Copyright © 2024 by Brad Tolinski, Jaan Uhelszki, and Ben Edmonds

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Print book interior design by Amy Quinn

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024939900

ISBNs: 9780306833014 (hardcover); 9780306832994 (ebook)

E3-20240807-JV-NF-ORI

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Preface by Rob Tyner

Cast of Characters

CHAPTER I: Come Together

CHAPTER II: Ballroom Blitz

Part 2. Motor City is Burning

Part 3. Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa!

CHAPTER III: Kick Out the Jams!

Part 2. Rise, Panther, Rise

CHAPTER IV: Motherfuckers!

CHAPTER V: Full-On Destructo

Part 2. Free John Now!

Part 3. End Times

Epilogue

Photos

Acknowledgments

Discover More

Also by Brad Tolinski

Advance praise for "MC5: An Oral Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band"

Cover

Table of Contents

Copyright

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For Ben Edmonds

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INTRODUCTION

“KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFUCKERS!!!”

What people know about the MC5 is contained in those five little words. The first four have become a permanent part of the culture. That fifth word can still get you in as much trouble as it did the MC5 back in 1968, but trouble was also what this band was known for. Although, through a modern lens, much of it was what we would now call “good trouble.”

Managed by legendary ’60s radical and hippie spokesperson John Sinclair, the MC5 preached the gospel of police reform and cannabis legalization fifty years before those topics became part of the mainstream conversation. And for their efforts, the rabble-rousing musical arm of the White Panther Party, the scourge of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and other defenders of public decency, were often beaten with clubs, threatened at gunpoint, and tossed into jail.

Police raided MC5 shows, record stores were busted for selling their albums, and the group was unceremoniously dumped by its record company even as their record was storming up the charts—all of this transpiring while the Sex Pistols were still on training wheels.

What has been lost in this proto-punk notoriety is the MC5 itself—vocalist Robin Tyner, guitarists Wayne Kramer and Fred “Sonic” Smith, bassist Michael Davis, and drummer Dennis Thompson. Though they never quite got the hang of making records, turned loose on a stage the group could be among the most awesome and awe-inspiring noise machines rock ’n’ roll has ever produced. The Five are worth remembering not because they were bad boys but because they were so damn good.

Becoming the house band at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom—one of the first hippie music palaces outside San Francisco—gave them a personal laboratory in which to hone their skills. When the Ballroom began to bring in “name” acts from both coasts and England the following year, the MC5 were ready. This local band quickly acquired a reputation for blowing the headliners like Janis Joplin and Cream off the stage, such that some of these music hotshots specifically requested that the Five not open for them. Their mettle had been tempered on Motor City’s intense Battle of the Bands circuit, but competition was only part of it. It had as much to do with the performer’s basic responsibility to give their audience everything, to hold back nothing. Eventually they came up with a catchphrase that expressed this philosophy, and a song to go with it.

This made the MC5 hometown heroes. But only a few miles outside Detroit’s city limits, the ambassadors of weirdness could get a very different reaction.

“We weren’t just a rock-’n’-roll band that came in to play some songs,” said guitarist Wayne Kramer. “We brought a whole new way of life with us. We were there to convince people to run away and join us in this wonderful, free alternative lifestyle! We were the first longhairs they’d seen in some of these little farm towns, and the hostility could get intense.”

As the Five’s visibility increased, so did law enforcement scrutiny. “We began to get hassled constantly,” said Sinclair. “We’d show up at a job and the authorities would already be waiting, looking for any excuse to fuck with us. The promoters would be trying to tell us what we could and couldn’t do—one even had it written into the contract that the band were not to move onstage, fearing that our salacious undulations would corrupt the young girls in the audience! Club owners regularly pulled the plug on us, saying we were too loud. Or they’d beat us out of our money and call in the cops to beat us up if we complained. These were the frustrations being felt by forward-thinking young people all over—with the government, with the Vietnam War, with a lack of self-determination—but magnified because we were in the public eye, and it started to piss the band off. Me, I’d been pissed off since the ’50s!”

Sinclair’s stated cultural agenda of “rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets” also gained attention, and police harassment became so unrelenting that the band and Sinclair were effectively driven out of Detroit, taking refuge thirty miles west in the slightly more tolerant college town of Ann Arbor.

Though still just a lowly “local” band, a journey in August 1968 to appear at the demonstrations coinciding with the Democratic National Convention would change all of that. It was there that the MC5 made national headlines after an impromptu concert turned into a full-scale police riot, and the group suddenly became the darlings of the growing hippie underground as “the only band with [the] balls to play Chicago!”

After blowing them away in the Windy City, the Five signed with Elektra Records and recorded their debut album live over two nights at the Grande Ballroom. It was an audacious move for a new rock band to make their first album a concert recording, but perhaps not as audacious as what came next. Born out of a desire to “create the illusion of something bigger and badder; that if you fucked with us, you were fucking with a whole organization.” Sinclair, the band, and an alliance of leftist insurrectionists formed the White Panther Party, an anti-racist political collective created to support the Black Panthers, the revolutionary Black socialist movement.

And that was just the beginning of their adventure. What happened next is one of the wildest and most culturally relevant rock-’n’-roll stories ever told.

Intrigued? We certainly were.

The creation of MC5: An Oral Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band is almost as intriguing as the content itself. Beginning in 1990, Ben Edmonds, the respected CREEM editor and Rolling Stone contributor, spent more than a decade interviewing the MC5 and their inner circle, many of whom are no longer with us. Unfortunately, Edmonds also died in 2016, succumbing to pancreatic cancer. However, as his health was failing, he asked us to organize his extensive notes and turn them into a definitive book on the band.

