For several days during July, race riots raged downtown, resulting in the deaths of dozens of people and the destruction of many businesses in the area around 12th Street.
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"Fuck Hudson's!"
Advert published in The Fifth Estate
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While San Francisco basked in the Summer of Love, Kramer remembers watching tanks roll down his street. And whereas up to now, things had been pretty loose and fun ("We smoked a lot of reefer, and given our ages and a lot of hormones, there was great humor in everything we did"), it was now time to organize.
"We had a fan club that we called the MC5 Social and Athletic Club," says Kramer, "and one day somebody came up with the idea of calling it the White Panther Party — kind of as a tribute to the Black Panther Party."
The White Panther's early manifesto advocated for rock 'n' roll, dope and fucking in the street. "And we went with that for a while," he muses. "But those were very scary days. The city was at war for a week. John was being prosecuted for a reefer conviction and was being set up on another one. There were undercover agents all over the neighborhood. There was the war in Vietnam; a lot of our friends were coming back dead or crazy. So, what started out as kind of a joke became more serious as we became more militant."
How much control did Sinclair have over their political activism?
Kramer: He didn't have
any control because we were uncontrollable, much to his dismay. But he had a great influence on us inasmuch as... What we knew about America being fucked up was from a gut level. We knew it was fucked up and we didn't like it, and we were ready to do something about it. John could put it in an intellectual perspective. He could explain why it is that things are the way they are.
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Advert for the Detroit Pop Festival featuring the MC5,
the Amboy Dukes, Sweetwater, Bob Seger System, the Frost
and SRC, among others - Monday, April 7, 1969
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The months preceding the recording of the MC5's debut album in October 1968 were punctuated with violence.
The Fifth Estate reported that on July 23, Sinclair and Smith were "brutally assaulted, beaten, MACEd, and arrested by members of the National Security Police, the Oakland County Sheriff's Department, and the Michigan State Police while performing at a teen-club in Oakland County."
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MC5 - publicity photo
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And in August, the MC5 provided the soundtrack for the infamous Democratic National Convention riots, which saw thousands of young people swarm the streets of Chicago in protest of the Vietnam War. Playing on a flatbed truck, they were the only band that showed up that day, and they had to cut their set short and flee for fear of being arrested.
"We knew that while we were playing everything would be cool," states Kramer, "because the crowd had something to focus on, but the minute we stopped playing all that energy had to go somewhere."
Rock hustler Danny Fields had talked Elektra Records into signing the MC5 (along with the Stooges). "It was the classic thing," points out Kramer, "they offered us lots of money! We were in debt up to our asses. No matter how much we made, we still couldn't meet expenses. We had the five musicians, the wives and girlfriends, roadies and trucks, reefer, and everybody's gotta eat. They offered us $10,000 [other sources put the figure at $25,000]. We said, 'Yeah, that'll just about get us up to zero.' Plus, Elektra came off as being fairly hip. They told us we'd have complete control over our music and complete control over advertising."
Did they actually get complete control?
Kramer: No.
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Advert for the MC5 & the
Stooges at the Pavilion in
Flushing Meadow Park, NY
September 3, 1969
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Recorded live at the Grande Ballroom over two nights (October 30/31 — Devil's Night and Halloween, or Zenta New Year should you belong to Brother J.C. Crawford's Church of Zenta),
Kick Out the Jams was a raucous heavy metal rampage even by today's standards.
And for the most part, the rock music press was keen. The January 1969 issue of
Rolling Stone featured Rob Tyner on the cover (a month before the record hit the shops) with an article written by Eric Ehrman that advised: "If you hear of some notoriously freaky band coming to your town with a trail of policemen, narcs, freaks and guerrillas, it'll be the MC5."
But reviews were, to say the least, mixed.
CREEM editor Dave Marsh continued to praise the LP for several years after its release. In the October 1971 issue of the magazine, he wrote: "Those who were prepared for a total assault on the sensory culture to which they had been accustomed were delighted … Those who weren't ready were aghast, horrified in a way they'd never been before by a mere rock 'n' roll band..."
