3 Energy Freak-Out Freeform
While the Velvets were vacating New York and the mainstream American media were centering their attention on the West Coast’s gentrified version of rock & roll, the centre of white trash garage-rock was the home city of the soul brothers of Motown, then dominating the pop sensibilities of black America – Detroit, the Motor City.
If the Velvets can be considered to have fathered art-rock, then Detroit’s two chief rock exponents, the MC5 and the Stooges, represented a more primitive tradition – rock & roll as the people’s music, requiring nothing more than commitment from its participants, an approach best expounded by that godfather of punk-journalism, Lester Bangs:
Rock & roll, as I see it, is the ultimate populist art form, democracy in action, because it’s true: anybody can do it. Learn three chords on a guitar and you’ve got it. Don’t worry whether you can ‘sing’ or not. Can Neil Young ‘sing’? Lou Reed? Bob Dylan? . . . For performing rock & roll, or punk rock, or call it any damn thing you please, there’s only one thing you need: NERVE. Rock & roll is an attitude, and if you’ve got the attitude you can do it, no matter what anybody says. Believing that is one of the things punk rock is about. Rock is for everybody, it should be so implicitly anti-elitist that the question of whether somebody’s qualified to perform it should never arise. But it did. In the Sixties, of course. And maybe this was one reason why the Sixties may not have been so all-fired great as we gave them credit for. Because in the Sixties rock & roll began to think of itself as an ‘artform’. Rock & roll is not an ‘artform’; rock & roll is a raw wail from the bottom of the guts. And like I said, whatever anybody ever called it, punk rock has been around from the beginning – it’s just rock honed down to its rawest elements, simple playing with a lot of power and vocalists who may not have much range but have so much conviction and passion it makes up for it ten times over. Because PASSION IS WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT – what all music is about.
If rock & roll is indeed ‘a raw wail from the bottom of the guts’ and punk ‘rock honed down to its rawest elements’, then their home in the late Sixties was undoubtedly Detroit. The Velvets flirted with the effects of distortion and feedback, but the MC5 based their entire sound oh them. They had consciously assimilated. the precepts of free-jazz pioneers like Albert Ayler and John Coltrane and now sought to place their innovations in a ‘rock’ setting. Their historic first album contains an adaptation of a Sun Ra song, ‘Starship’, and covers in their set at the time were drawn from Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp. The appeal of the free-jazz approach was obvious. To quote Valerie Wilmer in her history of the new jazz:
For the player, the new music has been concerned with ways of increasing his freedom to improvise, but to the listener, its most obvious characteristic was that the musicians constantly explored, and exploited, new systems. No sound, in fact, is considered unmusical in the New Music.
It was the MC5 who were largely responsible for turning Detroit into the centre of American underground rock & roll in the late Sixties. The Motor City Five, to give them their full name, had already been in existence some considerable time when they signed to Elektra Records in September 1968, predating even the Velvet Underground in formation. For the first two years of their existence (1964 – 6), they were essentially a covers band in the tradition of fellow Detroit combo the Amboy Dukes (the A-side of‘their privately pressed first single, released in 1966, was Van Morrison’s ‘I Can Only Give You Everything’ a good indication of their early roots).
A change in rhythm section in the fall of 1965 – Michael Davis. and Dennis Thompson enrolled on bass and drums respectively – to augment vocalist Rob Tyner and guitarists Wayne Kramer and Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, allowed a shift towards a more improvisatory, jazzier approach. By the summer. of 1966 they had introduced their most famous free-form song, an extended improvisation called ‘Black to Comm’.
In the early months of 1967 they began to be managed by radical journalist John Sinclair, who quickly augmented their raucous rock & roll sound with a chic revolutionary stance. Sinclair shared the MC5’s love of free jazz – he was the author of a regular jazz column in Downbeat – and openly encouraged them to travel further in this direction, at the same time cementing a link between the MC5 and his radical Trans-Love Energies organization. Under Sinclair’s direction the band soon worked up several confrontational blasts of radioactive rock & roll, including‘Kick Out the Jams’ and ‘The Motor City is Burning’.
The considerable press that the MC5 were generating was bound to pique record company curiosity, but their radical stance was a dissuading factor for most major labels. The field was clear for a newcomer like Elektra, seeking to transform their ‘folkdom’ image into one that accorded with the rock & roll audience they had begun to attract with the popular success of the Doors. On 22 September 1968 Danny Fields, publicity director for Elektra Records, attended an MC5 benefit for the Children’s Community School at the Union Ballroom on the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus.
