12
AN EXPERIENCE OF POWER
Zenta New Year, 1968, the Grande Ballroom, Detroit
IN THE YEARS between the release of Elvis’s first single and the end of the 1960s, a generation of young people came to accept the notion that the large themes of contemporary life were not just reflected in, but were somehow entangled with popular music—that rock and roll was making things happen. That it was not just the soundtrack of their teenage lives but was also playing some mysterious but significant part in a transformation that was coming over the Western world, if not the globe.
Sometime in 1968 one seemingly very stoned person sat down to try to articulate how that was, how it worked. He was John Sinclair, the manager of the MC5, a rock-and-roll band from Detroit, Michigan. In his eyes the MC5 embodied this process. He had been asked to write the liner notes for their debut album, and he sensed an opportunity to lay it all out:
We say the MC5 is the solution to the problem of separation, because they are so together. The MC5 is totally committed to the revolution, as the revolution is totally committed to driving people out of their separate shells and into each other’s arms. I’m talking about unity, brothers and sisters, because we have to get it together. We are the solution to the problem if we will just be that. If we can feel it, LeRoi Jones said, “Feeling predicts intelligence.” The MC5 will make you feel it or leave the room. The MC5 will drive you crazy out of your head into your body. The MC5 is rock and roll. Rock and roll is the music of our bodies, of our whole lives—the resensifier, Rob Tyner calls it:
[The MC5] are a working model of the new paleo-cybernetic culture in action. There is no separation. They live together to work together, they eat together, fuck together, get high together, walk down the street and through the world together. There is no separation. Just as the music will bring you together like that, if you hear it. If you will live it. And we will make sure you hear it, because we know you need it as bad as we do. We have to have it. The music is the source and the effect of our spirit flesh. The MC5 is the source and effect of the music, just as you are. Just as I am. Just to hear the music and have it be ourselves, is what we want. What we need. We are a lonely, desperate people, pulled apart by the killer forces of capitalism and competition, and we need the music to hold us together. Separation is doom. We are free men and we demand a free music, a free high energy source that will drive us wild into the streets of America yelling and screaming and tearing down everything that would keep people slaves. . . . Go wild! The world is yours! Take it now and be one with it! Kick out the jams, motherfucker! And stay alive with the MC5!1
The Rust Belt, a huge arc across the top of the eastern United States, the cockpit of American industry, is not a landscape made for vision. From Newark to Minneapolis, there’s not much romance in the soil. New England has Nantucket whalers and Salem witches. The lore of the western plains is known all over the world. The South’s mythology is thick enough to choke on. But the industrial Northeast and Midwest are a geographical metaphor for mundanity. There’s no bullshit, as the natives might say. And the suburbs of these northern cities, a lot of them still new and treeless in the 1960s, were more mundane still: the archetypal “geography of nowhere.”
But this is also the part of the country that absorbed the giant waves of European immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the Jews, the Italians, the Irish, the Poles. These were also the cities that had received the Great Migration of blacks from the rural South, cities that by the 1960s had huge segregated black populations.
The people who survived in these cities were hard, practical, earthy, tough. They worked in heavy industries, often in brutal and brutalizing conditions. But there was an element of insurgency in these city people. As union members they had fought and bled—and many had died—for economic justice. And as the country turned the corner from the 1950s into the ’60s, a spirit of resistance was rising in the black communities.
Of these cities, the archetype was Detroit, Michigan, the Motor City, the heart of the American automotive industry. Detroit froze in the winter and baked in the summer, and there was black grit on the windows in all seasons. For Dave Marsh the Motor City “was as anti-metaphysical as the cars that are so aptly its symbol.” The destiny of the kids was a life working on the factory line.
