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* ROCKET REDUCER N°62 ( RAMA LAMA FA FA FA ) * BORDERLINE
* MOTOR CITY IS BURNING * I WANT YOU RIGHT NOW * STARSHIP
APRIL 05, 1969
"Whoever thought when that
dirty little quickie Wild in the streets came out that it would leave
such an imprint on the culture? First the Doors (who were always headed
in that direction anyway) grinding out that famous
"They-got-the-guns-but-we-got-the-numbers" march for the troops out
there in Teenland, and now this sweaty aggregation. Clearly this notion
of violent, total youth revolution and takeover is an idea whose time
has come - which speaks not well for the idea but ill for the time.
About a month ago the MC-5 received a cover article in Rolling Stone proclaiming them the New Sensation, a group to break all barriers, kick out all jams, "total energy thing," etc. etc. etc. Never mind that they came on like a bunch of 16 years old punks on a meth power trip - these boys, so the line ran, could play their guitars like John Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders played sax!
Well, the album is out now and we can all judge for ourselves. For my money they come on more like Blue Cheer than Trane and Sanders, but then my money has already gone for a copy of this ridiculous, overbearing, pretentious album; and maybe that's the idea, isn't it ?
The set, recorded live, starts out with an introduction by John Sinclair, "Minister of Information" for the "White Panthers," if you can dig that. The speech itself stands midway between Wild in the streets and Arthur Brown. The song that follows it is anticlimactic. Musically the group is intentionally crude and
aggressively
raw. Which can make for powerful music except when it is used to
conceal a paucity of ideas, as it is here. Most of the songs are barely
distinguishable from each other in their primitive two-chord
structures. You've heard all this before from such notables as the
Seeds, Blue Cheer, Question Mark and the Mysterians, and the Kingsmen.
The difference here, the difference which will sell several hundred
thousand copies of this album, is in the hype, the thick overlay of
teenage-revolution and total-energy-thing which conceals these
scrapyard vistas of clichés and ugly noise.About a month ago the MC-5 received a cover article in Rolling Stone proclaiming them the New Sensation, a group to break all barriers, kick out all jams, "total energy thing," etc. etc. etc. Never mind that they came on like a bunch of 16 years old punks on a meth power trip - these boys, so the line ran, could play their guitars like John Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders played sax!
Well, the album is out now and we can all judge for ourselves. For my money they come on more like Blue Cheer than Trane and Sanders, but then my money has already gone for a copy of this ridiculous, overbearing, pretentious album; and maybe that's the idea, isn't it ?
The set, recorded live, starts out with an introduction by John Sinclair, "Minister of Information" for the "White Panthers," if you can dig that. The speech itself stands midway between Wild in the streets and Arthur Brown. The song that follows it is anticlimactic. Musically the group is intentionally crude and
"Kick Out The Jams" sounds like Barret Strong's "Money" as recorded by the Kingsmen. The lead on "Come Together" is stolen note-for-note from the Who's "I Can See for Miles." "I Want You Right Now" sounds exactly (down to the lyrics) like a song called "I Want You" by the Troggs, a British group who came on with a similar sex-and-raw-sound image a couple of years ago (remember "Wild Thing"?) and promptly disappeared into oblivion, where I imagine they are laughing at the MC-5.
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