However, Lester Bangs was a prime example of someone who (surprisingly) didn't get it. In his first published piece for
Rolling Stone (April 5, 1969), the now-revered rock critic declared that
Kick Out the Jams was a "... ridiculous, overbearing, pretentious album." (Kramer still sounds a bit hurt when he paraphrases Bangs: "He said we were snot-nosed white boys that couldn't tune our guitars.")
The criticism might have stung the guys on a personal level, but that didn't stop the title track from reaching the very top of Detroit's local rock charts and the LP going Top 30 in the US. And believe it or not, therein laid the problem.
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July 1970 issue of the counterculture newspaper
it, announcing the MC5's first-ever European
appearance at the Phun City Festival
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To ensure airplay and get their message of revolution to the people (and become rock stars), Tyner recorded two different versions of the song's introduction.
The 45/radio-friendly rendition opened with the nonincendiary: "Kick out the jams, brothers and sisters." Meanwhile, the LP (or "true") intro had the vocalist clearly hollering: "Kick out the jams,
motherfuckers!"
"Our plan," states Kramer, "was to make sure the single was firmly in the charts. It was already #2 in Detroit; it was on in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. We told Elektra to wait until the single was a lock smash hit,
then we'd put out the album. Of course, the shit would hit the fan, but nothing could be done about it because it would already be a hit."
The one thing they hadn't considered was record company greed. Once Elektra saw the single making money, they couldn't wait to release the album.
"And of course, people started hearing the
real version of 'Kick Out the Jams,'" he emphasizes. "Parents started calling the radio stations saying, 'My kid came home with this MC5 record and there's
swearing on it!' So, the radio stations had to back off playing the single because it would encourage sales of the album."
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"Back in the USA" b/w "Tutti Frutti"
Atlantic Records (1970)
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Some record distributors and store owners were arrested for selling the LP to minors. While many records were banned prior to
Kick Out the Jams, to Kramer's knowledge, this was the first time that arrests had been made. Hudson's, one of Detroit's largest department stores, refused to sell the album. In retaliation, Sinclair took out an ad in the underground press which proclaimed: "Fuck Hudson's!"
"We put the Elektra logo on the ad and sent them the bill," chuckles Kramer. Elektra, for all its hipness, did not find it amusing. But before the label dropped the MC5 like a hot potato, Kramer asserts: "They came to us and said, 'All these records are getting returned. Can we put the clean version on the album?' We said, 'Absolutely not! We have to stand by our guns!' They said, 'Okay,' and went and did it anyway."
(In its rush to sanitize the LP, Elektra also deleted Sinclair's politically charged liner notes which read in part: "We are free men and we demand a free music, a free high energy source that will drive us wild into the streets of America yelling and screaming and tearing down everything that would keep people slaves. The MC5 is that force. The MC5 is the revolution in all its applications...")
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Two Gary Grimshaw-designed posters for MC5 gigs at the Grande
(Left) With Wicked Religion and the Maxx - April 4/5, 1969
With PG&E and the James Gang - April 6, 1969
(Right) With Southbound Freeway and Bossmen - November 4/5, 1966
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Naturally, all this fuss caused a schism the size of the Grand Canyon to open between the band and its counterculture fan base.
Rolling Stone handled the controversy by sardonically captioning a photo of the group: "The MC5, kicking out the, uh, … "
But at least
Rolling Stone printed both sides of the story. (In the label's defense, President Jac Holzman was quoted as saying, "Elektra is not the tool of anyone's revolution.") Other editorials — like the one headlined "Rock For Sale" — just assumed they'd wimped out.
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| MC5 - publicity photo |
"In a way," laments Kramer, "it broke the back of the MC5 because it made us look like we were waffling. Like, 'Yeah, we're for the revolution, but we want the money too.' The thing is that [wanting the money] was never in question to begin with. But when Elektra went ahead and put out the clean album, it made us look like we were copping out."
Thanks again to Danny Fields, the band wasn't label-less for long as full-page ads in the music press soon announced: "Atlantic Records Welcomes MC5!"
Too bad Fields couldn't make all their other troubles disappear as easily.
