I can’t remember how many years ago this appeared as sleeve notes for an Easy Action MC5 release, possibly 15 or even 20 years ago. However, great rock n’ roll never dies, it leaves an electric scar on the present and the music survives, just like the memories. I was fortunate to meet and interview Wayne Kramer several times. As well as being a powerhouse guitarist, he was a sincere well- meaning man who had managed to leave the drug life behind and start afresh. No easy task as the death of the MC5 must have been hard to recover from. The intensity of the band fuelled by political dissent made them an incendiary proposition . Sadly, the U.S is in as much turmoil now as it was in the 1960’s. You can only kick down the doors of a decade once, but the MC5 did. The effect was shattering.
MC5 Liners
As photogenic as Che Guevara, The MC5 could be construed as pin ups for the American counter culture. Although the dream image of the U.S.A in the late 1960’s is often perceived as a time of love and peace when even Hell’s Angels were benevolent, the flipside of the coin was devastating: Vietnam, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the Kent State University shootings and the Tate/LaBianca murders to mention but a few of the prevailing horrors. Perhaps things were different in San Francisco. In The MC5’s home town of Detroit, it wasn’t the gentle scent of incense wafting on the breeze that assailed the senses, but the acrid smell of neighbourhoods on fire during race riots. The best music usually comes from the toughest (or poorest) places. Like salt in the soul something rubs off. New York spawned the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls. Mississippi sired Muddy Waters and Elvis Presley, and from Detroit came The Stooges and the MC5. Many years have passed since Vice President Spiro Agnew then serving under Richard Nixon considered the MC5 a genuine threat to America’s youth. It was Spiro Agnew who also noted in his 1968 election speech “If you’ve seen one city slum, you’ve seen them all.” It didn’t matter much to him whose home went up in flames if the inhabitants were poor, black or anti-establishment but it did to The MC5. As guitarist Wayne Kramer commented: “We were very frustrated with the slow pace of change, and what we viewed as an intolerable situation, between racism, police oppression, the war in Vietnam, outmoded drug laws. We took the lead from the Black Panther Party, in that they were the vanguard and voice for their community. We felt that we could be the vanguard and the voice for our community.” As a result of their political commitment, the band found them selves on the receiving end of police harassment and surveillance, were busted and arrested whilst their manager John Sinclair became a marijuana martyr and hounded by the authorities. John Lennon even sang about Sinclair’s plight, sentiments that the former Beatle soon quietened lest he not be allowed to live in the U.S. By the time Lennon had forsaken his radical rhetoric and was residing in New York, The MC5 were history. Aside from a few loyal supporters in what remained of the underground, the demise of the MC5 made barely a dint in the rock universe. Wayne Kramer sets the scene: “New Year’s Eve, 1972 was our last performance, at the Grande Ballroom, the scene of some of our greatest successes. It was an ironic ending that the last performance should be there – playing for $500, stoned on heroin, with maybe 500 kids in the audience. All the memories of it are in black-and-white, bad, bad, bad. The centre never holds. What was happening in ‘68/69, this great promise of the revolution, that was never going to hold anyway. As time goes on things fragment.”
