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ROCK AND REVOLUTION: THE MC5 AND MUSIC’S POLITICAL LIFE
By

Mathew J. Bartkowiak

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of American Studies

2007

ABSTRACT
ROCK AND REVOLUTION: THE MC5 AND MUSIC’S POLITICAL LIFE
By
Mathew J. Bartkowiak

Released in 1969, the MCS’S Kick Out the Jams was a new measure of the
relationship between music and cultural and political change. Although rock’s entire
history has been based in an inherent sense of rebellion, the MC5 as the “house band”
and central organizing force for the White Panther Party (WPP), a group which advocated
for the end to capitalism, the full support of the Black Panther Party’s initiatives and
other revolutionary aims (and which would become the target of local state and federal
authorities), formalized for various perspectives the threat, the promise or the parody that
music could hold within larger societal spheres. A space of useable rebellion was created
that could offer audiences a safe space from which to question dominant power
structures, as well as providing a text from which countercultural America and the role of
music in its life could be measured by numerous interested parties.

The following study is not to determine or search for a unified goal in
respect to the careers of the White Panther Party and the MC5. Instead, the complexity
of interactions and perspectives will be used to determine the parameters of an
experiment of power. This experiment and the desired goal of this book is to understand,
through the career of this band as a case study, the potentialities and contradictions that
occur in the relationship of music and social change. The MC5 is an example of the
inherent possibilities of audiences, performers, producers and others to engage in a space

of useable rebellion.

Copyright by
MATHEW J. BARTKOWIAK
2007

TO Sara and Ella
&

TO Mom & Dad. . .thanks for teaching me about the importance of music. We miss you
Dad.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My immense gratitude to all of those who helped make this dissertation a
reality. To my incredible wife, Sara and daughter, Ella for their patience and love, thank
you. I would like to acknowledge as well my wonderful family: Mom, Dad, Jus, Mark,
Sandy and Aaron for their support. The work contained within I hope is an adequate
reflection of the brilliant scholars I have worked with over the years; Gary Hoppenstand,
Ann Larabee, David Stowe, Maria Bruno, Jack Santino, Joe Ruff, Joe Austin, Craig
Lockard, Andrew Austin and Peter Kellogg. I have been so fortunate to surround myself
with such caring and gifted scholars; thank you all so much. I would also like to thank
those who I have so completely exploited through their efforts in editing and discussion
about this topic, Kathryn Edney, Jerry Goldberg, Arthur Versluis, & Don Garso. Thanks
as well to Matt Conger for introducing me to the MCS’s music. My humble thanks as
well to the DKT/MCS family who have been so incredibly open and kind during these
interviews: Michael, Angela Davis & Family, Wayne Kramer and Margaret Saadi-
Kramer, Dennis Thompson and Patrice, John Sinclair, Leni Sinclair, Pun Plamondon. . .I

hope I have done justice to this band and its life.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER 1

FIGHTING IN THE STREETS: UNDERSTANDING THE UNDERCURRENT OF
REBELLION IN ROCK ........................................................................... 13
CHAPTER 2

REVOLUTION ON YOUR HEADPHONES: CHARTING SOCIAL LOCATION IN
THE RISE OF THE MC5 AND THE WHITE PANTHER PARTY ........................ 36
CHAPTER 3

MOTOR CITY BURNING: ROCK AND REBELLION IN THE WPP AND THE MC5
......................................................................................................... 62
CHAPTER 4

SONIC ANARCHY: THE MAKING OF THE MC5 .......................................... 91
CHAPTER 5

GUNS AND GUITARS: REVOLUTIONARY STYLE AND SUBSTANCE? ............. 122
CHAPTER 6

UP AGAINST THE WALL: MUSIC ’8 PLACE IN REVOLUTION ..................... 157
NOTES .............................................................................................. 179
BIBILIOGRAPHY ................................................................................ 180

vi

Introduction

Rock and Revolution: The MC5 and Music’s Political Life

Released in 1969, the MC 5’s Kick Out the Jams was a new measure Of the
relationship between music and cultural and political change. Although rock’s entire
history has been based in an inherent sense of rebellion, the MC5 as the “house band” for
the White Panther Party, a group which advocated for the end to capitalism, the full
support of the Black Panther Party’s initiatives and other revolutionary aims (and which
would become the target of local state and federal authorities), formalized for various
perspectives the threat, the promise or the parody that music could promise within larger
societal spheres. The complexities of a product like the MCS’s career and its
revolutionary potential are hard to fully collect and ascertain.

Scholars within popular music history and cultural studies have struggled to
determine these parameters and their practice in everyday life. These debates concerning
the validity of popular texts range from pessimistic paranoia in the Frankfurt School to
positivistic self-assertion through popular culture considered in Birmingham School
thinkers, with numerous other polarities to boot. Often though, theoretical concerns Of
power and control Often abstract very real human practices. This gap in consideration in
determining cultural texts needs to be filled in by talking to the actors themselves along
with considering theoretical frameworks to guide the realities of a musical creation like
the MC5. Research trips to Los Angeles and Detroit in 2005 and 2006 to talk with those
involved revealed an experiment in rock, an experiment in determining the power of

media and spectacle, and an experiment in determining the role of music in cultural and
1

political change.

My interviews with band members Michael Davis, Wayne Kramer, Dennis
“Machine Gun” Thompson (the other two members, Rob Tyner and Fred “Sonic” Smith
passed away in the 19903) their manager John Sinclair, and their photographer, Leni
Sinclair Opened up a world of multiple interpretations Of what the music was supposed to
mean. Was it a call to revolution? Was it about becoming a big rock and roll band?
Was it parody? Was it serious? Was it meant to spark cultural or political revolution (or
both?)? The answer to all of these questions was an emphatic yes. The ability to frame
an entity like the MC5 and the WPP, which sought to make the most of mass media is a
difficult one, as individuals and the media itself all look to determine and communicate
specific meanings to the targeted audience. For some, the group was a means to
sparking a revolution of political and social consciousness through the use of the media
and rock and roll. For others the group was meant to be a means to begin a career and
make a living through the production of their musical works (and many perspectives
existed in-between).

The following study is not to determine or search for a unified goal in respect to
the careers of the White Panther Party and the MC5. Instead, the complexity of
interactions and perspectives will be used to determine the parameters of an experiment
of power. This experiment and the desired goal of this book is to understand, through the
career of this band as a case study, the potentialities and contradictions that occur in the
relationship of music and social change. The MC5 is an example of the inherent

possibilities of audiences, performers, producers and others to engage in a space of

useable rebellion.

“Useable rebellion” refers to the inherent rebellious nature of rock that has both
allowed producers and consumers to partake in a notion of questioning social mores and
ideas in a safe spot that for the price of concert ticket or CD can be secured. It also is a
space in which dominant power structures and major corporate interests can find
immense profit from this successful blending of rebellion into the very fabric of rock and
roll as a social and consumer practice. The MC5 is a subject from which this dichotomy
of subversion and profit can be better understood. The MC5 tested where these borders
begin and end. By mobilizing the powers of subversion built into rock and roll from its
inception, the band and the WPP were able to test the potentialities of music within the
realm of social change. They also create questions about the role of dominant corporate
power in harnessing this same energy within rock and roll, as it has successfully done
since the 19505. Hence, this study does not seek to deny or accept the MC5 and the
White Panther Party as a legitimate/illegitimate counter cultural power in the late 19605
and early 703. The main focus will center on how the band was able to harness the
potential power of the counterculture and rock and roll to create a media-friendly space in
which rebellion could be explored and enacted for the artists, audiences and others in a
framable model.

In order to enact such an interdisciplinary study, an interdisciplinary framework
will be required. Not only do issues Of the media, popular music and popular culture
studies come into the fray, but also so do perspectives from history and political thought

from the New Left and other radical forces. These conceptual frameworks will allow for

 

balance from which to gauge the products and perspectives from the MC5 and those
involved in its creation and maintenance. This multiplicity of perspectives in framing
this study will offer new critical insight into biographical sketches like David Carson’s
Grit, Noise and Revolution which views the MC5 as one of numerous players within a
larger Detroit rock scene or The Future is Nowls An Illustrated History of the MC 5 which
chronicles the life of the band from its inception to its demise. Both of these works
provide a biographical layout of the group’s career but do not focus on the relationship of
music to cultural and social change nor do they offer extended insight into the
ramifications of the band’s association and disassociation from the White Panthers. Jeff
Hale’s article on the band, “Total Assault on Culture,” which focuses on the band as a
countercultural force pushed into radical extremism, overshoots the musical life of the
group and focuses on an intense view of the band and the White Panthers as a formalized
entity. Don McLeese’s The MC 5 ’s Kick Out the Jams, the other major work on the
band, also veers towards biographical, but also allows some perspective into the band as a
musical entity, which were definitive influences on the punk and heavy metal
community.

This book openly denies any wish to act as a comprehensive biographical work.
Instead, the research will be an intensive case study in looking at the interaction of music
and possibilities for cultural and political change. The very real pressures arising from
the political and social climate of the time, the music industry and media’s framing
methods all contribute to complexity of the MC5 in myth and musical practice.

Numerous road trips to Detroit and many flights later, this study is the reflection a diverse

amount of research and insight that has been the result of actively questioning players in
a production that undercuts any single intent or perspective. There is much more to the
MC5 story than politics, dissent and consumable rebellion. Only a small part of the
equation is being dealt with in this work, and is not intended to be a definitive treatise on
a group that will continue to demand the attention of scholars, musicians and fans alike.

In order to begin the examination of the band specifically in the frame of useable
rebellion, the first chapter will offer a short history of the investment by fans and by
producers of an inherent sense of rebellion within the advent and life of rock and roll.
Much as jazz had done earlier in the century, rock and roll offered a potentially
subversive wealth of anti-authoritarianism, sexuality and thanks to rabid consumerism,
the creation of clearly delineated generational gaps in the musical fabric of the United
States. Audience use as much as marketing forces created a space for subversion in the
nation’s ears and minds. These influences were ones that the MC5 took on and grew up
with in their lives in the Detroit area (a hotbed of popular performers including John Lee
Hooker, Bill Haley and others). Attempts to institutionalize these musical forms by
producers into more marketable and less threatening forms (i.e. Pat Boone) were
eventually rejected as in the 605. The link between rock and rebellion continued to
develop.

It is an open question how much this meant in everyday life. Did the potential
empowerment of music as rebellion contribute any significance to the debate over the
massive social issues of the 19605 like race, class, Vietnam and agency? Indeed, music

was seen as a common referent in social change movements in the 19603. “We Shall

Overcome” or “Blowin’ in the Wind” for instance were common references that allowed
people to unify their voices in the streets and on college campuses. The violent offspring
of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Weathermen took their name
specifically from a Bob Dylan song, “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

Obviously music was invested in by a generation that pushed record sales to new
levels and found a voice for these expressions especially in the rise of the New Left and
counter cultural movements. Yet, how much change could this common culture effect?
Was it meant to bring about change? Rebellion was alive in well in the music industry in
these two decades, yet its effect was hard to comprehend. Regardless, market forces as
well as audiences delighted in the process of subversion through music pushing acts like
the Jefferson Airplane and Country Joe and Fish in front of audiences of hundreds of
thousands both on record, and in massive concert festivals across the nation. Scholars
who have written on the interaction of music and social forces such as Reebee Garafalo,
Simon Frith and Keith Negus amongst others provide a conceptual framework from
which to begin to understand this interaction of rebellion and rock. The rise of the MC5
and its affiliation of the White Panther Party were set to push this discussion of music’s
place in cultural and political change to a more immediate level, as bands themselves
potentially became their own organizing political forces.

The 19503 and 19603, decades in which rock and roll formalized itself as a genre
are inherently tied to the rise of mass media forms in a new era of consumerism after
World War 11. Understanding the power of this media force in the constitution and life of

the genre (models that the MC5 and WPP would invest in) is a first step into this

discussion of meaning and power in rock and rebellion. Robert Benford, David Snow
and Todd Gitlin can allow insight not only to the realities of media and its capabilities of
labeling, marketing and naturalizing popular culture products in the post-war age.
Conversely, Gitlin’s work especially can contextualize the intersection of politics (Of the
New Left) and music, two entities whose success was based on the post war media
onslaught and the spectacle of rebellion. Theories that deal with framing also point to the
need of a holistic interpretation of one of popular culture’s great false binaries, art versus
commerce.

This intersection and the continued debate considering authenticity highlight the
continued investment of individuals in music. Did rock really mean to subvert? Did it
mean to sell? Conversations between now institutionalized names in music scholarship
such as Reebee Garafalo and Simon F rith in works like Rock and Roll is Here to Pay and
Performing Rights, respectively, point us in a direction which seeks to understand the
relationship of media to creative and artistic expression, and how much these factors are
determined from above or from below. Keith Negus in Music Genres and Corporate
Cultures links these discussions of authenticity and the realities of media power,
providing the main theoretical framework from which to look into the history of rock, roll
and rebellion. lt no longer is a case of art versus commerce, but instead is a process.
This process entails not only industry producing culture, but culture also producing an
industry. Here the true nature Of rock and its relationship to rebellion can best be
understood.

Chapter 2, “Revolution on Your Headphones: Charting Social Location in the

Rise Of the MC5 and the White Panther Party,” begins the complicated discussion of the
varying perspectives of the group’s members amongst WPP Officials and amongst
themselves. These varying perspectives are reflected upon in terms of foundations for
the band member’s political and musical mindsets. Chapter 3 looks to locate the social
location of group members in an attempt to understand their goals for the life of the band
and its role in the White Panthers. Members reflect on historical events, musical
foundations and the realities of local, national and international concerns that shaped the
band and to differing political and musical extents the plans and goals of group members
in the MC5. There is not necessarily any grand narrative that is identified in these
processes: instead an interaction of social and musical events and practices intertwine in
the formation of the group’s musical and social/political views. These views are
highlighted especially through the guide of meso-level works dealing with the social,
political and cultural history of the metro Detroit area (including Sugrue’s Origins of the
Urban Crisis), which directly influenced the creation Of the band and the WPP not only
in their direct experiences, but also shaped their ideas and approach to national and
international issues that would form to varying extents, member’s commitments to
political and social messages through the band.

Chapter 3, “Motor City Burning: Rock and Rebellion in the White Panther Party
and the MC5,” begins a detailed examination of the White Panther Party and the MC5 as
a musical and potentially social force. The chapter reflects the first phase of research
conducted with involved individuals within the organization. John Sinclair, the band’s

manager and head of the White Panther Party was interviewed in Detroit in the Spring of

2005 as was his former wife and band photographer Leni Sinclair in the hopes of
accumulating a perspective on the group from the Sinclair’s cases, some of the most
potent forces behind the band’s rise to fame and the development of the Party itself. Pun
Plamondon, a co-founder of the White Panther Party was also consulted. The writings Of
Sinclair and semiotic messages put forth by the band and the collective point to numerous
influences that can allow a gauge from which these ideas came forth.

John Sinclair, as one of the most sincere and sure proponents of the path the band
and the Party were taking at the time, provides immense insight into the realities of the
life of the organizations. Instead of a formalized political organization, Sinclair
discusses the organic base from which the Party came into being and the way in which
the WPP and the MC5 were working without a concrete plan of action and calculation.
Music was seen as the real tool of enlightenment to Sinclair; the MC5 was the catalyst for
change against imperialist control. The reaction to the group by local and national
authorities was swift and severe for Sinclair who would serve several years in a federal
penitentiary. In the end those in high positions in the WPP looked to the MC5 as a media
spearhead for open questioning and rebellion against societal norms. Far beyond politics,
the band was representative of a program put forth of “rock and roll, dope and fucking in
the streets” (Sinclair 1). Rebellion had found a comfortable home.

Chapter 4, “Sonic Anarchy: The Making of the MC5,” focuses on this
disagreement in political and musical visions of the surviving members of the group:
individuals who are often forgotten when looking at the life of the WPP. Perspectives

vary significantly as to what the revolution was to mean and what the outcome was to be

for those involved. F ormalized conceptualizations of the group’s political aims have
proved a difficulty in determining an overarching frame for audiences, the WPP, and
band members themselves due to these differing perspectives on intent. The White
Panther Party and the MC5 as the determinate power within the organization was prone
to levels of use by varying groups and populations. Audiences, the government, and
others to varying extents bought into the space of useable rebellion by the group.
Sometimes dismissed and sometimes feared as a threat to national security the
potentialities of meanings took on lives of their own and continue to do so today, creating
an almost mythical vision of group within the counterculture and within rock and roll
history. Coming back to Chapter 1, this section will focus on, through Gitlin’s work
especially, the confounding nature of creation in the mediated age. Here the polysemic
nature Of intent versus appearance is greatly problematized.

Chapter 5, “Guns and Guitars: Revolutionary Style and Substance?,” will examine
the career of the band in determining their revolutionary potential as accessible products
of useable rebellion. Interestingly, the band for all of its political ascriptions very rarely
addressed social issues. This chapter will look to the other “revolutionary” potentialities
of the band and its career. Critics and other musicians commonly cite the group as a
powerful influence in the development of both punk and heavy metal (two more musical
forms that continued the formalized tradition of spaces of useable rebellion). What,
hence, then made their music and their message a revolutionary one for other artists and
audiences? The MC5 understood the importance of performance. Numerous areas of

“performance” including lyrics, onstage antics, and media propaganda were utilized to

10

present and sell an image and reputation of the band. These arenas of performance
pushed forth representations of rawness and rebellion to a sometimes believing,
sometimes suspect audience. Here the message would be conveyed, but like the Yippies,
the call to revolution could only equal a call, with no response possible. Such factors,
along with the media assault orchestrated by Trans-Love Energies and the White Panther
Party created an entity that no one involved in the band or the WPP was ready or able to
comprehend. Thrust into the national spotlight, both of popular culture and government
surveillance, the myth of the MC5 quickly eclipsed any single actor conflating and
confounding those who thought they were at the controls. To return to a reoccurring
theme, framing models create a method from which to examine these possibilities of
confusion and ultimately in terms of political change, a failure.

Chapter 6, “Up Against the Wall: Music’s Place in Revolution,” then takes the
lessons of the MC5 case study and looks to larger applications of the interrogated
interaction of music and politics. The case study does not aim to extend itself into
universals concerning this interaction, but instead will look into the potentialities of
music’s role in social and political change through the success and failures of the MC5 as
a measure for the applicability and reality of mass mediated frames potentially
constituting a tool for said change. Stanley Aronowitz’s The Death and Rebirth of
American Radicalism ’s contention that there are two countercultures, the political and the
cultural will occupy a central presence as the lessons of the MCS’s career points to an
inherent disconnect in revolution in which cultural revolution does not equal lasting

political change.

11

Unlike other acts of its time or since, never has the line between political and
cultural life been so blurred as it was with the MC5. Sex, drugs and rock and roll became
a call for revolution in the streets that was heard and feared by some, embraced by others.
Numerous wiretaps, a federal prison or two, and thousands of albums sold later, the MC5
myth grows. It is time to look past the myth and instead look to the realities and
perspectives of its participants and weigh these against critical thought and perspectives
on the power of media, the power of music in social change and development.

Far from a top-down method of ideological control, the potentialities were
actively negotiated amongst numerous interests benefiting from a sense of useable
rebellion. In an era of equally contentious political and social times, music (the renewable
resource that it is) continues the tradition of supplying audiences and fans a place to rebel
and openly take part in collective dissent. The immense success of Green Day’s
politically charged album American Idiot, along with albums from Neil Young to the
Dixie Chicks, prove that the public is listening to voices of challenge within the music
industry. Perhaps by examining a group who dealt with these problematic borders of
commercialism and dissent can help provide some insight into the role of music in

revolutions of all sizes to come.

12

Chapter 1

Fighting in the Streets: Understanding the Undercurrent of Rebellion in
Rock

In many ways the career of the MC5 can best be described as an experiment in
power. This experiment not only refers to the band’s hard-driving sound, but also to its
role as a counter-cultural force that tested the parameters of rebellion, as it sought to
create broad social and political change. The group was at the forefront of the White
Panther Party (WPP), a collective which advocated for the end of capitalism, gave full
support to the Black Panther Party’s initiatives, and had other revolutionary aims that
brought the band to the attention of local, state and federal authorities. For these
authorities, the band became a symbol of a threatening, amorphous youth rebellion. For
other Observers, the band represented either the promise or the failure of music as tool of
social change.

Through their music, the MC5 consciously articulated the meaning of rebellion in
the youthful expression of rock. Although rebellion had always been associated with
rock from its very inception, the connection was implicit rather than an explicit part of a
program of social change. From its very beginning following World War 11, rock had
been an instrument of youth resistance and rebellion to the social mores of the 19503 and
19603, but it was also embedded in a market system that reinforced social hierarchies.
The MC5 also faced this contradiction, even as it openly fostered a useable rebellion,
already located, to some degree, in the history of rock. .

“Useable rebellion” refers to the inherent rebellious nature of rock that has both

allowed producers and consumers to partake in rebelling in a safe spot that can be
13

secured for the price Of a concert ticket, t-shirt or album. However, this space is owned
by dominant power structures and major corporate interests who make immense profits
from selling rock as both a social and economic practice. "Useable rebellion" is a process
inherently promised by and contained within rock, in which participants including
audiences, artists, and critics to differing extents use music to actively question the world
around them. This rebellion is no more directed than Marlon Brando’s response in the
The Wild One of “Watcha got?” to the pressing question of the film, “What are you
rebelling against?” This foundational and often times generic ethos of rebellion in rock
can be momentary or lasting, subversive or reinforcing of the dominant power structures
on which it depends for its distribution and reception. Despite this fluidity, some kind of
reification of identity through questioning takes place for those investing themselves.
Rebellion is alive in rock because through it, the music maintains its freshness. The
viability of rebellions is debated, showing itself in discussions Of authenticity and selling
out, youth culture, sexuality and in some cases like the MC5, politics.

This is the process that was tested through the MC5’3 association with the White
Panther Party. Here rock’s constant, but Often broadly articulated sense of challenge and
subversion that it had been dependent upon was given a public testing ground with the
MC5 and the White Panther Party. Though not intended by its creators to be a formal
revolutionary political party, the band found itself at the center of these foundational
concerns of how far could rock really go in mobilizing dissent, and how much could a
product of popular culture mean to its audience.

Because the MCS’s band members were highly conscious of the contradiction

14

between rebellion and consumption, they are an interesting lens through which to view
the meaning of rock in the late 19603 and early 19703. By mobilizing the powers and
energies Of subversion associated with rock from its birth, the band and the WPP were
able to test the social and political possibilities of music. The Party and the MC5 also
raised questions about the role of capitalism by harnessing this subversive energy within
rock, as had been successfully done since the 19503. Due to their dependence on a major
record label, a contentious debate ensued amongst their critics wondering if such
expressions of dissent could be valid when contained within the same system of capital it
sought to destroy.

