MC5's Kick Out the Jams

Don McLeese

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781441163349
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

When the Motor City 5 stormed the stage, the band combined the kinetic flash of James Brown on acid with the raw musical dynamics of the Who gone berserk. It's a unique band that can land itself on the cover of Rolling Stone a month before the release of its debut album and then be booted from its record contract just a few months later. Rock had never before seen the likes of the MC5 and never will again. Many of us who were floored by the 5 in concert were convinced that this was the most transcendently pulverizing rock we would ever experience, while many more who heard or read about the band dismissed the 5 as a caricature, a fraud, White Panther bozos play-acting at revolution. There was always plenty of humor to the 5-visionary knuckleheads-though the question was whether they were in on the joke. Frequently ridiculed during their short career, they've since been hailed as a primal influence on everything from punk to metal to Rage Against the Machine to the Detroit populist resurgence of the White Stripes, Kid Rock and Eminem.

Sunday in the Park

Join us in Chicago in August for an international festival of youth music and theater. Rise up and abandon the creeping meatball! Come all you rebels, youth spirits, rock minstrels, truth seekers, peacock freaks, poets, barricade jumpers, dancers, lovers and artists. It is summer. It is the last week of August and the NATIONAL DEATH PARTY meets to bless Johnson. We are there! There are 500,000 of us dancing in the streets, throbbing with amplifiers and harmony. We are making love in the parks. We are reading, singing, laughing, printing newspapers, groping and making a mock convention and celebrating the birth of a FREE AMERICA in our own time…

The life of the American spirit is being torn asunder by the forces of violence, decay and the napalm, cancer fiend. We demand the politics of ecstasy. We are the delicate spoors of the new fierceness that will change America. We will create our own reality, we are Free America. And we will not accept the false theater of the Death Convention. We will be in Chicago. Begin preparations now! Chicago is yours! Do it!

—An Announcement: Youth International Party

(or Yip!) is Born (January 16, 1968)

I didn’t know what to expect as I drove to Chicago’s Lincoln Park on the eve of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Nobody did. Nobody could. Neither politics nor popular music was as carefully scripted back then as both would soon become. For months, speculation had run wild. As conjecture got crazier with anticipation, it seemed that anything could happen. And probably would. The daily newspapers in Chicago had reported threats (jokes?) of protestors organized by something called the Youth International Party—or Yippie!—dosing the city’s entire water supply with LSD. There was talk of guerrilla theater by radicals in Vietcong pajamas and guerrilla tacks scattered on the city’s expressways, causing massive blowouts and gridlock. There were promises of pot smoking in the park, naked swimming in Lake Michigan and rampant fornication in the streets. (“Whenever and where ever there is an aroused appendage and a willing aperture,” promised one Yippie missive.)

Along with the lure of sex and drugs, rock and roll would be Chicago’s major drawing card. For months, underground newspapers across the country had written that there’d be a music festival in Chicago, a free fest, with a lineup that would rival or even eclipse that of the previous year’s Monterey Pop. All the San Francisco bands would be there, to be sure. The Grateful Dead. Big Brother and the Holding Company. Country Joe and the Fish. Maybe even the Rolling Stones. How about the Beatles? Bob Dylan? How could any revolutionary rocker resist something this big?

Countering such anticipatory delirium, there had also been darker talk, premonitions of violence, warnings that the siren song of a rock festival was in fact a lemmings’ invitation. Countercultural skeptics charged Yippie with a cynical attempt to exploit the nation’s youth, spark a violent confrontation, turn music fans into moving targets for angry police. Wrote editor Abe Peck of Chicago’s underground newspaper, the Seed, “If you’re coming to Chicago, be sure to wear some armor in your hair.” Chicago wasn’t San Francisco. This wasn’t the summer of love.

From San Francisco, a new rock rag named Rolling Stone carried this front page headline on its tenth issue, dated May 11, 1968: “Musicians Reject New Political Exploiters.” Founding editor Jann Wenner urged readers to stay away from Chicago. He wrote that the fest was a scam, an attempt to use the power (and promise) of rock and roll to lure naïve youth into battle with police, a plan “as corrupt as the political machine it hopes to disrupt.”

