Of all the loud, rebellious rock groups forged in the white heat of America's Motor City, MC5 were the most uncompromising. A high-octane force of nature, saluted now as punk pioneers, MC5 were streetwise Detroit factory rats, assembly-line escapees who lit the touchpaper on some of the most combustible rock'n'roll ever heard.It's 1968. An incendiary debut album fused the raging pungency of free jazz with dislocated cosmic blues and brutally confrontational garage rock. A second stripped the music bare and became a blueprint for Britpunk. A third, exuding maturity and professionalism, was widely praised. Yet by 1972 their advance ruptured by accident, deception and often self-sewn misadventure, MC5 were done.Despite the tendency to self-ignite, the distractions of activist tomfoolery and management seeking only a soundtrack to sedition, MC5's aim was pure: to get down, party and blow every other rock band into insensibility. Now Richard Butterworth dissects MC5's chaotic, magnificent history, their records and the fevered countercultural ecosystem that spawned them: the speed-fried music; the bristling posture; the duplicitous record deals; the corrosive drugs. And, of course, the significance of MC5's infamous catchphrase. So right now, it's time to KICK OUT THE JAMS (brothers and sisters).
Richard Butterworth's grown-up career began in advertising, first as a paste-up artist, later as a graphic designer. Settling on copywriting, for years, he reaped the pleasures, pains and penury of freelancing. As a lifelong believer in the healing and redemptive power of music, however, he knew that humankind's highest art-form would eventually saddle up and ride him into the sunset. Today Richard lives in Cornwall, UK, with his partner Sue, a golden retriever and CD shelf-space in managed but perpetual decline. He still reads and writes about the music he loved before he was a grown-up.
There wasn’t a lot of doctrinaire mumbo-jumbo in our music, and I think that was resented.
Rob Tyner, interviewed by Ben Edmonds, 1990
It’s 1968. Politicos and peaceniks march against America’s meddling in Vietnam. Anti-war factions in the US and Europe spring up and down like whack-a-mole. Modus operandi vary: megaphone diplomacy; cop-baiting street scuffles; improvised, I’m-mad-me eccentricity. For many, only dialogue will stem the flow of body bags. Some throw stones, or worse. A few devolve to clownish mischief, from exorcising the bad juju in the Defense Department to nominating a pig named Pigasus for President.
Whether the best way to bring the boys home was to petition the politicians, tear down the walls or levitate the Pentagon was moot. For MC5, it was academic: the revolution was abstract, conceptual, a vessel for rock ’n’ roll, not vice-versa. The 5 had flirted with the usual touchstones of 1950s-60s protest:Das Kapital, Che Guevara posters, Ho Chi Minh cufflinks, whatever. But while the era’s more strident protestors and academicians took MC5 to their hearts as shock-troops of the resistance, the band’s onstage musical blitzkreig flattered to deceive. MC5 were no more far-left political attack-dogs than Ted Nugent was a pacifist. Despite hand-me-down wisdom inherited from John Sinclair and a coterie of ideological exhibitionists, anyone back in 1968 looking to MC5 as a radical lodestar would have been disappointed. Tying the 5 to the coming crisis of Western capitalism was like calling Frank Zappa a hippie; violent upheaval wasn’t on their bucket list, even if they played what many took to be its soundtrack.
The 5’s aggression in concert suggested another hotline to their closest musical inspirations. Pete Townshend may have hoped to die before he got old enough to write a rock opera, but while The Who’s creative lead fed his fury into some of the stormiest rock music ever heard, the composer of ‘My Generation’ and ‘Substitute’ was no placard-waving politico. More auto-destructive art project than Oxford Union debate or Grosvenor Square riot, Townshend’s anger felt existential and arbitrary, its target anything the establishment threw at him. Like Marlon Brando’s inThe Wild One, Pete’s negativism proposed no solution, and he held in contempt evangelising, self-styled radicals and holier-than-thou activists. Witness his peremptory dispatch of Abbie Hoffman when the Youth International Party leader tried to muscle in on The Who’s show at Woodstock, of which more later.
In their earliest years, MC5 were kicking down the fence because it was there, not because the neighbours had all the local gossip on a better world. And in truth, little would change before the band called time in 1972. Having toed John Sinclair’s party line and assumed the position with dutiful seditionary aplomb, the 5 later insisted they never bought their manager’s faux-militancy and magical thinking, still less the gurning tomfoolery of histrionic provocateurs like Hoffman and fellow late-1960s nuisances Jerry Rubin and Paul Krassner. As for the routine misreading of MC5’s famous signature tune, America’s middle classes were better advised to lock up their daughters than unlock the gun cupboard. The only armed struggle MC5 had on their minds was feverish, sweaty, adolescent sex. ‘I only wanted to be in a rock and roll band,’ Mike Davis mused. ‘This crusade to forge a new world seemed ludicrous, a Quixotic lunge at an imaginary adversary.’ In 1990, Rob Tyner remi
