MC5 ON THE CUSP

MC5 ON THE CUSP

“Our program, at its finest level, is supposed to be together, coherent and relatable. In order to be effective you have to have those qualities, and our program obviously didn’t in the past because our program, which was to clarify things, muddled things. And when you get into a situation like that you either have to check yourself, Jack, or get back.’’ Rob Tyner of the MC5, a group which is going through a period of critical self-evaluation and restructuring, appraisal and correction that was much needed. All signs indicate that the band is on the move again after, after a disasterous first album, a period of financial chaos, and months of creative stagnation.

“You have to check yourself, check what you’re into, and if you’re into the wrong shit, then you’re not doing anything, you’re not doing it right. So you cut it - you got to rearrange, reevaluate, new strategies, new ways of doing things. Like we’ve gone through a period of reassessment of our tactics and our capabilities, and we’ve found after this period ended that our program in the past wasn’t always as solid as we might have liked to consider it.”

“You see, there are a lot of bands running around on the planet calling themselves rock and roll bands when actually what they’re playing is mind music, not rock and roll at all. You just don’t get five guys together and get monster amps and you’re a rock and roll band. You have to play rock and roll to call yourselves that. And our last album, unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot of rock and roll on it. It was quote psychedelic unquote music on it, and we’re now getting deep into a rock and roll theme, we’re now. writing rock and roll. It’s closer to it than we’ve ever been and we really like it because rock and roll feels good when you play it. You feel good and the people listening to it feel good because they can dance to it. I doubt very strongly if you could dance to the first album. How can you dance to Starship?

“What we’re talking about is having a good time, getting down and going wild, getting involved in Motor City tokedowns and being crazy and dancing, but we realize that we weren’t playing dancing music .and people couldn’t dance to it. They wound up sitting down, listening to it with their minds, and we feel that rock and roll should be listened to and responded to with the body. This doesn’t mean in the metaphorical sense but in the literal sense. If it’s rock and roll you want to shake your ass.”

A year ago the Five looked like they were bound for superstardom in the immediate future. The failure of the England/San Francisco axis to produce anything new or startling left a void which the high-energy music that the Five, then playing at their peak, and completely embodying the resurgence of the midwest, seemed destined to fill. The media were curious; the band’s name appeared everywhere. And when Jac Holtzman came to Ann Arbor at the insistance of Danny Fields, to hear and almost immediately sign them, the progression seemed inevitable. Ann Arbor, a town which the Five have made their own, which their presence, music and politics dominate, was ecstatically and chauvinistically proud.

Reverses followed close on the heels of success. The East Coast tour degenerated into political name-calling and paranoia, and the West Coast tour was characterized by a marked lack of enthusiasm on the part of the few audiences they managed to play for. The Elektra album, recorded at the Grande on two nights, didn’t do much to change people’s minds about the band: if you liked the Five for what you knew them to be you cherished the record as an artifact, though not as a creative triumph; if you were convinced in front that they were a bunch of Detroit punks, the album bore you out.

“The first album was a live show,” says Wayne Kramer, “it wasn’t an album, it was just what we played on our gig that night. If they would’ve recorded us another night they would have got an incredibly better response. We’d never been in the record business, you know; we were intimidated by the equipment.” Still, the band concedes that the music they were playing at that time was not well suited to recording. Michael Davis explains: “Our tunes were structured super-free. Like in each tune everybody’d play just what they wanted to play and there’d just be a very general idea of what the song was gonna be, and the musician would just take that idea and go. So consequently our tunes just turned out to be great conglomerations of parts and not any solid things.”

This isn’t meant to imply that you can’t put free-form music on record. As Rob explains: “It’s just gotta be together. A lot of the time our show and music together wouldn’t be efficient. We were so deep in to the show aspect of it that the music itself was like only half of the experience. And that’s an unfortunate state of affairs because when you’re makin’ records people can’t see you. If you be shakin’ your ass and like that it doesn’t get on the record. Basically, what needs to be said is musically we had to get our asses together. When we do another live album it will be a true live album. You won’t have to get a videotape with it or a bunch of pictures. You’ll get the whole story right there.”

