So once upon the time there was this band of kick-out-the-jams, honest-to-god revolutionaries (or so they claimed—they seemed far more interested in becoming big rock stars than actually bringing down the fascist American state) who came out of Detroit and played this raucous brand of “high-energy” rock and roll.
And while they never sold many records (lotsa hype didn’t stop them from just fading away), over the years they’ve become these larger-than-a-Buick Motor City legends like The Stooges. Except The Stooges never trucked in revolution, probably because they were smart enough to understand that punks don’t fight revolutions (people with guns do). Which is to say Iggy and the boys were actually paying attention in class when the Rolling Stones put out “Street Fighting Man.”
The band of course was the MC5, and every hip individual loves them, if only because if you DON’T love them you risk becoming an unhip individual and NOBODY wants that. Why, they could take away your membership card. Well I’ve never loved them; I’ve never been able to understand what all the fuss is about. Sure they looked great and had real street cred being the musical arm of the White Panther Party and all, but I’d be lying if I said there’s a single MC5 song I’d expend the energy necessary to remove the album it’s on from its sleeve and put it on the stereo. Which basically puts them lower on my musical totem pole than the very unhip likes of REO Speedwagon, Styx, Journey, Sammy Johns, and the lamentable Grand Funk Railroad even.
Then again, who cares if I like a band or not? Nobody, that’s who. If you’ve gotten this far and read the above you no doubt think I’m simply a crank who’s full of shit, so please allow me to explain WHY I think the MC5, who were an undeniably good (but not great) band and an essential entry in any good book about rock history, do nothing for me. And as good a place as any to state my case is their second album (but first studio album), 1970’s Back in the USA.
Back in the USA was a far less galvanizing and hairy-chested affair than the band’s galvanizing live debut, 1969’s Kick Out the Jams, and disappointed a lot of fans. The reason was producer Jon Landau, who started as a rock critic before going on to manage and produce Bruce Springsteen and produce the likes of Livingston Taylor and Jackson Browne. Landau was no fan of the band’s raw sound and psychedelic guitar freak-outs—they offended his hit-making ears.
In short the MC5 entrusted their future to a guy who was utterly determined to turn them into something they weren’t. It’s hard to explain this, unless one concludes that the MC5 were a band on the make and were more than happy to play by Landau’s more conservative views and make whatever compromises necessary to help them achieve their heart’s desire—a record at the top of the pop charts.
Compare that to, say, the Velvet Underground and The Stooges, who followed their uncompromising debuts with even more uncompromising sophomore albums, although they had to know that was hardly a recipe for commercial success. I’m sure they wanted to be stars too, but instead of making concessions they doubled down, and they doubled down for the simple reason that they couldn’t help themselves. They had an artistic vision and had no choice but to follow it into the cut-out bins. The MC5 had no vision; they were a band on the make, and they went into the studio with Jon Landau to let him do what he would, the way a poisonous snake might slither to the vet to be defanged.
Landau was a big fan of first-generation rock and roll, and undoubtedly he’s the reason Back in the USA begins and ends with moldy oldies, to wit Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and Chuck Berry’s “Back in the USA.” And that right there is part and parcel of the reason the MC5 do nothing for me—what’s to make of a band of long-hair radicals who happily agreed to become an oldies cover band? There’s no denying they stand and deliver on “Tutti Frutti”—it’s high-octane stuff and muscle car fast. Rob Tyner’s vocals do Little Richard proud and Wayne Kramer’s guitar solo sizzles, but great bands rarely open great albums with great covers for the simple reason that great bands make great statements and have no time to waste playing other people’s songs.
“Back in the USA” has enough jet fuel in it to get you to the USSR and back, but the backing vocals are Happy Days stuff. You would think a band with a grudge against the USA (and hooray for them, if you didn’t have a grudge against the USA in 1970 you were a goddamn Nixon voter) would find some way to turn the song into an ironic commentary on being glad to be back in the land of Kent State. Which I’m sure was their intention, but they do nothing to make that plain. Instead they make like the counterculture’s version of Sha Na Na.
Back in the USA is an album for the kids—the MC5 makes that clear over and over again. They want the kids to have fun, to get wasted, to skip school, to go see this cool band called the MC5 and hopefully buy their albums. But they also envisioned some kind of teen takeover, which was ridiculous And besides they show no real understanding of the teenage dilemma. Because high school was a deadly proposition and every great band of the time knew being a teenager was no fun (The Stooges), hopelessly confusing (Alice Cooper), boring (The Stooges again) and basically a horrible proposition curable only by the end of the school year (Alice Cooper again) or graduation, after which things were bound to get worse.