The long-standing debate among musicians and critics concerning the social
possibilities of music, caught between commerce and authenticity, is the focus of this
chapter. A historical perspective on how rock has been tied into a market system gives
us perspective about the music’s power in challenging conceptions of social identity and
its ability to create moral panic. A history of rock also demonstrates how this rebellion
was successfully sold to youth including the members of MC5 and other important
figures in the life of the band and the White Panther Party, such as Ministry of
Information and counter-cultural guru, John Sinclair. The chapter will also examine the
role of authenticity in the debate about the viability of rebellion in rock. Authenticity,
especially in relationship to major corporate interests, still solicits debate among
audiences as to what role bands and rock have in really shaping a challenge to a capitalist
system. Notions of purity and degeneration in the face of capital have often been tied to

discussions of the lineage and place of rock in society.

15

The MC5 could not escape this critique, even as it articulated its version of youth
rebellion. Along with its cohort, the WPP, and members of the surrounding youth
community in Michigan, the MC5 became an experiment in semiotic and sonic warfare,
challenging local, state and national authorities while attempting to inspire counter-
cultural values in audiences. Contingents of that audience and some critics viewed the
MCS’s music as a meaningless marketing ploy. Between these polarities social locations
were dynamically challenged and reified by the band and their listeners.

The Revolution Will Be Televised, Recorded and Appearing at a Venue Near

You

Changes in the music industry and in media technologies in the post-war period
allowed for the widespread introduction of rock. The breakdown of the monopoly
created by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), the
introduction of television and the transistor radio, and the successful creation and
marketing of the 33 1/3 and 45 RPM record allowed for a recontextualization of music in
everyday life. Due to the increasing venues for music and the opening of the music
publishing and recording industries more music was needed to fill in these gaps. Here the
independent record companies came into play. Such labels as Sun Records and Atlantic
began to provide artists with a less centralized recording and distribution system.
Geoffrey Hull chronicles this watershed in the recording industry in the post-war period
when “rock and roll jolted record sales into ever higher gear,” resulting in rising profits”
and an increasingly formalized distribution system (Hull 71, 2). Compared to $189

million in 1950, the rise of rock and targeting of the newly anointed “teenage audience”

16

pushed total album sales up to $600 million dollars in 1960 (Hull, 2). Hull discusses
how “mom and pop operations” benefited initially from this economic boom, in effect
marking a breakdown of the major recording interest’s oligopoly. This economic shift to
the independent labels reached a pinnacle in 1958 when their recordings represented an
astounding 76% of singles on the music charts (Hull 29). These market developments
and a new generation of consumers in the mass mediated age caused upheaval in the
music industry. A generational rift was developing because of the introduction Of new
technologies and the creation of the “teenager” as a cultural identity. The independent
labels could exploit this rift in their marketing strategies.

Now able to potentially compete on a national scale for radio play, the
independent labels could sell to a large upcoming niche market, the baby-boom
generation, now anointed by market interests as “teenagers.” This youth market had
extra spending cash, supported by a Gross National Product, which rose from $200
billion to $360 billion between 1940 and 1954 (Szatmary 23). This niche market
ultimately made rock a successful multi-mediated phenomenon.

Because of economic, technological, and social change, the recording industry
made rebellion a central dimension of rock’s success, a message delivered through film,
television, radio, and record sales Robert Albrecht, in Mediating the Muse, explains that
the newborn genre was difficult to contain, especially semiotically,

The staid performances of swing bands-musicians in tuxedos sitting behind

monogrammed shields and waiting for their turn to blow a few notes-would have

hardly made for good television. But rock ‘n’ roll was different. Here was youth,

17

action, and unbridled excitement. Taking their cues from the flamboyant

performances of rhythm and blues musicians, the artists of rock ‘n’ roll whirled

and whined, screamed and jumped across the stage and into the American living

room (159).

He further points out that especially with new development of the visual turn in
society, brought on by the vast success of television, rock was a new and semiotically
fascinating form. Rock effectively made the image as important as the message.

If rock could be considered a revolution, the revolution was most certainly
televised. Rock harnessed the potentiality of a multi-mediated world. Performers like
Elvis Presley, who gyrated his hips to the beat, or Jerry Lee Lewis who pounded the
piano with various appendages, encouraged a new perspective on popular music,
especially aimed at the emerging buying power of the baby-boomer generation. David
Szatmary sees this visual turn as intrinsically linking rock with moral panic over youth
rebellion. Elvis’ television appearances highlight this connection. Szatmary writes:

By the end of the year (1956) Ed Sullivan, who earlier had condemned Presley as

‘unfit for a family audience’ agreed to pay the new rock star $50,000 for three

appearances on his show, one of the most popular television programs in America

at the time (51).

Reactions to the performances were harshly received in numerous circles including the
American clergy. Much of this focus remained on the signifiers of Presley’s sexuality
and his violation of racial taboos: Reverend William Shannon wrote in the Catholic Sun:

“Presley and his voodoo of frustration and defiance have become symbols in our country,

18

and we are sorry to come upon Ed Sullivan in the role of promoter. Your Catholic
viewers, Mr. Sullivan, are angry.” Evangelist Billy Graham, who had not seen Elvis,
commented that he was ‘not sure I’d want my children to see’ him (Szatmary 55).

It seems the creation of this post-war notion of “teenager” allowed both successful
marketing as well as a successful othering/exoticizing Of youth. Presley, as rock’s
gyrating poster-child represented to the American populace the face of this newly
established music. Combined with the raucous sounds of the music, Presley as a visual
embodiment of rock provided a neatly packaged target for those fearing rock’s influence
on youth and on American culture.

Szatmary aims that the image of the rebellious youth, as embodied in Elvis
Presley, was also personified in major films of the time that stoked moral panic. Rebel
Without a Cause (1955), The Wild One (1953), and especially Blackboard Jungle (1955)-
-were the most important of these. Blackboard Jungle was the first motion picture to use
a rock song, “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets. If the “image of
the alienated, shiftless, and violent street tough in black leather jacket who dangled a
cigarette from his lips” (Szatzmary, 54) was becoming a symbol of collective fear, then
rock was the soundtrack for these icons of rebellion, with jazz now taking on a stodgy
traditionalism.

Fears of juvenile delinquency were joined by fears of deviance and a
disintegration of class, race, and gender hierarchies as rock became more and more
popular. Michael Ochs, a leading musical archivist, states:

If rock was the soundtrack to our lives, then these soundtrack albums had to

19

encapsulate any of the teen topics of interest-automobiles, assorted fads,
sexuality, rebellion, escape, energy, life, death, loneliness, dancing and dating
(Qtd. in Waksman, 10).
Rock seemed to ignore all notions of societal taboo, an image conveyed through the mass
media. Boundaries of race were of special interest as rock unashamedly brought together
black and white audiences and artists in a time of racial upheaval. In an examination of
popular music in Britain, Dick Bradley contends that racial boundaries especially created
a joyous space Of subversion for youth:
It is the nature of the developing codal fusion over the years that young people
should be more familiar with, and less puzzled or affronted by, the Afro-
American elements in popular music than their parents and elders. This fact gave
rock ‘n’ roll, rhythm ‘n’ blues, soul and Beat their shock value and their capacity
to act as a ‘secret for the young’ (121).
Violations of class hierarchies also played a role. More so in the United Kingdom, but
also latently ruminating in the American mindset, youth culture and rock were a
fundamental challenge to class boundaries as well. Most labels and artists popularized in
the early life of rock reflected a southern, working-class aesthetic; challenging dominant
conceptions of what performing artists should sound and look like. A youth audience
was attracted to a working class aesthetic, and found their way to this aesthetic through
middle-class consumption: “This leisure style was created through the appropriation of
consumption goods-clothes, haircuts, records, etc...” (Bradley 85). Hence, youth could

purchase a challenge to racial, sexual and class lines simply by investing in a record.

20

Youth, rock and rebellion fused into a semiotic system, to which many people
reacted with hostility. Frank Sinatra stated that rock was, “. . .sung, played, and written for
the most part by cretinous goons, and by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration and sly,
lewd, in plain fact dirty, lyrics it manages to be the martial music of every side-burned
delinquent on the face of the Earth” (Qtd. in Altschuler, 6). In their tell-all investigative
report of youth culture at the time U.S.A. Confidential, journalists Lait and Mortimer
wrote,

with tom-toms and hot jive and ritualistic orgies of erotic dancing, weed smoking

and mass mania, with African jungle background. Many music shops purvey

dope; assignations are made in them. White girls are recruited for colored

lovers. . .We know that many of platter-spinners are hopheads. Many others are

Reds, left-wingers or hecklers of social convention. . .Through disc jockeys, kids

get to know colored and other musicians; they frequent places the radio oracle

plug, which is done with design. . .to hook juves [juveniles] and guarantee a new

generation subservient to the Mafia (Qtd. in Altshuler 6).

One can see in Confidential, a book hoping to provide some insight to a
generation of perplexed parents who looked to youth/rock culture was a supposedly
bordered and segmented area where societal ideologies and values were openly
questioned. Here was a “folk devil” that could be a focal point Of societal fears of testing
dominant white ideology. A3 Dick Hebdige stated in his now classic study of
subculture, “The struggle between different discourses, different definitions and

meanings within ideology is therefore always, at the same time, a struggle with

21

signification: a struggle for possession of the sign which extends to even the most

99

mundane areas of everyday life. He continues that stylistic transformations “go ‘against
nature’ interrupting the process of ‘norrnalization.’ As such, they are gestures,
movements towards a speech which offends the ‘silent majority,’ which challenges the
principles of unity and cohesion, which contradicts the myth of consensus” (18).

Rock was a tool of style and signification. The economic challenge put forth by
smaller companies against the dominant record industry, the confrontation of new
technology in the hands of a new generation, the challenge to social boundaries, and
issues of sexuality provided the wellspring of value-laden arguments for and against the
rise of rock. These ideological challenges allowed a fundamental identity for rock to
emerge that would operate as a framework from which validity and authenticity would be
gauged even as rock became an international industry. .

Making Sense of the Rebellion

Obviously, the complex history of rock and rebellion warrants much more
attention than is allowed in these last few pages. However, the MC5 provides a concrete
case for seeing these forces in action. Against this backdrop, the band emerged in the
19603 to push the foundations of rock’s relationship with rebellion.

This helped to sell the music to a youthful audience, which would or would not
buy into the inherent values already discussed. This was a successful strategy as the 603
music industry saw a reclamation of the charts by major corporate interests as rock

proved to be a continuing revenue producer. Vanilla-ized (a term used by Pat Boone)

rock proved that the music, visuals and messages of the music, whether a potential

22

corrupting force or not, could sell. The White Panther Party’s call for “rock roll dope
and fucking in the streets” was a promise to partake in the full potential of youthful
rebellion seemingly evidenced in rock’s early life. It was a realization of the power of
youth and its ties to the music. Tied to political and culturally revolutionary ideals, it also
tested how authentically one could be tied to rebellion and how much one was beholden
tO corporate hegemony.

As a test case, the MC 5 provoked debate amongst music critics, artists, audiences
and scholars over the conflict between authenticity and commerce in popular music. The
19505 set the standards for expectations and ideas concerning the role of rock.
Conceptions of authenticity can be traced to the conflict between rebellion and
commerce, as audiences rejected or accepted the music as a cultural form. As Bradley
postulates, “teenagers and young adults engaged in ‘resistant’ and rebellious cultural
practices, which defined them as youth or sub—cultural members. And music-use,
including music-making, was tied up with the process from the beginning” (99). The
more potentiality to reaffirm a rebellious youthful identity, through products of rock, the
more authentic the product is seen by those taking part. The economic, technological,
social, and cultural questions issued at rock’s inception would set the standards as to what
“real” and “authentic” rock music and culture would be. The further the music
supposedly steps away from youth and rebellion, the more it is suspect and the more
degeneration is seen from an ideal level of purity.

Rebellion, Degeneration and the Dance of Authenticity

In “Concerning the Progress of Rock & Roll,” Michael Jarrett examines what he

23

calls “conventionalization” as the “foundational myth of popular music” (167). He

describes the tendency for rhetoric of “degeneration” to enter our understanding of

popular music in everyday life (168). Jarrett contends rock lives with an ethos where,
bad (commercial) things happen to ‘authentic’ music is sufficient to generate the

real/fake distinction that has become musical common sense. It creates a

consumer who understands the history of rock as a series of authentic moments

that deteriorated into conventionalized moments, transforming the music into a

field of ‘commercial’ imitations of some real thing, and it prompts histories

organized around the proper names of acknowledged innovators (172).
Degeneration is at the “heart of all distinctions that attempt to delineate a boundary
between the authentic and the commercial, in whatever guise that may take: rock vs. pop,
black vs. white, modern vs. postmodern, art vs. commerce” (168).

Useable rebellion is a practical tool from which to gauge the alleged process of
degeneration. Rock’s foundational ethos is one that depends on supposedly authentic
challenges to the status quo predominately from a youthful perspective. Deviation from a
youthful voice or deviations from themes or styles connotating dissent are seen as
suspect. In Rock ‘Til You Drop John Strausbaugh serrnonizes that, “Rock is youth music.
It is best played by young people, for young people, in a setting that is specifically
exclusionary of their parents and anyone their parents’ age. It is music of youthful
energies, youthful rebellion, youthful anxieties and anger” (2). He continues later, in
reference to older artists’ continuing commercial appeal, “Colostomy rock is not

rebellion, it’s the antithesis of rebellion: it’s nostalgia.” He adds, “And nostalgia is the

24

death Of rock. We were supposed to die before we got Old. Now look at us. Woo woo,
Mick! Rock on Bruce!”(10).

One can stand witness here to the pervasive and continuing power of youth
rebellion in evaluating the authenticity of rock music. Strausbaugh warns us about
nostalgia as being the death-knell of rock. Nostalgia is, in effect, creating a stasis in a
music that depends on its ability to subvert societal lethargy. Strausbaugh, far from being
alone, is part of a much larger societal perception that true rock is not nostalgic, but
always cutting edge. The reality of thinking that nostalgia is a death-knell to a youthful
and dissident music is to partake in a form of nostalgia itself; Strausbaugh is pining for a
form that supposedly once was in an idealistic time and place.

One of Strausbaugh’s targets is the MC5. His discussion of the band reflects his
broader contention that “the movers and shakers of rock were always exemplars of hip
capitalism, paying empty lip service to social change and ‘the revolution’ but always far
more focused on money and glamour and personal gratification” (15). The connection of
degeneration and rebellion is further evident in the author’s claim that, “It wasn’t just the
hairlines that had receded: the political commitment, the anger, the will to change that
permeated the original music was also gone”(l4). His examination of the MC5, The
Jefferson Airplane and the Fugs rates the subjects based upon an absolute, regenerating
fundamental nostalgia of youthful rebellion that Strausbaugh has essentialized as the
foundation of rock. The key issue for Strausbaugh is the authenticity of the band’s
political commitment. In the end his judgment is, “They made the media look and sound

more cool, the better to market their products and their advertisers” (91).

25

The debate over authenticity and rebellion, as witnessed in Jarrett’s and
Strausbaugh’s history of rock, is a lasting one. Simon F rith matter-of-factly states that
rock is a commercial form of music. It, like jazz, the pre-eminent music of rebellion
before rock, has grown and developed within the realities of an economy based on capital
(54). What has been successfully sold to audiences, he says, is the aesthetic of rebellion,
“The 19503 images of rebellion without a cause merged with the 19603 images of
rebellion with a cause...” (64). This was not done though without understanding the
needs of the audiences. Rock from its inception has had to understand its audiences and
offer them products that met their needs as youth living in the post war American
landscape. “Rock,” explains F rith, “is a capitalist industry and not a folk form, but its
most successful products do, somehow, express and reflect its audience’s concerns” (62).

The hope is that music can be a useable counter-hegemonic force in which social
dissatisfaction can be communicated and control and mastery in one’s life can be
reasserted against the pressures of the outside world (Frith 262). Frith states that one of
the reasons audiences and critics can ignore the realities of capital is that audiences in the
end are able to control and manipulate these texts within their individual lives. In Frith’s
perspective the interplay of collective and personal needs even within the context of
commercialization, can still be seen as potentially revolutionary or authentic in terms of
audiences’ uses of the music itself (264-265). In the end, this search for authenticity gave
listeners a “sense of freedom that was, simultaneously, a sense of rootlessness and
estrangement” (262).

Steve Chapple and Reebee Garofalo critique Frith for putting too much emphasis

26

on audience reception. Instead, the authors see economics as indeed the determining
factor, which shape the ability of audiences to receive and make use of music. To
Chapple/Garofalo this very notion of rebellion is less a real tool that audiences use within
the music and rather is an autonomous zone that could be reached through consumption:
“The creation of a teen culture was clearly not a revolutionary development, but it did
distance young people to a certain degree from home and church, and provided a wedge
from which inchoate rebellion could be expressed, if not yet directed at the
establishment” (298). As rock evolved as a musical form associated with youth, it also
evolved as a commercial product:
The position of the music as an increasingly important cultural commodity within
a consumer economy weakened any of the explicit antimaterialist content of the
music. The sexually liberating aspects of the music remained, but sexual
liberation itself was integrated into the system as an important selling tool for the
‘liberated’ economy (300).
Chapple and Garofalo continue that sexuality was not the only topic subsumed by a
march to capital:
And finally, the music became separated from the political ferment that had
provided it with its critical edge (as well as themes and images) in the earlier
sixties. Musicians and the creative personnel within the music industry were
integrated into an entertainment business now firmly part of the American
corporate structure (300).

The music was so effective in reaching youth, that is was hegemonically subsumed into

27

the capitalist world (306 & 308). The authors consider this a co-optation in which
audiences had very little input and which is demonstrative of the top-down realties of
power and control in modern musical practice. They emphasize production over Frith’s
focus on consumption. However, Chapple and Garofalo as well as Frith are aware of the
important role of capital no matter how much they believe that audiences construct their
own meanings. Both believe that audiences should be able to claim music as their own,
even as a tool to subvert dominant power structures.

To counteract this top-down view of the masses and their relationship to
authenticity, one can look at the work of Keith Negus to explain the complex intricacies
of the industry in its relationship to authenticity. Instead of industry corrupting culture or
exploiting dissent and rebellion, Negus asserts that a false binary is created between the
industry and the people. Instead, the music industry is built upon larger cultural values
and beliefs, which are essentially shared. Rather than a threatening edifice, the industry
is composed of ordinary people who represent the larger culture. Through these
participants, the industry both shapes and is shaped by the culture around it. (1 8, 30).

The creation of genres, in Negus’ perspective is a way for corporate cultures to
make sense of and to market musical forms. It is a resource for audiences to make sense
of and consume authenticity and to partake in potential subversion in ideology or action.
Genres are “unstable intersections of music industry and media fans and audience
cultures, musician networks and broader social collectives informed by distinct features
of solidarity and social identity” (174). Genres allow us to affirm our beliefs and wants

concerning who we are and what our past is. It provides comfort in an immense and

28

unfamiliar world. It also allows the pleasure of breaking these boundaries. In the case of
the MC5 it was possible to feel a sense of community with the band and their embracing
of rock as a subversive form, as well as enjoy the group’s progressive and heavy sound
that challenged genre conventions of the time when compared to dominating San
Francisco psychedelic acts of the time like the Jefferson Airplane.

The use-value of genres and their ability to help us discern and consume popular
culture is accomplished through successfully communicating authentic feelings and
experiences for their audiences. The discussion of authenticity that Negus, F rith and
Chapple/Garofalo engage in revolves around notions of purity. In terms of rock’s purity,
concerns about how much audiences, artists and the industry create a music that is able to
overcome corporate influence is a key topic. Like country and jazz, which are often
understood as authentic forms emerging organically from distinct communities, rock is a
music that supposedly found its voice and its power in an emerging youth culture with its
own mores. The music is then as Jarrett explains, held to romantic notions of purity and
eventual degeneration. The ability or inability to overcome corporate power and to
harness the energy of the music is the focus of these conversations, demonstrating the
lasting influence of useable rebellion for those taking part in it.

The MC5 was both heralded as a revolutionary force and as a corporate sham
because of their abilities to draw in these foundational elements of the discussion of
rebellion and hence, authenticity. This was done in an incredibly intense and combative
fashion through their association with the White Panther Party. The affection and

disregard they garnered often centered on this ability to test these parameters of rebellion

29

within rock. A question loomed over their short association with the WPP about what
happens when a band attempts to cash this promissory note of useable rebellion in rock.
In this autonomous zone one could rebel with a cause, politically, culturally or musically
through the music of the band. One could also rebel without a cause, partaking in rock’s
favorite hedonistic topics of sex, drugs or just momentary release when encountering the
music. One could also be simply without a clue in dismissing this generic rebellion as
something that could be written off as meaningless drivel.

The MC5 and those associated with the band soon were to learn that these modes
of reception could not be controlled: amongst their fans, amongst the authorities or even
amongst themselves. The foundational themes and promises of rebellion that rock
Offered to the public en masse would find a spectrum of interpretations and uses.
Included, were impassioned concerns about authentic youthful expression, the identity it
provided to those invested as well as rock’s possible effect on national security and the
American way of life. Discussion of commerce versus authenticity would be of central
concern during the tumultuous years of protest and dissent in the late 603 and early 703
and beyond. How much of a role music could play, if any, in the charge for social
change highlighted these continuing debates about rock and what it has come to mean to
the many that have heavily invested in it to develop social locations.

Media Frames and Their Importance in the Measuring the MCS’s Authenticity
Adding to this discussion of authenticity within music scholarship, the notion of
media framing can provide a larger perspective for what Negus describes as the

complexity of interactions among audiences, musicians and producers. The MC5 and

30

their association with the White Panther Party solicited a great deal of press, from
coverage in Time to Sinclair’s self-generated press in the 5'” Estate and the Ann Arbor
Sun. These media outlets negotiated the meaning of the band and its mission and provide
a picture of the group for a general audience. While the band and the Party didn’t
necessarily have a coherent plan for self-representation, these media frames could control
that representation through vilification or romanticization. . The use of familiar cultural
frames by media outlets provided audiences with a limited understanding of what was
happening with the youth in their communities. . The following chapters will
demonstrate that the MC5 is a textbook example of this process. Numerous individuals
and frames used for the band described them as a spearhead for a cultural revolution, as a
way for ordinary youth to become rock stars and to get girls, as a hollow sham to sell
records, as a radical threat to national security, as a recruiter for the counterculture, as a
major or minor influence in rock, and as an exploiter of mass media outlets for purposes
of dissent and the promotion of anarchism.

The historical influence of the media on social movements and their role in the
creation of ideology is important in garnering a full understanding of useable rebellion.
This power was especially visible in the 19603 as the mainstream media’s presentation of
Vietnam and the anti-war movement helped sway public Opinion. Todd Gitlin, a former
head of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and a significant name in the New Left,
sees the media as the primary means for the promotion of dominant ideologies (2). He
explains that social movements, such as SDS, were made digestible and consumable

through the mainstream media’s use of framing techniques. This created simple binaries.