The Story of the MC5

The orgins of the MC5 can be traced back to the Downriver Detroit suburb of Lincoln Park, and the adolescence of Wayne Kramer and Fred Smith. Wayne starts the narrative: “Me and Fred played together when we were in junior high school. He had a couple of guitars at his house because his father was from the South and everybody from the South has guitars around the house”. Eventually they each got a band together. “Fred’s band was the Vibratones and I was with the famous Bounty Hunters. We were sorta rivals. There was a well developed scene back in Lincoln Park. The Downriver Rock and Roll scene.”

“ What we’re talking about is having a good time, getting down and going wild... If it’s rock# roll, you want to shake your ass.”

“We used to play a lot of the same kind of gigs,” says Fred. “Little neighborhood parties and at the junior high school. When my band’d play he’d go and see us and when his band would play we’d go and see them. Finally we got together and got talkin’ about it. We got the idea to take the best members from each band and form.a new band.” It was inevitable. “The original Super Group,” comments Wayne.

Wayne contributed the name Bounty Hunters, himself and his rhythm player, Billy Vargo. Fred contributed himself and drummer Leo LeDuc. Vargo left the band because he couldn’t relate to the general insanity, and so the Bounty Hunters became, in Wayne’s words, “the first power trio,” once again scooping Cream, et al.. (This was in 1963, mind you.) Equipment was the biggest problem back then, and it was over equipment that the band finally broke up, remembers Wayne. “LeDuc got this amp for Christmas, but he told us it was his neighbor’s and that we could rent it. If we would pay him so much money we could use it anytime we wanted ’cause his neighbor was a piano player but he didn’t play in a band, he just had this amp. We went along for a while until we found out that the amp was actually his and that he was extorting all this money from us to use his amp to play in our band.” Needless to say, that was the end of LeDuc.

At this point, enter Rob Tyner, who used to sit in Gregory Park with Wayne and draw on the back of sweatshirts. “I had this job, I used to break up barricades, but I wanted to be in a band; thats all I could think of. I’d known Wayne for a long time, and one day he came in on his motorcycle, he was a real down dude, high up in the entire bizarre scene. It was a Yamaha ... if you had a Yamaha in Lincoln Park you’re the Hell’s Angels. Anyway, I’d been messin’ around with harmonica and Wayne came in and we just sat down and I had my harmonica. I was stinkin’ drunk and Wayne said ’Wow, I didn’t know you played harmonica. Why don’t we get together tomorrow? We’ll mess around and see what happens.”

As Wayne recalls it, “I wanted to be like Booker T. and the M.G.’s. I wanted to have a band with guitar, organ, bass and drums, ’cause I figured that’d be the most universal. We could play at bars, we could play at bowling alleys, we could play anywhere. Rob decided to have this rehearsal and he said, ‘well that’s ridiculous, you ’n’ Fred can really play great together. At first Rob was going to manage the band, but it was later decided that he was to be the bass player. Leo LeDuc was replaced by Bob Gasper and they started calling themselves the Motor City 5, even though there were only four of them. Much more euphonious than MC4, you see.

Rob left the band for a while, to be replaced on bass (apparently as a bass player he was fairly easy to replace) by Pat Burrows. When he rejoined the band in the latter part of 1964 it was as a singer exclusively. “Finally found some way to get into to thing.”

Towards the end of 1964, Pat Burrows left the band, being unable to relate on any level to the music that Wayne, Fred and Rob wanted to play; avant-rock they called it, but to Burrows it was not music at all and he couldn’t dig it. Rob Tyner: “When Pat Burrows left the band, well, we had previously become associated with this degradee’ ruffian known fallaciously as Michael Davis, or at that time, Mick Davies. Michael was hanging around down in the infamous Warren-Forest area way before it was the Warren-Forest area, way before it was infamous at all. The Original Prentis Street scene. Michael was at that time the rebellious young folksinger; he used to play acoustical guitar and sing Bob Dylan and I knew if he was into that he was a heavy dude. We got Mike in the band and we continued on 6ur program of playing the weird jams. Bob Gasper was still the drummer.

