Dec 14

MC5

MC5

 
MC5  was an American rock band from Lincoln Park, Michigan, formed in 1964.  The original band line-up consisted of vocalist Rob Tyner, guitarists Wayne Kramer and Fred “Sonic” Smith, bassist Michael Davis, and drummer Dennis Thompson.  Their loud, energetic style of back-to-basics rock ’n’ roll included elements of garage rock, hard rock, blues rock, and psychedelic rock.  MC5 developed a reputation for energetic and polemical live performances, one of which was recorded as their 1969 debut album Kick Out the Jams.  MC5 was often cited as one of the most important American hard rock groups of their era.  Their three albums are regarded by many as classics, and their song “Kick Out the Jams” is widely covered.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
I am not the only one who feels this way about Andy Colquhoun; as Ken Shimamoto expressed in an online review of his solo CD, Pick up the Phone, America! (I sure wish I knew enough about music to write like this):  “Nobody on Earth plays guitar like Andy Colquhoun.  Well, maybe Wayne Kramer [of Detroit’s MC5 and another running mate of Mick Farren’s for several decades now] and Tony Fate (ex-Bellrays, current Streetwalkin’ Cheetahs) are in the same league, but Andy’s brand of over-the-top rock skronk and acid-blues is totally unique.  As guitarists go, he’s got a deep trick bag:  a huge sound, saturated with fuzz and Echoplex; a monstrous whammy bar attack that skews his snaky, vibrato-laden blues lines and monolithic octaves; ringing harmonics; a deft touch accompanied by a fine melodic sensibility . . . almost a bent-head Jeff Beck (always a name to conjure with in the gtr circles I run in).” 
 
(August 2011)
 
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Angie Pepper grew up as the youngest of three children in a middle class family in Newcastle, Australia.  She was always interested in art and music and became part of the Sydney rock music scene.  Angie became friends with the bandmembers in Radio Birdman, a legendary Sydney punk rock band that formed in 1974 and broke up in 1978.  One of the bandmembers, guitarist Deniz Tek is actually from Detroit and brought the hard-edged Detroit sound of MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges with him Down Under. 

 

(December 2013)

 
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Patti Smith Group’s previous album, Radio Ethiopia was influenced by the fiery 1960’s Detroit band MC5; and Patti Smith later met the band’s guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith.  They married in 1980, and the couple raised two children.  The joke at the time was that she married him only because she wouldn’t have to change her name.  Their son, Jackson Smith married White Stripes drummer Meg White in 2009; interestingly, Meg didn’t have to change her name either when she had previously married the band’s guitarist Jack White. 

 

(February 2014)

 

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I certainly can’t compete with the description of Mona – The Carnivorous Circus provided by Dave Thompson for Allmusic, so I won’t even try:  “Mick Farren convened a more-or-less all-star band from the same disreputable circles he’d always moved in.  Carnivorous Circus was cut, the first essential album of the 1970s, and it’s still one of the most unrepentantly nasty, gratuitously ugly records ever made.  Rock history loves to bandy those terms around, then apply them to this week’s most fashionable long-haired gnarly snarlies.  And it’s true, the Pretty Things, MC5, the Pink Fairies, the Broughtons [Edgar Broughton Band], any of the myriad ’60s freakbeat bands captured on sundry Nuggets and Pebbles type collections, they’ve all dipped a toe into those malevolently murky waters.  Some of them have even swum around a little.  Carnivorous Circus goes the whole hog and then some, holding its breath and descending to the seabed.  Now it owns a roadhouse and wrestles giant squid for fun.” 

 
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The following year, Mick Farren organized his idea of what a rock festival should be.  Called Phun City, it took place from July 24 to July 26, 1970.  Unlike Woodstock and most other similar festivals, there were no admission fees and no fences.  After the funding for the concert was withdrawn, the organizers had to notify the bands scheduled to appear that they would have to perform for free.  Most of the bands agreed to go on anyway; ironically, one of the few bands that didn’t play was Free, best known for their 1970 hit “All Right Now”.  Rock musicians who did perform included MC5, the Pretty Things, Kevin Ayers, Shagrat, the Edgar Broughton Band, Mungo Jerry, Mighty Baby, and the Pink Fairies; the Beat poet William Burroughs was also there. 

 
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The tape was thought to be lost for many years but later turned up in a box, marked “Dingwalls”; and several tracks from the show were released by Total Energy Records on a 2000 CD called Cocaine Blues 1974-1978 with an artist name of Wayne Kramer & the Pink Fairies.  This is somewhat misleading, as the concert was actually circa March 1979, and only Larry Wallis had ever performed as part of the Pink Fairies at that point in time.  The complete tape of the concert was released as Wayne Kramer – Live at Dingwalls 1979 on Captain Trip Records in 2001; I don’t have this CD as yet.

 

Other than a song about oral sex that is a little hard to take, Cocaine Blues is quite good and features renditions of the MC5 classics “Ramblin’ Rose” and “Kick out the Jams”.

 

(March 2014/1)

 

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Motown is of course the best known music from the Motor City, but Detroit has always had a hard-edged rock scene as well. Proto-punk gods Iggy and the Stooges and MC5 (“Motor City 5”) are both Detroit bands that were founded in the 1960’s. Perhaps the hardest rocking 1960’s American band that made it big is Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels.  
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I first heard the classic track “I’m a Ramrod” by the Ramrods on the 1998 Total Energy Records compilation LP and CD, Motor City’s Burnin’, with the title adapted from the MC5 song “Motor City Is Burning”; I got it in a special package of 3 Detroit CD’s that also included Motor City’s Burnin’, Vol. 2 and Motor City Blues. The first two albums are stoked with killer tracks from many of the bands mentioned above and others. Among other things, Motor City Blues was my introduction to a simply amazing street musician named One String Sam who plays a handmade “unitar” and has a bluesman howl unlike any that I have ever heard.
 
(March 2016)
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I have written already of several of the first-wave punk rock bands that were formed in the wake of the proto-punk bands that I wrote about in my last post:  the Stooges, the Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, the Modern Lovers, MC5, and others.  In fact, one of my early UARB’s was the Eyes; they were one of the first punk bands in Los Angeles and included in their line-up future stars Charlotte Caffey of the Go-Go’s and DJ Bonebrake of X. 
 
(March 2017)
 
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An overview of the Loons was published in the San Diego Reader in 2015 upon the release of Inside Out Your Mind; eight other articles about the band had been published previously by this alternative weekly. The article lists the “genre” for the Loons as noise/experimental and punk and describes the “full scope of their sound” as “Beatlesque vibes reincarnated in the form of post-punk fervency”. Influences are listed in the article as the Pretty Things, the Seeds, the Yardbirds, the Monks, the 13th Floor Elevators, MC5, the Misunderstood, and the Dutch band the Outsiders. 
(June 2017)
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Anyway, here is what and who I talked about last year:
December 2016 – 1960’s garage rock band THE IGUANAS; Story of the Month on the Muddy Waters song “Rollin’ Stone”; also, 1970’s music and proto-punk music, Ramones, Nuggets, Pebbles Series, the Sonics, New York Dolls, the Modern Lovers, MC5, the Stooges, Iggy Pop.
 
(Year 8 Review)
Last edited: March 22, 2021