31

As they were represented in the media the MC5 and the White Panther Party often reflect
a binary in representation, making them either authentic dissidents or dismissible fakes.
In essence, the media influences social movements much more so than their leaders
would like to admit. Mainstream media demands spectacle, and group leaders gain
visibility for their causes through spectacle. The band and the White Panther Party well
understood the importance Of spectacle and media assault but like Gitlin could not,
frustratingly enough, control their representations within the media completely. Sinclair
especially attempted to manage the image of the band and the WPP in numerous
independent newspapers as revolutionary heroes. These did little for the general
populace when compared to features in major publications like Time and Newsweek
Like Gitlin, Benford and Snow have been leaders in the development of framing
theory when looking at political and social movements. According to the two, frames
“help to render events or occurrences meaningful and thereby function to organize
experience and guide action” (Benford/Snow, 614). The association of rock with
youth and rebellion was accomplished primarily through what Benford and Snow have
called “adversarial,” “prognostic,” and “motivational” framing. The first of these frames,
“adversarial,” seeks to “delineate the boundaries between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and construct
movement protagonists and antagonists” (616). Commentaries in major press sources
used this framing technique to pit rock and its audience against the prevailing social
mores. The MC5 was held to adversarial frames especially from critics of the band like
Lester Bangs, who looked at it as a countercultural fake that hid sub-par musical vision.

He criticized “the hype, the thick overlay of teenage revolution and total-energy-thing

32

which conceals these scrap yard vistas” (Bangs 34).

Other public commentaries used, “prognostic framing,” issuing a “plan of attack”
which put cultural activists and supporters of the music “on the defensive, at least
temporarily” (617). As a potential force of change, rock successfully subsumed youthful
rebellion in reaction to the moral condemnation that it received from prominent public
figures like Billy Graham and Frank Sinatra. The audience and industry was able to
create successful spaces of rebellion set apart from condemnation, and in a Hebdigian
sense, take pleasure in a display Of otherness. The MC5 found themselves on the
defensive from prognostic frames. In Disc and Music Echo Caroline Boucher wrote, “the
reaction they achieve is such that the MC5 seem to have earned the reputation of being
the enfants terribles of America.”(Boucher). Guitarist Wayne Kramer complained that
their reputation in the press had compromised their abilities to deal with promoters. He
told Bucher: “Promoters think we're going to go out and burn things. They hear
incredible rumors of how we kill cats on stage and run around stark naked” (Boucher).
The band’s propaganda machine put together by Sinclair used prognostic frames as well
to combat their detractors and to progressively quell such negative press that might
compromise their ability to be heard.i

Finally, through “motivational framing” the media can provide “socially
constructed vocabularies” give audiences “compelling accounts for engaging in collective
action and for sustaining their participation.” (617). Thus, the band’s promoter, John
Sinclair, produced an aggressive propaganda in various publications. Through

descriptions of the band’s performances and run-ins with the police, Sinclair created an

33

image of the band as heroic countercultural heroes capable of bringing the revolution
single-handedly. Such a call evoked a mystical experience described as the “magic that
can set you free”—, as “some mythical adolescent moment against which all subsequent
rock moments can be judged” (Frith 176).

These framing models are effective in understanding cultural movements such as
the creation of youth culture in the post war period and the construction and maintenance
of rock, a form that the New Left looked to for insight and inspiration. The question
might be asked as well, is rock inherently political because of its ability to recycle the
presence of youth and rebellion? With the great popularity of rock, could social change
actually be effected whether or not the music is perceived as organic or authentic? This
is the question that the MC5 can help us understand, since they blurred the lines
identified by scholars like Stanley Aronowitz who contend that there “were really two
countercultures in the 603.” First, there was “the political counterculture, those who
engaged in the politics of direct democracy, who organized traditional constituencies in
new ways.” Secondly, were, “the cultural radicals, the artists writers, and, above all, the
rock musicians and their audience, for whom the erotic revolution was a political
movement.” (36). Is it possible that music can ignite social change in political and
cultural spheres? How powerful are audiences and bands when used as symbiotic
organizing forces?

The association of rebellion and youth in rock were realities for individual
members of the MC5 and the WPP. Within the band and amongst community members,

some looked to music as an organizing force for dissent and action. Others found music

34

as a stepping-stone for financial gain and notoriety through a sonic assault on audiences.
Often times these perspectives were mixed. Often times as well, the band and the Party
were surprised at how effective they could be at exploiting the recording industry and the
mainstream media. Audiences, musicians, producers, politicians and the federal
government were all interested in this experiment and what it was to mean. For
whatever political, commercial or “authentically” created aims, the band was to enter into
a continuing debate on rock and rebellion, remaining a cornerstone of its focus for

decades to come.

35

Chapter 2
Revolution on Your Headphones: Charting Social Location in the Rise

of the MC5 and the White Panther Party

The interaction between popular culture and society is a constant site of struggle.
From the studies Of Theodore Adorno and the Frankfurt School, which viewed popular
culture as a potential Opiate for the masses, to Michel De Certeau who claimed that the
masses were able make their own worlds with the raw materials popular culture provided;
the dividing lines between popular and other forms of culture were conceived as a
contested domain. The rise of the MC5 and the revolutionary entity for whom they acted
as organizers, the White Panther Party, is demonstrative of this complex interplay. In the
collective, a musical act and a radical movement were intertwined.

Popular culture was infused with national and local politics and a desire for social
change as represented in the MCS’s music. The Party was meant to be a channel through
which the band and other associated individuals like John Sinclair, who was a leader of
various housing collectives and workshops around the City of Detroit, could express
frustrations with the political and social realities of their time (Sinclair 1972, 104). The
MC5 acted as the Party’s sonic organizing force, bringing together audiences through
their music.

This chapter looks to understand how this political and musical force came into
being, and to understand why the MC 5 and the White Panther Party would become potent
organizations in popular music and radical politics, creating a space for useable rebellion,

a concept that surrounded them from the advent of rock, especially with the “British

36

Invasion.” Interviews conducted with band members have revealed that, although
reflecting disparate notions of what the MC5 and the White Panther Party symbiosis was
supposed to mean and how far it was hoping to go, a commonality existed amongst these
five young men. They shared a common background and upbringing in post—war Detroit.
This background fundamentally shaped how individual members came to view the world
around them. The interviews reveal that numerous factors came into play in the
formation of the band and the Party. Issues of civil rights, anti-war sentiment,
technological innovations, drug use and musical influences combined to make a product
unique to its time and context. These numerous concerns were linked through the band’s
affinity for rock as a potential sight of rebellious discourse and action. The band actively
consumed and eventually found a voice of rebellion in rock that called for both hedonism
and revolution.

That rebellion was deeply tied to the local milieu of Detroit. The group and the
Party had roots and eventually would find fame in the late 19603 Detroit landscape,
where such nationally pertinent issues like race and class would confront them through
immediate experience. The message would spread and many voices would join in
shaping the WPP. At its pinnacle the WPP possessed 30-40 core members, hundreds of
local participants and chapters across the country and in Europe (Kramer 2006).

This assessment begins a focus on perspectives from surviving band members
concerning the life of the White Panther Party and its relationship to the trajectory of the
MC 5. This perspective, although featured in some studies of the band is Often

overlooked in favor of perspectives predominately from John Sinclair, who is often

37

viewed as the overwhelming force behind the development of the WPP.ii Responsibility
for the WPP’s life and work was much more distributed than has been popularly thought.
The following pages examine the views of those remaining band members and
of course one needs to remember that time has probably reframed these views. It is a
concern when looking into groups and figures of this time, that there may exist among
those initial active agents still alive, a want to manage their legacies. The band and those
associated with them have still not come to a common ground regarding the life and
legacy of the MC5’s and the WPP’s political and revolutionary associations. Media
frames and reactions from critics over time have presented the band as either an organic
hope or an exploitative ruse, which eventually pushed the individuals involved into
different realms of intent and hope and folded back into their self-perception.
Nevertheless, the invaluable interviews upon which this chapter is based are surprisingly
telling, frank and aware of folly when discussing political and revolutionary thought.
Music is the place where MC5 members hope to retain their legend; the revolution is
often the theme that has gotten in the way of this hope.
Detroit Divided: Race and Class and Their Effect on a Music Movement

Before beginning to understand the contextual framework of the late 19603 and
early 19703 in Detroit we have to reach back several decades to grasp fully the intensity
of racial and class discord in everyday life. These social realities would significantly
come to shape the political and musical expression of the band. Detroit historian Richard
Thomas describes the first four decades in the twentieth century as a period of massive

change in Detroit’s population because of immigration and migration. According to

38

Thomas, arguably the most significant influence on Detroit was the “Great Migration” of
African-Americans hoping for opportunities in the industrial sector (24-25).

The demand for cheap labor during World War I and numerous immigration
restrictions during the first three decades of the twentieth century pushed poor
southemers, namely African-Americans, to be heavily recruited populations by the
northern industrial sector up until the beginning of the Depression. Because of
automakers’ need for labor, Henry Ford promised five dollars a day to potential laborers.
The needs of the automobile industry coupled with demands from iron, rail, and steel
industries, pushing Detroit to become one, if not the most popular destination for
migrating southemers (25-26). In his The Origins of the Urban Crisis, Thomas J. Sugrue
explains that the increased demand for labor extended through the Second World War
and into the decades following (Sugrue 23). Union and civil rights organizations further
opening the labor market to the black populace marked this “Second Great Migration,”
lasting from 1940-1970. Especially during the war, unions “opened many locals to black
membership, lobbied for civil rights protection, and supported the hiring of black
workers.” The UAW in the early 19403 “forged an alliance with black churches and
reform organizations, especially the NAACP,” that firmly established new levels of
representation in the workplace and in the community for African-Americans of the time
(26).

Due to this rapid expansion of the black community, the population of the Detroit
area changed significantly. The influx of African-Americans was seen as a threat to white

industrial workers as the black population more than doubled in the 19403 from 149,119

39

to 300,506. This change created a thriving environment for racial and class conflict due
to competition for jobs and changing ethnic and racial lines in neighborhoods. These
issues were exacerbated with the eventual economic downturns that plagued the city
through periods of recession and deindustrialization. White homeowners and real estate
agents created and reinforced strict racial covenants in Detroit neighborhoods (Sugrue
44). A de facto racial segregation persisted due to these covenants and other racial
practices in the real estate market.

The members of the MC5, Wayne Kramer, Fred “Sonic” Smith, Rob Tyner,
Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson and Michael Davis grew up in this climate: the
Detroit metropolitan area, mostly Lincoln Park. The economic and social realities of the
area would be a constant influence on future band members, as living in Lincoln Park
(also referred to as living “down river”) “was to reside within the spitting distance Of
Rouge, the Ford Motor Company’s central plant” (Simmons/Nelson, 15). The
neighborhood was one dominated by white and black autoworkers. Guitarist Fred
Smith’s parents who were white natives of West Virginia reflected the labor migration,
moving to Detroit in the hope of finding better opportunities for employment (16).

Drummer Dennis Thompson sees this industrial background as one that greatly
influenced his music. By the time the MC5 coalesced in the mid to late 19603, Detroit
had already been home to numerous musicians who reflected the working class aesthetic
of rock. These included John Lee Hooker, Highland Park native Bill Haley and many
others (Barnett, 9-11). David Carson sees such figures as Haley and Hooker leading to a

Detroit sound that embraced their identification with a “tough, gritty, unheralded

40

metropolis.” Time linked the urban industrial scene to the music, describing a “real
Detroit sound, pulsating with the belch of its smokestacks and the beat of its machinery”
(Carson ix). Suzanne Smith, in her Dancing in the Streets: Motown and the Cultural
Politics of Detroit asserts that Berry Gordy, who founded the legendary Motown label
actually used his familiarity with the production methods of companies like Ford: “Gordy
implemented his idea of inserting the assembly-line process into the recording studio as
soon as he founded Motown” by creating divisions of labor throughout the company
including creation, management, quality control and marketing (14). Thompson claims
that the working class background weighed heavily on their musical careers not only in
their teenage years playing in various groups but also in their rise to fame and the radical
politics of their later years:
Detroit is a working class, blue collar and at that time, primarily an industrial
town. These are people who were coming from parents who worked in factories.
These were children that were coming from working class backgrounds...where
it’s a tough life. It’s a hard life...you work your 40 or 60 hour week and its boom,
bang, crash and you’re turning out parts in a factory and basically you work very
hard. You have callused fingers and dirty finger nails...so you want music that is
pretty rough and tumble (Thompson 2005).
This rough and tumble aesthetic, born from industrial realities of life in urban Detroit,
provided the MC5, along with numerous other acts, a distinct musical voice representing
America’s “Arsenal of Democracy.” This ascription, from Thompson, makes sense in

reference to artists like Hooker and Hank Ballard, as well as figures like Gordy who had

41

put time in at Detroit assembly lines or in Detroit steel factories before making music
their careers (Carson 1-9, 35). Machine operatives and crafts workers overwhelmingly
dominated the face of employment opportunities and positions in the Detroit area in the
1950 and 1970 census data (Farley 72). These jobs were fragile and highly susceptible to
economic downturns due to the reliance on manufacturing. For example in 1950, fifty-
six percent of all auto manufacturing in the United States was in Michigan. A decade
later this number would fall to forty percent, drastically affecting the Detroit and
Michigan area workforces (Sugrue 128). Less a romantic ideal and more an everyday
fact of life, the working-class lifestyle would be hard to escape in post-war Detroit and
would be reflected in the culture, including in the process of musical creation.iii

The industrial realities of Detroit in the post-war period had much more far-
reaching influences than in just creating a working class background amongst its citizens.
Drastic population change had direct impacts on the streets and in the neighborhoods of
Detroit in heightening racial tension and strife amongst the City’s inhabitants. By
1970 the black populace would dominate with more than 600,428 (45% of the total
populace of Detroit) (Sugrue 23). The massive shift in population in just a few decades
forced Detroiters to deal with established economic and racial lines being challenged.

Thomas Sugrue points to a lack of public housing and complete segregation as
among the most contentious issues in Detroit. Rental agents, bankers and landlords
looked to the black migration as a threat to real estate investments. The result of these
racist views was the creation of black enclaves in the inner city (39-44). As of 1947, out

of the 545,000 open housing units, only 47,000 were available to black tenants (Sugrue

42

43). Here as well, class and racial conflict would emerge from the territorializing of
space, eventually resulting in “white flight” when these racist practices where challenged
at local and national levels, in the courts and on the streets. Detroit’s enclaves
represented the harsh economic realities of blacks in the community, who were
disproportionally relegated to the lowest paying jobs on the economic ladder (99). The
continuing discrimination and rising frustration of the community came to the national
public eye especially in the 1967 Riot/Rebellion. In 1942 Life Magazine had featured a
headline that stated, “Detroit is Dynamite” adding, “It can either blow up Hitler or blow
up the U.S.,” in reference to the prominent racial tensions present in workplaces, and
neighborhoods that included numerous strikes relating to issues of race and street
skirmishes over residential racial lines (Sugrue 29). The end of 1967 had fulfilled the
prophecy in both ways.

By 1967 the MC5 had been performing in Detroit area venues mostly as a cover
band, playing such artists as Chuck Berry, The Yardbirds and other such influential acts
of the time. From 1964 to 1966 they had become familiar with local counter-cultural
leader John Sinclair through his Detroit Artists’ Workshop (DAW), a meeting place for
artists, poets and musicians attracted to the “beat” movement. Band members would
Often hang around the commune participating in artistic creation and drug use. This
artists’ collective would morph after 1966 into the Trans-Love Energies (TLE) collective
which imagined itself as a communal fellowship pushing for societal change. The growth
in perspective of the Trans-Love Energies collective, including the MC5, can be

attributed to the increasing use of LSD and marijuana and the influence of rock, in what

43

was formerly a jazz-loving group. New poetry, music and other arts provided a way for
members to culturally confront the realities of Detroit and their nation. This
environment fostered the members of the band who began to hang out at the DAW and
increasingly more as it morphed into Trans-Love Energies.

In Trans-Love Energies, the band and Sinclair forged a mutual partnership. The
band sought out Sinclair as a means to increase their area audiences, and Sinclair looked
to the band as a potential cultural force to enrich his commune. He found the energy and
vigor of the band, which by this time had begun to experiment with distortion and noise
in the hopes of emulating jazz improvisation, intriguing. The collective’s publications
including poems, posters, and newsletters as well as cultural events (e.g. poetry readings
and art showings) would take on a decidedly more anti-authoritarian spirit in the hopes of
exacerbating social tensions around them. Most importantly, they criticized
governmental handling of the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam War and thus
increasingly drew the attention of the police.

The power wielded by Detroit authorities created frustration within the commune
and band, a frustration that was entrenched when the collective became a target of police
harassment during the 1967 Riot/Rebellion. Jeff Hale describes that, “A significant
turning point in the history of Detroit was the bloody Rioting of July 24-31, 1967, the
worst in America’s history. Following the riots, the attitudes of Detroit police moved
farther to the right, reflecting the growing siege mentality prevalent among many of the
city’s whites” (Hale). TLE felt the impact of this mentality immediately, with Kramer

perhaps tellingly being accosted by the police during the Riots for allegedly being a

44

 

sniper (Kramer 2005). The real impetus for moving primarily was a result of the TLE
being firebombed. Who actually carried out these bombings according to Kramer is a bit
of a mystery due to a lack of police follow-up. Kramer believes the responsibility could
rest with one of the following groups: “The Detroit Police Department. (a covert political
ops unit). Right wing zealots like the John Birch society and Breakthrough. The federal
government (FBI operation Cointel or White House covert operators)” (Kramer 2006).
Whoever the culprit, the immediate threat to their safety pushed Sinclair and commune
members to move to Ann Arbor.

Here, the band and Sinclair came together to found the White Panther Party,
issuing the White Panther Statement on November 1, 1968. The group, reacting to the
harsh class and racial realities of the Riot/Rebellion and of their lives in Detroit
advocated for the complete support of the Black Panther Party, and for the end of the
capitalist state (Sinclair 1972, 105). Like the Black Panther Party, the White Panther
Party and their official house band, the MC5, reflected an end to innocence in the civil
rights era. Notions of non-violent protest did not seem to match the violent retribution
waged upon the African-American community. The Party looked to the brooding
machismo of the Black Panthers as a model from which to confront the world around
them:

Knowing the power of symbols in the abstract world of Americans we have taken

the White Panther as our mark to symbolize our strength and arrogance and to

demonstrate the commitment to the program of the Black Panther Party as well as

to our own-indeed, the two programs are just part of the same whole (Sinclair

45

 

1972, 105).

From their new base in Ann Arbor, the White Panthers still focused on Detroit but
looked to a national level for agitation, attempting to bring forth change by any means
necessary. Sinclair remembers the band’s participation at the Chicago “Festival of Life”
during the 1968 Democratic Convention as a turning point in which he realized he had to
look beyond Detroit, and “in order to preserve and develop our culture we couldn’t
ignore the political aspect of the Revolution anymore” (1972, 44). Detroit and Chicago
seemed like microcosms of the national crisis that gripped the United States in the late
19603.

The American Ruse: National Issues and the Rise of the MC5

As the band developed into a nationally recognized act they were affected by
political and social tensions at a national/international level. Drug culture, technological
innovation, the Vietnam War, and the civil rights movement all played a role in shaping
the White Panther Party and the MC5. The band’s voice was unique to its time, and the
issues that affected its members in the past were still very much with them as I
discovered in my interviews with Michael Davis, Wayne Kramer and Dennis Thompson.
(Smith and Tyner passed away in the early 19903.)

Michael Davis, bass player for the MC5, argues that, “The MC5 was in a sense a
victim of circumstance...a product of a time that is unique. . .a time that will never happen
again, the situation, the conditions will never happen again never in a million years.”
Within these circumstances, he says, “something called dissent came out from under the

covers” (Davis 2005). This dissent against the status quo came in numerous forms. For

46

example, the interviewees frequently reflected on their involvement in civil rights and
feminist struggles. When asked about the influences that led to the band stepping up their
anti-authoritarian message, Dennis Thompson states:

One was the minority movement...which was very powerful at the time. Female

rights too...women still hadn’t achieved any kind of equality whatsoever. It was

still a pretty chauvinistic society and a pretty racist society and a pretty bigoted

society (2005).

This statement, in regards at least to perspectives on feminism is a comment of hindsight
that developed for band members over time as well as for Sinclair. The band’s
articulation Of support for the black power movement was at times matched by their
machismo. As Kramer reflected in our interview, “We were sexist pigs and we
masqueraded under the guise of revolution our total hedonism” (Kramer 2005).
Although gender equality was something that eventually became a topic of importance
for the interviewees, the realities of WPP rhetoric and the MC5’3 music did not reflect
anything close to such recognition of the women’s movement.

The WPP showed their support for civil rights and more specifically the black
power movement through the MCS's music, such as the band’s use of John Lee Hooker’s
“Motor City is Burning” on their first album, Kick Out the Jams. The interviews point to
young men who were acutely aware of the realities of the struggle for African-American
rights across the nation and could relate them to their experiences in Detroit. As guitarist
Wayne Kramer remembers,

The White Panther became an expression Of our frustration with the injustice that

47

we saw in the world around us, that we saw even in our own city in our own

police department, in our own neighborhoods. It was a way to get it out to

express ourselves where we would use this radical language. Then we identified
with the Black Panther Party. They’re young, they’re brave...we like to think of
ourselves as brave. They’ve got guns...so we got guns. They say there needs to

be a White Panther party...we say okay...so here we are (2005).

Kramer, like Sinclair, saw the civil rights movement as a basis for cultural revolution. In
the “White Panther Statement” Sinclair writes that, “The actions of the Black Panthers in
America have inspired us and given us strength, as has the music of black
America”(Sinclair 1972, 105). WPP propaganda maintained that rock, strongly
influenced by African and African-American musical forms, was the main weapon in
cultural warfare. The MC5 was meant to be the musical firepower in this contentious
struggle. As Thompson remembers, the cultural revolution was to “help our black
brothers be accepted as an equal faction of Americans...allowing them the opportunity for
equal education and employment opportunities” (Thompson 2005).

Part of the group’s and the Party’s strategy for changing perceptions towards
racial ascriptions and class divisions was through the use of drugs. Primarily the
concentration was on LSD and marijuana. As stated in the “White Panther Statement,”
“Our program of rock and roll, dope and fucking in the streets is a program of total
freedom for everyone.” It continues, “We are LSD-driven total maniacs in the universe.
We will do anything we can to drive people out of their heads into their bodies” (Sinclair

1972, 104). This experimentation with drugs (especially LSD) led to the development

48

from the Detroit Artist Workshop, in which marijuana was the drug of choice, to the
Trans-Love Energy group, which depended more on the use of LSD as a consciousness-
raising tool. There also existed in the TLE a more heavy concentration on rock as a
cultural force for several members of the band, especially Kramer and Rob Tyner and
organizational leaders like Sinclair, Plamondon and Leni Sinclair (Sinclair 2005).
Eventually, the White Panther Party would be born in 1968 from and through the actions
Of the Trans-Love Energies commune.