By this point, the MC5 had ascended to the crest of their own personal wave, though Detroit’s alternative scene had barely begun to coalesce. In concert they were fusing gut-wrenching originals like second single ‘Borderline’, the infamous ‘Kick Out the Jams’, and ‘Come Together’ with raucous covers of rock & roll classics like the Who’s ‘Can’t Explain’, Bob Dylan’s ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ and Screaming Jay Hawkins’ ‘I Put a Spell on You’, and versions of free-jazz epics like Pharoah Sanders’ ‘Upper Egypt’, Coltrane’s ‘Tunji’ and Archie Shepp’s ‘Hambone’ (reworked as ‘Ice Pick Slim’), all topped off nightly with their own ‘energy orgy’, ‘Black to Comm’.
But there was serious dissension in the ranks.
John Sinclair: The Elektra contract came at the end of September 1968 – and the peak of their discontent. Just before Danny Fields came out to hear the Five and sign them up, we had a decisive argument. We were returning from a manufacturer’s party, which we had attended to look at some new equipment. The band had all drunk a lot of alcohol at the party, and I was as pissed off as usual. They started attacking me on the way home, telling me that they were tired of living with my Trans-Love Energies crowd, and demanding that they be allowed to get a house of their own. I really got pissed off at that, and told them it was fine by me – that they could move out just as soon as they could afford it. I also told them that if they didn’t start taking their work more seriously, I didn’t want any more to do with them anyway . . . because I wasn’t interested in playing nursemaid to a bunch of drunks.
Fields was not to know that the Sinclair/MC5 coalition was breaking apart. Perhaps it was the sense of an outfit straining at the seams that impressed Fields. He returned two weeks later with Elektra president Jac Holzman, who agreed to sign not only the MC5 but also a second act witnessed by Fields in September. At the MC5’s insistence Fields had gone to see an even rawer Detroit outfit, the Psychedelic Stooges.
The MC5 were keen to document their own extraordinary live show as soon as possible. They arranged to record two shows at the end of October at the Grande Ballroom, a 2,000-seater venue in Detroit proper, where they had regularly appeared since October 1966 and were always assured of a rapturous reception.
The resultant album, Kick Out the Jams, is an appropriate document of the Motor City’s premier underground band firing on all cylinders. The thunderous pounding dispensed by the rhythm section, aligned to a guitar-sound with the sort of distortion they usually measure on the Richter scale, was the perfect antidote to a bath at Baxter’s. However, the album did not reflect the cross-section of material that the MC5 were playing, omitting the legendary ‘Black to Comm’, as well as ‘I Believe In My Soul’, ‘Upper Egypt’ and ‘Tunji’, all staples of their live set at the time. It was as if the MC5 were unsure about the likely reception for songs overtly reflecting their rock/free-jazz fusion.
By the time Kick Out the Jams was released in the spring of 1969 the MC5 were champing at the bit, angry at Sinclair’s parochial politics and what they saw as his mismanagement. Sinclair later claimed that the band was showing its true colours, betraying a long-latent desire to move in a more mainstream direction. When the MC5 became embroiled in a controversy about the use of the word ‘motherfuckers’ on the title track to Kick Out the Jams and finally agreed to Elektra censoring the record on subsequent pressings – though not before taking out ads in the local Detroit press castigating one particular record chain for refusing to stock the album – Sinclair realized that pressure was being brought to bear, transforming his ultra-radical vision of the MC5 into a rock & roll band. No more, no less.
John Sinclair: I kept hoping they would wake up one day and realize what was going down. They never did. In fact, they kept going further in the other direction. As the band got more national publicity and exposure, the industry people started getting to them more and more, it seemed, trying to convince them that they would have to give up their ‘political’, revolutionary stance altogether if they planned to make it big in the biz. This fit right in with their own fears – that they had worked this long and this hard only to be denied their rightful position as a s
tar band because their manager had mis-led them and had got them to do all the wrong things ... and they began to plot their break from me.
When rock journalist-cum-aspiring record producer Jon Landau moved into the MC5’s Detroit home in May 1969 to help put together a second MC5 album, this one for Atlantic Records (Elektra had sacked them as a result of the ‘motherfucker’ incident), the original exponents of free-form distortion in rock & roll were dead in the water, even if the body stayed afloat for another two years.
The MC5 were the first important American underground rock band to forsake their previous sureness of direction, and ultimately disintegrate, when unable to reconcile the need for commercial success with an original integrity. They would not be the last. Their natural heirs as Detroit’s premier ambassadors of subterranean rock & roll, the Stooges, never had any such illusions of reconciling their outrageous approach, both musically and visually, with a mass market. Their shows were a form of terrorist assault resonating deep into witnesses’ psyches.
