John Sinclair: A letter from prison

(EDITOR’S NOTE: If John Sinclair isn’t the father of the midwestern rock and roll scene, he certainly is its prophet. As Detroit’s contributor to Down Beat ten years ago, as father of the Trans-Love Energies and Artists’ Workshop, manager of the MC5 and Minister of Information (now Chairman fof the White Panther Party, John was largely responsible for much of the energies available, to everyone in the area concerned with rock and roll.

He’s been in jail for five months now and the scene is changing; in some way all of us, whether we agreed with everything John ran down or not, understood and learned from him. His energy was incredible; he is sorely missed, (perhaps when the area needs him most).

The following letter was sent to'CREEM as a clarification and response to the MC5 interview in CREEM VoL 2, No 4. As John himself writes ”it covers a whole period of t\yo years that weren’t covered in the CREEM article". Whether that omission was because everyone who conducted the interview accepted it as mutual history, since we were all present when it was happening, or whether there are other reasons, the point is well taken. No one certainly is more qualified to write the history of those two years than the man who largely shaped them, John Sinclair. Those two years were the time when Detroit grew up, when the alternative culture in the Midwest became a potent force. Potent enough to support 200 rock and roll groups. The MC5 and John Sinclair were in the vanguard of all of that. Thus, John’s letter is it’s ownjustification, both historically and culturally.

At the same time, it makes us sad and kind of wistful to print this letter. Because John Sinclair is who he is and because the MC5 are who they are. Because they ’re our friends and our brothers, because they’re important to us, and We care what happens to them. As John always said, separation is death, and now he and the Five, who in many ways represented the coming together that we all hoped for, have grown apart.

We can’t choose between the conflicting realities involved here. To do so would go against everything we’ve learned about the nature of experience. And just as important, taking sides is the ultimate expression of the pig society that we’ve come to reject. When this whole thing started surfacing we didn’t think it was necessary to draw lines of confrontation. Well, the pig forced us into a situation where it's necessarily “us” or “them,” but we’re not going to descend to the level of the pig to work out differences between brothers.

The bloom is off the Movement, or whatever you want to call it. The naivete which was our strength for so long is gone, and we have to find new sources of strength if we’re going to break through. The 1960’s are over, and in a lot of ways they’re ending on a sour note. OK, if we’ve learned anything from what we’ve been through it’s surely that we have to take our changes easily, as they come, and dig them for what they are. As a way of life, looking wistfully backward and brooding over what might have been is not only foolish but destructive, but still and all, the end of an era deserves a little wist.)

Dear Creem,

I was privileged to be able to read a copy of your paper with the interview with the MC5 while in the Wayne County Jail briefly last month. I’m sorry that I don’t have the interview with me now to refer to, but it was seized when I returned to Marquette Prison and 1 no longer have access to it.

The fab 5. left a few gaps in their account of their pop career which jnay tend to be misleading to your readers, and I thought I’d take the time to try to set a few things straight in the interests of truth and history'as well as the people who have seen fit to' support the MC5 over the past few years.

When I started working with the 5 as their official and de facto manager in the late summer of 1967 they had just had all their equipment repossessed (except Dennis’ drums) due to their failure to make any payments on it for an eight-month period. They were all living (again, with the exception of Dennis, who lived at home in Lincoln Park and was attending WSU) in an apartment building on Canfield between Second and Third, in two apartments—Rob Tyner and his lovely wife Becky in one apartment, Wayne, his girlfriend Chris, Fred, Michael, plus Frank Bach (of the mighty Up), Audrey and Deirdre all packed into another two-room-plus-kitchen apartment. They rarely worked jobs since few clubowners would risk hiring them for dates since they had a reputation for not showingup, showing up late, playing too loud, not playing long enough, playing stuff the audience couldn’t relate to, etc. They had to borrow equipment and con somebody into driving them and the equipment to the gig, and when they’d get there they’d be wiped out drunk or otherwise indapacitated-although I must say that when they did get all this shaky shit together they would play the most exciting music in the history of rock and roll-at least as far as I was concerned. They were so far-out that a lot of kids hated them, but I was certainly their ’’biggest fan“, and not just in size. That’s how I started working with them in the first place.

In the summer of 1967 they were working hardly at all, as I said, and to make sure I didn’t miss an opportunity to hear them play I would go along with them on their infrequent public appearances. The first one was at the Cavern in Northville, where they played in a ’’battle of the bands" with the Unrelated Segments. Emil Bacilla drove us and the equipment in his trusty Volkswagen bus, John Fry was the equipment manager (such as it was), and I carried equipment. I couldn’t believe how untogether their business operation was and started talking to them after the gig about working as their manager. I had no idea what a manager was supposed to do, really, although I was sure that they had to have some permanent equipment, a decent place to live and practice, some transportation, and steady gigs, and I knew I could do better than was being done by them.

We agreed that I would be the ’’manager" and I started getting the shit together. We worked out an agreement with Uncle Russ Gibb, that grand old man of Detroit rock and roll capitalism, whereby he would sign for two sets of equipment (for Fred and Rob), Wayne got his mother to sign for his, and Michael’s father took care of his. All we had to do was make the payments to the finance company every month. There were three sets of Sunn 100 series amps and a puny p.a. system which was never adequate. Then we browbeat Emil Bacilla into letting us use his van on a more-or-less permanent basis until we could get our own, and along with the Mustang owned by our new equipment manager, Steve Harnadek, we were set for transportation.

