This can't go on much longer

The MC5 rocked hard on "Over and Over" and still sound as timely as ever

The week I was born, the Beatles were in the studio laying backwards-guitar overdubs onto “I’m Only Sleeping,” the Who were building the futuristic industrial soundscape of “Disguises,” and the Rolling Stones released their bold new single, “Paint It, Black.” Within a couple of months, the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet would release their avant-garde, free jazz debut Sound, and Dylan would unleash Blonde on Blonde. Et al. “Was 1966 pop music’s greatest year?” The Guardian once asked. I often wonder that myself. In retrospect, it feels as if I was born into the future.

By 1966, the MC5 had been kicking around in the Detroit area for a few years, and their collective eye was also gazing keenly at the horizon; by ‘72, they were finished. In between, they released the incendiary live album debut Kick Out the Jams (1969), the thinly-produced but barreling Back in the USA (1970), and what many feel is their strongest album, High Time (1971). I’ve had the Five on rotation ever since learning of the death of drummer Dennis Thompson, on May 9. He’d been the last living member of the band. (Singer frontman Rob Tyner died in 1991, guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith in 1994, bassist Michael Davis in 2012, and guitarist Wayne Kramer last month.) Beyond the usual grief and grim reckoning with mortality that any death provokes, there’s some cognitive dissonance involved when all of the the members of a revolutionary rock and roll band pass on, consigning a path-blazing, forward-looking group, finally, to the irretrievable past.

Though draped in radical finery during their career, particularly early on, the MC5 to a man ended up positioning themselves away from narrow political rhetoric. When asked in 1998 why the band moved on from their manager/White Panthers-founder John Sinclair, Thompson replied simply, “Politics. [Sinclair] had two agendas. One agenda was to manage the MC5. The other agenda was to become the new left leader of the new Pepsi generation, which was going to drink Pepsi and take LSD and smoke pot.” He added, “We felt ‘you can do whatever you wanna do in the confines of your own life.’ We just weren’t into promoting it. We were not gonna wear a banner that says ‘everyone should be allowed to smoke pot and take LSD.’ That wasn’t our platform.”

All of the bands at the time like the Rolling Stones were doing it but they didn’t run around saying “we’re trying to pass a law to get this legalized.” That wasn’t the MC5 either. Trust that. That was John Sinclair’s situation. That was his second agenda, his hidden agenda.

Davis, too, felt the awkward tug between the excitement of playing rock and roll and the perceived obligations to inhabit a militant political posture. “I didn’t mind us bashing away at the establishment,” he wrote in his engrossing memoir I Brought Down the MC5, published in 2018, “but I certainly didn’t see how we were in line to take it over if it all came crashing down. Life went on, and day-by-day, our habits became routine. Our rhetoric became more homogenous, decrying the events of the [Vietnam] war and other profound errors of the time. Our voices were loud and our performances were rowdy, challenging the rules of obscenity and decorum.”

But, he added, “I only wanted to be in a rock and roll band. This crusade to forge a new world seemed ludicrous, a Quixotic lunge at an imaginary adversary."

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By 1971, the ragged seams were showing on the MC5. Back in the USA hadn’t sold well, shows were increasingly erratic, and drugs were coursing recklessly through the band members. As Davis remarked to Jason Gross, “I think some time after 1969 or so, the band started to lose its light.”

But they had one great album left in them. 1971’s High Time wouldn’t sell well either, yet its clutch of songs has mightily endured. From the righteously storming “Sister Anne,” “I Want Ya,” and “Gotta Keep Movin’” to the world-weary yet indomitable “Miss X,” the rawly mystic “Future/Now,” and the ecstatic, riff-driven grooves of “Poison” and the jazz freakout “Skunk (Sonicly Speaking),” the album fairly hums with energy, spirited, inspired playing, and a big sound courtesy of co-producer Geoffrey Haslam. With bombast and sheer sonic spectacle, Kick Out the Jams created a kind of cultural tinnitus; with its eventual fade, we could see both follow-up albums with greater clarity. Despite the many killer songs gathered on Back in the USA, that album’s grievous lack of low end renders the fuller sounding High Time, to my ears, the MC5’s best, most consistent album.

The highlight is Smith’s “Over and Over,” an evocative, exasperated response to culture, part anthem, part complaint. High Time was recorded in the fall of 1970 (all but one track was taped at Artie Fields Studios, in Detroit; “Sister Anne” was recorded in London) and, though I tend to be skeptical about takes on a given decade’s essential vibe, the album feels very much to me like a Seventies Album, much as Kick Out the Jams feels very much like a Sixties Album. Only a year into the decade, Smith and his band clearly sensed the dying narcotic haze in the air as it mingled with disappointment and anger.

And though they’re responding to a Zeitgeist with High Time, they managed to capture something abiding, as the greatest art can (and, probably should). I was in my car a couple of days ago, driving on a rural road somewhere in DeKalb or Kane County, in Illinois, when “Over and Over” came on shuffle, and the circumstances felt ideal: unmoored from the context of its making, from early-’70s urban politics and generational clashing, the song felt utterly eternal, and sounded tremendously exciting, its arguments clear and sober when heard in this century, far removed from what inspired it—that is, it felt for those five minutes that what inspired the song was all around me, still.