The White Panther Party and the MC5 looked to drug use as a potential method
for breaking down social, cultural and political boundaries to varying levels. “Drugs
played a large, large part in people becoming more open and less xenophobic and more
open to discussing amongst themselves the state of their lives and their nation,” explains
Thompson. Through sharing, drugs could potentially create a bridge for new forms of
understanding: “You could sit down with a member of the Black Panther Party, smoke a
joint and talk politics” (Thompson 2005). Members of the two parties, although not
sharing an Official relationship, did interact socially. Michael Davis states that although
many of the drugs were new to the group, the early exposure to these influences heavily
effected the band’s political and social perspective, and perhaps most importantly, the
music which they made. Thompson shared in his interview that the band was heavily
under the influence of these substances during the creation of their first album, Kick Out
the Jams.

Drugs would continue to be a factor through the band’s short life, even after it

discontinued its relationship with the White Panther Party. The influence of drugs would

49

both shape the band in its early days, as well as being perhaps the most influential factor
in their demise in the early 19703. Interviews revealed that soon the band would move
beyond marijuana and LSD to what the Party labeled as “death drugs” including the
widespread use of heroin amongst band members. Several members of the band would
do prison time due to this use, and remaining members would contend that continued
effects of these drugs played a role in the deaths of their two band-mates, Rob Tyner and
Fred Smith.

LSD went far beyond the expectations of its developers in medical science
laboratories and the U. S. military, which imagined its use in psychological warfare. For
the band the realities of technology reached beyond the realm of drugs and instead
reflected a general focus and valuing of massive technological innovation in society.
Prior work on the MC5 often ignores an emphasis on technology as a contributing factor
towards the formation of the band’s aesthetic. This influence would have been easily
overlooked if it had not been for my face-to-face interviews with band members,
especially with Michael Davis. To him, the focus on technological innovation is a key
influence that shaped the perspectives of his generation “the key main element is this
technology...basically the number one factor. We all grew up in post World War 11”
(Davis 2005)

Psychotropic drugs were representative of a larger scene of potentially
destructive technological innovation. The dawn of the atomic age created a measure from
which the future was calculated: “The creation of the nuclear war head...it was a break

through in what human beings could do with the phenomena in which we live in” (Davis

50

2005). This connection would be a constant reminder for Davis of the destructive
potential of technological advancement in society, a factor that would come directly to
the public’s eye through such events as the Cuban missile crisis and perhaps most
importantly in terms of determining the band’s and WPP’s message, the Vietnam War,
which will be discussed shortly.

Other technological advancements occurred in communications, including those
that shaped the modern face of rock. Davis comments that the transistor fundamentally
“changed society.” It allowed for music to become a portable electronic form not only
transported by people, but by automobiles in the 503 and 603. Another communications
innovation, breaking down space and time, was television, “We grew up with that...TV
brought commercialization of everything! It was displayed...we kind of became victims
of media” (Davis 2005). This understanding allowed a view into the power of media and
its framing abilities in terms of issues of politics, commercialization and music. The new
mass media technologies, as Gitlin states, “have become systems for the distribution of
ideology” (2). The WPP along with other groups like the Yippies would harness this
energy to develop a voice in American society. This same energy also eventually became
their downfall.

This mediation would bring the sound of rock to homes and cars and therefore to
a newly defined segment of the population, teenagers. Images and sounds of performers
like Chuck Berry could be consumed daily by youth across the nation. In turn, new
technologies of amplification and electric instruments could be bought by those same

youth exposed to them by television, radio and records. They could emulate musicians

51

seen in the media: “You could buy an electric guitar for $125 at Sears. The better stuff
like Fenders and Gibsons, were way up to about $300, but all within the reach Of kids like
us,” states Kramer (Simmons/Nelson, 15). The widespread purchasing of electronic
instruments and amplifiers amongst this demographic could especially be seen after the
worldwide success of the Beatles and the subsequent “British Invasion” in rock and roll.
To return to a theme of the first chapter, technological innovation coupled with upturns in
consumption habits helped create a space of useable rebellion where rock music was
performed.

With such diverse influences as technological development, civil rights struggles,
drugs and nuclear proliferation, one might be hard pressed to find any kind Of unifying
elements that could bind these subjects under one comprehensive umbrella. Yet, the
interviews revealed that these diverse factors all needed to be understood under the
growing influence of the Vietnam War in the 19603. Vietnam overshadowed and at the
same time brought together these concerns: “The essential...the umbrella under which all
of these dynamics fell was the Vietnam War. If you dropped out of school...you were
drafted. There was definitely a personal liability. Their ass could be on the line...They
could go to some foreign jungle and die” (Thompson 2005). Drugs, anger about
domestic social issues, advancements in technology both in the home and on the
battlefield were channeled into the band’s anti-war stance which examined the effects of
the war on social, political and cultural life. Media ensured a constant barrage of
coverage and exposure to the war and these attendant issues:

We had drugs, we had rock and roll, we had social issues that were dissatisfying,

52

we had an emerging culture of people who were aware that things weren’t quite

kosher in normal life. That the government was feeding us a crock of shit. The

guys who were supposed to be our leaders, the guys we were supposed to respect
were just ramming us. We knew better. All these factors came together at

once...then I met the MC5 (Davis 2005).

The White Panther Party was a way of concretely expressing resentment towards the
government and powers-that-be, viewed as perverted monsters of Enlightenment
drinking. The White Panther 10 Point Program provided a plan for the breakdown Of
these powers, “#9 Free all soldiers at once--no more conscripted armies!” and, “#10 Free
the people from their phony ‘leaders’--everyone must be a leader--freedom means free
every one! All Power to the People!” (Sinclair 1972, 105).

The extent of a WPP member’s loyalty to this vision would be a point of
confusion for the band, its audience, and its circle of influence. After the initial period of
the Party’s formation, the band sometimes diverged from the WPP’s platform and was
conceived as separate by the media. This mirrored the experience of other groups
identified with the New Left where media would reshape movements into palatable forms
that for Gitlin and SDS stripped them of the original intent. Gitlin states that this media
framing process had real ramifications, robbing the SDS, for example, of their own
meaning and representation; “I worked in a movement and watched it construed as
something quite other than what I thought it was” (17). The creation of the band by both
band members and the media is the focus of the following chapters.

The Music is What it was About: Assembling the Sound

53

Interviews with the band and with John Sinclair reveal that the musical life of the
group is hard to reconstruct amid the political ascriptions the band has collected over the
past 40 years. Although interviews today express a certain frustration with the politics
overshadowing the music, in the minds of certain individuals involved at the time, like
Kramer, music was his politics. Music was the means by which one could make sense of
and comment on the world around oneself. Yet, one only has to listen to the band’s
catalog to see that lyrically this did not equal out to an overwhelming prevalence of
revolutionary rhetoric. In context to the musical world in which they lived, however,
revolution could be more a sonic than lyrical undertaking. This section is devoted to
seeking an understanding of the musical background of the group, in order to start to
discern the lasting musical influence that the band has had. This is a sound that, as many
critics would attest, has heavily influenced punk, metal and beyond (i.e. the use Of
distortion, dissonance, etc.).

The diversity of influences cited by the band crisscrosses genre boundaries and
sounds. The MC5 seems to have been a sponge for countless influences that ranged from
the Motown sound that surrounded them in their adolescence to such legendary names in
experimental jazz as Sun Ra. One of these early influences was the socially challenging,
yet sonically non-threatening sound of the 503 and 603 folk revival,

White guys got a hold of that stuff [Alan Lomax collections of ‘Folk’ music] and

they said we can do this too but our guitars are made by Gibson and Harmony!

You started having this folk music that was talking shit. You had lame kind Of

pop folk music peOple like Peter, Paul and Mary, which I happen to like and the

54

Kingston Trio. Even to us straight guys, and I was a straight guy back then, that

was radical, that was like you were hip. It was intellectual at some level, it wasn’t

little Pretty Peggy March...it was Pete Seeger (Michael Davis 2005).

The artists that Davis speaks of here were sonically simple in terms of instruments and
musical tools (like chord progressions) and instead utilized lyrics as the political delivery
system. The band set itself in opposition to this softer sound in music. Yet, the notion of
rebellion through musical forms was one that identified the band, even if it was not to be
done lyrically. In essence, the band was more known for their sonic sense of anarchy,
which came though in heavy use Of distortion, pulsating rhythms and improvisation,
called by members “High Energy” music. This sound was more important than the
absence of political rhetoric on their three albums; Kick Out the Jams, Back In the USA,
and High Time.

These early influences made sense in terms of the rise of dissent that Davis spoke
of earlier. These children of the Detroit area heard the challenge to the status quo
lifestyle in these supposedly “traditional” forms. From this folk revival came an icon to
the band and, one could say to a generation, Bob Dylan. “Then he came along, Bob.
Bob spoke to us like no one had ever spoken...he spoke for us. He sang these same
songs, traditional songs, only the way he sang em...it was like he was there. Like you
were there, like it was you singing it...because he couldn’t sing!” recalls Davis (2005).
Taking in the poignancy of Dylan’s message and delivery Davis began to possess a
broader perspective concerning the power and viability of music in uniting large and

diverse audiences.

55

However, a more important influence on the MC5 was the British Invasion, a
musical movement that looked to American R&B and blues performers for its sound.
The MC5 had encountered the music of some of the artists that inspired the Invasion like
Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Chuck Berry. Yet, groups like The Beatles, The
Rolling Stones, The Who, and The Yardbirds furthered these influences on the band
through their reinterpretation of these artists. According to Thompson, The Yardbirds
were of special interest because “they were an experimental band” (Thompson 2005).
This fascination with Yardbird’s-like experimentation was mentioned in some of the
earliest press the MC5 received. In a February of 1967 feature in the Detroit Free Press
“Teen Beat” column the group called it “the new music.” Kramer was quoted as stating
that, “Now we are taking rock and roll further than it’s been taken before. We’re into
playing sound as a method of expression.” The article later refers to the Yardbirds and
The Who as “leading exponents of the new sound” (Alterman 3B).

For the MC5’s inspiration, Thompson indicates that the British Invasion was
balanced by domestic talents: “from that point and time you could add James Brown, Otis
Redding Wilson Pickett, and the Motown influence because we lived here in Detroit...so
we had a lot of great music on the radio all of the time”(Thompson 2005). One can hear
many borrowings on the band’s first album, Kick Out the Jams, where heavy guitar
distortion meets pulsating rhythms, hype men, lasting grooves, shuffle rhythms and Rob
Tyner’s pleading and emotive vocal delivery. As one can see here, music, like politics
and social issues, was a mix of international, national and local forms. This combination

of musical forms would be further complicated as the band established a relationship with

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John Sinclair.

Because of numerous affiliations with publications like The 5m Estate, and
Downbeat Magazine, Sinclair was known in the musical community as an authority on
jazz in the Detroit area.iv Through the DAW and Sinclair’s record collection, the MC5
was exposed to jazz that would provide new fuel for their musical fire. Such names as
Archie Shepp, Pharaoh Sanders, Sun Ra and John Coltrane further diversified the bands’
approach to music and to the potentiality of experimentation with dissonance, feedback
and improvisation.

Soon through their association with Sinclair the band became regulars at Detroit’s
Grande Ballroom. Owned by a former schoolteacher, Russ Gibb, the Detroit music scene
centered around the club for rock acts trying to find presence in a town that was
dominated by Berry Gordy Jr.’s internationally celebrated Motown label. The MC5
would share the stage with nationally known acts like The Grateful Dead and Big Brother
and the Holding Company as well as up-and-coming local acts like Bob Seger, Iggy and
the Stooges (from Ann Arbor) and Ted Nugent’s Amboy Dukes. Thompson reflects,

We had a concept and that concept was called High Energy. We looked at it as

music that had a lot of strength, music that had a depth of emotion, music that was

powerful not just in terms of volume, but it was powerful emotionally and
powerful dynamically. Once exposed to the free jazz movement, then we

understood that sound itself was the palette (Thompson 2005).

This concept of “High Energy” music, Thompson states, was one that most of the groups

playing the Grande were “keyed into.” He attributes this feeling to the working class

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realities of Detroit. (Thompson 2005). The scene eventually commanded some attention
from the major record companies. The MC5 were some of the first names signed from
this period, along with Iggy and the Stooges to major record labels. Numerous other
performers like Alice Cooper, Ted Nugent, Bob Seger and The Rationals would all
eventually find a national audience thanks to being part of the vibrant Detroit scene of the
late 603.

The popularity of these Detroit acts would challenge the dominance of the San
Francisco and Los Angeles psychedelic scene of the same period. Acts like the Jefferson
Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Santana and the Byrds had come to be major forces in
popular music. Thompson sees that although possessing many similarities like the
dependence on psychedelic drug use and anti-war activity, the scene was fundamentally
different. He points out that the West Coast scene was heavily influenced by Timothy
Leary’s mantra of “Tune in, turn on, drop out” and pacifism to create an alternative way
of life: “Mommy and daddy were paying their way through school while they were
developing these ideas, this alternative reality” (2005).

The youth in the Detroit scene, due to economic realities faced a more immediate
threat of forced conscription, due to their potential inability to pay for college and receive
a deferment. As John Willis has found, more affluent men were able to obtain
deferments during the Vietnam War (564). When comparing the annual per capita
incomes of Detroit and San Francisco during this time period, we find that wages
averaged minimally 10% higher in more wealthy areas like Berkeley and San Francisco

proper, even including the lower income city of Oakland (US. Census). The MCS’s

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particular local context and gritty hostility made it problematic for companies trying to
make the band an effective commodity, especially compared to San Francisco acts. For
instance, the band was dropped after its first album by Elektra Records for
“unprofessional conduct” when it used the company’s trademark on an ad that read “Fuck
Hudson’s.” Hudson’s had refused to sell the album due to the profanities used in the
song, “Kick Out the Jams Motherfuckers” (Holzman). Elektra found the band difficult to
control and the WPP disheartening when viewed as more than a gimmick, a Midwestern
oddity suited only to sell records through a generic sense of rebellion.

Such realities of geographical placement closely mirror the experience of the so-
called “Prairie Radicals” in the New Left who represented a “broadening of SDS to
include more students from working class backgrounds.” The economic reality of
Midwestern labor and life, according to activist Robert Pardun, “gave us reason to hope
that we could build a broad-based movement that would change America” (Pardun 2).
Prairie radicals were offering another narrative of the anti-war movement and
interpretation of the New Left that extended beyond the campuses of Columbia or
Berkeley. Pardun identifies these “prairie radicals” as possessing a unique geographical
and hence different ideological construction of America. Here, “no one read the New
York Times” and “conformity was the norm” (113). A sense of moral outrage over
racism and the Vietnam war pulled these individuals from their Midwestern sensibilities,
a new stance that could alienate them from their community and family (1 13). This was
also true for the MC5. A3 a product of the “Midwest,” the band also seemed an oddity in

the larger scene of music and politics.

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Understanding Social Location

Michael Davis’ comment that the MC5 was “a victim of circumstance and a
product of a time that is unique” astutely points out the necessity of understanding the
forces that shape cultural forms. It is within these forces that one can begin to
understand voices that have an immense potential power in reaching audiences through
their creations and providing a space to express social location and dislocation. The
cultural force that has been most studied in relation to Detroit, Motown Records, can
perhaps teach us a valuable lesson in terms of the rise of the Detroit rock scene of the late
19603. Smith states, “Motown’s relationship to the cultural politics of Detroit teaches
that place matters-the productive social, cultural, economic, and political change emerges
from distinct communities” (259). Especially because of the political history and the
mythical past that has grown from their short career, the complex intersection between
politics and popular culture must be understood in relation to the MC5. The realities of
their lives in the Detroit area, their affiliation with Trans-Love Energies and The White
Panther Party, and their engagement with national/international issues allow a glimpse
into an entity that, as Davis states, “is its own entity now.” Because the music and image
of the band have survived nearly four decades, influencing acts as diverse as The Sex
Pistols to Rage Against the Machine the process can be conflated and confusing" The
following chapters will demonstrate the historical influence of media frames that have
reified the WPP and the MC5 as political radicals. The band members have expressed
disappointment and frustration with the media and with repressive state apparatuses and

the music industry that they see as overshadowing and marginalizing their musical

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legacy.

The history of the band allows some contextual insight into a product of popular
culture that still generates debate amongst fans, critics and even amongst band members
themselves. Cultural creations cannot escape the cultures from which they were formed.
To discern the legacy and influence of a band such as the MC5, a legacy now invested in
by numerous generations of fans and musicians, is to in reality discover not a specific,
linear history, but is to instead allow a forum for discussion of meaning and investment in
a band musically and politically larger than the sum of its parts. Public memory has
played a key role in the maintenance of this legacy. The MC5’s past is rife with
polysemic messages for its audiences and for band members themselves. This chapter
has only laid the ground for understanding of the MCS’s career and legacy within popular
culture and within the political history of this country. This legacy will be further

complicated and these use values exposed in the coming chapters.

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Chapter 3

Motor City Burning: Rock and Rebellion in The WPP and the MC5

In the late 19603, the United States was a country in turmoil. The Vietnam War
and the movement for civil rights had generated numerous voices of discontent against
the status quo. This fight found its way onto the streets, as organizations like the Students
for a Democratic Society and The Black Panthers advocated various programs for social
change, some peaceful, some more direct. In Detroit, amidst race riots and startling
discrepancies in wealth between those who worked in industry and those who owned it,
came the rise of the White Panther Party and their official house band and propaganda
machine to the masses, The MC5.

The WPP was a revolutionary organization that called for the complete
dismantling of the forms of power and control in the United States, focusing its efforts
through the power of popular culture and media. John Sinclair along with his wife Leni,
members of the MC5 and other local revolutionary figures in Detroit and Ann Arbor,
founded the organization to antagonize dominant U.S. culture and to generate social
change. The White Panther Statement, which was issued by the fledgling group in
November of 1968, states, “Our program is cultural revolution through a total assault on
the culture, which makes us use every tool, every energy and any media we can get our
collective hands on. We take our program with us everywhere we go and use any means
necessary to expose people to it” (1968, 1). This musically led ambush of noise and
rhetoric looked to exploit media forms, and situate the message of the Panthers into every

home, primarily through the youth of the time.

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The focus of the chapter will begin with the perspectives of organization leaders
and members such as John Sinclair, Pun Plamondon and Leni Sinclair on the WPP and
the MCS’s role in the group. These organizational voices have been the de facto sources
of interest in regards to the political life of the MC5 since the band began to garner
notoriety. With a heavy focus in the popular press directed to John Sinclair, as the
determinate political power, the voices of the band are often pushed to the margins by the
press as secondary actors along for the ride. Perspectives of the band members
themselves will be the focus of chapters following, demonstrating the falsity of these
allocated roles. To understand how useable rebellion played into the image of the MC5,
we need to hear from all the stakeholders involved in creating that image.

Rebellion and its ties to market success and audience engagement have become a
gauge for authenticity and for understanding the possibilities of rock as an effective,
socially subversive practice. Can music foster radicalism? Can music foster change?
The MC5 represents a rich intersection of musical, political and social identities through
which one can interrogate these questions. Here a group and an organization which
sought an array of goals looked to rock’s foundational myths of rebellion. The following
conversations with John and Leni Sinclair provide perspective on an experiment that
became too big for any of the individuals involved and which has ofien evoked
emotionally charged disagreements over how and where music and politics intersect.
From Jeff Hale’s use of the WPP to understand “why some segments of the
counterculture progressed from strictly non-political ideologies to positions of radical

extremism” to John Strausbaugh’s view of the MC5/WPP “as simply making the media

63

look and sound more cool, the better to market their products and their advertisers,” the
perspectives on the band itself center on issues of purity (Hale 125; Strausbaugh 91).

The band garnered both affection and dismissal because of their association with
the WPP, which stood as their connection to an authentic rebellion. While many bands
communicate social and political messages through their music, the MC5 phenomenon
was different in that there was, as Sinclair describes, “an extra vision” of helping fund
TLE and WPP projects. This relationship would allow them to “explore the possibilities
of subverting the music industry and using its resources against it” with their overall aim
being to tear down the American capitalist state (Sinclair 2005).

Such interplay between the mass media and seditious groups in the 19603 and
early 703 has been the focus of numerous scholars. Dissident groups like the WPP, Black
Panther Party, SDS, and the Yippies were both exploiters and victims of media. The
WPP, like SDS looked to the media as tools for promoting their ideas. They would soon
learn that the media were something entirely beyond their control and in their eyes media
would Often compromise or sensationalize their efforts. The ways in which these groups
were reduced into palatable media forms is of concern to media critics such as Todd
Gitlin who sees a danger in such representations. This is because information, “must be
timely, unambiguous, intense, predictable, culturally familiar-and precedented” (45).
Hence, the intricacies of a group, movement or party are ofien left by the wayside: “Some
of this framing can be attributed to traditional assumptions in news treatment: news
concerns the event, not the underlying condition; the person, not the group; conflict, not

consensus; the fact that ‘advances the story, ’ not the one that explains it” (28). In the

64

case of the New Left, “media treatment helped polarize the society, mobilizing a
repressive Right and a controlling administration against a caricatured New Left” (127).
The difficulties encountered by SDS in terms of its relationship and dependence on the
media are also featured prominently in other scholarly works that include Kirkpatrick
Sales’s SDS and Jim Miller’s Democracy is in the Streets.

Other groups were susceptible to this misrepresentation including such prominent
groups as the Black Panther Party. Jane Rhodes contends that these distortions not only
come from above but also come from within. In the case of the Panthers, the Party:

consciously relied on the press for salience and visibility, and they carefully

crafted visual and rhetorical material to be disseminated for public consumption.

The press shaped stories about the Black Panthers to fit the organization,

practices, and constraints of media institutions and the ideologies of government

and law enforcement (97).

Hence, all of these interests found some benefit in media exposure, which carried the risk
of making them look less genuine. Rhodes explains that multiple usages of media
created “contradictions of the national response to the Panthers’ self-representations” and
three thematic frames that “dictated the coverage of the Black Panthers as the group
moved from obscurity to national icons” (104). These frames were: fear of the Panthers,
condemnation Of the group, and the creation of celebrity for group leaders. As we will
see, the WPP found themselves susceptible to these same three interpretations, including
the elevation of John Sinclair to celebrity status as his legal woes continued.

