MC5 * STOOGES * DAVID PEEL * MOLLOCK
The PAVILION , Flushing Meadow Park , NY - 9/1969
©1969 by Chris Hodenfield
When
I was back there at the Seminary School, they used to call it
a
"rep." The brand you carried with you. . . who you fought. . . who you
smashed. . . whose girl you stole. The MC5 have a rep, and in the
sophisticated circles of tasteful musical acknowledgement, they have
the worst.
Phony guerillas. White Panthers (who needs
THEM?).
Belching Detroit Revolutionary screamers. On the first Elektra album,
Rob Tyner harangues at the audience (live at the Grande), "TIme has
come, bruthahs and sistahs!. . . time has come to decide whether YOU
are gonna be the problems or the solutions! It takes five seconds to
decide!"
From there, they bend into hard-core rock'n'fuzz
music.
If I'd have heard the album before I'd seen them, I'd have junked it..
The recording quality doesn't separate sounds and notes. The likely aim
was to capture the power and glory, but they got this secondary to a
lot of noise. The album does move with no let-up, and loud loud power,
but it just doesn't do them justice.
For
their concert at New
York's Pavillion, what had we to expect from them except more
frustrated revolutionary spiels? It was double feature with another Ann
Arbor, Michigan, group, the Stooges. (Josephine, out at Elektra
Records, called it "Perversion Night." But more about them later.) The
MC5 run out onto the stage, hurriedly plugging everything in, smiling
and grinning. After the preliminary "do you feel alrights?" Tyner
introduces the lead guitarist, "Now ovah heah is Wayne Kramer, weighing
in at 165 pounds, as the heavyweight Fender guitar champion of the
world!" Kramer walks up with a delirious smile on his face, shaking his
clasped hands over his head. Big smasm, and they break into "Rambling
Rose". . . and it doesn't sound too much like Nat King Cole.
They're
a great rock'n'roll band. They have dropped the revolutionary jargon
and the whoopla. They have American flags on their eight-foot high
Marshall amps. They wham from one song into the next, without any of
this business about constant tune-ups and equipment breakdowns. And
spirit, drive, enthusiasm, jokes. Kramer looks like the craziest loon
that ever came from a Marvel Comic. He gets on down with his playing,
big ol' euphoria on his face, his tongue sticking out and he's
slobbering all joyous.
The only time they slow the pace down is for
Brother James Brown's,
"It's A Man's World." Tyner's voice doesn't have that lowgut easy
scream, but he is and able singer. The band seems to be free from
spotlight-grabbing egoism. When someone else takes a solo or a verse,
Tyner jumps back to the rear of the stage until they're finished, then
he leaps back.
Their
numbers last about three or four minutes each. For "Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa"
they skip around the stage playground style, looking all the more
ludicrous in their dazzle suits, all glitter and sequins.
They
are American in a very well-meaning up-to-date way. Kicks, thrills,
unleashed lust. (Yah!) Somebody once called Bryan Hyland "good teenage
music." Which is a fine thing if you're unfettered by things like war,
pimples, the broad who lives next door, and your guitar that wants to
kill your dad. This is where MC5 fits in. Their music fits together in
a certain power-mesh, each guitar is distinguishable. Mike Davis'
rhythm guitar sets down these very emotional sounding patterns, and
Kramer seems to splice in his lead segments at just the right time.
(How can you keep screaming about their playing? It fits, and it's
loud, and I think they're "terrif.")
The
Stooges, on the other hand, are from an entirely different door. After
seeing THEM, I was ready to hand in my credentials. They are being
advertised as representing the sexually repressed American male, etc.
They're dogs, more like it.
They are a quartet made up of
lead guitar, bass, drums and lead singing by none other than Iggy
Stooge. Iggy doesn't really sing, he sort of talks out his songs;
sounding like a tripped-out gas station attendant. ("We're gonna have.
. . a real cool time.")
I was prepared to hate them as i wrote
this, to be inflammatory and merciless towards them. Then I talked with
my good friend David, who wisely said, "if they're a blues band, and
they play bad blues, then you can criticize them. But if they sing
about boredom and that, how can you criticize them?"
The band
live in a commune in Ann Arbor. Iggy lives in his squalor in the attic.
And he watches television, and spends a lotta lotta time alone. He
played drums for a few years behind differing black bands, and the
Stooges is his very own vehicle. He told the guitarist to get ready to
play in a rock band, and even though the cat hadn't played before, he
was ready in three days.