The Stooges had made their live debut just six months before signing to Elektra in October 1968. Part of the difference between the vinyl legacies of the Stooges and the MC5 may be due to the former being signed to Elektra at a point when they were still experimenting with their music. They were thus able to sustain their brand of garage-rock long enough to record two of rock & roll’s most powerful collections of ‘raw wails from the bottom of the guts’, before they too imploded under the intolerable burden of a public demand for excess in its many malignant forms.
The Stooges, when seen and heard by the shell-shocked Danny Fields in September 1968, may have been gigging barely six months but they already had their own ‘sabre-toothed fury’. Their standard set never lasted more than 25 minutes, the bulk of which was taken up with such abstract constructs as ‘The Dance of Romance’ and ‘Goodbye Bozos’.
Iggy Pop: We weren’t interested in anything like writing a song or making a chord change I didn’t bother with anything like that until I had a recording [contract]; once I had the contract I thought I’d better really learn how to write some songs – so I did. Our [early] music was flowing and very conceptual. We’d have just one given song, called ‘Wind Up’, or I’d change the title to ‘Asthma Attack’ or ‘Goodbye Bozos’, or, I don’t know ‘Jesus Loves the Stooges’. So, la de da, that’s how we started out.
Iggy Pop’s natural showmanship mitigated for a band who had barely made it out of the garage. Unremittingly inept, the Asheton brothers, who were largely responsible for the Stooges’ pneumatic noise, were only just beginning to master their instruments when they signed to Elektra. What they did have was an ability to extemporize while Iggy did his stage acrobatics and indulged in his unique audience interplay.
Ron Asheton: Usually we got up there and jammed one riff and built into an energy freak-out, until finally we’d broken a guitar or one of my hands would be twice as big as the other and my guitar would be covered in blood
Even in the early days their shows required an unusual degree of audience participation. The MC5’s bass player, an early devotee, remembers the form Iggy’s onstage stunts usually took:
Michael Davis: Iggy gyrated around the stage and usually made a crazy fool out of himself to everyone’s pleasure. Everybody liked it. Everyone who was at those gigs was shocked in a pleasant way – not in a negative way. They weren’t turning people off. They were just weird and different and didn’t play songs like everybody else.
Having barely advanced beyond the stage where they ‘didn’t play songs’, the Stooges were patently unprepared to record an album when signed to Elektra in October 1968, and were not much more prepared when they actually began recording their debut album in June 1969. They arrived in New York with just five songs – barely half an album – so Jac Holzman sent them away, telling them to return when they had enough material. They composed ‘Not Right’ and ‘Real Cool Time’ in the space of two days, but still required the largely improvised ten-minute opus, ‘We Will Fall’, to pad out their debut album. On ‘We Will Fall’, John Cale, the Stooges’ chosen producer, added the trademark drone of his electric viola to the hypnotic quicksand of sound the Stooges spontaneously created, establishing a direct link between the Stooges’ and the Velvets’ improvisations.
The Stooges reflects a midway point in their passage from early, purely abstract structures to the coherence of their third and most conventional album, Raw Power. It had no more initial impact than Kick Out the Jams, despite being the first American rock & roll album to strip the early Rolling Stones’ sound down to a swamp of jagged guitars and vocal histrionics.
Thankfully, the debut Stooges album, though met with general bemusement by critics divorced from its sister city sounds and indifference by the record-buying public, was only the first step in the Stooges’ grand strategy. As the MC5’s power began to fade, the Stooges, whenever they played at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, were cranking up the volts. The sheer unpredictability of Iggy in performance warranted regular examination:
John Sinclair: Iggy had gone beyond performance – to the point where it really was some kind of psychodrama. It exceeded conventional theatre. He might do anything. That was his act. He didn’t know what he was going to do when he got up there on the stage. It was exciting. I’d just watch him and I’d think, ‘Wow, this guy will stop at nothing. This isn’t just a show – he’s out of his mind!’ . . . I remember when he started taunting the crowd with broken bottles . . . I think he got to where he didn’t really have any respect for the audience. So he’d do things to see what would get a response.
On 29 August 1969 both of Detroit’s arch-exponents of garage-rock shared a New York bill, at the State Pavilion in Queens. Though the Stooges would later make some of their most infamous appearances in New York, on this occasion they were watched by just a small enclave of New York rock fans who had come to see what all the fuss was about with these Detroit punks. Iggy’s final act before leaving the stage was to pick up two drumsticks and ‘cut long welts into his chest with the tips of the drumsticks’.