In the intervening years, the MC5 became cultural exiles. Sure, there were strongholds of true believers, Zigzag magazine published John Sinclair’s jail cell penned memoirs of the band, the former 5 singer Rob Tyner cut a track with UK rockers Eddie & The Hot Rods called ‘Till The Night Is Gone’ and briefly reminded England that Punks weren’t the sole heirs of misrule; journalist Mick Farren waged a campaign to free Wayne Kramer from prison whilst the guitarist languished in Lexington, Kentucky on drugs charges. After his release, Kramer formed the short lived Gang War, with Johnny Thunders, who’d always cited the 5 as an influence. However, even as recently as 10 years ago, the MC5 were still a less than tangible presence. The sight of Jennifer Aniston, former wife of Brad Pitt, sporting an MC5 tee-shirt on the opening credits of the anodyne ‘Friends’ would have been previously unthinkable. Reappraisal seems to have a shelf life of 30 years. By then the mainstream are finally able to process the radical and innovative. Welcome back the MC5 – all is forgiven. Along with The Stooges and the New York Dolls, the MC5 are now hailed as the founding fathers of contemporary rock. In a largely synthetic music world, credibility which the MC5 possessed in abundance is everything. Yet however well deserved the current reassessment of the MC5 is some folks have gotten desperately reverential. Respect is one thing, but reverence should be saved for God not rock and roll, which was meant to be fun, sexy and subversive. Let us not forget that though the MC5 created their own political program under the banner of the White Panthers, the main thrust of their manifesto was ‘Dope, rock & roll and fucking in the streets.’ It must have been one hell of a party. They were as hip as Che, poster boys for the revolution, delinquents with a taste for spangly clothes, a musical powerhouse of testosterone and testimonials who originally met through that most dangerous of institutions, school. Like every band in its formative stages there were early line up changes, as Wayne Kramer explains: “Fred Smith and I started playing guitars together, must have been in the tenth grade – in ’64 we played in a lot of rival bands. Then we ended up in the same band together and we met Rob Tyner and Dennis Thompson and Michael Davis and we all moved away from home together. We were all getting to be 16, 17. We moved to the beatnik neighbourhood, the Detroit version of Notting Hill Gate.” Drawing on a collective spectrum of influences that included Chuck Berry, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, The Yardbirds, The Rolling Stones and Them, the band had already honed their gritty nascent sound during rehearsals in Mrs Kramer’s basement. From the outset, the 5’s bad ass musical identity was singularly potent, riff hungry teen wolves or ‘hormonally overdosed smarty-pants’d punks’ as Kramer once succinctly described them. If their roots were forged in Garage and Rhythm and Blues, the punks got Jazz/political consciousness in the second phase of their development, whilst living in Warren Forest and hanging out at the local Artist’s Workshop which was nominally presided over by poet and music journalist John Sinclair, although at the time he was serving a 6 month prison sentence for marijuana possession. To celebrate Sinclair’s eventual release from Detroit’s House Of Correction, his wife Leni organised The Festival Of The People, and asked the MC5 to play. As John Sinclair explains, it was an auspicious event: “I met the band briefly the day I got out of jail in 1966 but I didn’t work with them for a year, I just wanted to hear them, then I became friends with Rob Tyner, best friends. He was a genius who wanted to have a rock and roll band and try some ideas out that were different, mostly having to do with energy, imagination, improvisation and intelligence. It was thrilling. I wasn’t into rock and roll at all, I’d grown up in the 50’s and I was into Jazz, Avant Garde, Coltrane, Taylor, Sun Ra, and Archie Shepp. I heard in the band the kind of energy that I liked in this type of music, and also Rob principally was into Jazz and took the name Tyner from McCoy Tyner who was Coltrane’s piano player. Rob’s real name was Derminer. When I met them they were calling themselves Avant Rock so I thought they were the greatest and never missed a chance of hearing them play. What I liked about them most was their whole lives were focussed on music and trying to make the band as good as they possibly could. I really related to that because I was coming from an artistic standpoint of music as self-expression without any regards for reward.” Following a 12 month courtship during which the band cultivated Sinclair, he began managing them in the Summer of 1967. There were no heavy contractual details or a formal discussion, indeed bass player Michael Davis likened Sinclair’s role to that of a ‘Guru’ rather than someone who just took care of business. Despite his unconventional approach, Sinclair was passionately dedicated to furthering the MC5’s cause as drummer Dennis Thompson noted “John took us to the next level. He was the first manager we had who understood where we wanted to go and who we wanted to be.” Thanks to Sinclair, the 5 now had Trans- Love Energies at their disposal. Formed by John and Leni Sinclair and artist Gary Grimshaw who designed the band’s logo and artwork, Trans- Love Energies was a hippy collective with its own newspaper, light shows, activists and poets that united as an information agency for The Stooges and the MC5. It also provided money for bail and legal expenses, as John Sinclair explains: “It was fun but also it protected us from the authorities, everything that we were doing was completely despised by the established order. We were under total scrutiny because we had this huge following. We’d started talking about the war on stage and the Black Panthers, we were blatant smokers of marijuana, everything we did was illegal, we had long hair and we were just crazy.” Another key figure in establishing The MC5’s profile was Russ Gibb who booked the acts at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom and virtually adopted the MC5 as the house band. Able to draw upwards of 2,000 kids to the Grande Ballroom on a Friday night, the 5 became massively popular on their home turf and used to lay in wait for the out of town competition according to John Sinclair: “Because we were tight with Russ Gibb, we used to open for all the hot bands that came in from England and New York, and we’d try to destroy them. In October ’67, we’d opened for Cream at the height of their power and they’d humiliated us by making us set up our equipment around Ginger Baker’s drum kit, they had to stay at the centre of the stage and we had to work around it and I was extremely angry about it so we begged Russ Gibb to let us open for Cream the next time they played at the Grande. We prepared to do the best possible show we could for the gig and made a freak flag with a big marijuana leaf on it. At the end of the show we destroyed the American flag and raised the freak flag high and then one of our friends rushed out on stage with a starter pistol to shoot Tyner, like a right wing attack, but the audience were already going so crazy they didn’t notice. But we’d achieved our goal. When Cream came out on stage it was to a lukewarm response. We were huge in Detroit hundreds of people followed us from gig to gig. The band always ended the show with ‘Black To Comm’ which was improvisational, it started with a single riff and then it would just go off, there’d be feedback and I would play the saxophone and it would become like an acid trip. The fans hated to miss a show because every night was different and ‘Black To Comm’ would end everything with a huge frenzy. It was the greatest.”