The music is incessant and pounding,
with usually one certain theme laid down again and again, all loud and
insane. Iggy wriggles and oozes about on stage in various sexual
posturing. He makes use of the microphone stand; he does fandangos
around, he sits on it, lies on it, caresses it.
At on point,
someone in the crowd (who were all sitting on the flat concrete) made
an obscene gesture. Iggy leapt, head-first, out onto him. Suddenly, the
whole place was up on its feet, crowding around to see their fantasies
being acted out. The crowd managed to get him back on stage. He ambled
around, while the band was keeping with the same feedback and
hi-screech cachexia. He drifted to the back of the stage, and then,
with new vigor, ran across the stage, into the air with a set
expressionn on his face, and onto the person again.
By the time
he got onto the stage again, he was drained and livid at the same time,
stalking uncertainly. He started to claw at his glistening, sweaty
chest, and welts that had been there began to get bloody again. Raising
fresh weals, uttering one word over and over; the band working their
amplifiers into a frenzied fuzz-fog. All fall down. Guitars thrown at
the amplifiers; finis.
I asked Iggy about times he jumped from
the stage later on, and he explained, "The guy insulted me, so I either
wanted to make it with him, or embarrass him in front of everybody.
Which I think I did. . ."
The Stooges no doubt appeal to base,
broken tastes. My friends and I all just shook our heads and mumbled
about the loss of civilization. (Is this what Rome and Athens went
through before they fell?) But there was another guy there who really
dug Iggy. (As a reporter, it is my duty to be objective.) He said it
was really different. . . that it was really some fine performance.
Now
this is all part of that same family of reasons that made the MC5 get
their bad publicity. Nobody talked about what a great band they were,
they talked about revolution, badness, meanness. These are things they
could relate to. Things that are hopelessly hopeless. They could relate
to the Stooges sonorous bedlam about boring times, more than they could
relate to the total energy of the MC5.
It's the people that can
line their kind of spirit up with the crash and kill pictures in the
centerfold of the Daily News. People who go around thinking about bad
news and No Cool Times. ("It's such a hassle to cross the street,
man.") Iggy represents boredom and, possibly, "sexual repression." And
then, this appeals to some people. And there's a few of these unhappy
cats sitting around right now. (Not running around, but sitting around.
They rarely get beyond their own muddled psychosis.)
Rock music is something we align with our
personalities. Almost all of us dig Jimi Hendrix cause that's sex, and
who can knock sex? The MC5 are stimulation and electricity. The Beatles
are happy stoned thoughts, fresh breezes too. The Rolling Stones are
hard knocks and more sex. The Doors used to have something of each, and
mostly dark poetry of the soul. Bubblegum is what it says it is.
Whatever your favorite band is, it's kind of a parallel of what you are
or want to be.
The Stooges are dungeon scuttling remains of "no
cool time."
x x x
Iggy was mightily impressed in his youth
by Chuck Berry, Wagnerian operas, and "Carmine Burana." (Some spread,
those.) Imagine them, now all mixed together, and then curdled.
Imagine, more like it, Kraft-Ebing's "Psychopathic Sexualis" as
performed by Marquis de Sade, and the wicked Witch of the East. Add,
come to think of it (for fairness sake) a dash of Frank Sinatra.
It is not right for someone to sit back in their
cubicle and sneer at musicians. A musician is doing something valid,
and the Stooges are a direct extension of Iggy's pretentions and
emotions.; (McLuhan said, "Art is anything you can get away with.") The
Stooges also seem to capitalize on wrecked heads and cheap thrills
inside people, waiting to be sprung with $3 tickets. (The doors were
opened to everybody free for the last 15 minutes of the MC5 concert, it
should be said. And it was the bands that demanded this.) The Stooges
are an effective and authentic directive for SOMETHING. I don't like
them at all, and ultimately they are real bad kicks. But books have
been banned for the same reasons. Do you want them? They have an album
out on Elektra, and it is, by their own admission, rottenly engineered.
John Cale, formerly of the Velevet Underground, produced it, but he
didn't know what he was doing. The album has one good cut, a 10-minute
dirge, but the rest is gaggling idiocy.
"'I Wanna Be Your Dog' is my favorite song," says
Iggy, "but some kid hears that and he can't relate to it. The nearest
thing he can associate it with is Question Mark & the
Mysterians."
RIGHT!
©1969 by Chris Hodenfield