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I started begging Jeep Holland for bookings after this shit; was taken care of, and although he hated the music he started cutting us into his hickory rock circuit of fraternity parties, mixers at colleges, and the occasional teen-club job-but he felt that the MCS’s music wasn’t really fit for the teen club circuit, that we wouldn’t really be ready until we started turning down and playing more of “What the kids want to hear.” The only good gigs we got in that period were at the Grande, thanks again to ole Uncle Russ, who paid the band their going rate of $ 125.00 a night for two or three 45-minute sets. So we were at the Grande at least every other weekend for a night, which made for steady income of at least $125.00 a week, with which we could make the amp payments; the rent, and grocery money-nothing more. This is for 5 band members plus their girls. Steve and I carried equipment, drove, and worked for no money at all, and my organization, Trans-Love Energies, took care of me and our incidental expences through working two stores (at Second and Forest and insie Forest and inside the ballroom) and by doing the lightshow at the Grande every week. The other thing was to get the band a place to live so we (TransLove tribe) moved from Warren and John Lodge (where we’d been for some time) and turned the apartment and the Artists’ Workshop over to the band while we moved to Second and Forest. The total rent at Warren and John Lodge for the band was $135.00 a month, or the price of one fraternity gig.

During this period (fall-winter 1967-68) we smoked a lot of reefer and a lot of DET (thanks to Fred and Ham) and talked and talked continually about the music and the whole mode of performing for the people. Tyner had a lot of really brilliant lyrics around and the band was deep into the music, and when they moved over on John Lodge they started practicing almost every day, working out new tunes and new arrangements of rock and roll classics, while I kept trying to get more jobs and making sure that the equipment payments were made on time. At Thanksgiving time my father happily gave us a 1965 Chevy van, so we quit having to borrow Emil’s every weekend, and by the first of 1968 we had another one, a new Dodge van which we leased from a Dodge dealer through Jeep Holland. We were working more and more Steadily since We had our own equipment and excellent transportation and could be depended on to show up and to play three full sets if required, although we still got a lot of flack from fraternity social chairman-types and dumpy clubowners who were always complaining that it was “too loud”. We never turned down, though, and it wasn’t until the locals started bringing in the “really big” bands,and saw all their Marshalls that the hicks stopped complaining about the “noise”. By then the big sound was plenty hip, and everybody was deep into it, even Russ Gibb who always complained the most, and Jeep Holland, likewise.

The whole scene with the Grande and the MC5 and Trans-Love was getting better and stayed good until the summer of 1968 when all of us split for Ann Arbor. Grimshaw Was doing the Grande posters every week, and since I had the band playing there almost every week for at least one of the two nights (I could never get Russ to book the “local bands”, as he insisted on calling them, for two nights running like the “big” bands that he brought in from afar and which consistently got blown off the stage by the Detroit powers, especially the 5. 1 guess he figured that if he started booking them properly and billing them properly he’d have tp start paying them more than $125.00 a night), Grimshaw was able to get their name on the posters every week. 1 also kept talking Russ into doing the posters regularly, but he finally refused because he couldn’t sell them and didn’t think they were worth it. But they helped legitimize the Grande, along with the national booking policy which was good because it put the recording stars on stage with the Detroit bands and thus informed the kids in the audience that their own bands were as “good” as or better than the big recording stars, and through that process the Detroit bands could start building real followings of their own even without recording contracts.

Prior to this time the Detroit area bands could draw big crowds only when and if they had 45’s out on the local radio stations. The only bands to my knowledge that were getting more than say $150.00 a night were the Rationals (who were still riding big on their recording of “Respect”), the SRC (after their hit with “I’m So Glad”), and the Bob Seger Last Heard, which had.hit after hit on Punchy Andrews’ label. Punch and Jeep were the big shots on the Michigan teen-club circuit-there was the ^Grosse Pointe Hideout and the Crow’s Nest East on the East side of Detroit, the Silverbell Hideout, the Clarkston Hullabaloo and Mt. Holly to the north, the Cavern in Northville (which was really the high school gym), the 5th Dimension in Ann Arbor, Daniels Den in' Saginaw, the Crazy Horse in Kalamazoo, and a scattering of Hullabaloo clubs across - the state, including Roseville Clarkston, Benton Harbor, Lansing, Jackson (which banned the MC5 before we could even play there), Ann Arbor, and probably some other places I’ve forgotten. We played all these places, plus high school dances around Detroit, college dorm mixers at Michigan State, fraternity parties there and in Ann Arbor and at Central Michigan U, the occasional birthday party, and whatever else we could get.

We also made our own 45, Looking at YoiiJBorlleriine,'which Russ Gibb paid for and Jeep Holland put it out on his label (actually'I put it out and put his label on it—he wouldn’t even come into the studio and help us mix it or record it). WABX was just starting to play the “underground sounds” at that time, under dangerous John Small the trembler of all time, and we got the record on the air once in a while. People really dug it and kept calling up to ask the dj’s to play it, but they thought it was a shuck, that we were telling our “fan club” or something to call all the timethey couldn’t believe that people really liked the record. It was really a non-existent production job, since I “produced” it and didn’t have any idea of what I was doing. I just knew that the music was killer and that we had to get it down, but I didn’t know the first thing about mixing, and consequently the record was never really mixed, it was just released unmixed. I wanted to make sure that all the high sound got in there, because I had noticed that when records were1 played on the radio the high sounds dropped out, and I loaded them on to Looking at You to the point that the record was worthless for standard record-player playing. But 1 never expected many people to buy it, anyway-we just wanted to get it on the radio in Detroit and wherever we could, so people could relate to the fact that the band really existed. In the Bizness it’s impossible to get the big shots to notice a band unless the band has some kind of solid product, a recording of some sort, that makes them legitimate. So we had a record, however ill-conceived and executed, and that helped us get more gigs around Michigan, which we had to have in order to stay alive and make the payments.