Such media frames, according to Aniko Bodroghkozy, were present not only in

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news media but also in television entertainment. Television shows of the time including
Dragnet and The Monkees provided dual interpretations for audiences not sure what to
make of terms like “counterculture” and “hippie.” Presentations of drug-crazed youth on
shows like Dragnet pushed the idea that generational disconnect was beyond one’s
command when drugs entered the picture. According to Bodroghkozy, “many shows
labored to find ways to portray the flower children sympathetically. The extent to which
representations of the hippie counterculture could be separated from mind-altering
substances determined the degree of favor or approval attached to those representations”
(86). The counterculture could either find itself feared, condemned, (this was especially
the case on law and order programs) or in the case of the Monkees, heralded as celebrities
(81 & 75).

The reductive practices of the media of which Gitlin complains helped to propel
numerous individuals within these groups into celebrity status. Huey Newton, Stokeley
Carmichael, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and of course, John Sinclair, became
celebrities through their own propaganda funneled through media attention. These
individuals were often deconstructed and debated instead of the groups themselves by
cultural critics and news organizations seeking to package complex political and cultural
entities nightly into consumable frames for middle America. They were keys to fearing
or celebrating the New Left. According to Gitlin, “The leaders elevated to celebrity were
flamboyant, or knew how to impersonate flamboyance: they knew what the media would
define as news, what rhetoric they would amplify” (153). For leaders of radical

movements, McLuhan’s promise that the “Medium is the message,” meant they had a

66

powerful weapon at their disposal (Bodroghkozy 39). And according to Bodroghkozy
the possibilities were especially ripe in two certain mediums; “For members of the
counterculture, art films and rock music were the preeminent arenas of cultural
consumption” (48).

Sinclair looked to rock as a part of the everyday lives of youth that could
potentially get them excited and ready for drastic social change. He discusses the
excitement he felt when encountering rock for the first time,

It was incredible! These dudes opened their mouths to sing and a whole new race
of mutants leaped out dancing and screaming into the future, driving fast cars and
drinking beer and bouncing half-naked in the back seats, getting ready to march
through the 60's and soar into the 70's like nothing else had ever existed before
(Sinclair 1972, 9).
He continues that the energy of this music shot out “through the radio into every comer
of Amerika {common spelling in the related materials} to retribalize its children and
transform them into something essentially and substantially different from the race which
had brought them into the world” (9). Rock allowed for the liberating impulse to go forth
into the masses. Music would also allow a bridge between popular culture and the
political/social underground of Detroit/Ann Arbor.
What we must understand more than anything else is that our music and our
culture constitute a political force that the cultural revolution is inseparable from
the political revolution, and the revolutionary potential of our culture cannot

possibly be fully realized as long as the capitalist social order continues to exist

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(35).

Sinclair, the MC5 and associated groups saw no disconnect between cultural revolution
and political life. In effect, the group and the community built around these ideals
benefited communally from the spread of music like the MCS's in both monetary and
culturally revolutionary ways.

Until this time Sinclair’s writings and propaganda associated with the WPP have
been the dominating celebrity voice in terms of the WPP. This study corrects the
concerns of scholars like Gitlin and Rhodes in terms of essentializing reductions. John
and Leni Sinclair, Pun Plamondon and band members in later chapters allow a multi-
tiered conversation that unlocks the complexity of interactions and realities of the WPP.
Addressing Rhodes’s point that these groups took part in the framing themselves, these
voices also provide insight into the WPP’s propaganda and how they saw it determining
their life in the media. The WPP and the MC5 were much more of an organic and
communal undertaking made up on the spot than the media or many studies of the entities
have let on. The collection of these voices fundamentally breaks down the continuing,
essentialized visions that these frames have ensured.

Background

This cultural base for their desired revolution and dependence on music as a focus
makes sense in terms of the path that had been taken by individuals like Sinclair to this
point, when one studies their beginnings, going through numerous stages before and after
the WPP. Near Wayne State University, John and Leni Sinclair (along with others like

jazz trumpeter Charles Moore) founded the Detroit Artists Workshop (DAW) functioning

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as a commune for Detroit area artists from 1964 to 1966. The workshop became a multi-
purpose organization: producing concerts, founding and maintaining a printing press, and
displaying art (Simmons/Nelson 22-23). The collective released several manifestos
calling not so much for a fevered revolution as for an utopian world based on the joy of
creation. Sinclair wrote that, “The real revolution that is forthcoming will be a bloodless
one...Armies of artists and students are invading slum neighborhoods...should the
revolution succeed it will usher in a golden age of arts and letters” (English/Sinclair).

At this point, the group purposefully avoided becoming a politically charged
revolutionary organization and instead was focused on artistic communication through
music, poetry, art and other mediums, meant to create a space where members could live
outside of the dominant culture. John Sinclair explains in my interview with him, “The
Artist Workshop basically was trying to model ourselves on the Beatnik movement.” He
continues, “The whole Artist Workshop thing was to try to find a place where we could
live outside of this [the dominant culture]. Somewhere, where we could do what we
wanted and no one would bother us.” He continues, “So we got our own place...there
weren’t bars or social settings or any kind of thing where what we were doing was
welcome in Detroit in ‘64. So we rented a house and put on our own concerts, readings
and we had our own place...classes...all aimed at people who felt the way we did pretty
much or wanted to feel that way” (Sinclair 2005).

The group was aiming to change themselves into an isolated artistic commune of
sorts. Here in their rented space they were able to provide a place for local artists and

others seeking an alternative to the industrial realities of Detroit. Although in Grit, Noise

69

and Revolution, David Carson explains that the authorities would continue an interest in
Sinclair and his organizations that grew from these early days of the communal entity,
due significantly to Sinclair’s continued use and advocacy for marijuana usage (and later
LSD) (Carson 109-14).

The collective would morph into what would be called the “Trans-Love
Energies,” (TLE) reflecting less the beatnik/jazz flavored inspiration of the DAW, and
more the growing influence of rock and the rise of LSD use (Simmons/Nelson 25-26).
Sinclair observed that the collective began to change when core members began to take
acid: “Then we wanted to change the world. It wasn’t enough to change it for ourselves.
We wanted everyone to see that it could be very different.” Sinclair continues, “So we
got this kind of evangelical feel to turn people on to the idea of changing things and
making it more beautiful and harmonious.” (Sinclair 2005). Much of this initial energy
was applied to the struggle for civil rights for African-Americans, a struggle that
members of DAW could see on the streets of Detroit in everyday life, as well as in riots.
Part of the change in the group was reflected in the growing importance of a local band
whose brand of furiously loud and uproarious rock would allow a connecting point
between the artistic aspirations of the group and the growing sense of radicalism within
the organization that would lead to the formation of the WPP. Members of the MC5
began to spend time taking in the beatnik culture and aura of the Workshop. Within this
phase of the community’s development, the MC5 would find its revolutionary voice.

The TLE would be marked according to Leni Sinclair (who would also become

official photographer for the band) by the increased presence and the eventual agreement

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of John Sinclair to manage the MC 5. TLE would continue on the heels of the DAW,
publishing, encouraging art creation and exhibition, as well as organizing concerts and
light shows. The Grande Ballroom became the hotbed of activity for the group, with the
MC5 becoming the Grande’s house band. Although starting as a local band covering
R&B standards and early Rolling Stones songs, the MC5 became, through an increasing
fascination with feedback and amplification, a band regarded for their inimitable brand of
sonic distortion and energetic performances. A3 a central figure in the artistic community,
Sinclair would be a valuable connection to the MC5 not only in his centrality within the
organization but also as a voice in such publications of the time as the anarchistic Fifth
Estate.

TLE’s experience in Detroit in 1967 was shaped by the increased paranoia of a
police state that had dealt with significant racial strife and riots. The group, because they
defined themselves as subversive of the capitalist-centric social world around them, and
because they openly advocated drug use, was a target for police torment. The Belle Isle
“Love-In,” an event organized by the collective highlighted this mounting tension
between the community and authorities. Tensions spilled over between participants and
the watchful eye of the local police. This resulted in a violent riot taking place involving
a significant police force who according to guitarist Wayne Kramer, “galloped toward the
running people and clubbed them like they were playing polo” (Carson 115-16). The
Love-In, along with other, increasing police and municipal harassment—especially after
the 1967 Riot——-pushed TLE and the MC5 to move to nearby Ann Arbor. With the new

location and the success of the MC5, the collective would reemerge as the White Panther

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Party, with the MC5 acting as its sonic organizing force.
A Total Assault on Culture

In November 1968 Sinclair and the Party released the White Panther Manifesto.
Now this was a group seeking not only social change through art (as demonstrated by the
MC5 as the organizing force of the group), but also through more aggressive and in-your-
face notions of cultural and social revolution. Modeling themselves after the Black
Panthers, the group sought complete freedom from the boundaries of 19603 American
society. The United States in its life as an international superpower and bastion of
capitalism was seen as a subsuming system that sought to hold its subjects within its
clutches. The group advocated an all-encompassing program that would not only show
itself on local stages, but also took on a more decisively public tone. The plan was now
for an all-out rejection of every facet of the dominant society, as demonstrated in the
Manifesto’s claim that “Our program of rock, dope and fucking in the streets is a program
of total freedom for everyone. We are totally committed to carrying out our program. We
breathe revolution.” (Sinclair, 1968). The MC5 would be the group’s greatest asset, as
their increasing popularity garnered them national interest with a record contract and
countless concert appearances.

The Manifesto contends that youth are the key to mobilizing social change. .
Sinclair advocated that youth were the energizing bridge to the revolution he hoped for:
“THESE KIDS ARE READY! They are ready to move but they don’t know how, and all
we do is show them that they can get away with it. BE FREE goddamn it, and fuck them

old dudes, is what we tell them, and they can see that we mean it.” (1). The White

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Panther Manifesto states that the energy encompassed within the potentialities of rock n’
roll and its audiences can tear down the machine:

ROCK music is the spearhead of our attack because it is so effective and so much

fun. We have developed organic high-energy guerrilla bands who are infiltrating

the popular culture and destroying millions of minds in the process. With our
music and economic genius we plunder the unsuspecting straight world for money
and the means to carry out our program, and revolutionize its children at the same

time (Sinclair 1968).

The Panthers sought to exploit the system in this regard: they would create, promote,
manage and develop artists like the MC5 to take their dreams of revolution to the masses.
While working within the capitalist establishment, the group’s main goal, according to
Sinclair and some others, was to exploit that system until it could be overthrown.

Their plan for the development and outcome of the revolution was laid out in the
accompanying White Panther I 0-Point Program. Besides advocating for the complete
support of the Black Panthers 10 Point Program, and the release of all prisoners in the
United States, the White Panthers also sought the complete breakdown of the capitalistic
system. The group sought to eliminate money, to open access to information media,
dissolve all “unnatural boundaries,” allow for free schooling for all, to end armies, to free
the people from leaders and a continuous, “Total assault on the culture by any means
necessary.” (Sinclair 1968). In their Openly dissident nature, these plans differed from
those of the DAW or TLE, which sought broad social change through less aggressive

approaches. Sinclair and the Party, especially in their admiration of the Black Panthers

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(mostly because of their encounters with police forces) were looking for communal life in
a completely different world. The group was now no longer content with their own small
communities; they had come to see the world as a place demanding social change.
Come Together

The interviews with both John and Leni Sinclair reveal that the group was less of
an orchestrated plot, and more a collective creation that occurred between band members,
John Sinclair and those involved in the DAW and TLE. Levels of ideology and
commitment would vary greatly. The band was also no longer merely a musical vehicle
meant to further a political message; instead, politics and music were woven into the very
lives of TLE, the WPP, and the MC5. The MC5’3 early career through their first album
should be seen as indicative of a complete life-style, in which politics and culture
demanded equal attention because they were a part of everyday life for those
participating in the various incarnations of the communes.

The MC5 was not a tool manipulated by the WPP and TLE, because the band and
the community seem to have emerged together organically. Sinclair observes,

The WPP was the MC5, they weren’t some kids conscripted into this evil

scheme. It was them and their manager and their road manager, the roadies and

other people who lived in the same communes. We came to this together. Rob

Tyner [lead singer of the MC5] and I spent most of a year just being best friends

and hanging around...ranting and raving, taking acid, smoking a lot of joints. He

influenced me as I conversely influenced him. He was a brilliant kid! (Sinclair

2005)

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The band proved to be the nucleus for TLE and the WPP. Their increasing success as a
local, then regional, and then national act according to Leni Sinclair actually became the
driving force of the transition into the WPP. The increasing success of the band
regionally would lead them to their first national record deal with Elektra Records.

The MCS's first album, Kick Out the Jams (taken from the title of their most
successful song as a band “Kick Out the Jams Motherfuckers”), reflected this artistic and
revolutionary assault on culture. John Sinclair wrote the liner notes introducing the group
to the nation. The record sleeve reads,

We are a lonely desperate people, pulled apart by the killer forces of capitalism

and competition, and we need the music to hold us together. Separation is doom.

We are free men, and we demand a free music, a free high-energy source that will

drive us wild into the streets of America yelling and screaming and tearing down

everything that would keep people slaves (Sinclair 1969).

The music of the MC5, along with groups like Ann Arbor’s Iggy and the Stooges, is cited
by many critics as the building blocks for the rise of punk and heavy metal. The ferocious
and amplified sound of the band was a call to order for Sinclair’s vision for the Panthers.
Besides the call to “Kick Out the Jams” (Sinclair would use this language in the White
Panther Statement saying, “there is a generation of visionary maniac white motherfucker
country dope fiend rock freaks who are ready to get down and kick out the jams-ALL
THE JAMS-break everything loose and free everybody from their very real imaginary
prisons”) the group sought numerous means to enact their program for change (Sinclair

1968, 1). Music and drugs would provide the impetus for the revolution; the rest would

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naturally follow in the mind of Sinclair and some of the band members. The contract with
Elektra offered the group a much larger potential for financial success, but also for
realization of their political and cultural aims
The relationship between the label and the band appears to have been symbiotic.
“They thought it was an act. It was an interesting thing and a lot of people liked it,” states
Sinclair about the relationship to Elektra. No matter Elektra’s views towards the band, the
WPP was able to further their goals through the contract with the band. “Our idea was
that this gave us a bigger stage for what we were doing. We could be a popular band and
still propagate our ideas about the ways things should be...anti-authoritarian, anti-
govemment, anti—war, and pro-civil rights.” The contract with a national label was
embraced because it could support the communes as well as further the music/message of
the band.
My goal was to work within that format of a band and audience, records... The
money earning part of it was important. I thought this is the way you support a
revolutionary force people that put out underground papers, etc. We were a single
economic unit in Trans-Love Energies, White Panthers Party, and the Rainbow
People’s Party. We devised a format where everybody lived together and nobody
had an individual economic identity (Sinclair 2005).
The message was not, in either John or Leni Sinclair’s eyes, something formalized. The
music itself and the live shows were the message. Leni Sinclair claims, “With the MC5
they didn’t go out organizing people...they played music and organized when they

channeled that energy” (2005). John Sinclair adds,

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One thing we were trying to do was exacerbate the tensions between kids and the
authorities. That was our main organizing tactic was to kick up the tensions
between the youths and the authorities and parents. And it worked like a charm.
There was no calculation. 1 mean calculation was sitting around a table like this
with three or four other guys, smoking joints, 3 o’clock in the morning, laughing,
talking about how fucked up everything is (Sinclair, 2005).
It was through the music that MC5 made their aims public. But the band for the
most part did not sing of social revolution, instead focusing on “high-energy” rock as a
means for harnessing the energy of the youth. Sinclair makes this very clear:
They don’t have no songs Ho Chi Minh you got to win. They were about fucking,
getting high; they were about playing high-energy music. All of that was
outrageous...it wasn’t like SDS! We didn’t engage in debates with people from
the other side. We just tried to get as many people as we could to come to our
events and enjoy our presentation from our hearts with them from their
hearts...really (2005).
The “jams” in essence were the force that could break down the initial impenetrable outer
shell of the machine, which included societal apathy. The energy and ferocity of the MC5
demanded investment and vigor from their audience. Political philosophies or
communicated manifesto-like programs of action are not addressed in most of the band’s
lyrics (which comment primarily on themes of sex and youthful rebellion), and instead
are left to the propaganda machine put together by visuals, performance, and Sinclair’s

writings. Inherent in the audience’s experience of the MC5 was the rejection of

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mainstream social values, replaced by “fucking, getting high, and playing high-energy

music.” The music of the MC5, rather than an overt lyrical barrage of ideologies, seems

to rely more on the noise and the energy it produces to harness social upheaval. Leni

Sinclair shared in her interview that,

There was an attempt on part of the band, and John and Pun Plamondon and the
rest of us to try to harness this gathered energy. ...that kids wanted to do
something. They wanted to implement ideas...but there had to be a vehicle. So the
White Panthers tried to pull them together so that they could start organizing in
their own communities to make things better. The whole thing was based on the

The Black Panther Party model of organization (2005).

That model of organization was one in which local communities would organize their

own people for programs of social change. The band, in lead-singer Rob Tyner’s view,

harnessed this potential energy through a symbiotic relationship in which the band

aroused and released energy from town to town. Tyner comments that the MCS's stage

show,

was a beautiful demonstration of the principles of high-energy performance: as
the performer puts out more the energy level of the audience is raised and they
give back more energy to the performers, who are moved into a higher energy
level which is transmitted to the audience and sent back, etc., until everything is
totally frenzied. This process makes changes in the people’s bodies that are
molecular and cellular and which transform them irrevocably just as LSD or any

other strong high-energy agents does (Qtd in Waksman 229).

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This notion of the non-separation of the music and politics by some band
members and WPP community members, especially in the sonic organizing potential to
be “turned on” as Tyner describes above, parallels concisely the theoretical framework
Jacques Attali describes in, Noise. Attali sees the potentiality for energy, and its
organization tied to the life of music. In essence, music conducts and directs the chaos of
noise in the world into ordered forms: “First, music-a channelizer of violence, a creator of
differences, a sublimation of noise, an attribute of power-creates in festival and ritual an
ordering of noises in the world” (Attali 23). Noise, in Attali’s mind, is the key to power
in society in that one form of noise can subsume other forms. Attali explains,
“Everywhere we look, the monopolization of the broadcast of messages, the control of
noise, and the institutionalization of the silence of others assure the durability of power”
(8). John Sinclair and the MC5 saw in their “extra vision,” that a band bridging the
underground and the popular could be a massively powerful organizing force by
harnessing potential audience energies for revolutionary purposes. By producing and
ordering noise into a stimulating flashpoint, the potential violence in noise could be
exhumed and ordered through the music of the MC5 and through the continued mythos of
rock’s relationship to a sense of useable rebellion for artists, audiences and the industry,
which depends on this mythos to sell it.

In Instruments of Desire, Steve Waksman examined the connection between the
MC5 and Attali’s perspectives on noise. Waksman observes that the context of working
class Detroit gave the band and those associated with it a unique perspective on the

potentialities of noise that sought to subvert Fordist notions of standardization:

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The production of a disorderly electronic noise in this context indicated a
contradictory stance towards technology, a willful move to master the tools of
standardization, which at the same moment threatened to drown out the human
presence with the force of the machine. The repetitive sounds and lyrics in the
Five’s music signified the boredom and sameness of everyday life, but also
counteracted this boredom by producing a disorientating noise that brought
listeners to an ecstatic pitch (216).
But this combination of boredom and its ecstatic transcendence communicated through
sound and lyrics is not the whole story. If one considers the MC5'3 creation of music both
lyrically and instrumentally, the band in the context of the history of rock to this point
was actively finding a voice in the public sphere of rock as a rebellious force. John
Sinclair’s comments on the band’s interest in “fucking, getting high and playing high-
energy music” was not too distant from archivist Michael Ochs earlier statement that, “If
rock was the soundtrack to our lives, then these soundtrack albums had to encapsulate
any of the teen topics of interest-automobiles, assorted fads, sexuality, rebellion, escape,
energy, life, death, loneliness, dancing and dating” (Qtd. in Waksman, 10). The MC5 did
this in a contextually new fashion. The same notions of basic rebellion and questioning
through the power of music that came in early rock were alive and well in the MC5. The
group took the initial energy of the rock music that the group and Sinclair had found so
much worth in, and put it into a plan for social action.
This sonic dimension, based on amplification and distortion, meant that the band

went further and further in seeking to realize Tyner’s vision of music and response.

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Waksman states that, “It was not technology as a thing itself, but technology in its
capacity to generate noise that the MC5 found so full of possibilities” (232). By
embracing technology (that is, developments in amplification, the electric guitar, electric
bass, and so forth) and rock’s continuing, inherent rebellious ethos, the MC5 sought not
only to create noise, but to use noise to reach for new possibilities in the world of music.
Attali claims that the ordering of noise that occurs within music “has as its function the
creation, legitimation, and maintenance of order” (Attali 30). He maintains that, “Its
[music’s] fundamental functionality is to be pure order. Primordially, and not
incidentally, music always serves to affirm that society is possible” (31).

To some extent this is both true and untrue when applied to the MC5. The use of
noise through the channeling of music was a tool to harness energy to subvert existing
systems. The guerrilla reputation of the band took rock to new levels of useable rebellion
and encouraged hope for social change. Yet the group, and the WPP in their focus on
their program of “rock, dope and fucking in the streets,” utilized the creation of noise, of
music, of the rebellious nature of rock also as a promise that indeed a new “society was
possible” as stated in Attali’s comment above. The society was one in which the creation
of art, music, poetry, and communal living could challenge and ultimately take down in
their eyes the capitalist, imperialist state of the United States of the time. As Attali hoped,
some found the MC5 within a new level of musical composition that reclaimed music as
a form of communal enjoyment and societal use. Here, “The listener is the operator.
Composition, then, beyond the realm of music, calls into question the distinction between

worker and consumer, between doing and destroying, a fundamental division of roles in

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all societies in which usage is defined by a code: to compose is to take pleasure in the
instruments, the tools of communication, in use-time and exchange-tie as lived and no
longer as stockpiled” (135). Music is then a mode of communication and commonality
meant to be actively used and whose authorship rests with each individual and the use
they make of it in everyday life. Such conceptions of organic purity when applied to the
band were of course complicated though in the dependence of the band on its recording
contract to spread the WPP message. Those investing such notions of purity into the
band were to be quickly disappointed when political and revolutionary hopes for the band
were not met.
Comparative Rebellion

At this point, we should consider the socio-political dimensions of the MC5 in
relation to other contemporary radical groups. After all, John Sinclair did not see the
DAW, TLE, WPP, or later the Rainbow People’s Party as mirroring groups like the
Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS. Rather, in Guitar Army, Sinclair postulates:
“we are given to feel that in order to be ‘political’ we have to take part in demonstrations
and rallies and confrontations with the established political system, that we have to make
the choice between getting high and digging the music and getting down with each other
on the one hand, and ‘taking part in the struggle’ on the other” He continues that,

we are making the revolution by living and carrying on the way we do, that our

cultural revolution is and integral component of the worldwide struggle against

imperialism, and that the way we can best contribute to the liberation struggles of

other oppressed peoples is to deepen our commitment to our own alternative

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culture, to develop that culture along its highest and purest lines, and to bring it

consciously within the context of the political revolution of which it is naturally a

part (Sinclair, 1972, 37).