Wrote Wenner, “What makes this otherwise transparent event worthy of notice is that these left-over radical politicos will rise and fall on their ability to exploit the image and popularity of rock and roll.”

The message was clear. Chicago was a tough town. The Yippies were hucksters. Those who followed them were dupes. Maybe such warnings would dampen the turnout, convince those who had to travel hundreds of miles or more that getting their heads beat in wasn’t worth the effort. Maybe Country Joe wouldn’t be coming after all. Whether Wenner was right or wrong didn’t make much difference to me. The drive from the conservative western suburb where my family lived to Lincoln Park was barely twenty miles. Whatever happened, rock or riot, this was the biggest thing to hit my native Chicago in my young life. I couldn’t miss it.

In retrospect, the irony of Wenner’s warnings against those who would “exploit the image and popularity of rock and roll” is too delicious to resist. Portents of violence aside, would the youth of America have been better off following those who believed in rock as a force for cataclysmic social change? Or for swallowing the hip capitalism of someone who would became a multi-millionaire tycoon by exploiting the image and popularity of rock and roll, reducing it to a series of fashion statements between ads for cars and liquor, less a revolutionary force than show business as usual?

It was by no means clear at the time that Rolling Stone would play a crucial role in the mainstreaming (and trivializing) of rock, or that the magazine would become such a slick purveyor of youth-market pandering. Yet what was obvious even then was that Rolling Stone represented a significant departure from the prevailing underground press. Local publications from Chicago’s Seed to the Bay Area’s Berkeley Barb to Lower Manhattan’s East Village Other focused on radical politics and wrote about culture as a manifestation of those politics. Rolling Stone focused on music, on culture, on what would later be called “lifestyle,” relegating political concerns to the periphery. (Ultimately, youth-oriented advertisers unwilling to subsidize publications that wanted to topple the capitalist government would find a safe haven and an attractive demographic in Rolling Stone).

Music and politics would achieve some sort of balance in Chicago, or ignite some sort of explosion. Nobody knew for sure. All that we knew (because we’d been reading about it as fact for months) was that an estimated half-million freaks, radicals and disaffected youth would be invading the city—our city!—both to protest and to party. Unlike the artistically successful, financially troubled Monterey Pop Festival of the previous summer, this free festival would not only gather the tribes, but mobilize them, politicize them, radicalize them. It would transform peace-and-love hippies into hit-and-run yippies.

In the process, it would expose the Democratic Party as the fraud it had become. The promise of a “peace candidate” had come to naught. With the “Happy Warrior,” Vice-President Hubert Horatio Humphrey, tabbed to accept the nominational baton from the reviled Lyndon Johnson, there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrats’ approach to the war in Vietnam and that of the vile Republican challenger, Richard Nixon. Humphrey might smile while dropping the bombs, whereas Nixon would scowl, but politics had plainly become a joke. The radically disenfranchised youth of America were determined to have the last laugh.

As David Farber would write twenty years later in Chicago ’68, “The Yippies, playing in costumes as court jesters and fools, believed they could make a revolution by simulating a revolution that looked like fun” (p. 212).

Whatever happened in Chicago would provide a climax to what had already proven the most tumultuous, divisive year in modern American history. It was a year that had seen Johnson shock the nation with his announcement that he wouldn’t run for re-election, bowing to the escalating opposition to his escalation of the war in Vietnam. It was a year that had seen destiny shattered by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. It was a year that had watched the youthful idealism of the Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy “peace” campaigns harden into angry cynicism and militant activism, as it became increasingly apparent that the protest that was driving Johnson from office wouldn’t prevent the nomination of Humphrey as his successor.