Most of the music we’ve talked about in this book came out of the American coasts or the South, or Britain. Any of these places, to a midwesterner, would seem highly metaphysical. But the trail of vision that we’ve been following ultimately leads into the heart of American ordinariness, the dug-in center of America’s tough, dense, hardheaded heartland, the hardest place in the country to set ablaze, you would think. (Though you might have thought differently if you had seen these cities by night in those days, with the volcanic glow from the refineries and furnaces and factories red against the black sky.) The story of 1960s rock and roll isn’t finished until we follow the trail of fire into the Midwest. We would miss, in a way, the story’s climax if we did not.
Fig. 12.1. Industrial Skyline
By the late sixties there had come to be a coterie of white radicals, artists, and musicians in Detroit who were intimately familiar with what gospel, jazz, and soul music had done for black America, for the Civil Rights Movement, for underground hip culture, and ultimately for the nation as a whole in the years following World War II. They thought they saw an analogous process in the way that rock and roll had worked a transformation in white youth culture, had spawned something like a revolutionary shift in attitudes and identity. They believed that in the context of an escalating confrontation between a revolutionary youth culture and the power of the state, the counterculture was going to need a music that would do for them what freedom songs had done for young blacks in the South. They were going to need a music that induced not psychedelic quietism but fervor and resistance. If deliberately fanned and focused, the revolutionary spark in rock and roll might yet set the cities on fire. At the same time they saw that, by the late sixties, rock and roll—dominated by London and San Francisco—had gotten caught up in psychedelic grandiosity and the ambition to legitimize itself as high art, and was losing sight of this first and most vital function.
John Sinclair of Flint, Michigan, was a homegrown midwestern beat and jazzbo, and he was more or less at the center of this scene. He was listening as jazz got harder and crazier as a new wave of black activism electrified the cities. His ears were open enough to hear the revolutionary energy in rock and roll too. Eventually, the course of things brought together Sinclair, the person who thought all this through the furthest, and five kids from the Downriver suburbs who could actually execute it.
Part of the role of the MC5 in sixties legend is as the apotheosis of the American garage band. They were the kids in your high school who were the first to hear the siren song of English rock and roll, to dare to wear high-heeled boots and paisley shirts and hair hanging in their eyes. Some of the MC5’s earliest surviving recordings are labeled “from Mrs. Kramer’s basement.” (“Garage band” is a term from California, the land of no winter and no basements. In the rest of the country basements were the forcing houses of rock and roll.) In the beginning kids like these were few and they were isolated, separated by an apparently unbridgeable gulf from the bands and the subcultures that inspired them. They were trying to build a response out of the materials at hand, like the engines of the cars they worked on. There was no rooted bohemia to link them up with any longer narrative. It was all new, very new—the big excitement for Detroit kids was the release each year of the new-model cars. If there was to be a mythology, they were going to have to build it themselves.
The MC5 came from the same world as millions of teenagers who were certain that where they lived was nowhere. Millions of typical American children knew the textures of this world from everyday life—the drab high school classrooms, the fast-food places, the cruising strips, the teen clubs. What there was of glamour and mystery in this life came from the records they listened to, the blue sheen on the gleaming black vinyl.
For a teenage rock-and-roll fan in that early time, with teenage tastes, one of the dreary facts of life was that not every track on an album was going to rock. One of the rituals of bringing a new album home was to set the needle down for a few seconds at the beginning of each cut so that you would waste no time sitting through the slow songs. There would be time for them later. Sgt. Pepper’s was the last album I remember doing this with before the musicians all seemed to decide at once it was time to break their fans of this habit, that their psychedelic reveries were leading them to more sophisticated modes, and it was a mark of maturing taste for all of us to go along with them. This was a step the young men who would become the MC5 were crucially reluctant to take. They clung to the simple, teenage impression that the fun lay in the loud fast songs, the ones that bothered their parents. This adolescent recalcitrance would eventually affect the history of rock and roll.
Juvenile as it may have been, they were on to something, something that was in danger of drifting away in psychedelic fumes, and it was largely the influence of the MC5 and their scene that preserved it and finally enshrined it at the heart of rock-and-roll aesthetics. It’s the seemingly obvious idea that the first job of a rocker is to rock. A truism now, maybe, but like a lot of truisms it actually represents the outcome of a long battle. First settle that question, the question of rocking, and then all other issues may be raised. Then you may explore gender or social justice or decadence or teenage anomie, addiction or God or the failure of the welfare state. But first you have to rock. That’s your claim on our attention.
