NEW YORK – Before there was the Clash, Nirvana or Rage Against the Machine there was the MC5.
“The MC5 was playing punk rock music before there was a name for it,” says Tom Morello, a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame guitarist for bands like Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave.
“They built the lattice on which bands like The Stooges, The Ramones, The Clash, the Sex Pistols, Rage Against the Machine and System of a Down ply their trade.”
The MC5 — short for Motor City Five — are getting into the Rock Hall this year, only months after the deaths of the two last original members, drummer Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson and guitarist and singer Wayne Kramer.
The Detroit-based MC5 are part of the class of ’24 that includes Peter Frampton,Foreigner,Cher,Mary J. Blige, A Tribe Called Quest, Kool & The Gang, Ozzy Osbourne, Dave Matthews Band, the late Jimmy Buffett, Dionne Warwick, Alexis Korner, the late John Mayall and Big Mama Thornton. The induction ceremony is Saturday in Cleveland.
The band — which also included Fred “Sonic” Smith on guitars, Rob Tyner on vocals, Michael Davis on bass — had little commercial success and put out just three albums, but its legacy endured, both for its sound and for its fusing of music to political action. During the chaos of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, only the MC5 showed up to play.
“The reason why they deserve to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is not because of the depth or breadth of their catalog. It’s because of their influence. Without them, there is no punk rock music,” says Morello. “They’re on the Mount Rushmore of founders of this particular brand of music.”
“Kick Out the Jams” was their most famous song — with the lyrics “Put that mic in my hand/And let me kick out the jam” and “Let me be who I am/And let me kick out the jams.” A live album of the same name reached the top 40 in 1969, their highest-charting release. They also released the studio albums “Back in the USA” and “High Time” before breaking up at the end of 1972.
In quiet honor of the MC5, Rage Against the Machine would nickname their band’s fastest song “MC5″ when they were recording albums. For months, that’s what “Sleep Now in the Fire” from the album “The Battle of Los Angeles” was called.
Grammy Award-winning producer Don Was grew up in Detroit and vividly remembers catching MC5 live, calling what he heard “a tsunami of sound.”
“To me, they unleashed a power. You could taste the music and see it. It was never really captured on any recordings. It was a big, monolithic wall of distortion and groove.”
Morello and Was are among several musicians appearing on a new MC5 album, “Heavy Lifting,” which comes out this month and includes songs by Kramer and Thompson. Slash, Vernon Reid and William DuVall of Alice in Chains also contributed.
“The idea, as Wayne described to me, was to make one last great MC5 record that would distill the spirit that the band had decades before but was also a product of where those influences lead,” says Morello. “I put everything I had into it. I’m like, ‘Let’s make one more really, really great MC5 record.’”
There’s also a new book, “MC5: An Oral Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band” by music journalists Brad Tolinski, Jaan Uhelszki and Ben Edmonds. It includes stories from Iggy and the Stooges, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, promoter Bill Graham, John Lennon and the Jefferson Airplane.
Morello, who on the nominating committee at the Rock Hall, says he’s been pushing for the inclusion of the MC5 for years and recent changes in the Cleveland-based organization has led to more fan favorites, like Rush, Kiss, Judas Priest — and now MC5.
“The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame tells a story. It can’t tell every story, but it tells a story. I think that story is becoming broader and more reflective of rock fandom than in the past when it might have been a more delicately curated situation.”
Kramer, who spent years in prison on drug charges, later established Jail Guitar Doors U.S.A., a nonprofit that donates musical instruments to inmates and offers songwriting workshops in prisons. He helped people get sober, find jobs for former inmates, build music careers for at-risk youth and was always up to back a progressive cause.
Was says Kramer went from believing that a revolution was coming in the 1960s to realizing it might fail but still trying to make life better for people.
“Wayne Kramer was the best man I’ve ever known,” says Morello, who will help induct the MC5 on Saturday. “He possessed a one-of-a-kind mixture of deep wisdom and profound compassion with beautiful empathy and tenacious conviction.”
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