Destroy Everything That Makes Us Slaves! ..... The revolutionary spirit of the MC5 never dies
On March 5, 2006 I was pushing my way through a crowd of shoppers along the busy Melrose Avenue, heading for an alley behind it.
I was going to interview Wayne Kramer, an ex-MC5 guitarist. On the 2nd floor of a very ordinary building with a dry-cleaner downstairs, I found the office of Muscle Tone Records, a label run by Wayne and his wife Margaret. Albeit a small office of a privately-owned business, on the back, it has a recording studio fully furnished with state-of-the-art recording equipments. When I arrived, Wayne was working at the room editing the soundtrack for a film which goes on general release soon.
Wayne Kramer, age 58. The fluffy long hair in the old days is now trimmed short to a near skinhead. It had been long since we last met and he greeted me with handshakes and a sunny smile, in all amiableness, until I began the interview when he set forth on, with piercing gaze, an incendiary criticism on the current American regime.
Do you know MC5? A few years ago I was startled to see the young girls in T-shirts and tanks with big MC5 logos swaggering on the
streets of Harajuku, the most fashionable town in stylish Tokyo. I was so intrigued I asked one of them in a MC5 tee who happened to sit
next to me at a café. She answered it was an item of a famous Japanese fashion brand and she was wearing it totally unaware of what
the logo stood for, just as a cool fashion like the shirts with uniform numbers of soccer or baseball. I realized the former icon of defiance was now being consumed as a fashion code, same as the T- shirt featuring Che Guevarra.
For those who are familiar with the rock revolution in the 60’s and the 70’s, MC5 is a charismatic, so to speak, radical rock band along with The Velvets, The Doors, and Iggy & The Stooges. Debut on Elektra in 1969, MC5 left 3 albums and disbanded in 1972, making their career as short as less than 4 years. Nevertheless, the tremendous energy emitted from their music combined with their attitude to thrust deeply into the contradictions in the society and the politics have exerted a substantial influence to the new generation of bands in various genres to date. To name a few of the groups who covered the MC5 songs; Afrika Bambaataa in rap, Blue Oyster Cult in heavy metal, Michael Monroe (Hanoi Rocks) in glam rock, The Damned in punk, Rage Against the Machine, Primal Scream, and The President of the United States of America in the alternative rock, and a singer song writer Jeff Buckley, etc. – the range is so broad.
MC5 started as a cover band playing songs of blackish music such as The Stones and James Brown in Detroit, an industrial city they lived, until they met John Sinclair in 1967. He was writing jazz reviews, etc. at that time and would later form the White Panther Party in alignment with the Black Panther Party. Under Sinclair’s management, the band signed on Elektra and released an album, Kick Out The Jams, in 1969. But the vocalist Rob Tyner’s cry of a word “motherfuckers” in the title track made the retailers including a major department store Hudson’s reject sale of the LP. To this Elektra urgently released a censored version replacing the word for “brothers and sisters”, which propelled the band to put posters with a message, “Fuck Hudson’s!”, on the windows of the retailer. Consequently, Elektra dropped the band. John Sinclair’s radical liner notes on the album, which goes, “… tearing down everything that would keep people slaves. The MC5 is that source. The MC5 is the revolution, in all its applications. … Kick out the jams, motherfucker! And stay alive with the MC5! ”, was completely deleted from the revised version of the LP.
MC5 played many political gatherings organized by Sinclair. At the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in 1968, they appeared as the only rock band and burned the U.S. flag on the stage, shouting motherfuckers repeatedly. Wayne talks about the old days.
“We were constantly harassed and detained by the police. They came to every venue we were playing because they were determined not to have a song with a word “motherfuckers” sung. They decided to stop us by arresting John (for possession of only a few marijuana cigarettes). We felt as if the spine of MC5 broke when he was put in jail.”
As Wayne said, in July 1969, Sinclair was sentenced to 9 years for possession of 2 marijuana cigarettes and went into prison subsequently. But John Lennon supported him and organized a big concert, “John Sinclair Freedom Rally”, at the Chrysler Arena in Detroit on December 10, 1971 appealing a release of Sinclair . Not only John and Yoko Ono but a number of musicians including Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger, Archie Shepp, Ed Sanders (The Fugs), Jerry Rubin participated in the concert which resulted in the release of Sinclair in 3 days after the concert.
MC5, having departed from Sinclair’s management, played at Phun City Festival in July 1970, an event organized by a journalist in London, Mick Farren, who later became an active SF novelist. With all the enthusiastic acceptance by the European audience, MC5 soon got into financial and drug problems and split in late 1972 after releasing their 3rd album, High Time. The band name turned into a legend and numerous live albums and rehearsal materials would go around the market as bootlegs.
It was in 2003 that MC5 reappeared in front of us. Although the vocalist Rob Tyner and the guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith had been dead, the surviving members―Wayne Kramer on guitar, Michael Davis on bass, and Dennis Thompson on drums―started a new project called DKT/ MC5 to bring the music and the spirit of the MC5 to the contemporary audience by including a rotating lineup of guest vocalists. On their U.S. tour in 2004, singers like Peter Wolf (The J Geils Band), Kim Thayil (Soundgarden), etc. joined the band one after another at each city they visited. In August 2004, DKT/MC5 came to Japan to play Summer Sonic rock festival. Not only the 2 guest vocalists, Mark Arm (Mudhoney) and Evan Dando (The Lemonheads), but Dave Vanian (The Damned) joined them at the end of their last gig. Regardless of the 32-year dormancy, the surviving members gave an emotive yet powerful performance to the Japanese audience. It was truly an “old soldiers never die” moment.
Along with the activity as DKT/MC5, they are engaged in own solo projects. While being active with his own band and sometimes collaborating with experimental jazz musicians, Wayne Kramer still retains the critical faculties and the anti-establishment spirit brought over from the MC5 days. From time to time he posts incisive criticism to his own website. In the ’04 presidential election, he lead a political drive called “Punkvoter”, in which many punk rock musicians collectively appealed to the American youth to go to vote for anti-Bush.
“The film to which I’ve been writing sound track, describes cynically how the U.S. government has created the drug problems on their own”, Wayne said in the interview with me.
Once being tipped for stardom, then taking a nosedive, now Wayne keeps himself away from all the silly nonsense of the music business and is creating the music as he really wants to, through which he trys to give a chance to the audience to realize the truth of what’s happening in the world. He sometimes collaborates with his old pal, John Sinclair, by playing accompanying guitar sound to Sinclair’s poetry reading. I wish to experience even a little part of the spirit of the 60’s as represented by these activities by Wayne and Sinclair, at Tokyo Hipsters Club, even in a small scale. I hope those young girls strolling in the MC5 T-shirt will have a chance to know them.
On March 10, 1994
Charles Bukowski died
Heartbreak
I’m going to miss that man
Of poems
Books
Short stories what they call
Spoken word performances
Hank told the truth in
All things all things
(So Long, Hank - music and lyrics by Wayne Kramer)
Gaku Torii
* MC5 photos taken by Leni Sinclair and Raeanne Rubenstein
About the author, Gaku Torii: A rock critic living in Tokyo.
Conducted a lot of exclusive interviews with many musicians such as The Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Serge Gainsbourg. Publication includes “Walk on the Wild Side” (Kodansha), “Patti Smith: Journey of Love and Creation” (Translator. Chikuma Shobo), “Brian Jones: A Portrait of a Solitary Rebel” (Editor. Shinko Music), etc. Also active as DJ and movie critic. His own rock band, Loaded, will release their first album, “Pull the Trigger”, on June 17, 2006 on Captain Trip Records.