From intensive study of the hits from England and incessant exposure to them on the radio, the kids in the basements, the cleverer ones, began to develop a craft. At a minimum they figured out how to build tension and release it. But beyond that there was a way you could build a song so that you could both maintain a musical structure and put a lot of pressure on that structure at the same time, so that energy and structure would have a controlled fight, focusing the tension on a certain point so that it finally cracked and yielded a kind of utopian explosion of vented teenage frustration, a momentary ecstasy that felt like triumph or freedom. It might be the best feeling you knew. As a technique it was not necessarily complicated, but the effect could be powerful. In terms of pure exhilaration, the best of these basement songs could survive being played back to back with the newest British singles on the local radio stations.
These moments are what were known, in the technical language of the teenage rocker, as the “good parts.” The founding members of the MC5—Fred Smith, Robert Derminer (soon to be Rob Tyner), and Wayne Kramer, from the Downriver Detroit suburb of Lincoln Park, conceived down in Mrs. Kramer’s basement of a music that was made only of good parts, that would take as its starting point the explosion in the typical garage hit, and somehow make that the whole song. So that you not only eliminated the slow songs, but also eliminated all but the most exciting parts from each individual song. (It’s predictive, in a way, of sampling and the way that hip-hop was first built.) If this sounds like it would be kind of relentless on the ears and nerves, that’s part of the point. Remember that part of Sinclair’s threat is to make you feel it or leave the room.
There they are, down in the basement around the record player, playing the good parts over and over on comically degraded media—seven-inch plastic disks sticky with soda pop and grit from basement floors—on the most primitive equipment. No sense at all of what better audio would be, or that that would even be desirable. The distortion of those badly treated singles—the tendency of distortion on vinyl to sound as if it harmonizes with the actual recorded sound—affected their idea of the sound they wanted; they wanted the full noisiness of those defaced singles, a sound with no spaces, a sound you not only take in through the ear but through your bones. The MC5 were not the first band to deliberately employ distortion, but from the beginning distortion would be a basic weapon in their arsenal. Distortion, feedback, the noise of the equipment, of the technology would be part of the music. “MC5” is usually taken to stand for “Motor City 5,” but some members of the band have said that the name was supposed to sound like a car-engine part.
At the beginning, cracking the garage code would have seemed a sufficient ambition. But once they did it—and they did it fairly quickly—they sensed that there was a further horizon. When they began smoking dope and then tripping, they got heady, and they began to theorize, to think about the implications of that ecstatic rock-and-roll moment, to imagine techniques to extend and widen that instant of transcendence. They began to make a connection between what they had learned about how rock and roll works and all the talk about consciousness that was in the air.
Nineteen sixty-six turned into ’67 and the teen clubs began to metamorphose into psychedelic ballrooms and the 5 were getting more eccentric along with their English heroes. They moved into the city and finally they met John Sinclair. Sinclair understood the things that were at the outer edge of their thinking and showed them how they connected with bigger ideas, helped them articulate what they had been working toward, and connected their emerging sense of mission with the needs of a nascent radical community.
And here we need to mention the other great factor in their development, one that Sinclair heard in them and drew out—soul. That is, a powerful orientation toward blackness—political, cultural, musical, even religious. After the Rolling Stones and the Muscle Shoals house band, the 5 are probably the white sixties band with the surest, most creative feeling for black music. The Stones delved deeper into the Mississippi delta sources of the blues, but the MC5 developed a special ear for, of all things, jazz. What caught their imagination was the avantgarde jazz of the time, what they were calling free jazz, a hard, wild, desperate, dissonant style. To ears accustomed to earlier jazz styles it could sound like atonal anarchy, but it was energized by a new spirit in the urban black communities, by visionary new modes of black spirituality and a thirst for freedom that was boiling over.
