MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams,” 50 Years Later

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I just bought at M-Theory Music in Mission Hills a copy of the 1991 CD reissue of Kick Out the Jams, the early 1969 release by the pioneering Detroit punk-rock band MC5. I ended up at M-Theory last night because as I left work and walked towards the bus stop on Washington and Falcon, I heard hard-driving rock music. At first I thought it was either a record being played by a neighbor or one of those overwhelming car stereos, but as I approached M-Theory’s location at Washington and Goldfinch I realized it was a live in-store gig.

The mini-concert was actually booked for two hours and I was just catching the tail end of it, but I heard enough to like the band instantly. They’re called Retra, and they’re a four-piece with a woman lead singer with a powerful, edgy voice and a simple guitar-bass-drums backup. The guitarist has a whole bar full of effects pedals (sort of a D.I.Y. version of the high-tech one we saw The Edge use with U2 on the film It Might Get Loud) and makes some effective use of echo. The guy who was there for the store (the one with a very long beard) was frustrated that Retra didn’t bring any CD’s to sell, since I’m sure he could have moved some (well, he’d have sold at least one copy — to me).

I also found a used copy of Kick Out the Jams, one of those landmarks of rock history I had somehow missed so far — I mentioned that to the man at the counter as I paid for it and he said, “Oh, this is a classic!” I just played through the album over the TV set and found it somewhat less than classic — though recorded in October 1968 it sounds more like the raw London punk of 1977, complete with incomprehensible vocals, loud and basic guitar chords, and an overall relentless sense of energy that in some ways overcomes the technical crudity of the music. Oddly, though all but three songs were MC5 originals, there were some with the same titles as other, better-known songs: Nat “King” Cole’s country-crossover hit “Ramblin’ Rose” and the Beatles’ “Come Together” — and frankly I’d have liked this album better if MC5 had just covered those superior songs.

By far the best song on the album was “Motor City Is Burning,” a cover of a song John Lee Hooker wrote after the Detroit race riots of 1968 — Hooker’s piece actually has a sense of song structure instead of being just a fortissimo rant, and MC5 do it justice even though, needless to say, Hooker’s version — which I just accessed on YouTube — is worlds better. The Wikipedia page claims that MC5 were heavily influenced by avant-garde jazz, and in particular saxophonists John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp — yet quite frankly I don’t hear any of that influence on the album except on the last song, “Starship,” for which they cribbed some of their lyrics from a poem by Sun Ra and therefore had to give Ra co-composer credit and a share of the royalties.

If you want to hear a major rock artist who was influenced by avant-garde jazz, you need go no farther than Jimi Hendrix. As I’ve argued in these pages before, if Earl “Fatha” Hines was influenced so much by Louis Armstrong that his playing was called “trumpet-style piano,” and likewise Bud Powell was influenced so much by Charlie Parker his playing could have been called “saxophone-style piano,” Hendrix was influenced so much by John Coltrane his playing could have been called “saxophone-style guitar.” (Hendrix actually referred to his instrument as “public saxophone” a couple of times — in his band introductions at the 1970 Isle of Wight concert a week before his death, and in the lyrics to the song “Midnight Lightning” he performed there.)

Yoko Ono’s controversial screaming-style vocals were her attempt to imitate the sound of an avant-garde jazz player (she even recorded one song, “Aos,” with Ornette Coleman), though the Yoko I like best is the one where she stuck closer to conventional song forms, particularly her early-1970’s masterpieces Approximately Infinite Universe and Feeling the Space (which I’d rank alongside Patti Smith’s Horses and Easter, Chrissie Hynde’s Pretenders and Learning to Crawl, and Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Kaleidoscope among the finest rock albums by women-led bands in the 1970’s and early 1980’s).

At this time I can admire Kick Out the Jams for its overall attitude and its almost uncanny anticipation of the punk scene that emerged nearly a decade later, but that doesn’t make it a great record — even the band’s lead singer, Rob Derminer (who adopted the stage name “Rob Tyner” in honor of Coltrane’s pianist, McCoy Tyner), admitted as much in the liner notes he wrote to the 1991 CD reissue just a few months before he died: “The cultural circumstances surrounding the creation of this music will never again occur. This shining disc that you now possess has, encoded in its whirling vortex, a moment of history frozen forever. … [T]his album of songs is a microcosm of the times that spawned it.”

As a microcosm of a particular phenomenon of the late 1960’s — the desperate belief that America was about to see a revolution of the Left when in fact its politics were going hell-bent in the other direction, and Right-wing propagandists were driving it there with carefully coded and endlessly repeated attacks on people who were “different,” either by birth (people of color) or adoption (the counter-culturalists, which in the late 1960’s meant anti-hippie and later, as the hippie fad faded away, came to mean anti-Queer) — Kick Out the Jams is great. As music, well, there’s a lot of stuff out there from this era that holds up better.