At subsequent New York shows Iggy would be far more extreme. He seemed to respond to the typical Manhattan ‘let’s wait and watch’ attitude like a bull to an audience of Redcoats, and would do anything simply to engender a reaction. Photographer Bob Gruen recollects the effect of Iggy’s attempt to reproduce his famous ‘walking on the crowd’ stunt from the 1970 Gincinatti Pop Festival, when playing New York’s Electric Circus in the spring of 1971:
Bob Gruen: I’d heard of [the Stooges] and I got there and there’s this guy covered in oil and glitter and peanut butter. There was this famous picture of him walking out on the people and he tried that in New York and he stepped off the stage – and these are New Yorkers, they don’t touch the performers – and they all jumped back, ‘Don’t step on me asshole,’ and he hit the floor eight feet down. And he’s lying on the floor. We’re all looking at him, ‘What you doing on the floor, fella?’
Ron Asheton was now inflicting a guitar sound of wilting intensity on those fortunate audiences who saw the Stooges in the fall of 1969 and the winter and spring of 1970 That spring, in the wake of the release of the MC5’s ‘collaboration’ with Jon Landau, Back in the USA, the Stooges recorded one of the two albums which define Detroit garage-rock at its best, Funhouse (the other, Alice Cooper’s Love It to Death, Bob Ezrin would produce later that year). Funhouse, not Back in the USA, was the logical successor to Kick Out the Jams.
The Stooges had decided to embellish their raw(cous)ness with a saxophonist, Steve MacKay. If the MC5 had turned their backs on their early jazz/rock fusion, the Stooges were keen to add jazziness to jaggedness and Sinclair was once again an important influence in the process.
Ron Asheton: John Sinclair introduced us to Coltrane and we loved it . . . We got Steve MacKay from the Charging Rhinoceros of Soul and Carnal Kitchen to play saxophone, because we liked the Coltrane stuff and wanted to have better freak-outs at the end of songs.
Recorded in May 1970 in Los Angeles, Funhouse redefined the Stooges’ sound. It featured their most extreme statement, ‘LA Blues’, a five-minute sonic wave of feedback and noise that, as with ‘We Will Fall’, came into being simply because they lacked enough quality material to complete the album. However, in the case of Funhouse it was the only possible conclusion to an album that reached deep into the darkened pit of degradation and emerged with the unrefined essence of rock & roll.
In the summer of 1970 the Stooges headed in the direction that ‘LA Blues’ had given them, i.e. towards ‘Energy Freak-Out Freeform’ (the original title of ‘LA Blues’). New songs with titles like ‘Way Down in Egypt’, ‘Searching for Head’ and ‘Private Parts’ were ‘more jazz-influenced and less structured’, and the Stooges, further augmented by second guitarist Billy Cheatham, allowed Ron Asheton to play more and more lead solos. Unfortunately Billy Cheatham was replaced in the fall of 1970 by a superior technician, James Williamson – shortly after the departure of saxophonist MacKay, who wished to form his own band – and the original Stooges ceased these explorations as Williamson began to steer the band in a more orthodox direction.
Despite the introduction of Williamson’s brand of accessible high-energy rock & roll, in June 1971 Elektra decided not to take up an option on a third Stooges album and Pop decided that their expulsion from Elektra was a perfect reason to break up the band. The Stooges’ lack of commercial viability had long been apparent even to Elektra, but the label had probably made a final decision to unload the Stooges the previous August. Iggy had insisted on a $400 advance to purchase enough cocaine to get him through four nights at New York’s Ungano’s, personally requesting the funds from Elektra president, Jac Holzman.
The Stooges’ disintegration in June 1971 was part of a general fragmentation of Detroit’s garage-rock scene, which was in an advanced state of collapse by the end of the year. Late in the day the MC5 seemed to realize the error of their ways, rectifying some of the damage caused by Back in the USA with the flawed but worthwhile High Time. Issued in October 1971, it features perhaps the MC5’s quintessential rock & roll statement – ‘Sister Ann’. The MC5 played their final show, appropriately, at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, on New Year’s Day 1972.
Meanwhile Bob Seger had gone back to college in 1969 and Alice Cooper, who moved from Los Angeles to Detroit at the beginning of 1970, believing that it was a more conducive locale for their brand of theatrical garage-rock, returned to the West Coast after the commercial success of their ‘Eighteen’ single. Though their next album, Killer, was still very much in the garage-rock vein of Love It to Death, it was the last of the Alice Cooper albums to run on Motor City fuel.
