April 16, 2003

THERE'S DANGEROUS MUSIC, and then there are dangerous musicians. There are the Dixie Chicks, whose singer shot her mouth off and got slapped around by the recoil. And then there were the MC5, who were the unofficial house band for the revolutionary summer of '68 and the onetime musical arm of John Sinclair's White Panther Party, given to posing with rifles. But you can probably bet the chicken ranch that a couple of decades down the road, Natalie Maines won't be caught dead pointing a firearm at her own documentary makers.

That's how filmmaker David C. Thomas ends his great documentary, MC5: A True Testimonial – with MC5 drummer Dennis Thompson getting a loony look in his eye, pulling out his shotgun, and pointing it at his guests. The lunacy is compounded by the fact that Thompson, clad in a D.A.R.E. cutoff T-shirt and drinking from a Detroit Red Wings mug, is sitting in what appears to be his living room, next to a big B&W photo of himself back around the time of the MC5's first album, Kick Out the Jams, looking unwrinkled, foxy, and soulful, framed by long, lank blond hair. It's an American gothic double portrait of a Midwest rock 'n' roller who seems to have gone from tabula rasa to completely sketchy.

Looking at the cast of surviving characters – alert, articulate guitarist Wayne Kramer, toasted cowboy bassist Michael Davis, and volatile "Machine Gun" Thompson – documented in True Testimonial, it might be easy to dismiss the Detroit band (circa 1964 to '72) as an also-ran. Once considered America's hippest and hippie-est, most outrageous, most politicized and powerful live band, the MC5 may have since gotten lost among the slew of other groups that took their dual-guitar mania and ran with it to more commercial effect. Musically, they merged the classic rock 'n' roll of Chuck Berry and the cleansing earache rhythm guitar of the Who with a dash of the psych-noise of Sun Ra, and they were rivaled in raw power only by Brits like Sabbath and Zep as well as their "baby band," the Stooges.

The MC5 were an American band that wore the flag on its sleeve and draped over its amps, a subversion of patriotic symbolism that is startling now that the "fuck you" has been blotted out by today's "America: Open for Business" message. The opening battle cry captured on True Testimonial and on Kick Out the Jams – "Right now, it's time to kick out the jams, motherfucker!" – was as pugnacious as the MC5 themselves, a group that began with a fistfight between vocalist Rob Tyner and guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith, rocketed along on testosterone-fueled performances that amounted to battles between themselves and their headliners, and ended on a mirror-perfect combative note. Motherfucker, indeed – according to the original Jams liner notes and manifesto by Sinclair, who was also the band's manager, they wanted to fuck in the streets, fuck with the system, fuck with the minds of parents who were afraid the MC5 would screw their daughters and get their sons stoned. The group's reward was continual police surveillance, harassment, and charges of obscenity; blackballing at a department store chain, Hudson's; and eventually their departure from their label, Elektra.

In True Testimonial the MC5 come off as just as ballsy, bold, and reckless as that infamous lead-in, which was eventually edited off the album, along with the liner notes. Thomas's interviews capture not only Thompson's rage but also Davis's recollections of his slow, sad departure and Kramer's nearly teary account of the band's final European tour, Davis long gone and Tyner and Thompson newly resigned. The film's live footage will seem miraculous to fans who were born too late to ever see the band. It's full of flash, blood, and heat. Here, the MC5 tumble through an impressionistic blur of glitter, stars, and stripes in what seems to be the blazing-color 16mm source material for the band's debut album art. There, the band almost catapult off the screen, lip-synching on a local TV show. And finally, in drab B&W, the "MC2" play one of their last shows in Finland with a hired rhythm section – Kramer looks pained about the group's diminished powers, coping with a bad heroin habit and unable to remember lyrics, as Smith shakes his head with resignation.

The time has probably gone when a rock band so clearly poised between the pop and political underground and mainstream, so clearly identified as subversive and as a pure product of America gone wild, can ever again catalyze as many imaginations as the MC5 did – not in this fragmented, multimedia global marketplace. Yet maybe it's High Time one tried.