Before the group had even begun to work on its Atlantic debut, Sinclair was busted for giving (not even selling) two joints to an undercover officer.
Rolling Stone threatened: "If John Sinclair gets sent up the river, Detroit will burn." Nevertheless, he was still sentenced to a ten-year prison term (of which he served two).
In the meantime, the Five were growing up, developing attitudes and political opinions of their own, which often put them at odds with the Panther's increasingly more dangerous agenda. For instance, Kramer realized that killing everyone who didn't see eye to eye with him would mean killing half the world. And that, he says, "wasn't the revolution we were talking about. We were talking about a revolution of
ideas."
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Advert for the MC5
at Friars in Aylesbury, England
Friday, February 11, 1972
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When the band finally insisted on having something to show for all their work and drove up in brand-new Corvettes (financed by their parents!), the Panthers saw it as the ultimate Star Trip and purged them from the party.
It was an emotional period, with hurt feelings all around.
Sinclair lashed out at the Five with an outrageous soundbite: "You guys wanted to be bigger than the Beatles, but I wanted you to be bigger than Mao." Kramer struck back at Sinclair in the pages of
Rolling Stone, saying: "He was just getting his ideas over through us, and we were getting tired of that."
Through it all, with an undeterred sense of allegiance, the MC5 carried on paying Sinclair a percentage of their earnings, contributed to his legal defense fund, and played benefits on his behalf.
Into the fray stepped Jon Landau, a recent graduate of Brandeis University and music editor at
Rolling Stone — "Mr. Rationality," as Dave Marsh called him.
Landau recalled his first MC5 gig in an interview with
Fusion magazine: "The kids were in an absolute frenzy. Rock 'n' roll hysteria for the first ten minutes … And then the power failed. This winds up being the highlight of the evening. Rob starts yelling at the club owner that the power's gone. And then he starts screaming 'Power! Power!' as a chant … And the whole place was screaming 'Power!' — all these kids. They're just shaking their fists and chanting, 'Power! Power!' It was scary, and then the power goes on. I personally did not interpret it as a mystical intervention of the Lord, but I think a lot of people there may have."
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My autographed copy of Wayne Kramer's solo CD
The Hard Stuff (Epitaph)
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On the basis of a 30-page "memo" he wrote analyzing the group's music with no mention of its politics (and with no prior experience), Landau was hired to produce
Back in the USA, the MC5's first Atlantic release. And with his help, the band made a tight, cohesive, very listenable, almost
pop record with songs about "High School" and "Teenage Lust" bookended with Chuck Berry and Little Richard covers.
Albeit a strong undercurrent of militant politics runs throughout the LP. To quote Dave Marsh: "... tunes like "American Ruse," "Human Being Lawnmower" and "Call Me Animal" are probably the finest examples of politics in our music since Dylan's
The Times They Are A-Changin' album."
In the more than two decades since its 1970 release,
Back in the USA has proved to be one of the most influential hard-rock albums of all time, but in '71, Marsh logged its initial lukewarm reception: "
Back in the USA bewildered most Five fans. Some reacted bitterly, some hostilely, others were just confused."
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Advertisement for the High Time LP
(illustration by Rob Tyner)
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In
Goldmine, Dennis Thompson summed up what everyone was complaining about: "He [Landau] took too long, and as a result the album came out more studio-sounding than it should have, and we alienated many of our original fans because it wasn't as … wild and crazy as the first."
Thompson also grumbled that Landau (who went on to produce Bruce Springsteen) was a "greenhorn [when] what we needed was a pro."
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Gary Grimshaw-designed poster for Big
Brother & the Holding Co. and the MC5
at the Grande Ballroom - March 1968
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Kramer agrees that Landau "didn't know what he was doing." And he admits that "in hindsight, you could say that maybe he did clamp down on our craziness."
On the other hand, Kramer also stresses that the producer "didn't hold a pistol to our heads; this was what
we wanted to do."
(One oft-cited gripe is the album's lack of bass, which set off rumors that Landau wanted to replace Mike Davis with a Nashville studio musician. By all accounts, the proposal was strongly vetoed by the band.)
