MC5

“Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!!”, these were the words screamed at the top of his lungs by Rob Tyner, singer of the MC5, from the blazing stage of Russ Gibb's Grande Ballroom in Detroit, on Halloween night 1968; that unforgettable evening would give birth to "Kick out the Jams", one of the most thrilling and underrated live albums in rock history.

The MC5 were, alongside the Stooges, the flagship band of the aggressive Detroit sound; their revolutionary musical approach amounted to a peculiar form of sonic guerrilla warfare, built from the hallucinatory guitar broadsides of Wayne Kramer and Fred "Sonic" Smith (future husband of icon Patti Smith), the possessed howls of unhinged singer Rob Tyner, and a ferociously loud amplification that unloaded avalanches of watts onto the unsuspecting listener. All of this was the perfect sonic magma for the revolutionary ravings of John Sinclair, the band's true éminence grise and a leading figure of the controversial and questionable "White Panthers" movement (he'd land behind bars right after the release of "Kick out the jams"). It's to Sinclair, who theorized rock as the liberating force of the era, that we owe the outrageous, subversive and deeply iconoclastic image of the MC5, deliberately designed to offend the sensibilities of the average, upstanding American.

More than for its extraordinary music, "Kick out the jams" is important for the incalculable influence it has had on generations of musicians to come; a good deal of punk, hard rock, heavy metal and, why not, today's "Back to the rock" movement (ask their fellow Detroiters the White Stripes for details) trace their origins straight back to the grooves of this seminal album.

The opening "Ramblin' Rose" lands like a punch to the gut: distorted guitars, hammering rhythm, Tyner's depraved falsetto — this track already contains all the aggression and urgency of punk rock, and indeed it would be worn out by the "No Future" kids soon enough. The title track is a bladed assault of a violence unheard of for its time, one that still makes your pulse race today: from its brutally heavy opening riff you're catapulted into a climate of unbearable tension, which reaches its peak in the effects-drenched guitars at the song's close. Not even Blue Cheer on "Vincebus Eruptum" had dared go this far. On the equally seismic "Come Together" (any resemblance to the Beatles is purely coincidental), the rhythm section gives no quarter and the guitars launch into psychedelic-tinged phrasing. A killer guitar riff kicks off the chaos of "Rocket reducer no. 62 (Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa)", a cacophonous whirl played on the edge of madness; Tyner spits out revolutionary slogans with iconoclastic fury, while Kramer and Smith's six strings machine-gun chords with no mercy, before dissolving into the cathartic final breakdown. The following "Borderline" is a shot of pure adrenaline, an explosion of primordial energy that seems to erupt straight from the bowels of the Earth.

Even a blues number as conventional, on paper, as "Motor city is burning" is completely transfigured by the MC5's sonic terrorism. The icing on the cake, and the album's masterpiece, is the closing "Starship", written by jazz visionary Sun Ra, which in the MC5's hands becomes an intergalactic journey into the depths of the cosmos: shards of noise flying wildly across the track from end to end, walls of guitars launching into hyperspace, cosmic voids and dense clusters of sound, howls, and Tyner's voice sounding as though it's coming straight from the realm of the damned. A sonic spiral that takes no prisoners.

There's no doubt that some of the anarchic ranting has aged poorly, but the music of "Kick out the jams" remains as vital as ever today; if you want to understand the meaning of that thing we've been calling rock for over 50 years, you inevitably have to pass through here too.

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02/11/2006