People who were around then will remember the magic MC5 shows at the Grande that were starting to evolve out of that whole contextevery time the band played there it was a mystical experience unlike anything in the history of music. They blew other bands away completely-I remember when the Beacon Street Union came into town riding high on the “Bosstown Sound” hype, and the 5 destroyed them so bad at the Grande that it was embarassing. The news of that encounter spread across the country, and when the first tour of Blood, Sweat & Tears was to come to Detroit, Gibb was instructed by Columbia Records" that the MC5, who had been scheduled to play with BST, was to be taken off the bill. The Stooges took their place and destroyed Al Kooper’s boys, who incidentally played for free just to promote themselves. Columbia even paid for the poster. The biggest boost to the band 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 their first night.

This kept happening week after week, and it had a tremendous effect on the band itself. They would be inspired by the audience response and would get deep into working out new songs and new treats for the people. They also were playing many benefits and free concerts through this period and helped the musicians’ union establish their rock band program, as Dennis Day will remember. The band was totally active, working every chance they could get and constantly practicing, working out new material and evolving their famous stage show. We all stayed as high as we could get and constantly rapped about music and how to improve the whole stage experience. We knew it was more than just music that was going down in those ballrooms and teen-clubs, it was a whole life experience, a whole mythology, the kids’ religion, and we kept working to make that religion farther and farther out. We wanted them to GET DOWN. Tyner was writing these incredible lyrics like Come Together, Kick Out The Jams, Starship, his version of John Lee Hooker’s Motor City Is Burning, Wayne wrote Borderline., we adapted classics like Ramblin ’ Rose (taken from Ted Taylor’s high-energy arrangement), I Want You (from the Troggs), Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ I Put a Spell on You, a lot of James Brown tunes and rock and roll classics like Tutti Frutti, I Can’t Explain, House of the Rising Sun, and then there was the cataclysmic closing sequence of Ray Charles’ Believe It To My Soul, immediately followed by Black to Comm, the energy-orgy that had developed over a period of more than three years. They alsq played a number of blues that Tyner had written and did things like Pharaoh Sanders’ Upper Egypt (for which I wrote words), John Coltrane’s Tunji (with Tyner playing flute), and an adaptation of Archie Shepp’s Hambone, which was given words by Tyner and extended and called Ice Pick Slim.

As the music got more and more intense so did the people’s reaction to it, and the police’s reaction too. The music was directed at the people and their new i culture and it came directly out of that same culture without making much if any reference to any other cultural scene. Which is to say, people who weren’t a -part of our culture couldn’t relate to the music, the show, or even to us as people at all--they just hated it and everything it stood for. We started getting hassled by the pigs, private guards and public cops, at job after job, especially after we started doing Kick Out The Jams, Mother fucker! and the police heard about it through the pig grapevine-they couldn’t understand the words to any of the songs by listening to them, but they had heard that that one song was dirty and it would give them a chance to bust us or at least hassle us, so they loved it when we played it almost as much as the kids did--then they could move into action too! They loved it! It was really weird--they would’ve been pissed off if we hadn’t played it, but we really didn’t give a fuck what they wanted, we didn’t come and play for them in the first place, we were playing for the people and the pigs could get the dick if they didn’t like it, you know what I mean?

The stage show grew directly out of the music, all the dope we were smoking, and out of our culture and our collective history. As the music got more ^frantic the stage show got farther out, and the people responded wildly and it got more and more wild. It was a beautiful demonstration of the principles of high-energy performance: as the performer puts out more the energy level of the audience is raised and they give back more energy to the performers, who are moved onto a higher energy level which is transmitted to the audience and sent back, etc., until everything is totally frenzied. This process makes changes in the people’s bodies that are molecular and cellular and which transform them irrevocably just as LSD or any other strong high-energy agents do. The transformation may last only as long as the performance, ' but with repeated exposure the transformation becomes permanent and you can never bring those people back down to television consciousness again--Unless they are deprived of the high-energy experience for long periods of time during which they are locked into a low-energy environment; then they will gradually be dragged back into the lowenergy ozone. This can happen to the audience and to the performers, especially living in the midst of the biggest low-energy scene in history that is established American honko plastic culture.

Enough theory-back to history. Along with the music and as part of the stage show we started developing guerilla/street-theatre scenes , like the famous flag-ripping ceremony at the Grande, June 7, 1968, when we played with the all-popular Cream. That was a great night in rock and roll history and finally established the MC5 as the band in the Detroit area. There were over 2000 maniacs screaming and sweating inside the 135-degree heat of the Grande that night, and the 5’s music and show destroyed the Cream so totally the Cream didn’t even know it - but the people who were there knew exactly what the deal was. ThaCs. why the 5 started to draw bigger and 'bigger crowds and bigger and bigger crowd response every time they played after that. They were at their all-time peak, and it was really glorious for everyone involved in it, from the band to the people in the audience. . I started writi n g about the various shit that was happening to us-because the more intense the scenes got, the more heat we drew from the pigs everywhere we played-in the Fifth Estate every issue,, because I saw that we were really making rock and roll history and felt it was important to report and interpret all the creep scenes that were developing as the people started relating to the band more and more. This activity was later described as the ultimate hype, but I think that if people would care to check into the things I was writing they will see that I was just reporting the real deal and not making up any bullshit at all.