Little did we know, Ben was never a fan of the computer and had written out his interviews in longhand on literally hundreds of sheets of lined paper, which had been organized haphazardly into massive file cabinets. Over the next year, we went about the seemingly impossible task of organizing the intimidating jumble into a semi-linear story line. And then the genuine work began. We spent another year writing narrative bridges and filling noticeable gaps with new interviews.

What slowly emerged was this genuinely exciting, funny, and thought-provoking portrait of rock’s most uncompromising band.

The MC5 dissolved in 1972, but the timing of this book could hardly feel more relevant. Their antiauthoritarian politics and raw punk rock are remarkably pertinent and speak to how far ahead of the sociological curve they were.

But this isn’t the first time the MC5’s urgent music has felt important or timely. Every decade since the band split, a new generation of musicians and music aficionados have discovered their albums and found reasons to call them their own.

Starting in the late 1970s, while their memory was still fresh, the first wave of punk rockers from New York were inspired by the band’s wild insurgency. The Ramones, the Dictators, Blondie, and Patti Smith (who eventually married MC5 guitarist Fred Smith) would all claim affinity with the Five.

“The MC5 really believed they could change the world,” poet/singer/composer Smith told Rolling Stone. “They didn’t just say it. They were intoxicated with the feeling that they could stop the war in Vietnam, that they could stop prejudice. And their music reflected that.”

Across the pond in London, they elicited an equally passionate response. “We wanted to be more like [the MC5], using our music as a loud voice of protest… punk rock, at the heart of it, should be protest music,” Joe Strummer of the Clash told journalist Antonio D’Ambrosio.

Brian James, of the pioneering British punk-rock group the Damned, was also an acolyte. “They wiped me out,” said James, who saw the band firsthand at one of their rare U.K. gigs. “Live, it seemed like Kramer and Smith were mowing down the audience with their guitars—these white guys beating the shit out of their guitars and ripping off Chuck Berry riffs at ten times the speed. I was impressed big-time.”

Throughout the ’80s, hard-rock icons Motörhead would also spread the word in the metal community. “I wanted our band to be sort of like the MC5, since that was the big hero band of most of the underground, and throw in elements of Little Richard and Hawkwind,” said singer/bassist Lemmy Kilmister.

The band’s influence continued to loom large over the next couple decades, serving as a template for some of the biggest groups of the grunge era. Rage Against the Machine, who saw themselves as the spiritual sons of the MC5, recorded a memorable cover of “Kick Out the Jams” in 2000, while Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil called them his favorite band, and demonstrated it by joining Wayne Kramer on a fiftieth anniversary MC5 tour in 2018.

“The MC5 has influenced a number of genres,” said Thayil. “There are obvious ones like acid rock and heavy metal and, later, punk rock, but I could draw a line from their song ‘Shakin’ Street’ directly to Bruce Springsteen’s work. There’s a lot there.”

Of course, Detroit’s own White Stripes, who spearheaded a serious garage-rock revival in the 2000s, wore the band’s influence on their sleeve by regularly performing covers of MC5 songs like “Looking at You,” and playing them with the same intensity. To complete the circle, White Stripes drummer Meg White would eventually marry Patti and Fred Smith’s son, Jackson.

Being ahead of your time, however, is not always the best thing for a rock-’n’-roll band, and the MC5’s cultural impact was considerably larger than the dent they made on the Billboard charts. This might explain why they were consistently overlooked by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, considered the pinnacle of legitimacy in the industry.

Historically, the Rock Hall has been slow to embrace music that was influential but not commercially successful. The Stooges, another Detroit band, endured eight ballots and fifteen years before finally being inducted in 2010. Similarly, cult favorites Velvet Underground faced five ballots before gaining entry. Despite being eligible since 1992, the MC5 had to endure six rounds of voting before finally receiving their invitation to the Rock Hall’s 39th induction ceremony in 2024.

Still, their long wait was somewhat puzzling given Jon Landau, one of the group’s staunchest supporters, chaired the Hall of Fame’s nominating committee for years. Landau—best known for his work with artists like Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, and Shania Twain, and producing the MC5’s second album, Back in the USA—expressed frustration at the group’s prolonged wait for recognition.

“It all comes down to voting,” he explained. “The MC5’s importance was more apparent to some of us than to others; in some ways it’s as simple as that. However, there was never a doubt in my mind that they belonged.”

The 2024 induction announcement was bittersweet, as none of the band members lived to attend the actual ceremony. The news came shortly after guitarist Kramer’s passing, followed closely by manager Sinclair’s death. Drummer Thompson, recovering from a heart attack, learned of the honor, declaring “It’s about fucking time,” but passed away three weeks later. Tyner, Davis, and Smith had already died years prior.

But perhaps bittersweet is fitting. The MC5 were always at their best when they were underdogs—spitting in the face of authority and fighting to be heard in the face of tremendous odds. Battling the “establishment” was often the source of their energy and power, and perhaps a perfunctory pat on the back would only dull their legacy of righteous civil disobedience.

“We were never a ‘hit’ band, and we never made any money,” said guitarist Kramer in recent years. “But our work stood the test of time and people still appreciate what we’ve done.”

As the song goes: “Let me be who I am… and let me kick out the jams!” One thing is certain, the MC5 done kicked ’em out.

—Brad Tolinski & Jaan Uhelszki