Tyner opens the propulsive garage rocker “Tonight” with “Alright kids, let’s get together and have a ball!” And from there he lays down this rap about not being able to pay attention in class cuz a band’s come to town and nothing, not even the summons you just got from the Army, is going to stop you from “bustin’ up some action.” I have several reservations about the song. It may have get up and go but great garage punk it ain’t, and the lyrics (with the exception of that “bustin’ up some action) are generalized mush. And to make matters worse Tyner’s lines about his girl doing the twist make it clear the song’s set in some mythical American past—the past of “Tutti Frutti” and “Back in the USA.” Which may be no big deal to you but bugs me, because unlike The Stooges or Alice Cooper, the MC5 are singing to kids who don’t even exist! They walked out of the sock hop and grew up! They’re in the Army now or married and living in the suburbs or died in switchblade fights!
“High School” is good song but I have reservations, namely that the lyrics are mulch and the whole “rah rah rah sis boom ba” backing vocals are kid-in-the-back-of-the-class dumb, hell I’d have thought that even when I was trapped behind a desk in first period contemplating suicide. “Kids want a little action/The kids want a little fun/The kids all have to get their kicks/Before the evening’s done” sings Tyner, and it’s all so vague and generic—how about some details? Are we talking drugs? Thunderbird wine? A Catcher in the Rye readers’ group maybe?
The devil is in the details, and am I the only person in the world who thinks the MC5 sound a bit condescending? Distanced? And worst of all, oblivious? Did they even go to high school? Because I listen to the lyrics and I’m NOT SURE. They may switch to “we” with the lines “The kids know what the deal is/They’re getting farther out everyday/We’re gonna be takin’ over/You better get out of the way” but what kind of bullshit sentiment is that? Takin’ over? What kind of self-respecting high school kid ever thought she was gonna take over anything? She was too busy thinking about getting out of her future alma mater alive!
And I’ll say this once and I won’t say it again—there’s never been a great song about high school (with the possible exception of Jerry Lee Lewis’ “High School Confidential” and Chuck Berry’s “School Days”) that isn’t funny. “School’s Out,” the Dictators’ “Weekend,” Brownsville Station’s “Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room,” funny, funny, funny! And the same goes for every song about high school ever written by Redd Kross. And don’t even get me started on the Beastie Boys “Fight for Your Right.” Because high school, like the Army and the Boy Scouts of America, was a horror show and the only appropriate way to take your revenge is by means of satire, sarcasm, and scorn!
“Teenage Lust” isn’t heavy enough, hell it’s practically bebop, and the fifties doo wop backing vocals are a real bummer. Ditto the lyrics—when I want to get a real idea of what it’s like to be horny and desperate I listen to the Raspberries or Kix’s “Yeah Yeah Yeah” (greatest because it’s the funniest song ever written about teen hormonal overload cuz the girl he’s trying to ball throws up on him!). This one, forget it, if only because Tyner (like plenty of teen males, true, but he’s a grown-up for chrissakes) comes on like a major league misogynist with lines like “Surrounded by bitches who wouldn’t give it in.” And he’s mistaken when he sings that the girls he “grabbed” at dances would “cringe like in terror”—what they were probably doing was trying to figure out where they could get a crow bar to whack him in the crotch with.
The ballad “Let Me Try” is an abomination—Tyner’s suddenly Mr. Sensitive but only in a risible Spinal Tap kind of way, because the gist of Mr. Sensitive’s message is that if she’d just let him in her pants he’d change her life. But he packages the message in lines of sublime stupidity, including the classics that go, “I’ll play you like music/I’ll sing you like a song/I’ll lay you down gentle/I’ll love you strong.” Jesus. Why if Iggy Pop had ever dropped something like this on the world I’d have been forced to reconsider his entire contribution to music. But that’s what separates the goods from the greats, right?
“Call Me an Animal” is another joke—it’s an okay at best proto-punker with not much meat on its bones, and it’s marred by some questionable hand claps and a rather lackluster instrumental break. But it’s the lyrics—which make me question the band’s collective intelligence—that really bring the song down. I hate to always be comparing these guys to The Stooges but Iggy would never have called himself an animal. A street-walking cheetah sure, but never a generic animal because, well, that would have made him an animal, and Iggy was a flesh-and-blood human being with the frustration and self-hatred to prove it. Animals go around killing and eating other animals, and the only animal Iggy was a threat to was himself. And HAD he eaten himself, he’d have only done it for the purpose of throwing himself back up, that’s how much he hated himself.