In traditional terms of success, the MC5 were off the map. They had no record deal, an outspoken radical manager and were facing police harassment on an increasingly regular basis. In August ‘68, the band was forced to pull out of a benefit gig on behalf of ALSAC (Assistance to the American Children with Leukaemia) in Oakland due to outstanding warrants dating back to 1966. The cops also paid particular interest in a number the 5 had started to include in their sets -‘Kick Out The Jams’ with its rallying ‘Motherfuckers’ introduction. ‘Kick Out The Jams’ became a favourite of the pigs – to give the police their quaint nickname back then – who believed that the song contained obscene lyrics, and was thus yet another reason to bust the band. It might have been everybody else’s Summer of Love, but it certainly wasn’t the 5’s. However, despite all the hassle, the MC5 were doing pretty well, as Wayne Kramer attests: “We achieved everything that we had dreamt of before we signed a recording contract. We had the respect of our community we could make a living making music we could draw huge crowds to our shows. We were a shit-hot band.” Their target practice also improved once they moved into two fraternity houses in Anne Arbor. The conundrum of the MC5 was merging the propaganda with pop. Guitars, guns and rock n’ roll, the nightmare of any American government and a hip young publicist’s dream. Enter Danny Fields as John Sinclair explains: “I had these friends, Bob Rudnick and Dennis Frawley. They were music journalists with the East Village Other, who wrote a column called Kokaine Kharma. They also had a radio programme on WFMU which broadcast from a college campus in New Jersey. On Friday evenings, their show was followed by Danny Fields who had his own programme. Danny Fields worked for Elektra records, he had gained quite a bit of power there because he was the hippy publicist who suggested that Elektra make ‘Light My Fire’ a single from The Door’s album and it had become the company’s biggest selling record. I met him at the radio station, we’d put a single out ‘Looking At You/Borderline’ on a little Anne Arbor label called A-Square, so we became friends and he started figuring out how he could get Elektra to sign the band. We got him to come out to Ann Arbor, to a show we were doing where The Stooges were opening for us. The Stooges were our friends, and their manager Jimmy Silver was one of my best friends. Anyway when Danny Fields came out he signed both of us.”
As soon as the ink had dried on the contract between the 5 and Elektra, the decision was made to record the band’s debut album live at the Grande Ballroom. The date in question was Halloween Eve 1968, or as Michael Davis puts it: “The single scariest night of my life. So much was riding on that chance, and only one shot at it. The atmosphere was charged with more energy than words can say. The sound on that stage was like pure molecular energy dancing.” Trying to distil the MC5’s power was like attempting to capture a thunderstorm in a jam jar, a tricky business and the band weren’t entirely happy with the end results. To have only got one shot at it was intimidating enough whilst certain sections of the album where recorded in a cavernous, empty ballroom, without the chemistry of an audience. Thankfully, as this boxed set testifies, the MC5 got many more chances to perform live without the pressure of producing a definitive product. Meanwhile, Elektra roared into action. How best to promote an album called ‘Kick Out The Jams’? By leaving in the contentious ‘Motherfuckers’ intro. Neither the band nor their manager was sure of the wisdom of such a move, but the label blithely assured them that should any problems arise, Elektra’s legal department would sort things out. No problem. Like any young band, the 5 trusted their record label and went on tour. For a group steeped in righteousness, stylistically they skipped the de rigueur drab revolutionary wardrobe of berets and army fatigues in favour of lurex and lame and enjoyed all the other trappings of their trade, especially the drugs and the chicks, to the chagrin of Sinclair, who later noted in his memoirs: “When we were on the road, I would spend all my time running around which ever city we were in, doing radio interviews, pushing the record, lining up benefits and concerts to supplement the weekend gigs, meeting people, checking out the underground papers in the various cities, and trying to explain to the Movement people just exactly what we were doing – that we weren’t just another rock ‘n’ roll band exploiting the people and fattening Bill Graham’s pocket. The band on the other hand, would sit around their motel rooms all day long, complaining that there was nothing to do, or hanging out with the skankiest broads in town and getting the clap some more, staying drunk and partying and getting arrested for drunk driving….”