The 5’s encounter with free jazz resulted in a sensibility unique in rock that could include both “Louie, Louie” and Pharoah Sanders’s “Upper Egypt” in one set. The MC5’s vocabulary of sonic assault came as much from players like Sanders, Sun Ra, or John Coltrane as from the Who. As crazy as rock and roll had gotten, this jazz told them it could get crazier. Via Fred Smith and Wayne Kramer the abandoned shriek of Pharoah Sanders’s sax has gotten into the DNA of all really oppositional rock and roll since that time. Guitar players to this day without knowing it have options of noise open to them because of free-jazz players as channeled through the 5.
That was the beginning of an awareness on their part of their role in a larger, older project. That there was life for them in finding, in their own cocky way, a way to stay near as they could to the golden ecstatic cord that ultimately winds back to Africa. The 5 and Sinclair wanted to affiliate themselves with it. You can call it the old hopeless politically problematic quest of the White Negro—and today it would no doubt be called out as cultural appropriation—but there was love and pleasure in it for all its presumption. And in fact it worked.
Let’s issue the statement here: the MC5 were one of the most exciting live rock-and-roll acts of the sixties, maybe ever, and you’d get no argument from a lot of people if you left out the “one of.” And, in their debut album, Kick Out the Jams, they made one of the most exciting live rock-and-roll records ever (same qualifier as before re the “one of ”). Kick Out the Jams was recorded on October 30 and 31, 1968, at Detroit’s legendary Grande Ballroom, on what John Sinclair and the freaks at Trans-Love Energies were calling “Zenta New Year” (Zenta meaning “cosmic life energy” as Sinclair explained)—day one, year one of the new revolutionary dispensation. Dave Marsh once said he would have gone to see the 5 if the Rolling Stones had been playing across the street for free.
In part this was because, unlike most of their peers in the white counterculture, but in common with most of their black contemporaries, the MC5 believed in the notion of a “show.” In hippie circles show connoted showbiz—Vegas reviews and artificiality, inauthentic, un-spontaneous. In a lot of late-sixties rock music, the body of the performer was separate from the music. It didn’t need to—indeed it shouldn’t—express the music. San Francisco bands stood like acolytes attending the music and were considered the more authentic for it. On the other hand black popular music, both sacred and secular, was based on the belief that dance—or at least some kind of physical expression of the music—was not separable from a musical performance. You cheated an audience by not performing physically for them. The exemplars of performance in white rock and roll were certainly the Who, and in R & B James Brown and his Famous Flames had no rivals. The MC5 borrowed from both, and were maybe not as elegant as either but just as enthusiastic. The idea, which they never left behind, was to embody the music as well as play it.
Further, the MC5’s show was built on the structure of a gospel service. They are memorably introduced on Kick Out the Jams with a Holiness-style oration from “Brother” J. C. Crawford, who introduces the central notion of “testifying.” Testifying is part of the service in a Holiness church (sometimes whole services are devoted to testifying) where members of the congregation may rise and describe a concrete way that the Holy Spirit has acted in their lives lately, usually with great fervor as if they may be already in the Spirit. The analogy is to testimony in a court of law, first-person evidence of the reality of the thing your hope is based on. For the MC5 the idea of testifying crystallized what they believed they were doing. On one level they were making a party, entertaining, providing a rhythm for dancing; at the same time they were offering experiential confirmation of a type of energy and consciousness that would require a new society to embody it.
The astonishing energy that the MC5 expended on their shows, as captured on Kick Out the Jams, is also connected to this identification with the black church. Bassist Mike Davis has described a feeling they had while on stage that something of great importance depended on their performance. The MC5 did not believe that they were only functioning as entertainers. They were a resource for a community. They provided an experience that empowered the members of their community to go back into the world and live out that new society. If they could bring the energy through on each night, then the revolution was possible. It was their vocation to give away power, and this vocation was closely analogous to that of gospel musicians. Yeah, the MC5 were “bad” just as Sinclair says; there was violence in their sound and plenty of aggressive sex. But it was also a service. This comes through quite clearly on the record. It accounts for a kind of exaltation that sets Kick Out the Jams apart from other live rock records.