Sinclair saw the actions Of groups like the SDS or their more radical break-off
group, the Weathermen, as merely reacting to what he called the prevailing “death
culture.” By contrast, the idea of the WPP was to create, through the power of artistic
communication and expression, and especially through the MC5, the energy for young
people to create local communities that shared communal styles of living and that could
effectively subvert the capitalist, imperialist worldview that Sinclair and others deplored.
Again, this development of the WPP was based on models that the Black Panthers were
practicing including the aim to establish numerous colonies across the nation that would
be able to reach local populaces.Vi

John Sinclair comments that in terms of what the Weathermen were doing
(clandestinely bombing government buildings including the Pentagon), “We were
sympathetic to anybody radical.” Yet, the violent approach was not something that the
WPP thought would be as effective as organic community creation to combat the “death
culture.” He points out that, “All the things that they were developing to embrace
ideologically...we were already practicing. We were an affinity group, we were a
commune, our lives were integrated with our thoughts...we had been to prison” (Sinclair
2005). Sinclair believed that there was no separation between practice and ideology.
Instead of being caught commenting on or protesting (as SDS did) the “death culture” a

complete practice was needed to allow for the continued grth of the revolutionary

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movement. The ideological impetus for this cultural practice came primarily through
music: “Tutti-Frutti by Little Richard, School Days by Chuck Berry, blues records, that
was my first inspiration. That’s what inspired me to find a life out of white cultural
America.” “It was young people making the records, so yeah, it was an expression of a
zeitgeist.” He continues, “Everything I ever did is founded on that.” Sinclair also
described his development of ideology also being closely tied to beat writers like Allen
Ginsberg and Lawrence F erlinghetti. Although in Sinclair’s view, Mao, Che, and Castro
provided beacons for people to liberate themselves from oppression (Sinclair 2006),
music was to remain central to his notions of social change and would continue to do so
even after his eventual break with the MC5.

Sinclair in his interviews and Minister of Defense, Pun Plamondon in his
autobiography pay homage to the Yippie movement as well.Vii Like the Yippie
movement, the White Panther Party would uphold a central reverence for spectacle and
usage of the media as a tool of empowerment. Sinclair’s call to use, “every tool, every
energy and every media we can get our collective hands on” (Sinclair 1968), bears a
striking resemblance to Abbie Hoffman’s contention that “Advertisements for revolution
are important in helping to educate and mold the milieu of people you wish to win over”
(Hoffman 67). The ability to utilize media outlets as well as create alternative outlets
became a central tenet of WPP life. Sinclair states that, “We were the same people!”
Chicago convention. . .we’re down we’re there. . .we’re the Detroit chapter and that was a
full ten months before we became the White Panther Party.” He continues, “See the

differences between us was that we did things. We had a program in real life. They

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[Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and other key Yippie figures] gave talks and speeches and
symbolic gestures and actions. It was extremely valuable in advancing the movement,
but it wasn’t what we did. We didn’t do protests...we didn’t call press conferences. We
didn’t care about being on television; our world wasn’t on television it was on the radio.
We put out records and did dances. We could organize people to come out and not only
make a statement and have a dance but also get some money to print some leaflets with to
get people out of jail.” (Sinclair 2006).

For Plamondon, individuals like Jerry Rubin and Hoffman were able to without
formal appointment, “express the attitude and aspirations of millions of progressive
young people.” However, the lack of formal organization pushed Plamondon
increasingly toward the community-focused actions of groups like the Black Panthers,

The YIPPIE! model had a certain attraction, but it also had its obvious drawbacks.

As a non-organization, it was difficult to organize anything practical or long

lasting, like a food co-op or medical clinic or free music in the parks. It’s

‘members’ were limited to calling for demonstrations, promoting pranks, and

performing street theater—valuable activities, to be sure, but not enough to

sustain a movement over the long haul (116).

For Plamondon, the Yippie penchant for media exploitation combined well with more
solidly ideological boundaries in the writings of the Panthers as well as within texts by
“Mao, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel, Nkrumah, and Fanon, as well as anything I could get
my hands on regarding the American left” (120). The formalization of ideology and

practice within the WPP and the influences being taken in would be an exacerbated

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contention amongst community and band members. This debate was heightened as
outside pressures and attention from governmental and music industry sources amounted.
Whatever the differences might have been in their approaches, the authorities
looked to the WPP as a serious threat. John Sinclair and Pun Plamondon were targeted
by police as subversive forces. Sinclair would eventually be sentenced to ten years in
prison for the possession of two marijuana cigarettes (State of Michigan). This conviction
was fought by Sinclair’s cohorts, eventually leading to a “Free John Now” concert
featuring such names as John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Bobby Seale, Jerry Rubin, Allen
Ginsberg and others in Ann Arbor in 1972 (Simmons/Nelson 82). Sinclair was released
three days after the event. The rise of the MC5 in Sinclair’s mind was the main cause for
his incarceration:
I went to prison, because basically I was manager of the MC5! That was what
really cheesed me offl I was an underground figure. I was big in the
underground, I wrote for the Fifth Estate, I was a poet...nobody knew anything
about that in the outside world. Where we went with the MC5...we intersected
with the popular world, because they were a rock band. That’s where they
operated, within the popular arena. That was what made me a notorious figure
that they had to lock up (Sinclair 2005).
Although he had been locked up earlier for marijuana-related charges, Sinclair’s later
sentence was viewed by many as an excessive one, including to the Michigan Supreme
Court who eventually overturned the conviction on its own motion.

Police and prosecutors also targeted Pun Plamondon. Leni Sinclair claims that

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Plamondon was a “fall guy” for a bombing of a CIA office in Ann Arbor in October of
1969. Plamondon was also prey for being targeted for drug charges as well.
The government had a plan all along I think to use us as a testing grounds for the
constitutional power grab by the Nixon administration. They thought we were
universally reviled and that no one would come to our defense because we were
not part of the new left. We were not like the people at the Chicago 8 trial, we
were not lefty radicals and they thought people would just think, ‘Oh...their
weirdoes and we wouldn’t have any support and they could get away with doing
what they did...and it didn’t work. The same lawyers that defended the Chicago 8
also defended us! (2005).
Eventually, the WPP began arming itself, but said it was only for defensive purposes.
Leni Sinclair explained: “As things got more overtly political, we also tried to follow the
Black Panther Party example in self-defense. We figured if we were ever attacked by
right-wingers or police...we should be able to exercise our Constitutional right and defend
our homes and our families with legal guns” (2005). It seems as if this move was less pre-
emptive and more a reaction to the changing nature of resistance in the United States as
described by Plamondon in Lost from the Ottawa. He asserts, “With the recent beatings
and arrests of antiwar demonstrators across the country, it was clear to me that the power
structure would do whatever it took, including beating, arresting, and even killing its own
children, to maintain the status quo” (115). He continues, “The Black Panther Party for
Self-Defense seemed to be effective in organizing and instilling discipline in street toughs

and ex-cons. Their platform called for black citizens to defend themselves with arms

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against racist police acting in an unlawful manner” (115). In short, the WPP did assert its
own right to armed self-defense, but weaponry does not seem to have played a central
role for the organization.
The Last Jams to be Kicked

Ultimately the band would dissociate itself from Sinclair and the Party, releasing
two more albums that commercially failed, leading to the demise of the group in the early
703. Pressure from authorities and a reputation gained for drawing unruly crowds and
associated antics (obscene language, performances, etc.)Viii that limited their ability to
produce capital and reach an audience pushed the band into dropping all associations
with Sinclair and the WPP. As promoters became fearful of booking them and labels
feared doing business with them due to the WPP’s rhetoric and reputation, their political
associations got in the way of being a rock band. Still, the notion of rebellion has stayed
strong in the history of the MC5. This is true as well as for the groups that would find
their voice partially through the work of the MC5, including the Sex Pistols, Fear, or
Rage Against the Machine. Music like that of the MC5 provides insight into how music
can act within rock as a space for the commodification of rebellion, as demonstrated in
Elektra’s idea of the MC5 as a great gimmick (the band was criticized as this by many
critics as well including Lester Bangs). But we also must recognize that implicit and
often explicit in the band’s music and in related projects was the desire to subvert
dominant power structures and to allow a public place for audiences to challenge the
status quo in ideology and in sound. These groups represent a foundational ethos and

promise for rock. They are texts for asserting identity through a common space of

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rebellion.

This was the inherent promise that the band, Sinclair and members of the
respective collectives found so much potential value in. Instead of picking up a weapon
and/or fighting in the streets audiences could assume and follow a rebellious spirit often
just for the price of a concert ticket, an album or a T-shirt. Band members could take part
in this rebellious community as well if so desired. The seriousness of this commitment
varied significantly among those involved. Whatever the case, totalizing statements that
construe the experiment as inherently authentic or as a capitalist ruse miss a perspective
on power and the potentiality of media that warrants further discussion and that can assist
in understanding the relationship between music, social change, and potential political
subversion.

Ultimately, music did not provide the impetus for revolution that some WPP
community members sought. However, Sinclair’s admiration for music’s power and its
potential to Offer people a useable sense of rebellious space is alive and well today, not
only in audiences but also in the industry that counts on this promise to sell. The MC5
and key organizers like John Sinclair, Leni Sinclair, and Pun Plamondon momentarily
found and used the potential energies that they saw in rock, in their Opinions an
organically rebellious music. Rock has not left this reputation behind; it continues—in
the industry, in artists, and in audiences—to allow subversion and/or commodification
within its borders.

Organizational perspective and thought only demonstrate part of this experiment

in power and in the inherent capabilities of useable rebellion and the potential for social

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change in music in the case of the WPP. The individuals who would become the
spearhead and (for some) unwilling organizers for the WPP were the band members of
the MC5. It is the MC5 who would garner the most attention and fimds for the ongoing
WPP project. In essence the project was the band. The garnering of band member’s
perspectives hence, is required to understand the parameters and possibilities of power in
the organization. Included should be an understanding of the fundamental social locations
that these individuals would bring to the table and the visions they would have for their
career as both a band and as a possible ideological force. Sinclair was far from alone in
building the MC5 mythos and these voices demand attention when garnering a complete

picture of the band’s life and its relationship to the WPP.

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Chapter 4

Sonic Anarchy: The Making of the MC5

Within the context of late 19603 Detroit a rock band found their musical style and
ideological voice. A Motor City-based rock outfit, the MC5 exploded onto the national
music scene after achieving regional and local success. Through individual band
members’ voices, we can better understand their intentions and their effect on collective
memory not only in music, but also on political and social change. These perspectives
counterbalance the views of Party leaders like Sinclair and Plamondon, which for
individual members could be a blessing or a curse depending on the individual and the
band’s career timeline. The blessings came through increased attention to the band
thanks to the media storm of often-revolutionary rhetoric that accompanied the band
throughout their career with the WPP. This same attention also brought with it though
critical reception in the music press and from an increasingly concerned police and
federal forces.

This micro level of investigation into the MC5 is meant to discern what members
intended in their call to a “total assault on culture” through their association with the
Panthers. Therefore, it explores how rebellion as a theme and practice was used in the
band’s career. The interviews reveal multiple perspectives because of the popularity of
the group at local and national levels and the emotional investment in the success of the
band, resulting in disagreement in hindsight about the experience. However, as the
second chapter demonstrated, the realities of Detroit helped to significantly shape these

perspectives, framing them by the use-ability of rock and its role in expressing grievances

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concerning race and class that had literally been taken to the streets. As local events like
the Detroit riot made national news and intersected with larger concerns about a fractured
and unequal society, it created the charged atmosphere that launched the MCS's career
and helped make it the voice of their youth, time and place.

All in all, as the interviews reveal, the band and its manager, Sinclair, were not
ready for the reaction that their creation solicited, especially from increasingly repressive
government interests as well as critical reception from their perceived brethren in the
New Left and in the music press. As Thompson notes, a public myth of the band was
created through an interweaving of self-generated propaganda, dominant media frames,
and musical style. Thanks to their continued influence on popular music, especially in
punk and heavy metal, as well as occasional coverage of band in the popular music press,
its vigor and the sound are still alive. Along with musical legacy, the question, “how far
were they willing to go,” politically and culturally occupies a place of infamy amongst
fans and critics, testing where fact and myth met in the political life of this band.

Perspectives on the White Panther Party and Its Intent

As charting its social location in the last chapter revealed, the White Panther
Party was a reaction of young Americans to the realities of life in Detroit, as well as to
national concerns like the war in Vietnam and the rise of psychedelic drug use. Guitarist
Wayne Kramer expresses the sense of frustration that led to the Panthers’ formation. He
points out though, that the organization did not have a coherent strategy for political
change, even as it adopted the image of the revolutionist:

It was never thought through far enough to become say the Green Party...an actual

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political entity in national and international politics. It was only intended to be a
voice, an expression of these young people’s frustration. It’s a way to say
Goddamn will someone listen to us? That’s all we’re asking is for someone to
listen to us. You keep saying it and saying it and it falls on deaf ears. You’re
natural instinct is to raise the volume, raise the level of the rhetoric. Start talking
about by any means necessary, start posing for pictures with guns in your hands.
That will get their attention and it did! (Kramer 2005)
Rising from the Detroit Artists Workshop and Trans-Love Energies, the White Panther
Party was a meeting of minds inside and outside of the band, namely singer Rob Tyner,
Kramer and Sinclair. The frustration that Kramer speaks of is demonstrated in the White
Panther Statement issued in 1968: “The white honkie culture that has been handed to us
on a silver platter is meaningless to us! We don’t want it! All we want is our freedom,
and we know we can’t be free until everybody is free! (Sinclair 1972, 104). A release put
out by the Party a short time later expresses: “We are responding to the increased
pressure of the power structure by building a dangerous power structure of our own!”
The main crux of that attack was the MC5, who would “get the Panther message to the
people” allowing them to “meet with militant brothers and sisters wherever we go. All
Power to the People” (108)!
The embracing of media forms to spread this message drew a great deal of interest
from fans, critics and the authorities. Advocating for the full support of the Black
Panther IO-Point program and platform, and calling for a program of “rock and roll, dope

and fucking in the streets” made the group a serious force to be reckoned with (Sinclair

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104). For Kramer and other members of the band the message held many possibilities,
some more serious than others. As stated in all interviews, such thoughts emanated from
life in Detroit and from the state of social and cultural strife at a national level. This
consciousness was balanced with an unapologetic desire to become a popular rock band.
Thompson states that this brew resulted in violent gestures that were mostly theater:
The notion of change, societal change and pushing them {the youth audience}
into the fight...we didn’t really want to push them into any kind of fight. What we
became was a representational model of a group of people who were willing to
fight, especially when there were photographs of us holding machine guns. That
sent out a message to the establishment. Now we got these MC5 guys who we
already don’t like because of their obscenity, because of the crowds they were
drawing, the anti-establishment hysteria that they did not know how to deal with.
(Thompson 2005).

Critics of the band have, according its members, perhaps misunderstood their
meaning and intention. In his review of their first album in a 1969 issue of Rolling Stone,
Lester Bangs stated, “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 scrap yard vistas of cliche’s and ugly noise”
(Bangs 34). Even recently, a 2005 Uncut review complains, “Shom of their political
context, they sound like a third-rate pub band.” In this review, a central concern exists
with the band’s political life and its ability to maintain it. Without it they are merely a

commercial, middle of the road act (Uncut 148). The search and perhaps hope for a pure

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product of rebellion, an ethos that would allow fans and critics to take part, seems
intrinsically tied to these perspectives. Davis seems to concur that at least at first the
desire to become a major force in rock was what propelled them, not any “political
context”

I thought we were out to show the world what we had. It was all about making a
record and being a big time rock and roll band. By that time I didn’t give a fuck
who was running the government...that bullshit. I just wanted to be a star. . .to
take our rightful place in the rock world. I wanted us to be a rock and roll band
not a political party (Davis 2005).

Kramer agrees that fame and profit outweighed any political ideology as he came
into his teenage years and early twenties. The band was not an organic creation of guns
and revolution from the start,

The band as teenagers were fundamentally most interested in becoming a

successful band, a popular band, to be stars. We looked at the kinds of thinking

that John Sinclair brought to the table as a stepping-stone to our stardom. It
wasn’t for me personally until I had been polarized by outside events, police

violence, the war in Vietnam things that touched me personally that I developed a

personal stake in political action or rhetoric. Literally the plan was to win over

Sinclair then we’ll win over the hippies and then we will be big stars! It was all
about stardom as the motivating force. It wasn’t until as I said some point when
events unfolded as members of a generation that I became personally politicized

or radicalized. Then it became real for me...(Kramer 2005).

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Like Sinclair’s interviews in the third chapter, the interviews with band members,
who were active agents in shaping the WPP, reflected a primarily musical focus that did
not rise to the level of strict political conceptions. . Kramer states, “My introduction to
the concept of revolution was cultural. . .it was through the music itself. It was visceral, it
wasn’t intellectual, it wasn’t studied. It was a gut feeling, an intuitive sense that
something was wrong. That something was out of kilter in America, in my country, in
my neighborhood.” He continues,
That questioning was really the source where everything started. Then I began to
fill in the blanks when I could say geez, this war that we’re involved in some
country far away, in some culture that has nothing to do with me and my culture
with my neighborhood and my city and my country. . .doesn’t make sense to me
(Kramer 2006).
The music allowed a place for like-minded individuals to come together. Davis, in
reference to The Beatles and the Rolling Stones states,
First it was just a sound. . .it was just fucking-a that’s great. . .wow. . .keep it in
your head and go through your day with that tune. . .thinking of that tune and
everything would be better. As soon as I found other people who were feeling
that vibe, these were the people that I wanted to hang with because we were on
the same plain (Davis 2006).
Part of this shared musical community building amongst those in the group was also the

cultural and racial challenges issued by the modern jazz movement of artists like John

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Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders. The band familiarized itself with
these artists primarily through John Sinclair, a jazz aficionado and critic:
Ideologically speaking, I think we got more information from the music, and
from the jazz music that we studied. The philosophy of the thinking of the jazz
players was of freedom in music. You could change music; you could do
whatever you wanted to if you used your imagination. I think that was the real
message (Thompson 2006).
Kramer in an interview with Uncut, described the sonic nature of rebellion put forth in
the group in this space of free musical expression, “The militancy and anger of the black
Free Jazz movement was the same anger we felt. That was one of the levels that we
connected to them, that they were pissed off about things, and were trying to find a new
way to say it in music” (Hasted 83). Thompson continues that the intrinsic link
between the enjoyment of rock and jazz was the promise of a collective energy, one that
they would label as “Hi gh-Energy” music, an energy that could allow for youthful
explosion of thought, emotion and hedonism, what we found in that music was energy.
The MC5 were interested in drive. We got that from the drag strips, fast cars,
acceleration. We got it from the Who. They understood what drive was all about”
(2006)

The ideological formation of the band and the WPP reflected musical forms as
well as other cultural fare such as beat poetry. Opposed to revolutionary models of the
time provided by Castro or Ho Chi Minh, Davis views other models leading to an

informal notion of dissent while growing up in the 503 and early 603, “It was a really

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hopeful time, the beatniks were happening, poets, Kerouac, Ginsberg were writing.

There was this tremendous explosion of intellectualism. Whereas my parents’
generation. . .the post war generation was ‘I like Ike.’ It was all very red white and blue
and stupid. It didn’t account that there were other cultures in the world.” These models
did not provide a direct revolutionary focus but instead allowed for a form for youthful
rebellion, “We were just kind of coasting. . .going from day to day. When some stupid
shit would come up and you would be looking at it. . .you would just be get that out of my
way. . .that’s how this all started” (Davis 2006).

For individuals like Kramer political consciousness was being shaped by a
process of immersion that was affixed to their quest for fame. This consciousness
developed as the five young men increasingly encountered discontent and upheaval on
the streets of the late 603 Detroit and Ann Arbor, as well as through radically savvy
minds surrounding them in the WPP. For the WPP, as in The White Panther Statement,
the revolution was to be cultural, “Our program is cultural revolution through a total
assault on the culture which makes use of every tool, every energy and every media we
can get our collective hands on” (Sinclair, 103). Kramer in the process of the interview
clarified that idea of a band being the revolution was a fallacy. The true power of a band
like the MC5, whatever its motivations, was the very possibility of organizing and
providing a place for dissent in society:

We’ve created a sense of community...there is a power to that...there is a place for

that within the political movement, but it is not in my humble opinion the political

movement. The political movement is one in which the French Revolution or the

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American Revolution was an armed revolution of the government, was never the
revolution we were talking about. We used those words and those symbols, but it
was a representation of (Kramer 2005).

Thompson echoes these sentiments when he discusses how the band and the WPP have

come to take on mythical proportions with some fans and critics waxing nostalgic about

the meaning of the Sixties searching for meaning in the 19603 counterculture:
The myth grows because we embraced a lot of revolutionary ideas, and that is a
good thing. The idea that you can be different, that you can wear colorful clothes,
that you don’t have to marry the first girl...court her for 6 months before you have
sex, the fact that you could experiment with recreational drugs like pot and not be
a killer. The fact that you can think differently than the establishment and the fact
that there were thinkers where the thinking was maybe if we could all talk to each
other, maybe we could up with some different solutions, maybe we could change
the way that people think about life. I think that is the true power, the ongoing
power of the MC5...its in the music, its in the three albums we created, its in the
lyric...the feel of the band. It is propulsive, it’s dynamic, it’s different, and there
are elements of risk. “Black to Comm,” that’s the platform for freedom...in that
moment in time...where can we go, what can we do. That kind of philosophy is
rebellious in nature because the status quo wants. you to be a consumer, to go to
work (Thompson 2005).

“Black to Comm” was a usual closer for the band where they would partake in a jazz-

influenced improvisation. Thompson’s comments exemplify the power and hegemony of

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useable rebellion in rock and in this case within the context of free jazz. The rebellion
and subversive behaviors that Thompson describes, although seemingly countering the
status quo, find substantiation in the capitalist order where sex, escape and style are all
things to be bought. Music fulfills both ends of the bargain in packaging this subversion
into useable forms for audiences who seek escape and social location in the subversion
and criticism of dominant forces, while the music successfully uses these very same
systems to spread its message and sound.

The modern music industry, despite its hegemonic capability to reincorporate and
sell the language of rebellion still offered the best path to express dissent for band
members like Kramer and Rob Tyner. The need to justify their notion of High-Energy
music came through continued interactions with authorities and the increasing
polarization of political life around him. As Kramer explains, “After a while you want to
back up your argument.” To accomplish this, he says, “we found a language and a
vocabulary in the language of revolution, in the images of Che and fighting the
oppressors and certainly the Black Panther Party. We saw in them, people who took this
revolutionary language and at least what we knew then, were applying it and had the balls
to carry guns and law books to confront the police of Oakland.” He adds, “We found it
inspiring, and we also found it patriotic that democracy required you, if you thought your
country was going in the wrong direction, to do something about it” (Kramer 2006).