“Shakin’ Street” is a relatively lightweight number (more pop than punk) but it’s got an infectious melody and has real shake appeal. Guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith handles lead vocals, affording us a welcome respite from the macho tonsils of Tyner, and the only problem I have with the song are (again) the lyrics, which are just as pedestrian as the title would lead you to expect them to be. The whole thing’s an atavistic throwback (again) to the 1950s—the chorus (“Shakin’ Street, it’s got that beat/Shakin’ Street, where all the kids meet/Shakin’ Street, it’s got that sound/Shakin’ Street, said you gotta get down”) is Chuck Berry unenlivened by a single interesting detail. It’s pastiche and pure shtick, right down to the names of the “hep cats” scattered through the song. Little Orphan Annie? Skinny Leg Pete? We had a kid in my hometown we called Fat Albino Whitey, which showed some real creativity and we weren’t even smart! We’d have never resorted to giving kids stock nicknames straight out of central casting, which means we were smarter than the MC5 and most of us were flunking!
“Looking at You” is a psychedelic shaker that comes at you really smooth and slick like. Has a real motor-oil-slathered Motor City feel to it, it does. Kramer plays a guitar solo I don’t like (sounds like he’s climbing a mountain but there aren’t any mountains in Detroit!), then he plays a rip-roaring guitar solo I do like even if he does diddle about a bit at the end, and then he plays yet a third guitar solo that I kinda like, which makes him two for three if I’m being kind. Meanwhile Tyner’s standing on the stage looking at you, I guess because you’re hot, I can’t think of any other reason, and that’s the whole message in a nut shell and if you ask me it’s a bore. Why, fellow Detroiter Bob Seger could write a better lyric with his brain tied behind his back, and he gets about as much respect from your hip types as Rodney Dangerfield.
“The American Ruse” and “Human Being Lawnmower” are the album winners—if you’re going to be a revolutionary rock band you’ll probably want to write one or two political rock songs and these are the ones. What “The American Ruse” lacks in muscle it makes up for with V8 acceleration, and before I go any further I should say it ain’t perfect—those backing vocalists who go “Oh, no” are cheesy as hell. Otherwise Tyner is is sick and tired, he’s “finally getting hip to the American ruse.” You get the nice shorthand of “69 America in terminal stasis” (even if it’s 1970!) and for once he’s ready to throw in some specifics and even (and this is unprecedented) actually say something halfway funny:
I learned to say the pledge of allegiance
Before they beat me bloody down at the station
They haven’t got a word out of me since
I got a billion years probation
Naturally he has to throw dirt on his own fire with idealistic folderol like “Young people everywhere are gonna cook their goose” (yeah, right—what they’re gonna do is get jobs cuz they don’t wanna starve) and I fail to see how cheap guitars are a scam being perpetrated on the American people—cheap guitars are what punk’s all about, you don’t need a Stratocaster to play one chord, and if you hate cheap guitars so much buy a more expensive one, or better yet steal one. You’re a revolutionary, for heaven’s sake!
On “The Human Being Lawnmower” the MC5 finally bring that heavy Detroit sound—big slashing guitar riffs tear holes in reality, Dennis Thompson pounds the drums like a hippie Bam Bam, and at long last you get the dark stuff, the kick-out-the-jams primal stuff, as Tyner sings about being sucked into America’s Death Machine the cogs of which won’t let you go until you find yourself being inducted into that human being lawnmower known as the US military. I’m not thrilled by the instrumental interlude, but the “chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop” Tyner closes things out with is great, it’s the sound of discovering yourself some rice paddy in Vietnam being mowed into mulch, and not enough mulch at that to fill a body bag. After which the band takes things out like a pounding thresher, a lawnmower turning human beings into corpses.
The MC5 were The Clash of their time—well-meaning revolutionary manques, serious to an extent, but canny enough to understand that revolution sells. And that “sells” says everything—they were just another band on the make with a cool gimmick. But they lacked vision and commitment; why else would they have turned to a producer who didn’t like what they were doing, then allowed him to turn them into a creature in his own image?
Great bands, to paraphrase Johnny Rotten, know what they want and know how to get it, and Rotten wasn’t talking about becoming a big rock star. Great bands stick to their guns, and let the pieces fall where they will. The MC compromised—gave it all away to sing about some pie-in-the-sky children’s crusade that was never going to happen except in England, where soon enough the children would put on make-up and thereby start another kind of revolution, one that had nothing to do with Mao’s Little Red Book. Because they understood that revolution is a drag—too many snags.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
C