From one angle the MC5’s music is all push and a Faustian desire to push harder and further than anyone ever had. This is the art of the phallus, to be sure. But like the phallus worship of antiquity, it’s not domination that is the issue but the distribution of generative energy to the tribe. Come and join this ancient dance, they sing, the dance from which all dances come.
Few people come to the end of Kick Out the Jams without feeling that they have experienced something. I mean something other than, or more than, an aesthetic experience. What I mean is, even the most intense aesthetic experiences are still once removed from primary, firsthand experience. Reading the most powerful description of being punched in the face can never have the impact of being really punched in the face. But Kick Out the Jams in a way breaks through the aesthetic buffer. You feel as if something has happened to you. You’re a little traumatized but in a good way. The feeling is something like a kind of surprise, kind of spooky, like observing an anomalous phenomenon actually presented for close observation, as if a real alien had sat down for an interview or the Loch Ness monster had swum up to the dock and offered DNA samples. But of course if that happened it would have implications beyond just the monster. It would be the thin end of a wedge that might eventually crack open the ordinary world and offer a new range of possibilities. With the MC5 there is the added factor that the phenomenon not only astonishes but does you good, is vivifying. When you are done with Kick Out the Jams, you have a conviction. It may be hard to articulate, but you know something now, something has been demonstrated for you through your own experience, beyond argument, something good. You have a sense of a thing you can count on that you weren’t sure of before. The MC5 have testified. You are better off than you were.
Norman Mailer happened upon the MC5 playing in Chicago’s Lincoln Park during the 1968 Democratic Convention, and was a little rattled:
It was the roar of the beast in all nihilism, electric bass and drum driving behind out of their own non-stop to the end of mind. And the reporter, caught in the din—had the horns of the Huns ever had noise to compare?—knew this was some variety of true song for the Hippies and adolescents in the house, he knew they were a generation which lived in the sound of the destruction of all order as he had known it . . . there was the sound of mountains crashing in this holocaust of the decibels, hearts bursting, literally bursting, as if this were the sound of death by explosion within, the drums of physiological climax when the mind was blown, and forces of the future, powerful, characterless, as insane and scalding as waves of lava, came flushing through the urn of all acquired culture and sent the brain like a foundered carcass smashing down a rapids, revolving through a whirl of demons, pool of uproar, discords vibrating, electric crescendo screaming as if at the electro-mechanical climax of the age . . . so he knew now on this cool gray Sunday afternoon in August, chill in the air like the chill of the pale and the bird of fear beginning to nest in the throat, that trouble was coming, serious trouble.2
Half a century on, Kick Out the Jams might sound to some like nothing more than an energetic bluesy rock-and-roll band in front of an excited hometown crowd. But shift your perspective just a bit and you can still feel the sublimely appalling noise that Mailer heard: the sound of “the destruction of all order,” a sound like a modernist nightmare of a vast machinery driven beyond its capacity and spectacularly self-destructing. Rock and roll’s detractors had often said that it was brute noise, the sound of the factory, of the heartless city. The MC5 seemed to relish this accusation, almost seeming to parody it. It was an absurd, excessive level of noise. It was overstated; there was a kind of wit to it. It was like a crazy Dr. Doom world-destruction machine going to pieces.
A primitivist intellectual like Mailer could make the kind of connection he did with the 5 because he sensed a really new response to the modern crisis diagnosed by so many of his literary forebears, an answer to all those alienated aesthetes who thought the inhuman noise of the modern city would drive them mad. To them the 5 were saying yes, let’s make it our own, let’s take it to an unheard of extreme, and see what happens when we finally do all lose our heads.