“Dump the Hump!” was the rallying cry for Chicago, or one of them at least. The fix was in. The ballot box was a sham. The two-party system was a farce. Yet if the voice of the people could not be heard within the convention, it would resound throughout the streets of Chicago. The contrast couldn’t have been more striking. Gathering inside the International Amphitheatre on the city’s south side would be the straights, the suits, the political machinists; the culture of imperialism, of napalm, of death. Outside the convention would be the culture of youth, of life, of naked flesh, of ecstasy, of sex, drugs and rock and roll. The celebration in the streets would expose the Democratic Party as the evil (at worst) irrelevance (at best) it had become.

Here, then, were two Americas; the one, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, was busy being born while the other was busy dying. If this clash of cultures made a second American Revolution inevitable—as so many of us so strongly believed—the major questions were whether this cultural upheaval would occur sooner rather than later and whether violence would be required to facilitate it. Did the end justify the means? Militants were increasingly eager to risk some bloody noses to hasten the process along—to “bring the war home”—while idealists were willing to see change proceed at a more peaceful pace. Both sides agreed that the extinction of the dinosaur that was mainstream America was within sight. Was it just a shot away? Or just a kiss away? (As the Rolling Stones would ponder a year later in the apocalyptic “Gimme Shelter.”)

If you’d told me then what the country would be like now, I wouldn’t have believed it. I couldn’t have envisioned, almost forty years later, that the power structure in America would not only remain the same but be stronger than ever. I couldn’t have imagined how harmless, effete and irrelevant rock would become, as it mushroomed into the sort of huge industry whose values it had once threatened to subvert. (And I wouldn’t have anticipated that middle age would find me with a steady paycheck from a “straight” job—as a journalism professor at the University of Iowa.)

Yes, those were different times. All that my eighteen-year-old self knew, on the eve of Chicago, was that the country was falling apart at the seams, and what we needed to do was just give those strings a little tug. For months before the convention, bright blue posters in the city and across the country heralded a FESTIVAL OF LIFE, AUG. 25–30, CHICAGO. MUSIC–LIGHTS–FREE–THEATER–MAGIC. The poster depicted the various United States of America as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one that had to be pulled apart before it could be put back together. Small print at the bottom of the poster gave the New York address and phone number of something called the Youth International Party. Smack dab in the middle of the jigsaw map was an arrow pointed at Chicago, with the exclamation YIPPIE! on it.

As I type this, more than thirty-five years later, that framed poster hangs on the office wall above my computer.

* * *

When August 25 finally arrived, my younger brother and I drove the forty-five minutes from our family’s home in Glen Ellyn to what we envisioned as another world—a free zone, a battle zone, a zone of adventure beyond anything we’d ever experienced in our sleepy suburb. We were ready for the counterculture orgy of free love, stoned-out bliss and mind-bending rock that we’d been reading so much about.

As we made the short walk to the park from Chicago’s Old Town—the neighborhood that was the heart of local hippie culture—our balloon of expectation deflated. Where were all the people? Okay, maybe a half-million had been a bit optimistic, but there weren’t a tenth that number in the park on a Sunday afternoon. Or even a hundredth. Instead, if you counted (and you could have), there were perhaps two thousand milling around the southwestern sector of the park—the Yippie enclave—a motley assemblage of tie-dyed freaks, bushy-haired hippies, curious high-school kids and a few buttoned-down radicals sitting or strolling, looking at each other, waiting for something to happen. We would later learn that, amid the few, there were plenty of undercover agents who had infiltrated the gathering and might later incite some aggressive action.

Instead of the high drama anticipated, the early part of that afternoon was closer to the era’s cliches of summer in the park—mellow, groovy, filled with good vibes. Allen Ginsberg sat in the lotus position under a tree amid the grassy expanse, leading a circle in the chanting of “Ommmmm.” (He would subsequently chant for seven hours, as the vibes turned increasingly sinister.) The two wild-haired, flashing-eyed Yippie masterminds—Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin—put a brave face on the meager turnout, smiling in the sunshine as they scurried and schemed, darting this way and that, recognizable from their pictures in the newspapers as “leaders” of whatever was about to transpire. Yet few of the locals in the park that day seemed to show much interest in following the lead of these manic East Coast activists. Rolling Stone had warned us.