Shortly after its release in early 1969, ‘Kick Out The Jams’ ran into trouble. Billboard magazine and some of the Underground press gave it a less than favourable response but that was the least of Sinclair’s and the band’s worries. In Detroit, the album had hit the number 2 position in the charts of a popular radio station, CKLW, and was selling well but Hudson’s, a local department store deemed it obscene and refused to stock it. Retaliating, the band placed a full page advert in February’s Ann Arbor Argus which ran ‘Kick Out The Jams, Motherfuckers! And kick in the door if the store won’t sell you the album’ and closed with the succinct statement ‘Fuck Hudson’s.’ Believing they had the backing of their label, the 5 placed the Elektra logo in the bottom right-hand corner of the advert. This all went down rather badly with Elektra who also had to foot the bill for the damage wreaked upon Hudson’s by the 5’s fans. Danny Fields subsequently lost his job with the company. But that wasn’t all as Wayne Kramer explains: “Then there was the problem of them putting out a clean version of ‘The Kick Out the James, Motherfuckers’ introduction. We said they absolutely could not do that, but they went ahead and did it anyway. They took John Sinclair’s liner notes off the record and put the single version of ‘Kick Out The Jams, Brothers and Sisters’ on the album just to sell as many as they could.” Sinclair and Fields negotiated the MC5’s release from Elektra and orchestrated their signing to Atlantic for a cash advance of $50,000. It was however, a move that John Sinclair only briefly got to savour: “I was excited about them signing with Atlantic because I grew up listening to Atlantic records, Ray Charles, Big Joe Turner, Lavern Baker and I thought the president of the company, Jerry Wexler, was one of the great geniuses of American popular music. The negative part of it was Jon Landau’s involvement.”
Along with the change of label, the band relocated to a large house in Hamburg, Michigan, where they were joined for four months by Jon Landau. A music journalist for Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone, Landau had been drafted in to produce the band’s second album, ‘Back In The USA’ and was trying to build a rapport with the 5. Whilst the band settled in to pre-album rehearsals, their manager was facing a maelstrom of legal proceedings for the heinous crime of giving an undercover policewoman two joints, and had less involvement than usual with the MC5’s affairs. It was during this period that Landau apparently became a more dominant force and a schism developed between the 5 and their manager. According to Sinclair, shortly before he received a 9 1/2 year prison sentence in July 69, he was fired: “Jon Landau kind of talked them out of their revolutionary connections, told them that if they wanted to get on in any way they were going to have to get rid of the dope fiend hippy revolutionaries.” Incarcerated in Jackson Penitentiary, Sinclair believed that the band had turned their backs on him but as Wayne Kramer explains, they hadn’t: “We had lost our mentor, our manager, our champion. And we were psychologically too immature to fend for ourselves. Let me state for the record that the MC5 never fired John Sinclair. As a matter of fact, it was the contrary. Fred and I represented the band and went to John’s wife Leni to inform her that we were standing behind John and were willing to continue to pay him because our loyalty to him was so intense. I don’t believe John ever knew anything about this, but he should know now that we never fired him.” It was under these unfortunate circumstances that work had begun on ‘Back In The U.S.A’. From his cell, Sinclair wrote that “….Fred Smith finally revolted against Landau during the recording sessions – which, incidentally, took several months instead of the two or three weeks I had originally envisaged.” Dispersion has often been cast on Landau’s production, which was an attempt to bring a stripped down Stax/Volt sound to the 5’s music. Certainly it was a departure from the sonic tidal wave of ‘Kick Out The Jams’ but it added an unexpected new dimension to the band – from revolution to bubblegum. Although the album title was meant to be ironic, it was also a homage to the 5’s hero, Chuck Berry, which is where the roots of much of the record lie. Chuck Berry made some of the greatest ever music for teens, his references