“Bob Gasper . . . there’s a thing that happens in Black to Comm that starts out with Fred playing the basic sound of the tune and the drums don’t come in for a long time. Dennis waits and lets it build. That came from Bob Gasper’s unwillingness to play the song, period. Sometimes the song’d go on for ten minutes with no drums. He’d sit there ajid sit there and get madder and madder and madder because he hated it so much and he couldn’t relate to it at all. We’re all flipping out, screaming into the mike, and finally he’d go crazy and take out all of his frustrations by coming in very strong, maintaining the thing at a very high energy level. We always maneuovered him into that situation. So there’s the Bob Gasper Memorial Wait at the beginning of Black to Comm.

“We’d been having a lot of trouble ‘cause Gasper did not want to play that kind of music ‘cause he didn’t feel that it was valid. It was just an outburst of energy and noise as far as he was concerned, and in some ways that was exactly what it was.

“So we got a job in the now-defunct Crystal Bar where we used that context as a place for us to get our thing together. It was a place for us to play. There would never be any people there, just this old Polish fellow sitting in the corner eating a sausage and a stick of butter. So we got this job and Bob Gasper cracked. He had a new car that he was trying to pay for. Got a job in a bank. The incredible job at the Crystal Bar was not paying any money, was not contributing to his financial success, so he said ’you guys are fucked up’ and took off. That left us without a drummer.

“In the past we had had a problem with Gasper not being able to make a gig once or twice and we had used this young drummer from the Bounty Hunters, the infamous high energy rock band. (Dennis Thompson, who had quit the Bounty Hunters in the early days to play weddings and Bar Mitzvahs with Jeff Wardy and the Paramounts, because “back in those days you couldn’t make money in rock and roll”.) We had gone through two or three drummers and we were using Dennis as a last resort because, well, I hated his guts. He was a terrible drummer and besides that he was a prick.

“So anyway, Dennis played with us several nights at the Crystal Bar and we’d succeded in antagonizing him to the point where he would be playing o.k. and he’d be working hard and so one night we had a little impromptu ceremony on the stage seeing as how there was only one person in the bar, who had since passed out. We announced to his lifeless form that we were going to ask Dennis impromptu on the stage to join the band because we needed him. So we made a little ceremony and asked Dennis if he wanted to join the band, publicly, you know, and he said ‘aw shucks, yeah,’ so we finally presented him with the ceremonial plunger out of the toilet down in the dressing room and there we were, the MC5.”

Assault on the Culture

About this time the cultural/spiritual referents of the band began to change, as they gravitated toward the Warren-Forest area of Detroit and the flourishing freak scene which dominates the neighborhood around Wayne State University. Wayne Kramer runs down “the Master Plan. It’s never been told. When we all went through our individual domestic scenes at home we kinda made up our minds that we didn’t want to live with our parents; we just weren’t gonna tolerate it no more. It was just get a job or move out, that’s all, you know, and we all knew what we were gonna do. Rob was already living downtown and there was already a little thing down there, some people, the kind of people that we could relate to, you know, so we all started moving downtown. After talking about it, discussing the general situation of rock and roll we came to the realization that the hippies and beatniks, well, prehippies really, were gonna be the next thing. ‘Cause everthing they were into was all right. It was gonna be the latest sensation. So/we figured, well, the thing to do, man, is to get all the beatniks to like us. If all the beatniks liked us then all the kids would like us, ‘cause all the kinds’ll like what the beatniks like, so it turns out who was the head beatniks? John Sinclair, man, so we knew we had to get Sinclair. If he liked us all the beatniks would like us.”

Rob continues: “So we began our assault on the young Sinclair by playing at the joyous gathering held the day he got back from bein’ in prison the first time. There was a festival to commemmorate the joyous occasion of John’s leaving the clutches of the Honk. At the very end of the lineup was the bizarre MC5. We waited all afternoon in the hot sun to play for him, and it got to be like one o’clock in the morning by the time everything was done and there was only a couple of people there. So anyway John unfortunately went upstairs shortly after we began our third song, a standard piece of improvisation, and then Leni Sinclair came downstairs and pulled the plug. Never happened to us before. We were never censored like that before. Here we were, being censored by a bunce of beatniks. It was weird, we were knocking ourselves out to please.