Even the re-formed Stooges were now based five thousand miles away. If the Stooges had supposedly given their final show in June 1971, a lengthy post-Stooges respite did little to cure Pop or lead-guitarist James Williamson of junk habits. They unwisely reassembled in London in the summer of 1972, after David Bowie offered to produce an Iggy Pop album. They continued to produce music of stark primitivism but recorded only one more studio album, the disappointingly restrained (indeed ill-named) Raw Power, which suggested that Bowie’s main forte was sanitizing genuine innovators for public consumption, particularly when taken in association with the results he achieved on Lou Reed’s Transformer.
The reincarnated Stooges were billed as Iggy and the Stooges, and compositions which had previously been constructed. by the band as a whole were now seen as the exclusive domain of Iggy Pop and his new confidant, James Williamson. The history of Iggy and the Stooges is one of a return into a maelstrom of physical excess but without Pop and Williamson’s indulgences feeding back into the music. Partially this was due to a muting of Ron Asheton’s role in the band. Though Williamson had originally been recruited as a second guitarist, Asheton was relegated to bass duties in the newly reconstituted Stooges.
Iggy finally cut loose from Mainman’s financial talons in May 1973 and attempted to resurrect the Stooges in all their profane glory, but his own drug dependency and compulsive need to live up to his reputation for excess – created on the back of stories of him rolling in broken glass, gouging himself with a bottle and fighting the more adept bruisers from his audiences – was already tearing the band asunder.
Ron Asheton: [Iggy] started out doing self-destructive things because that was the way he felt. Then it got to be expected. He’d just try to top himself for the crowd. We would often say, ‘Give it up Iggy’ . . . He tried to top himself every time. I was waiting for him to kill himself.
Iggy and the Stooges would make one more major contribution to the punk aesthetic. Shows in Detroit in October 1973 and February 1974 (their final show) were compiled into a live document, Metallic K.O., perhaps the most confrontational live album in rock music, Iggy determined to prove his willingness to push the boundaries of the artist – audience love – hate relationship beyond previous norms.
The Stooges’ influence on the New Wave would far exceed that of the MC5, both in terms of lead singer Iggy Pop’s onstage antics (and attendant lifestyle), and the metal-crusher sound they developed. Yet their influence would rarely be an accurate reflection of what the Stooges themselves had been about. As Lester Bangs later wrote:
I’d just like to ask some of these spikedomed little assholes if they think when Iggy formed the Stooges he sat down and said, ‘Okay, boys, let’s be punks: we’ll get fucked up all the time and act like assholes and make a point of not knowing howta play our instruments! It’ll make us famous!’ . . . Iggy was just a fucked-up kid who took too many drugs and wanted to have the most fucked-up band in history so as to externalize his own inner turmoil.
During Detroit’s temporary primacy in underground rock & roll, Bangs worked for the Motor City’s own rock & roll magazine. Just as Detroit’s music was intended to be the very antithesis of all the West Coast artists that Rolling Stone doted upon, so Creem was a necessary alternative to Rolling Stone’s ‘rock as Art’ approach. Throughout the Detroit years (1969 – 71) it maintained its underground status, thanks largely to its enduring coverage of the Detroit bands and the, ‘degenerate drool’ of Lester Bangs and Dave Marsh. Lester Bangs had started out writing the occasional piece for Rolling Stone, but soon realized that his aesthetic had little in common with theirs. So he moved to Detroit, working throughout the early Seventies for Creem:
Lester Bangs: Rolling Stone had flown me up to [San Francisco to] check me out, since I had been writing for them for about six months. I guess they wanted to see if I was executive timber. I guess I wasn’t, because not only did I get moved from Greil Marcus’s to Langdon Winner’s house after about two days, but I thought it was as curious that they sat around, not even smoking pot, but listening to Mother Earth and Creedence with absolute seriousness, as they were bewildered by my penchant for guzzling whiskey all day while blasting ‘Sister Ray’ at top volume . . . to make a dismal story mercifully short, I discovered a magazine in Detroit called Creem, whose staff was so craz they even put the Stooges on the cover. Of every issue! So I left my job and school and girlfriend and beer-drinking buddies and moved to Detroit, where my brand of degenerate drool would be not only tolerated but outright condoned, and over the five years I worked at Creem we used our basic love for it to exploit the punk aesthetic and stance in just about every way humanly possible.
Though Creem would make its own gradual transition into a mainstream magazine during the Seventies, it was one of the Motor City’s more enduring legacies from its buoyant late-Sixties scene. It still espoused the Detroit creed in its pages as late as 1974 – 5, when, aside from Bang’s, their very own godfather of punk journalism, they published the work of two figures central to America’s mid-Seventies rediscovery of a rock underground: Patti Smith from New York and Peter Laughner from Cleveland.