Interviews with Davis and Thompson especially highlighted a disconnect in this
thinking. For them there was a complete rejection of political models accepted by the

New Left. Dennis Thompson for example, in our discussion of ideological construction

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of the MC5 and WPP, quickly hoped to set the record straight on MC5 political legacy, “I
didn’t read the “Red Book”. . .sorry people I did not read the ‘Red Book’” (Thompson
2006)

Bassist Michael Davis echoes that their actual revolutionary dedication was paltry
at best when compared to the perceptions of them held by the authorities, including the
federal government. Instead, all those directly involved freely admit that the WPP was
only a small group of people frustrated with the system. Davis sees that the group got
beyond its founders’ initially playful intent at a very early stage,

To me as one of the founders of the WPP, one of the people who were sitting

around the table when the joints were going down and the WPP was founded, it

was just a joke! It was one of our like lets goof on the audience things! This is
just a cartoon! I didn’t realize we were trying to be like the Black Panthers. But
then I kept sensing...like they would show film of Black Panthers in berets and

Wayne was like yeah, yeah (Davis 2005)!

Davis states that he felt more along the lines of, “What, what? Okay, it looks cool...but
you mean we have to do that? I don’t think so. It kept getting more crystallized into
being something...something. I never thought it was anything more than tongue and
cheek, absolutely” (Davis 2005).

An affiliation with more formal revolutionary models for Kramer left him with a
sense of ambivalence. He insists, “I don’t regret anything and I don’t close the door on it
either. I know we made mistakes.” Part of the WPP’s reaction to continued harassment

by the police and FBI was a series of promotional shots showing the members of the

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MC5 brandishing weapons. Kramer sees this as problematic: “The image of the gun was
a mistake. The idea that we would use armed resistance was archaic” (Kramer 2006).
Those archaic sentiments were ones that the government found of special interest.

These shots reflected an increasing disconnect amongst the band members about
the band’s meaning and role in “the revolution” out there. Interviews with John and
Leni Sinclair highlighted encouragement of self-defense in a very Black Panther-esque
sense through the amassing of some weapons in the group (John Sinclair, Leni Sinclair
2005). Davis, who already testifies to having a disconnect with the focus of the Panthers
found the process a befuddling one, contributing to his distance from Panther rhetoric,

You’re not going to have an armed conflict unless you have an army. And you see

that’s what they tried to make us do. All of the sudden there was thirty-odd-six

and some Ml- Carbines around the house...what’s that shit do? We would go out

and target practice (laughs)...practice? I play guitar, when did I start playing a

thirty-Odd-six? (Davis 2005)

Thompson looked to the armament of the WPP, in retrospect, as an instance of
confusion, “There was a point where we started brandishing guns...that was one of our
tactical errors. We really didn’t want everyone to pick up a gun and shoot the
police...that was never the intention” (2005). Kramer, who as stated previously, was
elevating his awareness and political radicalism, points out that, “We were young, we
were crazy. We went too far with some things, but they went too far first!” He adds that
there was a lack in communication amongst some members at the time, which may have

exacerbated any confiision of direction for the band, especially regarding their role in the

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White Panther Party, “Today I know a lot more about how my colleagues feel today that
they didn’t talk about back then” (Kramer 2005).

The brandishing of weapons in these promotional shots demonstrates a
discrepancy in individual ideals and goals for the band. To return to the main focus of
this chapter, the White Panther Party while potentially expressing a foundation for
revolutionary thought and dissent was not the entity that critics have perhaps wanted to
believe in such as Bang Magazine’s claim that the MC5 were “the one and only in-your-
face, capital P political band” (Bang 2). Instead, the members of the band, whose
political thought varied from passionately invested to intentionally distant from more
formal rhetorics, could perhaps, find some middle ground in thinking that they did not
feel they themselves would have to partake in an armed struggle. Though the rhetoric did
increase as the band and the WPP faced an increasingly hostile police force both in their
homes and at their performances (Loren, 20), direct, violent action was not something
any member was willing to partake in.

Somewhere Between Chords and Discord: Ideologies as Separating Factors

As one can begin to gather thus far, a pure ideological voice within the
community of the MC5 or within the WPP cannot be discerned. It cannot be denied that
contemporary focuses like the Black Power movement and the Vietnam War did actually
affect all members of the organization in some way. The realities of Detroit and the
nation were continuously shaping perspectives amongst the Party and the band. Detroit’s
increased oppression of the band forced the collective to move to Ann Arbor to avoid

future violence. The collective had been the target of arson, and became a target for

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police harassment (Sinclair 1972, 44). The MC5 and the WPP’s call to revolution
reacting to these numerous pressures appears to be the area where contentions and views
amongst those involved becomes problematic. Numerous contextual factors added to this
confusion including: 1. the incarceration of Sinclair on a drug charge, 2. the increasing
political and radical awareness by individuals like Kramer as well as with lead singer,
Rob Tyner, and 3. the stepping up Of authoritarian methods of control, including the
Department of Defense, as well as local authorities, who as the band became more
popular became more concerned with their rhetoric and actions.

John Sinclair, the band’s manager and key player in the White Panther Party’s
development, was incarcerated on a 9 '/2-10 year sentence for possession of two joints and
was held without appeal bond for nearly 29 months (Loren 21). The harsh imprisonment
was part of an extensive record for Sinclair in the preceding years concerning marijuana
use. The band, that had ultimately found success through Sinclair’s promotion had for
some time leading up to the incarceration, felt themselves drifting from Sinclair and the
community.

Thompson states that the initial success of the band who were signed to Elektra
Records in May of 1969, was indeed an extension of the experiences encountered in
Sinclair’s Detroit based communes,

The message was inside the music. We were nurtured and nourished by Trans-

Love Energies and John’s people and their thought, intelligence and freethinking.

That was the beneficial information we received from being with them. There

was so much more than we must destroy what exists with a Godzilla like

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mentality, we must smash it down and build it all over again. But it was the idea
of alternative thinking (Thompson 2005).
Thompson continues, though, that as Sinclair faced jail time, a gap began to widen
between the band and community members more focused on political upheaval,
When John went to jail...it was like well, this man had gotten us this far. His
politics became more aggressive, and combative and he was going to jail, and we
were not going to profess the politics...we’re not going to jail. If it was our asses
up against the wall and we were on the stand I think we might have escalated our
politics even more so...but we didn’t want to go to jail. We wanted to be free to
make the music, make records, to tour and to be a rock and roll band. Ultimately
the real design of the MC5 in the beginning was to be one of the best rock and roll
bands in the world (Thompson 2005).
Kramer agrees that escalating tensions were occurring within the band due to factors like
increased commercial success and repression from authorities at national and local levels,
were heightened when combined with the harsh realities of Sinclair’s forthcoming
sentence:
John really believes in the power of art to change people, to enrich our lives...that
is the basis for the things that John does and for the things he does with the MC5.
When it became clear that the MC5 was an ongoing business concern and John’s
legal difficulties started to conflict, it reverberated in personal problems. It took
form in resentment. I don’t know if you know many people who have done

time...but most people freak out before they get locked up. It is such a traumatic

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thing to face and you want to blame somebody. And John blamed me, the

MC5...but mostly me because he was really close to me and that’s what we do, we

lash out at the people closest to us (Kramer 2005).

The band and Sinclair by the time they were signed to Elektra Records in 1969
had suffered a long past of frustrations and torment by local and national authorities.
Currently, one of the most intriguing evidences of this is in the footage of the band taken
by the Department of Defense during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The
Yippie festival was supposed to be held in Chicago’s Lincoln Park while the Convention
was meeting. The MC5 was the only band to show as tensions in Chicago had been
nationally broadcast, dissuading others to participate. The performance and the band’s
national contract with Elektra Records pushed Sinclair into the limelight as a
countercultural guru. Thompson thinks that the government had taken notice of the band
as a catalyst of anti-authoritarian rhetoric and singled out Sinclair as its main target: “The
idea was if we take this manager out of the equation, maybe this MC5 thing will go away.
There was probably someone who said that sitting around at some backroom table”
(Thompson 2005). One could certainly see this potentiality in the lO-year sentence
leveled against Sinclair for his possession offense, representing an affirmation of
Thompson’s fears. Along with this targeting of Sinclair, the indictment of Pun
Plamondon for his supposed role in a September 1968 bombing of an Ann Arbor CIA
office reflects an established interest in the WPP by state and federal intelligence
communities. This increasing interest in the New Left and groups associated with it

targeted key individuals within these organizations that were seen as domestic threats to

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national security. ’x
The crisis of thought in regards to Sinclair and other Party members that Kramer
discusses above could be witnessed in the increasingly militant rhetoric utilized by
Sinclair in Party press releases. A May 1969 release states,
We will not allow these creeps to stomp us out, and we will defend ourselves by
any means necessary against the fascist terror. This means using every possible
weapon at our command, including the pig’s own technology. We will rob that
motherraper blind, we will steal his machinery, his media, his money, anything he
lets us get our collective hands on we will snatch up and take back to our
communities where it will be put to use for the people by the people with the
people. All Power to the People! The spirit of the people coupled with the
strength of the pig’s technology in the hands of the people will enable us to turn
the pig out of pasture for good (Sinclair 1972, 153)!
One can see a marked contrast to the program of “rock and roll, dope and fucking in the
streets” advocated at the inception of the Party. Sinclair, in his book, Guitar Army, looks
at the WPP as being a reactionary force which was “struggling for survival” and that by
stepping up the rhetoric was “getting so extreme that it began to turn them (the MC5) off
too, along with the people we addressed ourselves to”(Sinclair 1972, 50). The group
became reactionary, according to Sinclair, because no longer was the group providing a
clear alternative to the “death culture,” but was reduced to defensively keeping their head
above water in the face of increasing authoritarian pressure. As Sinclair struggled for the

survival of his freedom, the MC5 struggled for theirs. Feeling isolated and repressed by

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local and national powers that be, and fearing that they too may become a target, caused
the band to split from Sinclair. Kramer reflects,
We were struggling to find our way. John was really our mentor...he was the
snowplow that cleared the way for us to be the MC5 and once he was out of the
picture, we were in trouble. The more his legal problems increased the less he
was available to us and we were really struggling and trying to find our own
voice. What John was able to do was articulate things that we felt at a gut level.
John was Older than us; John was better educated than us. John had a clearer
worldview than we did (Kramer 2005).
After the separation the band would make two more albums. The path was not an easy
one for them. Davis states, “We dumped the commune and then officially now we were
going to just be a rock and roll band. Then there was real hell to pay...because you
jumped horses in midstream. The press, the fan base is saying hey, hey that’s not cool!
People are very eager to point out when you step over the line...and that was stepping
over the line” (2005). The dropping of the White Panther affiliation, as garnered from
the interviews seems to have been a means for surviving as a band, who still wanted to be
a musical force. Thompson explains that the pressures were numerous, and facing the
continued wrath of a government that as Attorney General John Mitchell stated, “was
looking to gather intelligence information deemed necessary to protect the nation from
attempts of domestic organizations to attack and subvert the existing structure of the
Government." (Qtd. in Wilson), partially pushed them into a state doubt and confusion.

He continues, “The band was finding itself, who we were. Don’t forget all the

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things that were happening to us at the same time. Losing John Sinclair, confusing our
fan base a bit...from the 1S" album to the second album...two different schools of music
entirely.” He continues, “We were losing ourselves we were beat up. We were taking
some pretty nasty drugs, and that is another large part of the reason that the band
separated, because the drugs the band were taking were these death drugs” (Thompson
2005). The band had moved on from drugs like LSD and marijuana to heroin: a
reflection of larger trends of the time especially in urban centers like Detroit. Two
albums after their debut with Elektra drugs would become one of, if not the most
prominent cause for the band’s demise.x

Reducing the Rocket: Making Sense of the MC5 and the White Panther Party

The preceding pages have permitted a look into a relationship that allowed a

plethora of uses of meaning and significance for those involved. If one were to ask if the
relationship between the MC5 and the White Panther Party truly reflected a revolutionary
group in the annals of American history, the answer would invariably differ based upon
members’ perspectives. Time has taken away two of these voices in Rob Tyner and Fred
“Sonic” Smith. This further complicates the spectrum. What can be discerned from the
three remaining members is that the MC 5 and the White Panthers was a
group/organization that was built upon an array of perspectives, some seeing radicalism
as tongue and cheek and some declaring its authenticity. These perspectives were
complicated when the group amassed national media attention. This media attention
allowed the five young men a massive audience through a national recording contract.

Members, whether believing in the possibilities of change through cultural revolution or

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whether basking in the limelight the band had collectively sought, saw that the MC5 and
White Panther Party become an amorphous organization that could fulfill numerous
potentialities. It also created numerous grounds for alienating the less politically
motivated members of the band, exemplified by an increasingly apprehensive Thompson
and Davis. The MC5 quickly became a creature of numerous interpretations by the band
members themselves. Far from a cohesive unit, the group was an often-conflicted
collection of views and intentions for what the MC5 was supposed to in popular culture
and the political world.

The levels of communication and levels of loyalty to rock and/or to social
upheaval allowed for this multiplicity of perspectives among band members, among Party
members, and between the MC5 and WPP. The interviews conducted reveal a band
somewhat divided. Rob Tyner and Wayne Kramer are commonly referred to as the most
connected to Sinclair, and the potential social, cultural and political visions of the White
Panthers as expressed in the Party’s rhetoric. Davis points out that decisions regarding
the WPP’s marketing and its adaptation of increasingly formal political and revolutionary
rhetoric was done through a filtering process that began to progressively more involve
those excited by the reaction of political and cultural debate the band was drawing. “So
our information kind of got filtered down through innuendos and jokes” (2005). Hence,
it appears that an ineffective and incomplete form of communication occurred as the band
stepped up its rhetoric and ran into greater repression from authorities. As determined
by my series of interviews with the band and other WPP leaders, the breakdown is as

follows: the determination of revolutionary rhetorics and image mostly centered around

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Sinclair, Plamondon and Kramer; secondary to these initial discussions were Rob Tyner,
and other WPP members like Leni Sinclair, Gary Grimshaw and Dave Sinclair; finally at
the bottom of the rhetorical divide were those mostly concerned with the band’s career,
with little concern about their political role, including Thompson, Davis, and Fred Smith.
The Party was meant to create a sense of community for those persons that felt
frustration in their daily lives. As Thompson notes, the revolution was not at the end of a
gun barrel,
The basic revolution that was taking place to me was one of consciousness, one of
thinking. I think the revolution that was going on was in people’s personal lives
and the way that they looked at the world. I think the effect that the MC5 may
have had on people overtime was that yes you could kick out the jams in your
own life, yes, you could do something different...you could be unique (Thompson
2005).
Kramer who is still active in political and socially focused causes retrospectively
interprets the band’s place in the counterculture and its sometimes de facto association
with the New Left in a similar fashion,
We were sincere about what we did and it was expressed in the work we did.
There is something keeping this whole thing alive. Why has the work of the MC5
been recognized by a generation today when we weren’t even recognized in our
own day? I think the message holds up pretty well. The fundamental message
was that you could make a difference but you had to do it wholeheartedly. You

have to make a commitment. You have to kick out the jams; it doesn’t mean you

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have to nudge out the jams.
He continues,
Will the MC5 be looked on as a cheap revolutionary hype rock band that a bunch
of people were naive enough to swallow... I don’t think so...I think the sincerity
comes through. Given all that remember what we said in the beginning that the
idea of a rock band being political is an illusion. It was in fact a marketed sense of
revolution. We knew that then...this isn’t a new revelation to me (Kramer 2005).
Kramer states that the use of Electra Records and the use of mass media was an intended
one. It allowed the band to reach and influence a mass audience, carrying according to
Thompson, a basic message, “...we’re carrying a message a positive message a powerful
message a message of self-efficacy that I think is a useful message” (Thompson 2005).
These perspectives have been developed and refined by the three individuals
chronicled here for nearly four decades now. The MC5 lives above and beyond any
single member’s wishes or intents. Intent can only mean so much to a group that has
carved a status in popular music and the social/cultural history of this country. Davis
comments,
The legacy is cool, I’m grateful for it, I’m grateful for the fans and the people who
have come out and like the stuff we did. So much of that is in spite of everything,
in spite of yourself, in spite of all the mistakes, in spite of whatever you thought
about it...that’s what you meant. I have no control over the legacy, and I’m fine
with that (Davis 2005).

Dennis Thompson acknowledges the concepts of purity and authenticity being

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foundationally connected to the band especially in regards to their larger political/cultural
legacy. This now nostalgic view of the band being an uncorrupted foot soldier for the
counter cultural revolution is just as musically and generally constraining today as he felt
it was for the band at the time,
It’s an illusion...there is a lot of MC5 fanatics that would like us to remain pure; in
other words, they would want to let the sleeping dog lie. That we were this entity
at a certain point and time and they want to preserve it. They want to dip us in
plasticine and say geez...you’re not allowed to evolve (Thompson 2005).

He adds that for those that have invested a sense of authenticity in the band remain
adamant even today as the band confronts ongoing debates on genuineness and intent,
“People who are the fanatics...it’s like whoa...You’re stepping on their holy grail. This is
the way I perceive it...you can’t change my perceptions of it” (Thompson 2005)! Perhaps
some of this dedication can be attributed to the fact that the MC5 and the White Panther
Party really did, despite themselves, provide a useable text from which audiences could
rebel and voice their dissent. Within the music of the MC5 and the work of the White
Panther Party significant investment can come from audiences. This is because they
allow an energetic and autonomous space for questioning society around them that
could/can be obtained merely through coming to a show, wearing a t-shirt or putting on
headphones. Kramer explains this momentous power to offer a space of dissent,

Each generation throughout history...one part of that youth is that desperate desire
to figure out who I am...who the hell am I in the world. And one way I find it is

in my music and when I find my music, that is my fucking music and you can’t

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take it from me and that’s part of who I am” (Kramer 2005).

In effect a kind of authenticity is created for the listener. The power of the music is an
outlet that feeds on this energy of change and challenge, wherever the boundaries may be.
Indeed, it can be shaped by the bands and those controlling their images, but can also be a
deeply personal experience where one can use/not use or buy into/ discard the messages
of rebellion and angst put forth, whenever wanted. Somewhere between intended frames
and successful poaching of musical products, the life of the music takes on a hybridity
and malleability that fits numerous contexts. This notion of authenticity built into the
music and life of the MC5 and the White Panther Party was not one relegated to their
audience. The local and national authorities also questioned what exactly the Panthers
could mean. . .to national security.

Messing with The American Ruse

In retrospect the MC 5 and the White Panther Party were not capable of creating a
complete social revolution, nor did it seem that they had ever intended for there to be one
in a physical way. Yet, the intensity of police and government attention was
overwhelming to the group and to Sinclair. Their creation had fueled much more than the
success of a band, and much more than an outlet of creative expression towards social
ills. Davis comments,

We frightened the shit out of them. They didn’t know how to deal with it. We

recognized that we were cool, we know we’re cool let’s leave it at that. That’s

powerful shit. Because when you reach 10 year old or 12 olds kids and they just

think you’re the coolest and they want to be just like you...you don’t think that

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scares the government? That scared em...big. There weren’t too many ROTC

recruits coming out of that group (Davis 2005)!

One can see in CIA files of the time that this possibility of recruitment was especially
frightening to the powers that be, who at the time, were actively investigating links
between the group and a growing contingent of direct action components utilizing
violence and terrorization including the Weather Underground and allegedly the WPP’s
own, Pun Plamondon.

As merchants of cool, Davis points to perhaps the most powerful effect of
revolution through cultural standards. The power of media and its effect on culture
afforded the MC5 a significant voice whose energy shadowed political clout to many a
teenager: Theodore Adomo’s worst dreams coming to fruition; dupes finding an identity
for themselves created by the media. The media did not guarantee how that message was
to be interpreted and how close it would match individual’s perceptions within the group.

Here again, comparisons to the Yippie! movement can easily be drawn. Fiends
of media manipulation, the WPP and Yippies put the power behind image and sound,
blurring the line between Aronowitz’s notions of a divided counterculture of the political
and the cultural. Media did not allow for such a clear dividing line, and the WPP and the
Yippies acted as sonic and semiotic tricksters, with the WPP merging the
mischievousness of the Yippies street theater intimately with their musical output."i
Even though participating in the Festival of Life, and sharing a common view of media
power, the band itself did not have formal ties to Yippie leaders like Hoffman and Rubin

that Sinclair did. However, through Sinclair, the band felt the influence. Says Kramer,

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“We all learned from each other. I thought that they were brilliant agit-prop political
theatre artists. Wearing that American flag shirt. . .that’s why my guitars are painted in
the American flag motif. We wanted to say we’re super patriots. You’re the one
following the fascists. We’re for good old American justice” (2006). This sense of
learning and camaraderie did not mean a formal relationship or formal methodology for
change amongst the two. This was true due to the confusion that was apparent in the
WPP as well as the basic reality that the Yippies lacked any real organization as a “Party”
(Miller 285). Says Davis, “We understood what Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were up
against. What they were dealing with was the repression of the political society that we
rejected. That’s what they had to deal with within the boundaries because that was what
the law was.” He continues, “I respected those guys, I related to them, I knew what they
were going through. I knew it was tough, I knew they would have to stand up in court
and people would laugh at them. They would have to do radical absurd things, make
public statements that were going to fry them” (2006). Like the MC5, the cultural and
the political delineations of Aronowitz’s notion of the counterculture were blurred by the
Yippie approach, mixing the political and the cultural.

As the establishment increasingly targeted Hoffman and Rubin as subversive
forces, some band members including Thompson did not feel the need to firmly align
themselves with the targeted individuals,

What we had in common was the idea that change needed to take place. It was

natural youthful rebellion. We wanted to end the war, legalize pot and have some

sort of effect on bigotry and racism. Those themes we shared. But as far as

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sitting down and having pow-wows with them. . .planning strategies. . .Na, I wasn’t
ever involved with that. Didn’t care to be. Whenever the call came for us to
show up somewhere [by the Yippies]...we went (2006).
Although called into the spectacle, all members of the band did not necessarily buy into
the supposed ideological underpinnings of MCS’s presence there. Davis confirms,
We knew what they were talking about, but did I want to be part of their court

case? NO. As far as going to Chicago, I don’t remember ever having a

Haul t a- ”1L; h!

relationship with those guys. I might have met them. . .we might have said hi, we
might have passed a joint back and forth. But I didn’t sit down and have a talk
with them about what the new world would be like. Sinclair may have. He was
really our connection with all of that. He kind of passed down his edicts to
whoever was going to be the next link in the chain of puppetry (laughs) (2006).
Even though not formally aligning themselves with Hoffinan, the two groups tested the
power of media in creating real or perceived threats to the establishment through the
exploitation of media. Opposed to the romantic vision of a master media manipulator put
forth in the Abbie Hoffman biopic film, Steal This Movie! (2000), it seems that programs
of media exploitation where on the spot experiments that were often fumbled by the WPP
and the Yippies. Kramer explains, “In a sense we were all babes in media manipulation.
We were figuring it out as we went. It’s not like today where Karl Rove and the White
House are geniuses at media manipulation. We were just making our bones” (2006).