Since the Industrial Revolution, the machine, the heartless machine, had been an emblem of oppression. With the MC5 the hippies were pointing the machine back at the masters. This was a new response, this astonishing reply of the pale hippies to the noise of industry, war, and aerospace, of Northrop Grumman and General Motors and the Pentagon, a machine-made noise that yet was human, and still had a nerve that went back to Africa. Instead of simply mirroring the stupid repetition of industry, they found in it a fierce momentum and a rhythm that gave pleasure.
From the distortion of the 45s in Mrs. Kramer’s basement, they had followed the implications of the noise to a point where their love of the sounds began to feel like it might even be a serious response to the dilemmas of the age. They found the place where teenage kicks start to look like a metaphysical principle. A lot of people couldn’t quite credit this at the time, couldn’t make up their minds about the 5. Were they “18-year-old punks on a meth power trip” like Lester Bangs said? Or were they the source and effect of our spirit flesh, the solution to the problem of separation?
The Rust Belt counterculture was sort of acid-Marxist, by which I mean, that along with the demands for rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets, there was a nerve of hard political sense, maybe the ghost of all the old union struggles, that was foreign to the sensibility of the Haight or Swinging London. The Detroit people understood something of the logistics of making a revolution—tactics and strategy, evangelizing, propagandizing, recruiting, winning minds and hearts, self-defense. John Sinclair and his White Panther Party knew that a strong alliance between white and black radicals had to be forged; they knew too that they had to go into the high schools and radicalize the kids. They also knew that they had to be able to talk to the children of the “white ethnic” neighborhoods, the greasers and gearheads who were up until then the blood enemies of the blacks and the hippies. The MC5 was their primary tool for doing this.
What would happen if you radicalized those white ethnic kids, if they made common cause with the black kids? There was the big idea of Sinclair, the White Panthers, and the Detroit freaks. Such an alliance of interests was the stuff out of which actual revolution might be made, and the union of white and black workers had been the nightmare scenario of American elites since the Depression, maybe since Reconstruction. So when the chips were down, those elites were not going to let that happen unopposed, and if that ultimately meant violence, it was becoming clear that there were centers of American power where that option was by no means off the table.
In fact the white working class would in the end tip toward Richard Nixon, and hard-hats and hippies would brawl in the streets. But at that moment the prospect of radicalizing their sons and daughters set off alarms in the dark heart of J. Edgar Hoover. And while certain elements of the counterculture ethos would eventually seep through much of American society, the immediate situation in the last years of the sixties was that there was a vicious backlash brewing. So there were very real dangers in going on from there, in continuing to press the case for a radical transformation of society. The Detroit people could already see the counterculture retreating into sealed-off utopian communities, preparing to activate its hereditary privilege and opt out of the looming confrontation, as black activists could not.
The American consensus, finally goaded, called on its coercion and violence arm (largely quiet since the end of the last Red Scare) first to crush black radicalism, but the tip of the whip eventually cracked against the white counterculture, from dirty tricks to legal harassment (inevitably they got to John Sinclair, with a ten-year sentence for two joints) to arson, police beatings, and ultimately, in some places, murder. At the height of it the Detroit scene was flooded with heroin, and enough of the MC5 succumbed to end the band. At the time few noticed outside Detroit, and perhaps by then not all that many there.
For a while the MC5 seemed like perfect candidates for the memory hole. But a big part of the story of the MC5 and what they meant and still mean is the afterlife of the MC5.
The air went out of the revolutionary balloon fast. People enjoyed the pleasures that they had a newfound license to take, but the revolutionary context that gave those pleasures a meaning was discarded. Who needed all that extra thinking when all you wanted to do was get high and get laid? In an era that had more than its share of delusions, the 5 seemed some of the most loudly deluded, a garish example of the excesses of the age, and maybe really just the hype they had all along been accused of being. But something unexpected happened, as it sometimes will.
