Butterworth MC5

Every Album, Every Song
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-78952-633-2
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 104 Seiten

Reihe: On Track Shorts

Of all the loud, rebellious rock groups forged in the white heat of America's Motor City, MC5 were the most uncompromising. A high-octane force of nature, saluted now as punk pioneers, MC5 were streetwise Detroit factory rats, assembly-line escapees who lit the touchpaper on some of the most combustible rock'n'roll ever heard.
It's 1968. An incendiary debut album fused the raging pungency of free jazz with dislocated cosmic blues and brutally confrontational garage rock. A second stripped the music bare and became a blueprint for Britpunk. A third, exuding maturity and professionalism, was widely praised. Yet by 1972 their advance ruptured by accident, deception and often self-sewn misadventure, MC5 were done.
Despite the tendency to self-ignite, the distractions of activist tomfoolery and management seeking only a soundtrack to sedition, MC5's aim was pure: to get down, party and blow every other rock band into insensibility. Now Richard Butterworth dissects MC5's chaotic, magnificent history, their records and the fevered countercultural ecosystem that spawned them: the speed-fried music; the bristling posture; the duplicitous record deals; the corrosive drugs. And, of course, the significance of MC5's infamous catchphrase. So right now, it's time to KICK OUT THE JAMS (brothers and sisters).

Richard Butterworth's grown-up career began in advertising, first as a paste-up artist, later as a graphic designer. Settling on copywriting, for years, he reaped the pleasures, pains and penury of freelancing. As a lifelong believer in the healing and redemptive power of music, however, he knew that humankind's highest art-form would eventually saddle up and ride him into the sunset. Today Richard lives in Cornwall, UK, with his partner Sue, a golden retriever and CD shelf-space in managed but perpetual decline. He still reads and writes about the music he loved before he was a grown-up.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Butterworth, Richard

Leseproben

Chapter 1

Whose Revolution?

There wasn’t a lot of doctrinaire mumbo-jumbo in our music, and I think that was resented.

Rob Tyner, interviewed by Ben Edmonds, 1990

It’s 1968. Politicos and peaceniks march against America’s meddling in Vietnam. Anti-war factions in the US and Europe spring up and down like whack-a-mole. Modus operandi vary: megaphone diplomacy; cop-baiting street scuffles; improvised, I’m-mad-me eccentricity. For many, only dialogue will stem the flow of body bags. Some throw stones, or worse. A few devolve to clownish mischief, from exorcising the bad juju in the Defense Department to nominating a pig named Pigasus for President.

Whether the best way to bring the boys home was to petition the politicians, tear down the walls or levitate the Pentagon was moot. For MC5, it was academic: the revolution was abstract, conceptual, a vessel for rock ’n’ roll, not vice-versa. The 5 had flirted with the usual touchstones of 1950s-60s protest: Das Kapital, Che Guevara posters, Ho Chi Minh cufflinks, whatever. But while the era’s more strident protestors and academicians took MC5 to their hearts as shock-troops of the resistance, the band’s onstage musical blitzkreig flattered to deceive. MC5 were no more far-left political attack-dogs than Ted Nugent was a pacifist. Despite hand-me-down wisdom inherited from John Sinclair and a coterie of ideological exhibitionists, anyone back in 1968 looking to MC5 as a radical lodestar would have been disappointed. Tying the 5 to the coming crisis of Western capitalism was like calling Frank Zappa a hippie; violent upheaval wasn’t on their bucket list, even if they played what many took to be its soundtrack.

The 5’s aggression in concert suggested another hotline to their closest musical inspirations. Pete Townshend may have hoped to die before he got old enough to write a rock opera, but while The Who’s creative lead fed his fury into some of the stormiest rock music ever heard, the composer of ‘My Generation’ and ‘Substitute’ was no placard-waving politico. More auto-destructive art project than Oxford Union debate or Grosvenor Square riot, Townshend’s anger felt existential and arbitrary, its target anything the establishment threw at him. Like Marlon Brando’s in The Wild One, Pete’s negativism proposed no solution, and he held in contempt evangelising, self-styled radicals and holier-than-thou activists. Witness his peremptory dispatch of Abbie Hoffman when the Youth International Party leader tried to muscle in on The Who’s show at Woodstock, of which more later.

In their earliest years, MC5 were kicking down the fence because it was there, not because the neighbours had all the local gossip on a better world. And in truth, little would change before the band called time in 1972. Having toed John Sinclair’s party line and assumed the position with dutiful seditionary aplomb, the 5 later insisted they never bought their manager’s faux-militancy and magical thinking, still less the gurning tomfoolery of histrionic provocateurs like Hoffman and fellow late-1960s nuisances Jerry Rubin and Paul Krassner. As for the routine misreading of MC5’s famous signature tune, America’s middle classes were better advised to lock up their daughters than unlock the gun cupboard. The only armed struggle MC5 had on their minds was feverish, sweaty, adolescent sex. ‘I only wanted to be in a rock and roll band,’ Mike Davis mused. ‘This crusade to forge a new world seemed ludicrous, a Quixotic lunge at an imaginary adversary.’ In 1990, Rob Tyner reminded Ben Edmonds, of Creem and Rolling Stone, how rarely, to Sinclair’s chagrin, insurrectionary rhetoric was admitted into their songwriting. As later recorded in the essential MC5: An Oral Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band (2024) by Edmonds, Brad Tolinski and Jaan Uhelszki, Rob lamented how the 5 had become ‘artists under a quasi-Maoist regime’:

In Mao’s China, art was to be subjugated [to] political message and propaganda, and we weren’t always playing that game.