steeped in 50’s Americana – jukeboxes, cars, guitars, high school and girls – and in his trail the 5 followed. While detractors carped that the band had lost their political edge, in ‘The American Ruse’ for example they created a glorious anti-establishment anthem that could be danced to. Whoever said dissidence had to be dour? At the time, Dennis Thompson recalls resenting Landau but: “In retrospect working with Jon essentially set the bar much higher as related to our collective approach to playing MC5 music with precision and professionalism. Now I thank him.” ‘Back In the USA’ was released in January 1970 to disappointing reviews and sales but the band continued working on material for a third album called with unfortunate accuracy ‘High Time.’ Let’s hear it from Brother Wayne: “We were making our last grasp for our dream of the future and, at the same time, we were starting to fall apart. Everyone in the band was experimenting with more and harder drugs and alcoholism came to the forefront. And not one person in the band had an ounce of self control about anything.” On paper however, they seemed to be thriving and the MC5 signed a management deal with Dee Anthony who took care of Joe Cocker. The band maintained their usual busy itinerary playing dates across the U.S but on February 15th, they returned to the Grande Ballroom for a show with the Flamin’ Groovies. It was a night of symbolic import, as Russ Gibb was moving on to other projects beyond the Grande. Time and change inevitably erodes everything, except in the MC5’s case, the music. From John Sinclair’s imprisonment to Gibb’s departure from the Grande and the eventual dissolution of the White Panther party, the former mainstays of the band were slowly disappearing. All they had was each other but relationships within the 5 were becoming strained. In July 1970 the band departed for Europe where they were booked to play 4 English gigs and one in France. The trip got off to a good start as Michael Davis remembers: “On our flight to the UK we read in Melody Maker that we were living legends. It blew our minds completely.” They recovered in time to headline at the Phun City festival in Worthing on Saturday February 25th, on a bill that also featured the Pink Fairies and Steve Peregrine Took. The festival was intended as a fundraiser for the financially beleaguered underground paper It and although the bands were expecting to be paid, at the last minute the event was declared a free festival. Rather ironically, Friday night’s headliners, Free, pulled out because of the no fee situation but the MC5 played gamely on and were by all accounts brilliant, assuring their ‘Legendary’ status in Europe for decades to come. Before leaving London, the band recorded ‘Sister Anne’ which was produced with the assistance of Geoffrey Haslam, whom Wayne Kramer described as a ‘Mild Mannered English Professor.’ On their return to the states, the band continued to work on ‘High Time’ with Haslam, successfully integrating the power of ‘Kick Out The Jams’ with the discipline of ‘Back Of In The USA’ as Dennis Thompson concurs:” I believe ‘High Time’ to be our best record. It is a synthesis of the first two records. ‘High Time’ is both exciting and tight. With mucho balls.” The album was well received by the critics, but as journalist Lenny Kaye declared in a review dated September 2nd 1971: “It seems almost too perfectly ironic that now, at a time in their career when most people have written them off as either dead or dying, the MC5 should power back into action with the first record that comes close to telling the tale of their legendary reputation and attendant charisma. This may appear particularly surprising, given the fact that the group’s live performances have been none too cosmic of late, but then the old saw is that you can’t keep a good band down, and it’s never been more forcefully put than here.” Alas, sales of the album didn’t equal Kaye’s enthusiasm and Atlantic withdrew their support from the band, according to Wayne Kramer: “By the third album, ‘High Time’ we’d finally figured out how to make records. Unfortunately, the way major record companies do business is to sign four for five bands, hope one of them goes gold or platinum and the other bands can eat shit and die. They don’t care about you, your music, your health or your family. They don’t care if you live or die. They care about profit and music share.”