Because the MC5 didn’t leave a complete vacuum in Detroit. Lots of other scenes died of exhaustion, the players partying and doping themselves out. In Detroit the scene had not entirely exhausted itself; there was something left—some of the energy the 5 created survived them. The people who had witnessed the 5 at close hand were not easily put off the scent. The sense of freedom of the Detroit scene wanted a place to go, a channel. That channel turned out to be a rock-and-roll magazine.
Creem magazine was founded in Detroit in 1969 as an underground paper, like the Chicago Seed or the East Village Other, by a head-shop owner named Barry Kramer and one of his employees, a young Englishman named Tony Reay. In a little while they were joined by a nineteen-year-old Detroit kid named Dave Marsh.
Starting in the heyday of the Detroit scene, recruiting its first writers from people passionately committed to it, Creem covered local artists like the Bob Seger System, Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, Alice Cooper, Grand Funk Railroad, Iggy and the Stooges, and first and always the MC5. But even more important is what happened after the scene dispersed. The Creem writers, by taking the ethos of the Detroit scene and trying to apply it generally, came up with a new way to write and think about rock and roll that would be hugely influential, not just on the way that fans talked about and thought about the music, but on the way that musicians talked and thought about—and played—the music. Not the rockers who were established stars at the time but the next wave, what Creem called “third generation rockers,” coming up in the seventies.
An unusually large proportion of the writers who came to work for Creem were among the best and most original—some even visionary—music writers of their day (though they would never have said such things about themselves). This Detroit school included writers like Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Ed Ward, Robert Christgau, Richard Meltzer, Nick Tosches, Greil Marcus, Sylvie Simmons, Patti Smith, Cameron Crowe, Deborah Frost, Cynthia Rose, and John Mendelssohn, among many others. They were wildly heterogeneous writers, but they did share one thing, and that was a belief that the music had been the heart of the sixties countercultural project, more than the dope or the sexual mores or even the politics. That to the extent that anything in the counterculture was good and worked and was of ongoing relevance to life, it was contained in the music. And that the music made in Detroit in the last years of the sixties was a particularly potent distillation and working model of how that music had affected the consciousness of a big chunk of the Western world. As Dave Marsh said about an MC5 show at the Grande, “From the glimmerings of that confused babble, from the evidence of its hints of success, one could begin to construct an aesthetic and perhaps even a program that proposed how rock culture could fit into society as something more significant than a diversion.”3
These were writers who, often under a veneer of cynicism, were not cynics at all, and had not surrendered the Romantic and utopian hopes of sixties rock and roll. They were essentially developing, refining, and broadening John Sinclair’s project.
By staying close to the music, the Creem writers were not distracted by the changing cultural ephemera, as the seventies went on and hippies slowly disappeared from the streets. This made them better able than the sentimentalists at Rolling Stone to accept the disbandment or decline of sixties idols without it shaking their faith. They never stopped believing in the revolution and the fact that rock and roll was central to it. And so the next couple of revolutions, when they came, came from their sector.
It was the Creem writers who coined the terms punk and heavy metal in the same issue, who were in touch with the—at that point unrecognized—market of kids who would become the bands and fans of the next era. If Rolling Stone was the established church of rock, tending the cults of Saints Dylan and Lennon, the Detroit writers were the heretics who followed the spirit and not the outward form, ready to acclaim it wherever it manifested itself, high or low, in the Basement Tapes or “Ballroom Blitz.” Dave Marsh called this the “Rockicrucian Spirit,” an energy that “had the power to liberate the entire mental/ physical complex into a pinnacle of transcendent and quintessentially aboriginal energy.”4
This Detroit stream was where the countercultural impulse continued as a living thing, unrecognized by the media because it was shorn of the bells and beads, the trappings by which the straight media thought (and still think) they could recognize “the sixties.”