The MC5 story began in Lincoln Park: part of the archipelago of working-class communities in Metro Detroit which the city’s parvenus dismissed as ‘Downriver’. As Wayne Kramer wrote: ‘The Summer of Love didn’t make a stop in Detroit. It didn’t fit.’ Just as the post-industrial good earth of the English Midlands would propagate such bad apples as The Move, Black Sabbath, Mott The Hoople, Slade, Judas Priest, Napalm Death, half of Led Zeppelin and three-quarters of The Pretenders, MC5 were welded to the Motor City like fairings on a Ford Fairlane. Peace and love never stood an earthly among the shop floors, chicken stands and downtown dive bars of Detroit, so where better than the birthplace of the pumped-up muscle car to bear the ultimate in virile, high-octane US rock ’n’ roll? Where else but America’s once-thriving industrial heart, soon to be listed for life support, could more decisively convince young, frustrated musicians to take up arms?

Between 1910 and 1940, Detroit was among the northern industrial hubs to attract the first Great Migration from the Deep South of people soon to identify as African-American. Only a relative lack of professional recording facilities prevented the immediate arrival of electric urban blues to rival its fertile Midwestern neighbour, Chicago. Then by the late 1940s, Detroit’s massively expanding auto industry, with its opportunities for jobs and growth, was fuel-injecting America’s post-war prosperity. The black diaspora was now an ineluctable part of the Motor City community. A thriving music recording industry could only follow.

During a fortnight of dates in December 1947 backing Sarah Vaughan at Detroit’s El Sino Club, Charlie Parker was asked to cut a few sides by Savoy Records. Keen to avoid a time-consuming drive back to the Windy City, where he’d be obliged to weather a pay-related union ban on commercial recording activities, the bebop giant’s quintet checked in at United Sound Systems on Second Avenue. The state-of-the-art setup impressed Parker’s group, and word spread. Detroit-out-of-Clarksdale bluesman John Lee Hooker arrived to cut his seminal ‘Boogie Chillen’, and United’s reputation was sealed as a centre of excellence for the recording industry. And Detroit’s own, as a hotbed of fierce musical creativity, was ignited.

Towards the end of the 1950s, over at 2648 West Grand Boulevard, an enterprising songwriter, record producer and former boxer, Berry Gordy Jr, was busy signing talented young black singers and instrumentalists to a new imprint. Gordy had spotted the commercial advantage to be had in sweetening the hard-edged blues percolating up from the Delta with the comfort food of R&B, doo-wop and gospel. Alongside Smokey Robinson, Jackie Wilson and Al Green (no relation to the famously reverential singer), he raised a thrilling new strain of slick, dancefloor-filling black pop-soul, which an international audience lapped up and eventually put millions of bucks into the Tamla Motown label chief’s pocket. That Berry was as shrewd a capitalist entrepreneur as any car-plant CEO was no hindrance. As Hitsville USA thrived, he had the smarts to tack the production-line ethos of the auto industry onto a sleek recording business model with no loss of forward momentum, fuel efficiency or sexy, chromium-plated pizzazz.

Yet Gordy’s achievements (some would say off the backs of his artists, but never within earshot of his lawyers) proved a paradox. For here was a prosperous black businessman, his fortune founded on tailoring indigenous music to the widest possible market, operating in a town where the rise of automated process – just one aspect of the forces of capitalism – was eroding prospects for thousands of black workers. Only a select few were lucky and talented enough to escape food stamps and the assembly line and become household names with Tamla Motown. Yet motorvating through Metro Detroit like a demolition derby, holding a darkly combative mirror to Motown’s relatively unthreatening image, were a tough bunch of white rockers. The Stooges, Ted Nugent’s Amboy Dukes, Bob Seger, The Up, Suzi Quatro’s pre-Chinnichap band The Pleasure Seekers, The Scott Richard Case, Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels, Grand Funk Railroad, Alice Cooper and – above all – MC5 stepped up and spoke to a harsher, swarf-under-the-fingernails realism. It was all nailgunned into a growing antiwar, anti-establishment pugnacity, giving Motor City rock ’n’ roll a sense of identity to rival that of New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco.

It’s 1963. Wayne Kramer (b Wayne Stanley Kambes, Detroit, 30 April 1948) lures high-school buddy Fred Smith (b Frederick Dewey Smith, Lincoln County W. Virginia, 14 September 1948) away from The Vibratones to play bongos with his new band. The Bounty Hunters are a Ventures-style surf outfit christened by Wayne, like so many Motor City dudes a racing fan, after the nickname of dragstrip legend Connie Kalitta. At the bidding of his future lead vocalist, Wayne will change his own surname to something easier on the tongue: ‘Kramer’ sounds good: a consumer product, a brand of cheese, or a vacuum cleaner. This appeals to the all-American boy lurking within this radical novitiate. He’ll also distance himself from his long-absent father and an unhappy, abusive adolescence at the wandering hands of his stepfather. Fred’s...