Anyway, where was the music? Where were the Dead, the Stones? Where was Country Joe? From what we could see, the Festival of Life had been a pipe dream. There was no stage, no amps, no mic.

It wasn’t until late afternoon that one band would be brave enough—or foolhardy enough—to attempt to spark a revolution in Chicago and risk the wrath of the police. One band not only matched the anticipatory hype, but exceeded it. One band would transform itself into myth, embodying the chaos of cultural uprising for generations to come.

“Brothers and sisters, are you ready to testify? I bring you a testimonial: the MC5!!!!!”

Let me admit, brothers and sisters, that I can barely remember significant details of the day that I’ll never forget. Impressions dissolve in the haze of marijuana from that sunny summer afternoon in Chicago, while the subsequent passage of almost four decades has sacrificed more to the mists of memory. Yet the imprint remains indelible. Like a car crash or a blitzkrieg, it divides my existence into Before and After. For nothing was more important in my eighteen-year-old life than rock and roll. And rock and roll would never be the same for me after I saw—experienced? endured? survived?—the band that would change my life.

No, I’m not going to pull a Jon Landau. I won’t claim that I had a vision of rock’s future when I first withstood the aural assault of the Motor City Five, whose sound and fury disrupted that idyllic Sunday in Lincoln Park. Contrary to common legend, the MC5 didn’t spark a riot with their free concert on the eve of the 1968 convention. They simply lit the fuse, escalating the tension, energizing the crowd to a fever pitch of musical militancy as the police encircled the park, with their riot gear and billy clubs, maintaining a stone-faced vigil.

I can still see the orb-like Afro of the lead singer as he badgered the crowd, pointing his finger, thrusting his fist, working his feet like a speed-freak James Brown. I would later know him as Rob Tyner, but all I knew at the time was that he was crazy. But not as crazy as the two guitarists, the ones I would later know as Wayne Kramer and Fred “Sonic” Smith, both brandishing their instruments as if they were lethal weapons while swiveling their hips, arching their backs, flailing their arms, kicking their legs.

All this over a rhythm section that left no space unfilled in its relentless propulsion, a bassist and drummer—Michael Davis and Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson, I would later learn—less concerned with staying within the pocket than obliterating that pocket. When a low-flying surveillance helicopter buzzed the band, the whoosh and whirr of its blades didn’t interrupt the music, but enhanced it. Even the occasional roar of a cop’s motorcycle seemed like part of the musical gestalt, amid a crowd that fully expected that musical chaos would lead to physical violence. This wasn’t a rock band; it was a street fight. This wasn’t a concert; it was a battle zone.

We had been waiting for something to happen, even desperate for something to happen. The MC5 were what happened. We hadn’t known what to expect, but none of us had expected the 5. Almost none of us had ever heard of the band, except those who had made the drive from their native Detroit. Though we thought we’d been ready for anything, the frenzied, ear-splitting performance left most of us shell-shocked. It was a musical mugging so far beyond the realm of expectation that it would take years before punk or metal would provide some sort of frame of reference, though no punk or metal band would ever match the galvanizing force of the 5.

Despite the band’s railings against the “pigs” and exhortations to “kick out the jams,” the music didn’t rouse the rabble so much as render us benumbed or bewildered, confused or bemused. In the wake of that aural assault, the most prevalent reaction was What was that?—mouthed more than heard, with the aftershock continuing to ring in our ears. When Abbie Hoffman announced that the cops had pulled the plug on the festival, as if there was anything on the bill beyond the half-hour blitz by the MC5, an ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• 1. Sunday in the Park
• 2. Muscle Cars and Loud Guitars
• 3. Rock and Roll Guerrillas
• 4. You Must Choose, Brothers and Sisters…
• 5. No Middle Ground
• 6. Bigger than Chairman Mao
• 7. Encore
• 8. Afterword
• Copyright