The wire-tapped punk band that helped to take down President Richard Nixon: “It’s a crazy story”
In the midst of the counterculture age, The MC5 blew away the flower petals of ‘peace and love’, replacing them with loud, anarchic, proto-punk direct action, with the crosshairs of their distorted barre chords aimed directly at the skull of one Richard Nixon.
Throughout his presidency, Nixon was – rightfully – set upon by a newfound generation of musicians and political activists, calling attention to the regressive, warmongering politics of his administration.
Even still, when groups like The MC5 emerged from the garage rock haven of Detroit, the perceived threat against Nixon intensified somewhat; these weren’t, after all, bare-footed hippies making daisy-chains for peace, they were rock and roll madmen with their hearts set on total cultural revolution.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, Wayne Kramer and the gang were quickly placed under the watchful eye of the US state. They were, of course, far from being the only musical artists to amass a CIA or FBI file – everybody from Aretha Franklin to John Lennon was investigated at one time or another. However, The MC5 were among the first groups to experience the kind of ‘Tricky Dick’ tactics that eventually saw the disgraced president leave office.
Speaking to Perfect Sound Forever in 2025, Brad Brooks reflected on providing vocals to The MC5’s final album, Heavy Lifting, sharing, “Wayne was such a true American, and I learned a lot from him, and he was just a person who really loved his country.”
He explained, “But he also knew the bad side of US power as The MC5 had literally been wire taped back in the day and had to fight it to the end.”
“Eventually, that case kinda helped to take Nixon down back in the day, and it’s a crazy story,” he continued. Although Brooks, who would have been around eight years old when the height of Nixon’s battle against The MC5 was occurring, didn’t expand upon the specific details of that crazy story, it has been pretty well documented over the past half a century.
Reportedly, Nixon’s administration viewed The MC5 as a potential threat to the American way of life, largely as a result of their tendency to call for revolution. As if having political activist John Sinclair as their band manager wasn’t enough, the soon-to-be imprisoned leader of the White Panther Party also declared “The MC5 is the revolution. In all its applications,” on the liner notes of 1969’s Kick Out The Jams.
More officially, the band were targeted by the administration for their apparent promotion of drugs, but either way, the band members soon had their phones tapped by Nixon’s secret service. Inevitably, when you’re in a fast-living, drug-taking rock and roll band, hearing a click at the beginning of all your phone calls tends to cause more than a little paranoia, but in the end, it was Nixon’s penchant for phonetapping and bugs that caused the downfall of his administration.
While The MC5 weren’t quite as essential in that downfall as the Watergate scandal, the proto-punk heroes were certainly a part of the puzzle. In that sense, Kramer and the band’s unwavering confrontation of the American state probably had a greater impact on the cultural landscape than any future harbingers of punk rock rebellion.