The flag ceremony at the Grande really kicked the whole thing off. We had originally planned to burn the American flag on stage in an extended theatre sequence-which, incidentally, was developed by the members of the band themselves, with no help from me, I just thought it was great-but Russ Gibb got wind of it and called us lip to tell us that if the flag was burned he would call the police and have us arrested-good ole Uncle Russ, the all-time patriot. So, at the end of the 5’s show, during “Black to Crmm”, Rob and Steve tore Old Glory to shreds and raised a Freek Flag in its place in the middle of the stage. The Freek Flag was red with “Freek” written across it and a marijuana leaf in a circle in the upper lefthand corner. Actually, at the end of the energy invocation ”Freek“ to Comm,” while the sound died down to an electronic hum and everyone stood exhausted on stage feeding back their guitars, a dude named Eugene was supposed to run out on the stage and scream YOU FUCKING COMMIES and shoot Tyner with a blank pistol-then we were going to carry him off to the dressing room, wounded, with fake blood streaming from his wound, and barricade the dressing room while panic broke out. But the gun didn’t fire and the scene never came off, much to our chagrin. Still, it was a tremendous musical and dramatic triumph, Jerry Younkins had taken off his clothes and stood naked on stage with us, and people were smoking joints everywhere and rolling around moaning in ecstasy on the floor. It was the most intense moment in the history of rock and roll.

I want to give some of this history now because the band seems at present to want to claim that I somehow mysteriously politicized them during this period and talked them into doing stuff that otherwise wouldn’t’ve been done. But the beautiful thing was that none of this was contrived, and I was certainly no more “political” than they were. It was in the process of getting hassled by the police time after time, after getting beat up and arrested at a dance while I was trying to collect the money owed us by the club-owner, after getting gigs cancelled because of things we had done somewhere else,.did I start to realize what I know now, that any action which has a political consequence is a political action, “any action which has a political consequence is a political action,” and I started to operate on that principle and tried to unite our work with that of the more overtly “political” people. My whole orientation was toward cultural revolution, which I saw as essentially peaceful and outside, the mainstream of American life. I had always felt that we could “do our thing”--which was directly contrary to the established way of life--with6ut bothering or bothering with the honks at large, that we could develop an alternate life-style and an alternative culture on our own and that the honks would be glad to get rid of us, that they would even help us get our shit together so they wouldn’t have to be bothered with us any more. But I found out that they depend on us too much to be able to let us go like that, and they’ll do almost anything to try to make us do things their way. 1 should say if anything that the band and I were in the same mind during this period, that they learned from me and I learned from them, and it was a beautiful and total relationship which was entirely directed towards making a more exciting show, a more effective operation, and eventual self-determination for ourselves and for our people, including the audiences. We wanted eventually to establish our own record company, our own ballroom, our own booking agency, production company, etc., so that we could help other bands grow, record, and Work, and so we could create the proper working conditions for the bands the proper listening and grooving conditions for the people in the audiences. That was our “political” program, and we were committed to it equally I should think, at least that’s what I felt at the time.

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But the band now wants to deny all that, wants to forget that they once created the most exciting music and theatre that’s ever taken place in America, and wants just to pass into the mainstream of the pop-star industry. But the facts are that Tyner wrote the words and the band worked out the music and all of them got up on stage after stage and did this incredible shit night after night because they loved doing it and the people loved to get it. 1 encouraged them 100% because 1 loved every minute of it. If anything, I would be trying to hold them down, talking them put of saying “Motherfucker” on certain occasions because the clubowners or the police had threatened us with non-payment and/or expulsion and/or arrest, and we couldn’t afford any of that if we wanted to keep playing and reaching the people and paying off the equipment notes, ft was different at the Grande until June 7th, but after that Russ was like every other clubowner and made ridiculous demands of us which we refused to accept. The next time we played there-June 23rd, with the Blue Cheer--Russ’ partner, Gabe Glantz told us we couldn’t play because of the flag, naked, and obscenity issues and we had to fight it put with Russ and his, attorney for two hours before he finally relented. And even then it took Blue Cheer’s manager, Gut, to come (Jown to Russ’ office and say that his band couldn’t play unless the MC:5 played, .because they knew the crowd was there to hear the 5 andthey couldn’t go on before that kind of crowd and take the wrath of the crowd. We still had to guarantee Russ that there would be no flag burnings, no more nakeds on stage, etc., but we wouldn’t agree to censor Kick Out The Jams, Motherfucker! at the Grandethat would’ve been sacrilege. But that still was the last date we played at the Grande for threp months, until September 21-22 with the Afnboy Dukes. And the next time after that we headed the bill on a Sunday and drew 1800 people!

The band at that time and for months afterwards was into smashing their equipment at the end of Comm because that was the only logical conclusion to that monster energy explosion, but I kept trying to talk them out of it - not because it wasn’t valid, because it was and 1 loved it—but because we couldn’t afford to keep getting the amps repaired week after week. It was all we could do to. make the payments on the equipment, and all of our money above and beyond the rent, the groceries, and the van payments and some money out for clothes, went into more and more equipment. No one ever had any spending money at all, and we budgeted everything strictly so we could buy more and more equipment. I handled all the money and all the business arrangements with the band’s consent andadvice. We were all living together in one big house in Ann Arbori at 1510 Hill Street, where we had moved in June of 1968 to get away from the concentration-camp police-state atmosphere that had enveloped our neighborhood in Detroit after the riot-celebrations of 1967 and the Martin Luther King assassination riot-scare of April 1968. The band never liked living with our people, and vice versa, because we had slightly different 'life-styles that weren’t really compatible, but it was economically the only way we could do it and it worked out business-wise. The band fixed up a practice room but refused to practice in that house and stopped writing new material. This was coupled with rise in their general acceptance level not only locally but nationally (especially after we went to Chicago and participated in the Conspiracy to create riots at the Democratic Convention by playing for free in Lincoln Park August 25th), and they Started to get lazier and lazier.