“All at the same time, I killer admired the dude, because I had seen him at the old Artists’ Workshop, down on Forest 1 think it was. I’d gone there a couple of times and got literally blown back. The very foundation of everything I understood was shaken by the intensity of John Sinclair himself in the flesh and the people he associated with.”

The Five had begun rehearsing at the Artists’ Workshop when Russ Gibb, recently returned from California and considering the possibilities of opening a psychedelic ballroom in Detroit came by. After listening to the band for a while, he asked if they would do an original tune. They did one, “probably Looking at You,” recalls Rob, and “then we played some regular rock and roll for him and he dug it, you know, so we began our long career as the house band at the Grande Ballroom. Opened the Grande with the Chosen Few, now largely comprising the Scott Richard Case, the infamous SRC, and also the Stooges, ‘cause Ron Asheton’s the formabass player for the Few.

“After we began our association with the Grande Ballroom John would be coming down to check things out and stuff like that and got deep into the band and we began working closely together. What I did to get a thing goin’ with John, to establish communication . . . he’d be writing in his column in the Fifth Estate all those things - rock and roll news items - and I would write these letters, indignant about this band that we had that he just had to dig. He was writing about jazz and all those things and we were writing about rock and roll. We just developed a dialogue and then he became our manager.”

Shit and Fan

With John Sinclair in jail, the band’s organizational position has been thrown into a state of flux, and they are looking for some new solutions to the non-musical problems that confront them. Rob Tyner: “As of right now, there is no formal relationship between us and Trans-Love, i.e., there is no one from Trans-Love who is working exclusively with the band, for the band, on band business. They do not represent us, and it’s an informal relationship between two separate entities. As of right now. Because of the fact that John is now in jail and no one from the Trans-Love organization is working exclusively with the MC5. We’ve been taking care of pretty much all of our own business. We realized that basically there were all these things that had to be done, and done right away, because John’s being away is not going to stop our program. We want to continue at the same rate we have, continue getting the music and information to the people.”

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Wayne Kramer: “Our main responsibility is to ourselves, inasmuch as, hypothetically, if Trans-Love isn’t together enough to be doing all the things that a production-management company does, that doesn’t stop us; we still have to be doin’ what we have to be doin’. And we are doing - we have a new manager, Danny Fields, we have a new business manager, David Newman, and we’re continuing on what we’re doing. If they (Trans-Love) can come up with the programs that are necessary - well, we’re open to anything, any way you look at it.”

In the confusion and distress that attended John’s being sent to prison, rumors have been flying freely. An initial dispute between the band and John’s wife Leni over the disposition of the 20% of the band’s earnings that were John’s by contract gave rise to accusations within the Trans-Love community that the Five had refused to help John, turned its back on Trans-Love, forsaken the revolution. Old rumors that the band was dissatisfied with John’s management were given new life. There were even rumors to the effect that the Five had been “purged” from the White Panther Party.

As to the accusation that the band had been in the process of blowing John Sinclair off, Rob Tyner states: “Danny Fields had been working with us in very close conjunction with John. Since John’s whole legal thing got so embroiled and so horrifyingly urgent and time consuming, a lot of the stuff that a manager would do was done by Danny. And Danny is now working as our manager, on a trial basis.”

On the matter of money, Wayne Kramer comments on the fact that Trans-Love was upset because the band had specified that it was to go into a special fund, which was not to be at the organization’s disposal: “That was our original position, because we originally decided that our commitment, outside of our responsibility to ourselves, was our responsibility to John. But then we realized this wouldn’t have been the best thing to do. The best thing to do is to give the money to the John Sinclair Defense Fund and let them deal with it however they feel is necessary. Because it’s John’s money and it’s up to him whatever he wants done with it, and that’s what he wants done with it, so that’s what’ll happen. All John’s percentages that he worked for and righteously deserves now and in the future will go the the John Sinclair Defense Fund.”

