The two artists that defined the roots of The MC5: “Everything grew out from there”
Free-spirited hippie rock dominated the airwaves of college towns and communes back in the ‘peace and love’ era of the 1960s, but what was at first a revolutionary take on rock and roll quickly descended into a self-congratulating deluge of acid-riddled dross, and it took the raw power of The MC5 to blow away the counterculture cobwebs and take rock back to its roots.
Switching the sunshine psychedelia of San Francisco for the harsh industrialism of their native Detroit, The MC5 offered a stark alternative to the growing landscape of hippie rock. So while everybody else was tripping out and focusing their attention on half-an-hour guitar solos, Wayne Kramer and the gang reintroduced the power of short, sharp, and loud bursts of rock and roll rebellion, harking back to the garage rock scene which inspired their initial formation back in 1963.
Garage rock was the precursor to punk in numerous ways, putting the means of rock and roll production in the hands of the musical proletariat. In other words, young people with a very tenuous grasp of how to play their instruments suddenly began recording rock and roll singles, with an expectedly more rough-and-ready approach than the rock sounds populating the hit parade of the time. In turn, The MC5 adopted the same sonic manifesto, only with the volume turned up.
You only need to watch archival footage of The MC5 playing for crowds of cross-legged barefoot hippies to recognise the revolutionary nature of their sound; it blew everything else out of the water, and set the standard for raw rock rebellion for multiple subsequent generations of artist.
Once you’ve heard ‘Kick Out the Jams’, it’s hard to go back to the drawn-out psychedelic soundscapes of the late 1960s. “They [Grateful Dead] were the recipients of much of our harassment,” Wayne Kramer told Classic Rock in 2019. “All those San Francisco bands, we were tough on everybody.”
“This was the era of the twenty-minute guitar solo, the forty-minute drum solo,” he explained of the disparity between The MC5 and the rest of the rock landscape at that time. Rather than dropping acid and trying to predict a future of peace and harmony, Kramer and co looked back upon the trailblazers of rock’s past. “The MC5’s roots are in Little Richard and Chuck Berry,” he declared.
Virtually all subsequent rock and roll is owed to the pioneering influence of those two figures, altering the audiences of the 1950s to the explosive new age of music before them. “That’s where we were based and everything grew out from there, and we went from Little Richard to Sun Ra, all wrapped up in the era of Vietnam, civil rights and youth rebellion,” Kramer concluded, and it is a point which is certainly worth remembering.
After all, The MC5 weren’t opposed to the hippie anti-war ideals, but they rightly believed that these issues were worth fighting for, and doing so in a much more hand-on way than holding hands and spending your days on an intergalactic spaceship made from blotting paper. Kramer brought the rock revolution to the streets of Detroit, but it was the likes of Little Richard and Chuck Berry who he had to thank, not the deluge of jam bands and peace and love advocates.