At about this time, the late-summer/early fall of 1968, two major changes went down: Brother J.C. Crawford joined the band, and the MC5 was ’’discovered” by Danny Fields of Elektra Records, who signed us to a contract and got us enough money to take us temporarily out of the hole we were in financially. Also we had started booking through Mike Quatro’S eager-beaver agency at the beginning of the summer and were getting more and better jobs, and more money, all the time. Quatro has always known a good thing when he sees it, and he got us the jobs and the prices we wanted and helped in that way to build up the whole scene, through no foresight of his own but strictly, I should say, through his greed and avarice-he could make more that way, and incidentally it helped the bands and the scene. But that was fine with me, because the people I had been dealing with beforeRuss and Jeephad seemed determined to hold the scene doin to a level which they could understand and controlthe small-time hick-ory level.

The addition of J. C. made a change in the band,in two important ways: when he started announcing and carrying on before the band came on stage it heightened the feeling of a big stage show and raised the energy level of the whole affair since he was (and is) such an intense high-energy dude; and, on the negative side, J.C.’s wildness and party-going ways influenced the band and destroyed their internal discipline. I had kept them under a pretty firm disciplinary hand, because they were always wild and crazy and tended to get even crazier, but. I tried to keep their minds and bodies on the music and the show and the whole cultural scene at all times. Their dissatisfaction with the home scene at 1510 Hill Street (which in many ways boiled down to a tremendous clash in personality between Rob and Way he’s ladies on the one hand and the Trans-Love revolutionary women on the other; my wife Magdalene, who did all the band’s photography, Genie Plamondon, who handled their correspondence, and Audrey, who they had thrown out and we had taken in) and the emergenece of J.C. as a social force in our community combined to take them off into the ozonethey, started getting drunk after the gigs, partying when they weren’t working, drinking at home and even on the way to jobs, and generally breaking discipline all together. I started getting more and more pissed off at them because of this, primarily because their show had stopped improving, the music had stopped growing and expanding, and I knew it was just a matter of time before they would disintegrate.completely. Th6y were dissatisfied about money, about lack of recognition, all of that, and they started blaming me for all of this while I was doing everything I could to create better conditions, all around. The broads complained to them all the time about the money, too, and that helped a lot, you can be sure. This; period of perhaps a month (between the last of August and the last of September 1968) culminated in the Elektra contract. Just before Danny Fields came out to hear the 5 and sign them to Elektra we had a decisive argument one night returning from a manufacturer’s party which we had attended to lopk at some new equipment. The band had all drunk a lot of alcohol at the party and 1 was pissed off, as usual. They started attacking me on the way home* telling me that they were tired of living with us in the same house and demanding that they be allowed to get a house of their own. 1 really got pissed off at that and told them that was fine as far as f was concerned, that they could do just that as soon as they, could afford • it, and that if they didn’t start taking their work more seriously 1 didn’t want anything more to do with them anyway, they cpuld get a new manager and a whole new business operation because 1 wasn’t interested in playing nursemaid to a bunch of drunks. Within a week we had the Elektra contract and some front money ($20,000) with which we paid, off all our outstanding bills (including the original equipment contract) and got some'new equipment,. costumes and' other things we’d needed for some time. Then everything was pointed toward recording the album at the Grande and working out the package and the advertising campaign. We were getting more money for our local jobs and. in December started travelling^..first-.to-Bostonandr New -York and Connecticut and Cleveland, later (when the record was released.) to California. We also continued to work around Detroit and Michigan during this period, drawing bigger and bigger crowds.

The band started looking for a new house for themselves but ended up spending six more months With .us in Ann Arbor before'they finally got it together to'buy the house, in the country which they . presently occupy. The money was better most of the time and still went mainly for equipment and transportation-we leased a 1 1/2 ton truck for the equipment and finally acquired 3 sets qf Marshall, ’■amps* for each guitar and a $2,5,000 p.a. system which was custom-built.

Meanwhile Jesse had calmed down a little and, -Started taking on more responsibilities with the band; this r.aps before the band’s sets got farther and farther ' out (the introduction on the Elektra album was really only the beginning) and by the time the album came out we had organized the White Panther Party - Jesse, Pun 'Plamondon, Skip Taube, and myself, with Rudnick and Frawley in New York and Grimshaw in California, where he was hiding out from the Michigan legal authorities. I was still not happy with the band’s development at that time because they were, still drinking and carousing a lot, especially when we started travelling, and they had stopped practicing altogether. They didn’t work out any new material and their, stage show, since the music had stopped growing, had also stagnated to the point where they were making the same moves and the same jumps in every show. Also, they started "criticizing what we were doing with the White Panthers and wanted themselves disassociated from the Party and everything we were doing in that sphere.

1 remember when 1 wrote the liner notes for the Elektra album, in a hotel room in Cambridge, Massachusetts on our first road trip, I was talking to the band itself more than to the public, trying to get them to understand'that they were really a lot more than just another rock band and that they had a ^tremendous responsibility to the people which went beyond just playing stage shows and carousing and carrying on. Their attitiude could best be characterized as thoroughly ambivalent; they would be deep into revolutionary consciousness one day and drunk the next. When we would be on the road I would spend all my time running around whatever city we were in, doing radio interviews, pushing the record, lining up benefits and concerts to supplement the weekend gigs, meeting people, checking out the underground newspapers in these various cities, and trying to explain to the Movement people exactly what we were doing, that we weren’t just another rock and roll band exploiting the people and fattening Bill Graham’s and Aa^on Russo’s and Russ Gibb’s pockets. The band on the other hand, would

sit around their motel rooms all day complaining that there wasn’t anything to do, or hanging out the skonkiest broads in town and getting the clap some ipore, staying drunk and partying and getting arrested for drunk driving or something (as in San Francisco). 1 started staying away from them more and more, leaving the road manager duties to Jesse and Steve the Hawk. When we were at home during this period I kept trying to get them to go out and find a house, but it took them six months in all before they finally moved.