“There’s a lot of people who are into what is known in the revolution as romantic adventurism.” Says Rob. “The ideal, identifying yourself with the ideal, Che, and this and that, making rash statements that cannot be backed up. We do not indulge in such pasttimes. We’re involved in trying to do something concrete. We’re trying to reach as many people as possible with our program. We’re trying to have a real impact on not just one localized area, we’re trying to elevate and escalate our program to reach a wider area. The revolution, as it stands now, there is a lot of confusion, a lot of disorganization, and a lot of people involved in things that, while they can be applied, are still not effective. Now these programs don’t have a real impact on the community or on the nation. The only thing that’s happening right now is that they’re drawing fire from the facists. And when you have to spfend all your time defending yourself and defending yourself you don’t have time to run a coherent and cohesive program.

“We’re trying to elevate ourselves to a position where our program will come first. Reaching the people with the information will come first. Reaching the people with the music will come first. Because we realize that there is a whole monster rock and roll thing happening right on this continent. I mean, there are more people involved in listening to rock and roll music right now than there ever was for the Beatles or the Stones in their respective time place. And we know that since there are this many people and there are so many people interested in it, that our responsibility right now as a rock and roll band, because that’s what we are, is to get to those people right away and solidify things right away. Try to bring things together in a congenial and musical atmosphere so that change can go down.

“In a sense, living all that time at Trans-Love was really bad for us because everybody’d always be tellin’ us how good we were. In the year that we lived at Trans-Love I think we only wrote about four tunes. The Situation was not conducive to producing rock and roll music. It was really a noble experiment. Theoretically it should have worked, but it didn’t It got us out of Detroit, you know. I mean, we needed a place to move to and on all levels it was just a temporary thing until we could get a place of our own. Trans-Love started out to be a music promotion company, production company. And since John was the driving inspiration and motivation behind that, it has become deeply involved in John’s political thing. Of course the MC5 and the White Panther Party both have common goals and we do parallel but separate work. They do what they can do and we do what we can do and where they come together we can work together.”

In the midst of all these changes, Jesse (J.C.) Crawford, the Oracle Ramos, warm-up man and sixth member of the Five left the band, and speculation was rife that he had been sacked. “Fire J.C.? How could we fire J.C.?” responded Fred Smith, “That’s bullshit. He’s one of us.” Nevertheless, the fact is that the band were ready to see him go. For some time he and the band had been growing apart, not on the level of friendship, but as members of a performing team. His pre-set harangue seemed more and more like a holdover from a show that had outlived its prime and was badly in need of a complete overhaul.

If J.C. was to fulfill a valid function with the band, it could only have been as road manager, a job which involves a multitude ot menial but necessary tasks. And at bottom, Jesse is a musician, a drummer who used to play with the venerable Prime Movers and has now joined the Tate Blues Band. If he had wanted to be a roady he could have been one, but his capabilities and aspirations far exceeded that role. The split was inevitable. Rob comments: “It was just a question of which was the most reality oriented for this situation.”

The New Program

Faced with a demoralizing number of technical and creative problems, the Five brought in an unlikely-looking musical gunslinger from the East, Jon Landau, who used to write for Craw daddy l (in the days when it was still readable), and who had never before produced a record. “Landau’s the killer catalyst of all time,” says Wayne. “He’s the first person that we ever met that had a working knowledge of rock and roll music that could relate it to us. He knew about harmony, guitar playing, and he could tell us things and we would respect him. He’s the first person we met that could speak knowledgably about the things we were concerned with.

“The thing is before Landau came out here we were an amateur band. That’s what we were, no insult to the people out there. Anyhow, he looks at the music, and he’s the producer and that means he’s involved with music, and that means that he can tell you things that nobody else can. That’s what you pay him for, that’s his job.”

As Rob sees it, “Landau came into the situation and defined a lot of the things that we ought to be aware of.” But for all the influence he has had on the band, the band has clearly left its mark on his consciousness; the familiar Zenta inflection and rhetoric out of Davison, Michigan has been mated to a classic New York accent.