Despite poor sales (Landau once speculated that
Back in the USA had sold 60,000 copies, while the group guessed 100,000), the MC5 recorded a second album for Atlantic. Released in 1971,
High Time left the Five to their own devices — "Cut loose from all the gurus," as Marsh quips in the liner notes to the CD reissue.
"We made the best record of our career," states Kramer regarding
High Time. "At that point, we were no longer intimidated by the process of recording. We were producing it ourselves. It was our decision making, and we understood what we were supposed to sound like, who we were supposed to be."
And the rock press gave the LP a big thumbs up. In his enthusiastic appraisal for
Rolling Stone, Lenny Kaye wrote: "It's all there — the precise breaks, the madly screaming dual guitars, the fanatic drive and energy … For this we can only praise the Lord and pass the ammunition."
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Flyer designed by Edward Barker for the July 1970
Phun City festival in Sussex, England.
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Yet this album, too, failed to take off (despite a truly amazing advert drawn by Tyner) and Atlantic dropped the MC5, citing a $128,000 debt that could not be repaid. Kramer contends that the label is still trying to recoup the debt with sales of the CD reissue.
How disappointed were they when
High Time didn't sell?
Kramer: We were crushed. My heart was broken. From the time I was ten or eleven-years-old, all I'd worked for my entire life was in this band, and it all collapsed.
But he maintains that the MC5 didn't collapse by itself. "It was helped in great measure by the [government] authorities and the music industry. Every time we did something that had political significance, it incurred a larger, stronger political reaction. There was a prevailing attitude of, 'When is
somebody gonna do
something about the MC5?' And, of course, they did. We had constant problems with the police. We were beaten, fined, jailed, concerts were canceled..." (When he was arrested in the mid-seventies for dealing cocaine, Kramer was not surprised to find that the FBI had a file on him going back to 1966.)
After the failure of
High Time, the band was unable to secure a new US deal. "At that point," says Kramer, "the music industry wanted absolutely nothing to do with the MC5. It was too volatile a situation to get involved with."
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| MC5 - publicity photo |
The group made some forays to Europe, where they found a ready audience (they'd made their European debut in 1970, playing for free at England's Phun City festival).
However, "between the lack of response in the record industry and the band's own burgeoning substance abuse problems, we just couldn't quite make it through," remarks Kramer.
When the end came, it wasn't pretty.
Kramer: We had a tour [of England] booked, and two days before we were supposed to leave, Rob said he wasn't gonna go. He had been unhappy for some time; he wanted to stay home and write and be with his children. Dennis said he wasn't gonna go either because it would interrupt his treatment. So, me and Fred did the tour without them — and of course, it was hideous. We didn't even know some of the lyrics. The songs were all in the wrong keys. We met the drummer in the dressing room on the first night of the first gig.
The final performance featuring all the original members of the MC5 took place (fittingly) at the Grande Ballroom on New Year's Eve 1972. "It was terrible," says Kramer.
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Gary Grimshaw-designed poster for a
1967 MC5 show at the See in Detroit
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Because they didn't like each other?
Kramer: I don't know if it was that we didn't like each other... We didn't like
ourselves. We didn't like the band. We had been beaten down to where we had no pride left."
"The worst part of the break-up," he adds, "was that we lost each other. I lost my brothers. These were the guys that I had gone through the fire with. And all of a sudden, we weren't there with each other anymore."
It would be twenty years later when Wayne Kramer, Fred Smith, Michael Davis and Dennis Thompson once again joined forces, and it was to pay tribute to Rob Tyner, who died last year of a heart attack.
The group's three-song set of "Kick Out the Jams," "Ramblin' Rose" and "Black to Comm" (a wild showstopper which they never recorded) drew 8,000 fans to the Michigan Theatre and raised over $30,000 to be used as a scholarship fund for Tyner's children.
"I used that show as an opportunity to reclaim my brothers," reflects Kramer. "Sadly, it took the death of Rob Tyner to bring us all together."
* * *
* Many thanks to Metal Mike Saunders, who supplied me with copious magazine clippings when I initially researched this article.
* Thanks also to Loren Dobson, who recently fact-checked the article for this blog.