Of course,^during this period we were hassling with Elektra all the time too, and that contributed to the band’s alienation from me and from the organization. Elektra had encouraged us to record the ”motherfucker“version of Kick Out The Jams, although I had insisted that we record a ’’brothers and Sisters” version so we could get it played on the radio. They also dug my notes for the album and printed them. I felt that they were going a little too far out, but I figured that if they would stand behind the record and package and advertise and promote it properly we could surmount any obstacles the honks might throw up in front of us. As it worked out, Jac Holzman, the Elektra president, had undertaken this whole project with considerable naivete and without anticipating any trouble. I knew better and thought he did too, but he just figured that the national honko conciousness had risen above an occasional ’’motherfucker”. When Bill Drake, the national AM-radio station programmer (who is responsible for formats like that of CKLW, for example), doused the record in his weekly report because of the ’’obscene” word and the revolutionary stance of the MC5, Holzman shit his pants; and when the big record distribution chains like Handelman and Sam Goody announced that they wouldn’t carry the album like it was, the roof caved fn on him. He called a conference and came out to Ann Arbor to discuss the issue with us. In the meantime he had fired Danny Fields from his position as. publicity director at Elektra because Danny had assumed too much power in the Organization and was in fact almost running the company, at least in several important areas like corporate image. Holzman explained the developments in the business world to us and suggested that they put out an alternate version of the album with the “motherfucker” taken out and “brothers and sisters” substituted. The alternative, he said, was that we wouldn’t get mass distribution and wouldn’t make any money.

Well, all of us, including the band, were dead set against it, and we told Holzman and his vice-president, Bill Harvey (who was responsible for the bogus cover on the Elektra album, which he insisted on using), that we would rather just put everything behind the original version of the album and work for its popularity to the extent that the kids would demand that their stores carry it, just as we had done with our show. We proved that businessmen will provide their consumers with anything as long as it made them money~no matter how much they hated our show, they knew that we would pack their joints and make them a lot of money, and we had plenty of scenes where the jocal police or city officials would try to douse our appearances but the honko clubowners would stand up for us not because we were right but because they could make a pile of money off our dances and concerts. We knew, at least I knew, that the same principle would work on a national level with the record, but Holzman punked out even after he told us that he wouldn’t change.

When we were in California, just after the record came out, we saw Jhe censored version that Holzman put out against our advice and consent-with no liner notes-at all (he-hadn’t mentioned .taking them off) and with the single version of Kick Out the Jams. It was only a short time after that that he offered to release us from our Elektra contract, and we gladly accepted his kind offer. The biggest mistake we had made there--and all bands rrtight dieck this out--was not writing into the contract the things we had to have: production control, package control, and advertising control. We were swept by the ”hipness“ and good-feelings of Danny Fields (Who remained OK for some time) and Holzman and took their word for it that we would be able to retain control over our recorded product. When 1 signed them to Atlantic later that spring, all of that was written into the contract, and Danny Fields and 1 got the band a $50,000 advance in cash and a contract calling for 6% of all royalties.

Another weird scene that went down during that period which should be mentioned was the famous confrontation at the Fillmore East on December 26,

1968--wow, was that just a year ago? That finished us off with Bill Graham and the pop star world, and' with the ’’political movement" at the same. time. We made a tactical error by getting in the middle of that scene and ended up taking shit from both sides. We knew about the Motherfuckers’ free nights at the Fillmore East every Wednesday, and that they had a running feud with Bill Graham and the rock and roll syndicate, and of cburse our sympathies were with the rothers and sisters of the lower east side. So when we went up to Boston we had arranged to play a benefit for one1 of the Motherfuckers, brother. l)en Mbrea, who was supposed to go to trial on an assault charge in Boston just when we would be in town. The trial was postponed and we didn’t do the benefit (it never came off),'but.we met the Motherfuckers-and invited them on stage (with the clubowners’ permission) to solicit money and tell people abdut the trial and the other shit that was coming down. On the last night on our three days at the Boston Tea Party 1 he Mojth erf uckers got up -on stage and told, the „ people that they were being robbed by the clubowners, that the dances should all be free, etc. The owner, Donald Law (a member of the Bill Graham-Aaron Russo axis), really got pissed off and blamed it on us, although he had told the MFs that, they could talk on stage.

The next Wednesday (that was a Saturday night) we made ,a special trip down to New York City to play at the^Motherfuckers’ free night at the Fillmore East-. We had a great time, everybody at the place rocked on, and although the..tensions were, incredibly high (especially for a free concert) we were looking forward to playing there the following week, after we went back home for a couple gigs and flew back to NY at Elektra’s expense. We had talked them into doing a free concert at the Fillmore to introduce us to the New York audience and Holzman had rented the joint from Graham for the night.

In the meantime, as they say, Graham had finally doused the Motherfuckers completely and told them that they couldn’t have any more free concerts there because there was too much dope smoking, fucking and carrying on going on there on Wednesday nights and he couldn’t have all that-besides, he'said, he was getting hassled about all of it by the local pigs, who were threatening to take his license away if he didn’t throw the Motherfuckers.and the street freaks out of the place once and for all. The street people were really up tight about this development, and Graham added insult to injury \yhen lie announced that -he, wasn’t going to let any of them in for the free Dec. 26th concert by the MC5 and David Peel and the Lower East Side. The Motherfuckers were ready for full battle by then, and we walked right into the middle of it.

