WE DIDN'T WANT TO ENTERTAIN PEOPLE, WE WANTED TO DESTROY THEM
From the moment I heard Rob Tyner scream KICK OUT THE JAMS MOTHERFUCKERS, the MC5 took permanent spiritual residence in me. But it would be some years until I really got them. That came with ‘Want You Right Now’.
Sometimes music sits stewing in you for years until the fucker finally cooks and you can enjoy it properly for the masterful dish it is. MC5 always took the backseat after the Stooges for me. But when it all finally clicked, ‘Want You Right Now’ kicking it off, I was hooked. I devoured that song over and over in single sittings. Still do.
A typical night at Bruce’s - Bruce handling the party, instructing us ‘put on whatever you want’ from his vast vinyl collection. Off my nut, I’d go straight to ‘Want You Right Now’. In that cramped cave of a living room, at 5 or so in the morning, totally twisted, this is all I wanted to hear. I sat there, brutalised by the monstrous, neanderthal riffs.
Two years after the Summer of Love called, this was how the MC5 responded. Imagine trying to put a flower in your hair as Brother Wayne Kramer and Fred Sonic Smith beat you around the head with THOSE RIFFS while Tyner WAILED those braindead-lust proclamations. Like Pig Champion said, fuck that burned out hippie shit. This, and the Stooges, was the end of that 60s bullshit. This was the sound of industrial Detroit, of revolutionary punks and hot heavy metal drag racers. Nothing touches that song. It still sounds as dazed yet writhing, aching, violent, aggressive and heavy as it must have done then.
And that’s what got me enthralled by Wayne Kramer. His uncouth, caveman-genius riffs, the dirty, primitive sexuality. It wasn’t the hollow cockrock pretension and pomp of Zeppelin and the like. While the 5’s leads and arrangements often strove for sophistication, it was really just streetlevel grime. Proto-punk. De-fucking-troit. Fuck Jimmy Page, I couldn’t/can’t/won’t relate to him. But Wayne was one of us. An unrefined rock n roll barbarian. I can’t fully emphasise how much his destroy-not-entertain line means to me.
Another soundbite that deeply resonates, circa 1966: ‘I had been experimenting with new sounds on the guitar, feedback and distortion. I discovered feedback for myself when I set my guitar down at rehearsal with the volume up and left the room. I heard this unholy howling sound coming from the basement, and then a crash. A jar of nails sitting on a shelf had vibrated off and broken on the floor. I told the guys, “I’ve discovered the power to change the universe: feedback”’.
Many of us owe MC5 and especially Wayne a sizeable debt. Over the years he would come to have greater and greater influence on my style and playing, way after I was obliviously, subconsciously following the riff path he had laid down decades before.
His politics too - MC5 were the only band who played the Chicago Democratic Convention, in the midst of the police riots. They had national guard tanks outside their homes during the Detroit riots. Kramer hated power right into his final years. The prologue to his book ‘The Hard Stuff’ opens with his memories of the Bell Isle police riot of 1967. Of all his misadventures, summits and gutter moments, his entire rock and roll journeyman life, he chose to open his autobiography with this terrifying vision of state violence.
At the very end of the book he takes stock of his life, success, failure, and how he created most of the hurt in his life. But not all of it - he fits in a condemnation of the war on drugs in the final paragraphs. He then closes: ‘I still live in the tension between the angel and the beast, and that is my lot as human. This struggle will continue until the day I depart. Mine has been a painful and beautiful experience, and I wouldn’t change any of it, even if I could.’
These days, it’s more important than ever to dig in and get dumber. Everyone wants to over intellectualise every aspect of existence. So I got nuthin smart to say about simplicity or stupidity. Just let your heart vibrate with the Eternal Cacophony of Wayne’s riffs. Don’t think, just feel. Let your senses be bludgeoned. Everything that can’t ever be taught is already known. That’s rock n roll. That’s the MC5. That’s Brother Wayne Kramer.
He rests forever in power.
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Wanna do a band focussing exclusively on the kind of eerie bad acid build ups and horrific comedowns of Roxy Music's 'In Every Dreamhome A Heartache', MC5's 'Want You Right Now', and Stooges' 'Funhouse', where every member is on different drugs and the crushing violence we play makes hippies and wimps weep. I will only work with angry losers who view music as a weapon.
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On a similar strain of thought, there's endless things to love about Poison Idea, not least their 'Kick Out The Jams' cover, but my favourite is what a bonding tool they can be, just like MC5. You meet someone, it doesn't matter what background they have - if they list PI as one of their favourite bands, you know you are about to forge a lasting bond. You know you have a true friend in mischief, mayhem, the way you wouldn't if you mentioned any other band. It's an understanding, a pathological agreement. A semi-secret society, the way Darby Crash envisioned. And in that sense, PI really are the heirs to the Germs.
I am rolling on ecstasy right now.