The MC5 continued to gig through the remainder of 1971, but bookings were becoming fewer and the hardcore element of the counter culture that the MC5 were still perceived as representing was deemed either outmoded or too radical. After serving two years of his sentence John Sinclair was freed from prison but the rift had not yet healed between him and the band and they weren’t invited to a benefit concert for their former manager days before his release. Meanwhile, the MC5 had to endure the purgatory of watching their dream slip away, as Michael Davis opines:” When we grew, we grew as a band together. Then we became a product, and it became every man for himself.” They were offered some hope in the form of promoter Ronan O’Rahilly who had partially bankrolled Phun City, then subsequently organised a European tour for the 5 commencing in February 1972. Held back by Airport Security in Detroit, Michael Davis was the last member of the band to arrive in England and the first to quit. He played his final gig at the Fox in Croydon on February 13th. The show was a tumultuous affair as Charles Shaar Murray noted in Cream magazine: “Something happens when the MC5 get it on that only happens when the very best bands get it on. What makes it happen is that the MC5 understand Rock and roll, and they understand it well. They are masters of kinetic excitement, they know how to open a song at maximum power and then build from there, and that is what makes a better show than many a band whose technical ability may be infinitely higher.” However, a photograph of the 5 that was featured alongside the live review suggested that all was not as it should be. Kramer, Smith, Tyner and Thompson are sitting in a row with a bevelled pub mirror behind them, whilst Davis occupies the corner. They look a funny bunch really, not the sort of chaps that one would usually find down the boozer. Perpetually cool Wayne lays waste to a lolly ice, while Fred raises what appears to be a bottle of milk to the camera. Only Rob and Dennis T could possibly be mistaken for locals with their pint glasses. The singer looks amiable enough with his nuclear ‘fro and a half smile whilst the drummer is demure in a knitted hat and woolly scarf. Only the bass player appears out of place, unhappy and adrift. By his own admission, Davis was “Lonely, isolated and sad.” Almost immediately after Michael’s departure, the 4 entered a London studio in the company of Ronan O’Rahilly. With Wayne playing bass the band cut two tracks, ‘Train Music’ and ‘Inside Out’ for a film soundtrack called ‘Gold.’ Perhaps ‘Gold Dust’ would have been more appropriate as even at the time of its release on Mother records later that year, copies of the soundtrack were unusually difficult to locate, whilst the movie which was described as a political satire unfortunately had no advertising budget despite it’s West End premiere.
With English bassist Steve Moorhouse in tow, the band fulfilled their French commitments but for 5 aficionados the key moment was Tyner’s announcement to the press that they would be recording another album ‘Live On Saturn’ on their return to the U.S. Meanwhile, Ronan O’Rahilly began discussing a deal for the band with the American label, Roulette Records. (Incidentally, the New York Dolls were also possible candidates for a deal with Roulette) Sadly, all these plans would come to nothing, whilst Steve Moorhouse’s tenure with the band lasted only a matter of weeks before he was replaced by Derek Hughes for a run of gigs in Germany. Throughout the remainder of 1972, the MC5 continued to fragment, Dennis Thompson and Rob Tyner leaving during the second half of the European tour. Italian promoters cancelled 15 dates when they realised that the MC5 now consisted of only two original members, Wayne Kramer and Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, plus bassist Derek Hughes and drummer Ritchie Dharma. There was nothing left to do or say, but walk away. It was all over, even before that final gig in Detroit on New Year’s Eve, 1972. Wayne Kramer: “The worst thing that happened is we all denied each other. The five of us all turned our backs on each other and went into what I call denial on a massive scale. We suffered a tremendous loss. We lost each other.”
The corporate music industry fails to understand soul. Mainstream acts rarely have afterlives, unlike cult/underground bands that inspire a lasting devotion, particularly in the case of the MC5. In their absence, the 5’s myth became increasingly potent. That the former members surfaced with a plethora of other groups from Destroy All Monsters to Dodge, Main and Sonic’s Rendezvous only served to reinforce the legend, whilst their music is resonant in a host of younger bands from Spacemen 3 to Pearl Jam. Sadly neither Rob Tyner who died of a heart attack in 1991 and Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith who passed away in 1994 lived to see the current revival in the MC5’s fortunes, which has seen Michael Davis, Dennis Thompson and Wayne Kramer join forces again. John Sinclair who now performs the story of Jazz and Blues in a poetry format backed by a band, opened for his former charges in Detroit and Chicago: “Oh man, it was fantastic. The music sounded the same, like they’d been playing the night before. They had this kid, Mark Arm from Mudhoney singing and Marshall Crenshaw playing rhythm.” When asked if he still had a sense of Rob Tyner and Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith being present, Dennis Thompson responded: “All the time. They are with me in my dreams. They are beside me on every stage I am grateful to perform on.”
The End
Dedicated to ‘Desperate’ Dave Burns, who loved the MC5
Nina Antonia 