The main focus of Landau’s work with the bahd so far, of course, has been the forthcoming album for Atlantic, Back In The USA Landau discusses the record: “I would "say that we’re about 2/3 to 3/4 done. The album is programmed on two sides; not that there’s gonna be a lot of segues and a lot of made up stories. But one side of the album’s entitle ‘Teenage Lust,’ and most of the songs on it relate to that general them. The songs include Call Me Animal, Tonight, a Fred Smith composition to be used for the single, Teenage Lust and Tutti Frutti. Tutti Frutti will open that side (and will feature the piano playing of Lyman Woodard”.)

“On the other side, the ‘American Ruse’ side, obviously dealing with the most infamous ruse of them all, you have Back in the USA, High School, The Human Being Lawmower (chop chop chop), American Ruse, and a new song being written by Fred Smith entitled Shakin’ Street. Ten songs. Possibly there’ll be eleven songs; there’s the possibility of a little surprise. In line with whole contemporary rock and roll approach, the longest song on the album is just over three minutes. It’s unlikely anything on the album would be even three and a half minutes long.

“The album will be a rock and roll album, but it won’t be one of those albums that’ll be pretendin’ that it was recorded 20 years ago by a bunch of people. We try and retain some of the spirit of that, but to transpose or make more contemporary the notion of rock and roll. Turn it into rock and roll 1969, 1970, so that when we have on the album Tutti Frutti, it ain’t an attempt to revive or to emulate in any way the magnificence of Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti - one of the outstanding records in the history of the world - but is rather an attempt to take the song and retain the energy and certain dimensions of the song, but to put it into a contemporary context. It’s five young Lincoln Parkian lads, filled with energy, youthful vitality and so forth, and they do it different. It’s just different.

“I relate to rock and roll a lot more than I relate to a political thing as such. I think that rock and roll in a lot of ways is bigger than that. And I think that the album really is an attempt to get that absolute essential quality of rock and roll. It’s an attempt to break past all the artifacts and the pretensions and just an attempt to generate and create a rock and roll feeling at its most basic.

While they have been working on the album, the band has tried to play as few live gigs as possible, but their live show is up for revamping, and they are anxious to begin playing live jobs again in order to get that aspect of their program together. The basis of the new show will be new tunes, and new arrangements of old tunes. Wayne Kramer: “Musically, we’ve been going through an intensive examination and overhauling everything - bringing it up to date. We’re keeping some of the material from the first album and we’ve worked out entirely new arrangements for them, taking out all the excess and things which weren’t contributing to the music, really - trimming ‘em out, shaping them up, taking out the flab. We’re keeping about five tunes off the first album, and the rest will be all new tunes plus selected rock and roll classics.

“We’re still involved in taking music out there, but we want to do it together. We want the Five to do it together, play all together. Have it all there and have it work every time. And that involves an amount of programming, but programming isn’t always an evil thing.”

“See,” says Rob, continuing the thought, “in the past we’d go out on the stage and put out just as much meat energy as we possibly could, but

Cont. on Next Page sometimes this energy wouldn’t be applied. It would be like a blast. We want to harness some of that power. I mean, you can drop the bomb, but you can also use atomic energy within a context so that it’s essentially productive. It’s kind of difficult to relate to someone smacking you in the mouth. I mean, we want to make it a little more personal. Instead of kicking someone in the groin vou give them something, something they can use, something they can dance to, something that they can feel, ‘cause that’s exactly what we want to make people do, we just want to make people feel good.”

Visually, the live show, according to Wayne, “will be much the same, with costumes and such, but everything that’ll be done will be a product of the music. It’ll be a more enjoyable show. It’ll be less bullshit, tighter, faster between songs. And we’re always working on surprises. We have a lot of extra-musical things to do, what they call guerilla theater - little presentations beyond playing tunes that we try to get into now and then.

“It’ll all just be better. You know, our entire program now is total overhaul. All the things that were good we’ll expand upon and the bad we’ll eliminate. It’ll certainly be high energy, it will certainly have all the best aspects of our old presertation.”