When we got back to New York for the Dec. 26 concert 1 had a conference with Holzman, who told me what the deal was with Graham, the MoAljerJupkcrs.. and fire’"rltat night’s concert. I’ told him that if the tickets weren’t distributed to the people on the streeet as promised--we had made sure that 500-plus tickets would be held out for the people on the streetwe didn’t care about going on to do the show. He told this to Graham and the tickets that had mysteriously ’’disappeared" earlier or which in another story Graham said he had ’’ripped up‘V just as mysteriously reappeared and were sent down to the Motherfuckers’ hang out, a coffee house called the Common Ground

When the concert commenced there was still some hassle about some people getting in, but I had insisted that people off the street be let in until ail the seats were filled, and here was asshole Graham trying to stop people personally from coming in because he had something against them. He very properly got smashed in the face during, the course of the evening, and he deserved it for being such a lying punk and a fool. The big problem, though, was that the Motherfuckers wanted to rip the place apart once they got in there, and they wanted, indeed, demanded that the band help them do this by announcing from the stage that the people who were there should tear the place apart. We couldn’t see any sense in this at all, and the band went out on stage and publicly disassociated themselves from any of the ’’political" shit that was going down, claiming that they came there to make the music and have a good time and that’s what they were going 'to do. This really pissed off all the ’’political" people in tlie place, especially the street-fighting dreamers who wanted to do pitched battle with the whole pig power structure of New York City right there that night. I couldn’t see any sensg in the Motherfuckers position and knew they were just acting out of total frustration — they knew that once they left the Fillmore that night they wouldn’t ever get back in but they knew they couldn’t hold it either, so they just wanted to destroy it. I didn’t really blame them for feeling that way and certainly sympathized with them in their frustration, but f couldn’t see where it was-going to( do anyone any good, and all it would do for them would be to get them all beaten and arrested when the real pigs were called in and found them all trapped in there in that closed space, with Graham screaming for blood. We never really came to terms with the Motherfuckers after that, but at least we did get them to understand some of what we were saying. But the experience, as any media event is, was much bigger than the facts of what happened that night, and the experience as a whole served to alienate the MC5 from the Movement, and, in a subtle way, from me and my own organization. I knew by this time they were--the band wasalienated from what we were doing organizationally with the White Panthers, but I kept hoping that they would wake up one day and realize what was going down. They never didin fact, they kept going further in the other direction. As the band got more national exposure and publicity, the Industry people started getting to them more and more every day it seemed, and trying to convince the band that they would have to up their “political”, revolutionary stance altogether if they planned to make it big in the Biz. This Fit right in with their own fears-that they had worked this lopg and this hard only to be denied their rightful position as a s*t*a*r band because their manager misled them and had them do the wrong thingsand they started plotting ways to break their ties with me, Trans-Love, and the Panthers

Cant, on Page 27

Their biggest assist came from the courts, naturally, and 1 was able to spend less and less time with them as I had to spend more and more of it in court'or in jail-first the assault charge in Oakland County in which the jury found me guilty and Fred Smith innocent, even though he was the one who had jumped on the police when they were beating me; then the arrest at the Port Huron-Sarnia border on the way to a gig in Sarnia, where the Canadian officials had been told to expect us by the Detroit Narcotic^ Bureau and then denied me entry into Canada following which the U.S. Customs officials arrested me for ’’leaving the United States without registering as a convicted narcotics violator" and held me in the St. Clair County Jail for 3 days. Then the Oakland County pigs cut my hair off--three years growth-while 1 was waiting for a bondsman to come and post my bond; then the Detroit trial started on the narcotics charge, was postponed, started again, was declared a mistrial, started again, and ended in my conviction and sentence (9 1/2-10 years) which I am presently serving.

This period of court harassment started the 1st of April and extended until July 25th, when I was locked up for good by punk-ass Colombo in Detroit; it coincided with the recording of the 5’s second album which started in Los Angeles the last.week in March (at the Elektra studio there) and was transferred to GM Studios in Detroit under the auspices of Atlantic Records, with Jon Landau producing. During this period the band had made it known to me that they wanted to change our financial arrangement-they had finally acquired and moved into their new house in Hamburg, Mich.and we started the meeting, when we weren’t travelling or 1 wasn’t in court, to discuss the nature of the changes that were to be.made. We agreed at the .end of April that there Was a distinct possibility that I might be ripped off by the state and that we should make some arrangements to spread my responsibilities out within the organization. I was trying at that time to bring more people into the organization so we could start developing more bands, getting them recording contracts and records but, doing advertising and promotion for our friends, producing concerts, doing radio commercials and programs, etc. I convinced Rudnick and Frawley to move to Ann Arbor and helped them get the job at WABX (who soon after that barred me from the air and even from the station itself because I was”too political"). Dannny Fields was going to handle national publicity, we had other people more or less co-ordinating the whole thing. We were starting to produce fllms-the first one was done by wife Magdalene and myself of the MC5 and used Kick Out the Jams as a soundtrackit was meant for television and underground moviehouse screening-and we were preparing to do commercials and other things. We did the advertising, promotion work, and coordination for Russ Gibb’s Rock and Roll Revival (which I named), and were planning to make a film of the festival. At Danny Fields urging I arranged with a dude named David Newman to come in and take over the bands financial work starting June 1st, when our new money agreement went into effect. By this time Landau had moved out to the band’s house (from his home in Boston) and was preparing thefn for their recording work.

Cont. on Page 30

The addition of Newman, to the staff was the last straw. In addition to what the band wanted anyway, and the urging of Newman and Landau (both of . whom were staying at the band’s house in Hamburg and had little contact with us in Ann Arbor), they , conspired to ease me out of the picture altogether. In May we had agreed, before Landau and Newman had entered the picture, that Trans-Love would take a straight 20% of all MC5 earnings as our managerial fee, and that the MC5’s balance would be transferred from the Trans-Love account (out of which all bills had been paid in the past) into a new MC5 account, which would be entirely seperate. That was fine with me because I knew that it meant more money for us, even. though the 5 thought they would be getting more. Since I had been handling the money foY almost two years by then, they had come to feel it seemed that all their equipment and other expenses just got paid by magic and that I was misusing the bulk of their money for “political” purposes that they didn’t want to support. That plan went into effect June 1st, but shortly after that (and after Newman and Landau had taken over) th£ band wanted to have another meeting with me and Jesse to discuss possible changes in the arrangement.