Dig the first verse:

People talkin ‘bout solutions, over and over
’Bout how we need a revolution, over and over
Always talking ‘bout ecology, over and over
’Bout how we’ll be saved by technology, over and over
While the cat next door spends all his time
Trying to think up new antisocial crimes

Sound familiar? Can you see the social media talking points in between the lines? “Over and Over”—the title is the first complaint—feels like a song that’s awoken to something raw and unpleasant, yet undeniable, the smoke-bomb epiphanies that kicked out the jams, motherfucker, now more bitter. (Or realistic.)

The first minute of the song is a three-act playlet, first workshopped at the Grande:

Act One, 0:00 to :24—Bleary-eyed hangover
Act Two, :25 to :41—Grim reckoning
Act Three: :42 to :56—Resolve

The lone, ethereal opening guitar passage feels like nothing less than a valediction to the Sixties, and the bars that follow—the band kicking in, a dramatic, rising five-note sequence that hauls the singer upright, as Kramer slashes at the surface and Davis and Thompson roar though the open door—offer a righteous but exhausted appraisal of what’s outside right now. Tyner’s voice is frayed, tearing at the edges (that the song arrives near the album’s close emphasizes his fatigue), his words all the more deeply felt for that. He’s tired, pissed, and feeling cornered. What of the loud, spiritual, rockin’ promises of last week? No, hang on a minute now, let me outta here.

A litany of grievances, hyped by a fantastic, heated band performance, grows: while folks are yelling about revolutions and executions, the singer’s feeling castrated, working in a factory "(“over and over”) trying “to make it satisfactory.” The war in Vietnam’s raging (by the summer of High Time’s release, so-called Operation Ranchhand had sprayed 11 million gallons of Agent Orange upon South Vietnam) as the government’s pimping out soldier-whores; police offices nationwide are demanding supplication from protesters of all stripes, while Nixon says “we’ve got to have peace.” Someone else is crying for liberation while the hippies (remember them?) are still insisting that “we’re in the love generation.” The Motor City Five want none of this anymore. It’s 1970 and “Over and Over” is more skeptical of slogans and political rhetoric and the complex truths that they obscure.

Alan Goldsmith, in his 1994 obituary for Smith in Agenda, acknowledged that the guitarist’s solo the song “still nearly brings [him] to tears, even after hearing it maybe 1000 times.” In the song’s poignant and powerful bridge, the band collectively takes a deep breath as Tyner gathers himself—he’s in a froth now—calmed by the return of Smith’s opening guitar passage. “I need a release for my frustration,” Tyner warns us in a whisper. “Don’t you see I can’t hold my aggravation?” Fellow Michiganians the Stooges had already threatened us about all of this on Fun House—“Out of my mind on Saturday night / Nineteen-seventy rollin’ in sight”—and now Tyner and his band are cautioning us that “this can’t go on much longer,” the truest thing that the song says. And yet, of course, the song has to end.

I can't take much more of this, You better let me outta here

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“High Time is back on Shakin’ Street for most of its length, and that’s right where the MC5 belong.” That’s Dave Marsh, reviewing the album for Creem in 1971 (reprinted in Fortunate Son: The Best of Dave Marsh). “Still, High Time resolves none of the problems that the MC5 and its audience face. It doesn’t come to grips with the issues raised by the first two albums.” Yet, he adds, “Maybe that’s okay.”

If the MC5 have taught their fans anything, it’s that rock and roll can no longer be leaned upon, that the job gets done by us or no one, and finally, that rockin’ out is sometimes but only sometimes the best solution.

The album, Marsh continues, “is entirely rooted in solid rock and roll music, the crashing guitars of Smith and Kramer melding as they always should have, Dennis Thompson’s drumming once more frenetic after the disciplined listlessness of Back in the USA. Tyner’s vocals are also looser and mixed better. For pure music, High Time needs to bow to neither of the other albums.”

Solving the problems “that the story of the MC5 symbolizes,” Marsh writes, “probably don’t [sic] lie in rock and roll anyhow.” This was likely a powerful epiphany to have arrived at for the fiercely civics-minded Marsh; in the end, he might’ve loved rock and roll more than, or as least as much as, the potential for political activism. “They’re a band with an inescapable history, but for right now, it’s enough that they’re one of the finest rock and roll bands alive. To return to the beginning: that’s as it always should have been.”

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To my ears and heart, “Over and Over” is one of the greatest songs, perhaps the greatest song, that the MC5 recorded. As remarkable an album as Kick Out the Jams is, and as dangerous and explosive as “Tonight,” “Call Me Animal,” “The American Ruse,” “The Human Being Lawnmower,” and other two-minutes bursts of Back in the USA rock and roll are, the ambitious High Time, and “Over and Over” in particular, suggest how profoundly great MC5 might’ve been had they managed to keep it together, more realistic perhaps about the cultural power of rock and roll, yet testifying nightly, song by song, to how the music inexplicably moves us in other, deeply personal ways.

I’ll give Dennis Thompson—may he rest in power—the last word. High Time, he remarked to Jason Gross, is “just good. It’s loose and it’s strong and it’s powerful. It sounds good for those days. There’s a quality to it, a timelessness to it, a classic feel to it that you don’t have on the second record.”

To me, it’s not just the material, “Skunk” and “Sister Anne” and “Over and Over,” the production’s correct and the attitude’s correct. We didn’t have a producer telling us what to do. First record’s live—oops, that’s us. Second record has a Nazi producer—seig heil! The third record is us producing ourselves after we sort of gained some experience. So that’s the best record. Flat out.

Band image: Motor City Boys (USA, Michigan, Detroit) via Wikipedia Commons