This ongoing hope, as articulated by the Detroit writers, kept open an imaginative space where later bands and movements could grow, a space that would be the matrix of an alternative to the mainstream “rock” music of the 1970s and ’80s. Creem championed the New York Dolls and Big Star and Patti Smith, sponsored Springsteen, Kiss, Alice Cooper, Bowie, and the Clash, the glam rockers and the first punks. In the ensuing years, it often seemed like a lot of the most exciting pop music—REM, U2, the Pretenders, the Ramones, Nirvana, New Wave and Grunge and Riot Grrl—each bore somewhere the marks of an oppositional ethos that had been first scrawled on the wall in late-sixties Detroit.
In some cases the influence was more direct and obvious than others. Take the case of Bruce Springsteen. The notion of rocking out as some sort of service to a community—so characteristic of Springsteen—originated with gospel and soul but came to Springsteen by way of manager Jon Landau and Dave Marsh, who both migrated from the orbit of the MC5 to that of Springsteen after the 5’s breakup.
The Detroit vision, that music is a technique of ecstasy and that ecstasy is emancipatory, a vision that many at the time felt to be a hype that had misjudged its time and outstayed its welcome, was the one that persisted, the one that sprang up again, and that now looms at least as large as the legacies of more famous sixties scenes in San Francisco or London.
During their career the MC5 were in fact moving counter to the direction of the pop-music market. A lot of hippies had come to distrust the power of rock and roll. Altamont, like a communal memory of everybody’s worst trip, lurked always in the background. Former rockers sought comfort in the quiet, private music of singer-songwriters like James Taylor, Carole King, and Joni Mitchell. The MC5 arrived, not to find the kindling stacked for the burning, but to find that many of the fires were already burning out.
It might even seem as if they belonged more to the next era than the one that was ending. But you miss something important about the 5 if you just see them as a punk band avant la lettre, if you don’t understand that they were of the same church as Jerry Garcia, just another denomination. Their faith in the revolution of consciousness was as complete as his, and as strong as their belief in the revolution in the streets. They were two sides of the same coin to Sinclair and the 5. There was a Detroit version of psychedelia, with its own cosmology and eschatology. The MC5 were as sure as any Rastafarians that Babylon the mighty was about to fall. The MC5 were not, like so many other sixties artists, romantics. Their songs don’t evoke the echoing greenwoods or the mountains of the moon. And yet they were just as serious about the wild human possibility as their peers. In their abandoned boiling cauldron of noise, they brought you to the unspoken moment as surely as any of the others.
For a lot of people outside Detroit, there was no sense that great things would rise or fall with the MC5. But it’s clear now that Detroit was the last great scene of the sixties, the last time a band would arise from a living local scene to claim to interpret where it was all at, the last of the wild new things that had been coming along so fast, that tried to capture all the kids and advance the narrative for everyone, the last “band that mattered” of the 1960s. It was the last time, for that era, that a record would carry the secret news like a message to the resistance on the eve of the invasion. After the 5, it appeared that D-Day was to be indefinitely postponed.
Neither the MC5 nor John Sinclair nor any members of Trans-Love Energies or the White Panther Party ever really defined the revolution. But sometimes a phrase that meant one thing in one era becomes a useful metaphor for following generations. In the seventeenth century the Diggers of England railed against the “Norman Yoke” even though the English had stopped resisting the Normans centuries before. We may not be able to say exactly what the MC5 meant by their revolution but because they said it so loud it still echoes as a way of indicating our hope for the long-awaited turning of the wheel.
The lightning that was caught in London and San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, was not grounded until it reached the teen clubs and high school gyms of Michigan and Illinois and Wisconsin, until the MC5 showed up to testify that the local kids had somehow raised the revolution up like steam from their ordinary streets. The power of Upper Egypt, the gold of the barbaric Zenta sunrise, the old, secret, eternal revolution infiltrated those towns disguised as what seemed ephemeral and teenage and novel, and the MC5 showed that the power was not unconnected to where those kids went to school every day and the corners they hung out on and the Montgomery Ward stores where they bought their records.
So at this moment we will leave these children on their street corners, at the last moment they will feel they are standing in the barbaric sunrise, the last moment (for this generation at least) that pop music would connect their streets with the history of the soul.