We went out to talk it over'and heard their new offer; I was to get 15% of all bookings and personal appearances, 20% of any possible Elektra royalties (which had been eaten up by advances and promotion and production costs), and 0% of the Atlantic royalties that might be forthcoming! This figure was arrived at because they believed, they said, that I had had nothing to do with them getting the contract with Atlantic, that Danny Fields (who was to get the other 5% of my original 20) had been wholly responsible fox it, and that I didn’t deserve any of the possible Atlantic money! 1 couldn’t believe it, and I tried to figure out what could make them think that way, but they couldn’t relate to anything I said and ended up offering me a whole 5% of the Atlantic contract.

I had to explain that 1 didn’t care about the money especially, and never had, but it was hard to believe that they could forget the past so easily and think that they had come all that way themselves It really set me back--I could hardly believe what they were saying, and they were dead serious about the whole thing. I left the house that night knowing that things were never going to be the same, and from then the band went farther and farther away from us. Landau had a lot to do with it-he came out there and undermined all their confidence and ruined their whole musical outlook by telling them that what they were-doing was all wrong and that what they needed ' was to take everything apart and put it back together again very simplyto give up every gain they had made in electronic technology and power and total energy playing and turn back to a clean uncluttered super-simple style that would compare to playing to studio musicians at Stax-Volt or something. Now that form of music is perfectly valid and often exciting in its own right, but the MC5 had develeoped the most powerful and all inclusive attack in the history of music as far as 1 was concerned-except for maybe the John Coltrane-Pharoah Sanders-Archie Shepp attack-and this punk Landau wanted them to give all of that up. What was worse was that Wayne at least agreed with him, and everyone else at least went along with it (although I did hear recently that my brother Fred Smith finally revolted against Landau during the recording sessions, which took months: instead of the twp or three weeks I had originally envisioned.

Between Landau, who convinced them that my musical and performance ideas were all wrong, and David Newman, who convinced them that 1 bad mismanaged their money for two years and fucked everything up for them financially, the 5 turned against me completely and hardly wanted to speak to me anymore. Jesse suffered the same fate, and he was fired by the band just after I was’locked upc They; said he wasn’t useful anymore since they had “grown out of” the stage where they needed an announcer like that, and besides, he was too good a musician himself to waste himself doing stuff like that. So they gave him a set of drums in one of their big humane gestures and kicked him out of their tight new organization. Rudnick, whohad planned to work with them promotionally and otherwise, was cut loose too and Danny Fields, who served briefly as their manager (after 1 was gone) before he quit, was cut loose financially too. They finished up their album (which I had satirically named Back In the USA and which came to mean just that, in a straightforward not satirical sense) and have recently signed a management contract with Joe Cocker’s manager, ] ED. NOTE: Dee Anthony of Premier Talent [ hoping there by to pass into the mainstream of the pop-star establishment.

What struck me most about the interview with CREEM was their insistence on disassociating themselves altogether from their music, their show, and their people of the past, as though there was something wrong with what they used to be, something illegitimate which might somehow be held against them by the powers-that-bein the rock and roll industry. But it should be clearly stated and understood, as it was and is by the people whotook part in that period of Detroit rock and roll history, that there has really never been anything like the MC5 of those days, neither musjcally or in terms of the intensity and purity of the people’s response to them, it was really far out. If they wouldn’t’ve been so greedy and so eager for the easy fame of the pop-star world they could’ve been a really historic phenomenonI had been working on new projects last spring, before they turned the other way, which included recording and performing with the Jazz Composers Orchestra and writing and recording the soundtrack for a movie of the Living Theatre performing their manic masterpiece. Paradise Now!,

But they went the other way. What they do now will be history in its own right, and we will all be able to follow it. f haven’t heard their new recordings yet, but advance itjtelligtence says they aren’t so hotthat, in fact, they sound like the new Paul Revere and The Raiders. I know they don’t draw in Detroit anymore although I don’t know how well they do in other citiesbut Detroit is the place that counts, since the people here are the most advanced musically and emotionally of any audiences for music in the countryand I say that with great - personal experience. Of course, the 5 feels now that they’re really somewhat ^bove playing for the Detroit people anyway, since they’re really a “national” big-time band now and shouldn’t “overexpose” themselves in their home area. Well, I used to hear that from promoters and booking agents too when the band was in its heyday in Detroit, but I knewand was upheld in my knowledge by the response of the Detroit area audiencesthat people can never get too much of the real thing. It’s only when some capitalist is peddling an inferior, low-energy, low grade product that he worries about the people getting “bored” with-it. Check that out, brothers, and right on.

Tbe one thing, really, that 1 tried, to teach that band while 1 worked with them was this; SEPERATION IS DOOM. No person, no artist especially, can let himself be seperated from the people, from whom he draws all strength and all inspiration. The people are the only value worth having, and when so-called artists and musicians seperate themselves spiritually and physically from the needs and the actual company of their people they’re doomed. Unfortunately the forces of seperation can be stronger than the forces of brotherhood, especially in a cold capitalist society like this Amerika and Hollywood dreams and fantasies can seperate people from each other most. Now the 5 have declared themselves apart from us, and it is a sad hard thing to take—but mark my words, it is going to be much harder on them than it is on us. We still have each other.Right on! All Power to the People! Long Live the Woodstock Nation!

Cont. Next Page

Many Tribes-One Nation! .

Love,

JOHN