These rudimentary approaches to using the media as a stage for political theater and

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personal expression soon placed many of these now celebrity figureheads involved in this
manipulation, as targets of national security interest.

As was the case with the Yippies, Kramer and Thompson see the establishment as
linking the White Panther Party, no matter how unprepared or unknowing they were of
their own power in the realm of popular culture as well as within the increasingly
contentious and violent movement of dissent and rebellion. Such claims that the band
might now make in regard to delineations between culture and politics are not
qualifications the government sought to understand the nuances of.

The threat was that their hypocrisies and inconsistencies were obvious. The MC5

was one small part of a generation that disagreed with the direction the country

was going in that was directly affected by decisions that were made in

Washington. He [Nixon] viewed the White Panthers and the MC5 along with the

Yippies, and Black Panthers, and the Students for a Democratic Society and any

one who stood up and said we don’t want this war; we don’t want what’s

happening in this country. You expand that out to the connection between the
anti war movement and the civil rights movement...these were very powerful

social movements (Kramer 2005).

Thompson explains that the very alignment of the White Panthers to these other groups
created a reactionary response, which in turn propelled the band to higher levels of fame
and myth. There was a want to stop the mediated and unfamiliar path the band was
taking jumping between the popular and the political. “Because they wanted to stop

this...this is where the purists might have a point, because of the way the establishment

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reacted to us. All of it was running counter-posed to their ethic, a fundamentalist
Christian ethic” (2005). More than Christian fundamentalism, the anti-communist
paranoia of the time was probably more to blame in terms of isolating a foundational
concern of the status quo. The reference to “fundamentalism” which as a movement
found itself later, was in this context though of as a kind of Protestant ethos guiding the
American mindset, but nonetheless is an important reminder that legacies are often read
in contemporary terms. Overall though it is evident that the establishrnent’s reactions to
the band only added to their popularity and to the myth Thompson speaks of.

Perhaps this is why the debate continues. The terms of debate regarding the
band’s legacy is created in part by media’s framing abilities and the ability of individuals
to use or discard the historically entrenched and institutionalized space of youthful
rebellion within the practice of rock. A balance of sorts has come to rest at the feet of
the MC5 as cultural icons. As stated on the back of their recent Sonic Revolution DVD,
“The politics and drama that surround the group’s legacy may have enhanced their
legend, but what really counts is the music they made” (Day/Kramer/Samways). In the
end it is the music that does the talking, but what “really counts” is that the musical voice
is combined with the sometimes harmonious and sometimes dissonant aura that follows
the music as it reaches new generations. The music and the myth combine to create
something unpiloted and uncontrolled by its authors.

Rather than a mass-mediated product that imposes a dominant frame, popular
culture texts like the MC5 prove that audiences of all varieties (individuals, fans, critics,

governments etc.) should be looked upon as active agents like those described by Kramer

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who make the music and the potential sense of rebellion their own. Simon F rith offers
that music ”has been an important way in which we have learned to understand ourselves
as historical, ethnic, classbound, gendered subjects" (149). A significant practice that
proves this logic is in the investments and use of the MC5 and the White Panther Party by
audiences. These investments are drawn from audiences through numerous areas of the
band’s performance including: lyrics, stage presence, musicality, self-generated
propaganda, and the media’s presentation of the group. "How far would they go" in a
revolution inspired by class, race and war, is a question that is not likely to find any
coherent answer soon amongst audiences and fans. To provide only one dominant
narrative would be to ignore the varied and sometimes disparate uses of the band by
audiences and participants.

The ability of audiences to find significant investment in these areas of
performance used by the band, allows for a multiplicity of uses for a wide array of
stakeholders. Frith argues that in essence we come to find identity through music by
possessing it, "In 'possessing' music, we make it part of our own identity and build it into
our sense of ourselves" (143). This can create questions about intent and authenticity.
Authenticity is, of course, problematic to gauge as the realties of music show a rooted-
ness in, "the person, the auteur, the community or subculture that lies behind it" as well
as a rooted-ness created by listener communities. Despite the fact that music in the 20th
century and today is "a commercial form, music produced as a commodity, for a profit,

distributed through mass media and culture" (Frith 136, 137), this is still the case. An

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interplay of commercial, revolutionary and individual thought and culture coagulate in
the MC5, conflating absolutes in terms of these questions of political and musical intent.
The final product beyond politics, beyond music, beyond the band’s “high
energy” approach is ubiquitous and seems to have etched a place in sonic, visual and
written culture. They still effortlessly fit themselves into the formidable ethos of
rebellion in rock through continued touring, DVD releases, album releases and in the
press in such periodicals as Mojo, and Uncut. Simply put, the band garners further
attention in the media and with audiences, because of its ability to demand fevered
investment, disdain and debate regarding its validity in the political and social world as a
musical act. Detroit/Ann Arbor scene brethren Iggy Pop of Iggy and the Stooges
eloquently states this sentiment of fluidity, observing,
The MC5 went beyond having a sense of humor about themselves; they were a
parody. They acted like black thugs with guitars. In Detroit, if you where a white
kid, your dream was to be a black thug with a guitar and play like one...I can’t say
how political the MC5 are, but I certainly didn’t feel it. But on a basic level,
would they share their peanut butter with me? Yeah. So they were a decent
bunch of guys-a nice bunch of guys to have around to blow up your local CIA

recruiting office (Hasted 82).

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Chapter 5

Guns and Guitars: Revolutionary Style and Substance?

The MC5 was the product of an aggressive synergistic marketing campaign by the
WPP community that linked the group to the radical, musical, and political landscapes of
the late 19603 and early 703 in both local and national contexts. This campaign,
whether to the group’s chagrin or not, has successfully framed the band for several
decades, demonstrating the possibilities of performance and the place of useable rebellion
in rock. Questions such as: “Is it possible to thrive or merely get by in the music
industry and to still have a voice capable Of dissent?” and “How authentic were their
aims?” followed the group. Throughout the band’s career and association with “the
revolution,” the audiences asking these questions, have had various investments in
creating meaning through the band’s performances. The programs of performance that
made up this synergistic campaign propelled debate concerning music’s role in social
change.

Soon the MC5 represented, depending on one’s investment in the numerous areas
of performance, an all-too real threat to national security and “American values” or an
elaborate ruse leading to questions regarding how divisive popular culture could become
in the modern political and cultural world. Regardless of the intentions of the MC5 or
those involved in the WPP community, the authors soon lost their intended frames, as the
being morphed beyond a single, comprehensible whole.

Supporting a feasible postmodern perspective, preceding chapters have shown

how critics, and even some group members like Dennis Thompson, saw the political

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realities of the WPP as a “paper tiger;” as a non-functioning model. Yet, several
hundred pages of a documents from the FBI, CIA and other organizations including the
Michigan State Police, are now available through the Freedom of Information Act,"ii
showing that the MC5 and their association with the WPP was taken quite seriously as a
threat to national security and concerned names such as Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and
J. Edgar Hoover. Beyond governmental interest, numerous music journalists, musicians
and others took interest in the program of performance the band put together. From this,
came a discussion of authenticity in regards to the group and its political associations,
centering around the question of how far they were intending to go. Critics, the FBI and
the views of those involved in the group make for strange bedfellows in the following
pages, but all will be used as gauges to measure notions of dissent and rebellion.

Various parts of the synergized campaign of performance that elicited responses
from Lester Bangs to Richard Nixon will be broken down in order to understand the role
of these parts in the larger operation The first aspect dissected will be the lyrical output
of the group itself. The band’s three albums will be examined with a particular
concentration on the first album, Kick Out the Jams. This focus is warranted, as the
album is the only one actually representative of the band’s association with the WPP.
The following two albums mark a deliberate attempt by the band to distance themselves
from the political and cultural rhetoric of the WPP. The group’s output over the three
albums demonstrates a wide range of lyrical foci involving sex, to drugs and surprisingly
a relatively small amount of political content. Primarily the focus is on the pursuit of

hedonistic desires and wants. These focuses actually successfully reflect the hedonistic

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mantras of the WPP such “as rock and roll, dope and fucking in the streets.” Yet,
numerous examples of politically aware and possibly challenging lyrical messages do
occur in such compositions as “The Human Being Lawnmower” and their cover of
“Motor City Burning.” These messages, as will be demonstrated, do not however
constitute what one would call thematically an overtly politically message or rhetoric.

The second area examined will be concentrated on live performance. This entails
both the sonic make-up of the group and a focus on stage presence. Live performance
consists of a combination of music, dance, and on-stage antics. Musically the band
heavily fluctuated in their sound. A live, raw and loose aesthetic dominated their first
album, Kick Out the Jams. The second album, Back in the USA, which was released
after their break with the WPP, showcased a much more precise and meticulous band
with most tracks barely reaching three minutes, reflecting much more traditional rock
arrangements. The third album, High Time, finds a meeting of the first two albums,
reclaiming a certain rawness in the compositions that is balanced by the musical
discipline of the second album.

The band found their real success and fan base less through album sales, and
garnered more attention in live venues especially in the greater Detroit and Ann Arbor
scenes. The intrinsic importance of the band as a live act will be examined along with
their sonic identity for this reason. The MCS’s stage show was a spectacle of not only
music, but also choreographed dance, costumes, and numerous on-stage antics. The
power of their live performances led Jac Holzman and Elektra Records to issue the

band’s first album as a live album; this move was a risky and bold move in the record

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industry at the time. Numerous negative run-ins with the law and promoters like Bill
Graham also furthered the band’s mythic existence as a live force to be reckoned with
and sometimes feared.

The last and broadest topic area examined concerns the propaganda and press
associated with the band and their association with the WPP. The WPP and Sinclair
were behind an intricate network of live performances, photography, newspapers, flyers,
art exhibits, poetry publications and readings, buttons, bumper stickers and numerous
other means of creating and distributing the image and sound of the MC5 and White
Panther initiatives. Here the home-cooked synergy orchestrated by Sinclair helped the
MC5 create successful local and regional markets, with marginal commercial success to
follow nationally/intemationally. Hence, these sources are considered an important part
of the larger program of performance. Here, just as within their lyrical content and live
shows, specific roles were being played and presented by the band to audiences trying to
make sense of what this was all supposed to mean. The propaganda and use of the MC5
as the financial core of raising funds for the WPP greatly aided in the aura of useable
rebellion that the band commanded from fans and critics, as well as increasingly drawing
attention from the authorities.

The life of the MC5 exists both inside the music as well as in ideological spaces
outside of the music itself. This space between is demonstrative of the power and
potential of popular culture as a means of expression and dissent. The program of
performance that was amalgamated through lyrics, music, live performance, and

propaganda contributed in creating a group that was loved, feared and ridiculed for their

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experimentation with the useable space of rock in creating, or at least creating the image
of, rebellion and revolution sonically incarnated. A single part cannot be held
responsible for this mythos. Instead the MC5 myth has been dependent on these areas
functioning together and through each other. All the while, considerations of
authenticity and intent have stemmed from audience’s reactions to performative roles the
band put forth during their career.
Moon, Spoon, and Revolution? An Examination of Lyrical Content

The first area of performance examined is one that seemingly should be of direct
benefit to audiences in figuring out intent, lyrical content. For a group whose legacy
often centers around questions of authenticity in regards to political subversion and
rebellion, the lyrical content, the most immediate and obvious tool for a musician to
communicate a specific ideological message, is primarily focused on the traditional
conceptions of rebellion in rock. As cited by Ochs this is a concentration on, “teen topics
of interest-automobiles, assorted fads, sexuality, rebellion, escape, energy, life, death,
loneliness, dancing and dating” (Qtd. in Waksman, 10) and not on politically
revolutionary thought or rhetoric. Lyrically, the MC5 explored notions of rebellion in
much the same way as numerous predecessors in the rock canon. Isolated by itself, the
lyrical content of the songs of the MC5 could easily be overlooked in concern to themes
of revolution when considering other musical fare of the time such as “Street Fighting
Man” or “Volunteers.” The content at most offers a further obvious and potentially
crasser push to hedonistic pleasures found in dating, sex and drug use. . .in other words,

nothing revolutionary in the time of the band’s career. These messages speak to a level of

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useable rebellion, yet, not one that directly threatened the security of the nation or
advocated for socialistic or communistic revolution.

Primarily, the band’s first album, Kick Out the Jams, is filled with brooding and
unapologetic sexuality. Vocalist Rob Tyner actively mimics an orgasmic climax
indicative of this theme in “Come Together” describing a “Dance from which all dances
come.” The song ends with Tyner imitating the path to orgasm, describing to the
audience, “Oh God, It’s Getting Closer, Oh and When It Gets Closer/Oh God, It’s So
Close Now.” If we had not been given a clear enough indication of intent, the band,
when thanking the applauding audience as the song ends, beseeches, “We hope you all
did. . .come together.” Although potentially a message of brotherhood and community,
the band unapologetically points us to a voice of sexual desire through lyrical forms.
Throbbing machismo abounds as well in such tracks as “Rocket Reducer No. 62” where
Tyner proudly gloats that “I’m a born ass pincher/And 1 don’t give a damn.” Numerous
other tracks on the rest of the album and on the other two LPs echo these sentiments. A
cover of “Tutti F rutti” Opens Back in the USA. and shares a teenage vision of sexuality
that by the time of the release of the album seemed very unthreatening when compared to
the music industry at the time, where best-selling groups like the Beatles were asking
“Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” The band quickly though re-establishes its
swaggering tone on the track “Teenage Lust” where Tyner sings: “Surrounded by bitches
who wouldn’t give it in/W ho thought that getting down was an unnatural sin/I’d whisper

9”

‘Baby, baby help me, you really must/I need a healthy outlet/F or my teenage lust.

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The lyrical content bends between the extreme and the flaccid throughout and into
the next album, High Time. Songs from the last two albums demonstrate unashamed
sexuality in tracks like “Call Me Animal” on Back or “Miss X” on High Time, which
observes, “Heat gives way to sweat/My body’s soaking wet/We slide and slip/From hip
to lip.” Also though, present in such tracks as “Let Me Try” is a fairly commercially
digestible and traditional notion of sexuality in lyrical content present in the rise of rock
and in the case of this track, specifically in the blues tradition that inspired it: “I’ll be
your singer/You’ll be my song/I’ll lay you down softly/I’ll love you long.” This
sentiment does not much more challenge the sexual mindset of the American public than
individuals like Muddy Waters or Mick Jagger had done by the late 19603.

A very real tradition of sexuality in lyrical form, both obvious and as metaphor
was used and continued in the work of the MC5. One could easily make the case that
lyrically, sex thematically dominated the MC5’3 output. In regards to the band’s political
life the theme does not speak directly to a more official and potentially more useable
form of rebellion that could be upheld as a real threat to the nation by the government or
to notions of dominant American values. When held up to other musical examples of the
time, the subject matter of sexuality was old news. The second dominating theme of the
group might be considered somewhat more so a threat, that of drug use. The topic of drug
use, far from a rarity, is one that was dealt with commonly in music of the time.

The celebration and encouragement of drug use amongst Trans-Love Energies
and The White Panther Party was far from a tightly guarded secret. Drug use was

advocated within the basic platform of the WPP, was a focus of police interest directed at

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John Sinclair and his marijuana advocacy, as well as was a focus of the MCS’s lyrical
content. The band places drugs as an integral influence on performance in “Kick Out the
Jams” stating in the second verse, “Cause we all got in tune/When the dressing room got
hazy now baby.” The theme continues in “Rocket Reducer NO. 62” declaring a
dependency on chemical inspiration, “After some good tokes and a six pack/W e can sock
‘em out for you.” Michael Davis shared that “Rocket Reducer No.62” is actually the
name of a chemical solvent used to strip paint off of engine blocks. Several of the
individuals involved in the group and the WPP community would soak rags in the solvent
to get high (Davis 2005). Such overt references are less prominent in the latter two
albums as general themes of youthful rebellion and sexuality became the focus.

A general sense of youthful rebellion, the useable theme so present in the rise of
rock, is honored and heralded concretely throughout all three albums and through a
teenage perspective. Embracing this youthful play, the band decrees, “I’m a born hell
raiser/And I don’t give a damn” on the first album, and then overtly pulls in a 503 teenage
rock aesthetic on Back in the USA. where “Tonight” and “High School” describe a
world of teenage angst. “Tonight” posits the MC5 as the voice of youth yearning to
escape the dullness of the classroom to get to the “rock and roll dance in town/And you
know I just gotta hear that band play.” Significantly mirroring this theme “High School”
claims in regards to the “kids,” “They only wanna shake it up/Dance to the rockin’
bands/They only want a little excitement/They like to get a little outta hand.” In the end a
warning is issued that these wild Blackboard Jungle-esque youth will eventually take

,9

over and adults “better get out of the way. Again, the themes dominating the group’s

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work thus far, although sometimes crasser, still centrally posit Ochs’ notions of teenage
rebellion into the music.

Political themes did indeed make an appearance in the lyrics of the group, but in
terms of considering direct political challenges in lyrical form, a general sense of
youthful insurgency was much more present than any formal dissident plan for
revolution. Vietnam is predominately the focus over the three albums if one is concerned
with finding more politically overt messages within the lyrical output of the MC5. These
messages are less pleas for direct action and are part of the general commentary in
popular music of the time concerning the Vietnam War. Such messages could be found
in numerous other groups such as Country Joe and the Fish, Credence Clearwater
Revival, Jimi Hendrix, and even the Lovin’ Spoonful."”’

The anti-war theme is explored on the band’s second album where Rob Tyner
sings that after receiving a letter from the Army he decides that he does not want to take
part, “It’s not that I’m lazy/I’m just too crazy/To be goin’ doin’ thinks that way.” One of
the most overt commentaries on the War and the current state of American society on the
same album comes in “The American Ruse” where society in 1969 is cited as being in
“terminal stasis.” The band rejects the America of their youth where, “They told you in
school about freedom/But when you try to be free they never let ya” and is now facing
the Army beckoning them to Vietnam as they become “hip to the American Ruse.”
Similar in sentiment on the album is the song “The Human Being Lawnmower” where
the War is equated to a mindless death machine to which youth blindly submit

themselves.

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Such perspectives are continued on High Time, with numerous songs questioning
the War and its contextual relationship to modern American life. “Gotta Keep Movin’,”
“Poison,” and “Over and Over” discuss frustrations with Vietnam and American life.
Here the band is taking part in the path of useable rebellion in rock that had evolved as
social upheavals played themselves out on the battlefields of Vietnam and on the streets
of cities and campuses across the nation. Music offered commentary and a place for
audiences and consumers from which to vicariously or directly challenge social and
political concerns of the time. Some of these messages offered a sense of empowerment
without a clear path to tearing down the status quo. High Time’s most direct plea for
social change and rebellion came in “F uture/Now” where it is claimed that, “The future’s
here right now if you’re willing to pay the cost/The power crazy leaders who control your
very fate/They will steal your will. . .”

Yet such pleas, in terms of advocating rebellion to a new and useable level
through the band, were not an overtly central focus of concern for governmental agencies
that had looked to the band, the party and individuals like Sinclair and Plamondon as a
possible extremist faction in the New Left. In terms of Back in the USA and High Time,
this was probably due to the fact that the band publicly split with Sinclair and the WPP.
However, when formally associated with the WPP during the recording of Kick Out the
Jams, the band’s lyrical content was the focus of some concern for those governmental
agencies trying to understand the WPP and the musical organizing force that propelled
them financially, the MC5.

Lyrical content however is largely ignored. As will be seen, most of the interest

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generated in looking at the MC5 as a tool of extremism was based on tools of propaganda
with very little interest paid to lyrical content outside of the band’s use of profanity. For
example a letter dated March 20, 1969 addressed to the President of the University of
Michigan, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Michigan District Attorney from a
concerned “parent and taxpayer” was placed into the band’s F BI file, a file that looks to
have begun as early as 1967."iv The author collected quotations from WPP propaganda in
the hopes of providing some local insight to what they saw as a moral threat to the
immediate community. The author, through a collection of these quotations, states that
the letter was sent in the hopes that it would be possible to: “enforce the sedition laws
against the White Panther Party” due to the complainer’s view that the “moral tone of this
trash” exists outside of first Amendment Rights (“Name Classified”). The writer of the
letter then goes on to cite numerous pamphlets and rhetoric associated with the group as
cause for this claim. Such examples are the standard within the intelligence gathered on
the band and the WPP; lyrical content receives little attention in favor of Sinclair’s fiery
rhetoric.

Lyrically, the band did draw some attention for their performance of “Motor City
is Burning” a song performed by John Lee Hooker in his career.xv An FBI memo dated
February 25, 1969 describes a Time feature published on January 3rd of that year. It is
quoted in the article that “The group also performed John Lee Hooker's “Motor City Is
Burning,” and there was no mistaking the message: ‘All the cities will burn . . . You are

9”

the people who will build up the ashes. Concern about the article in the memo seems to

center around the contention that “the MC5 are taking protest one step further to get

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attention by practicing what they preach, as is shown by their string of arrests on charges
of noisemaking, obscenity, and possession of marijuana” (SAC 25 Feb.1969). The
article is used as an initial frame, from which the memo’s author is attempting to make
general sense of the band. The same article that contained this information harvested by
the FBI also stated that, “Just as clearly, even their most aggressive songs are only that—
songs, not bricks or guns. It may be that the first victim of their metaphorical revolution
will be the overused word revolution itself’ ("The Revolutionary Hype" 1/3/69). Even
with such words of leveled and perhaps condescending tones concerning the role of
music in social change and development, state and national authorities would not take
any chances. Interest in the band and the WPP grew into thinking of said entities being
dangerous extremists. The effective synergy that helped to garner audience investments
did not come from lyrics alone or even primarily in regards to the life of the MC5 and
WPP. Along with lyrical content, performance would greatly add to the band’s
reputation amongst fans, critics, and governmental authorities. Musical performance
both in a sonic and theatrical sense also heavily assisted in creating the MC5 as either,
depending one’s viewpoint, a face of the revolution, or a face of an unashamed marketing
campaign drawing on the social and political upheaval of the world at the time.
Marshall Stacks and Norman Mailer: Musicality, Performance and the MC5
This section combines perspectives on the sonic structure of the MC5’s sound
along with a focus on live performance because the MC5 and the reactions they garnered
from their fan base, from critics, and from authorities was primarily based on the band as

a live entity. This was especially the case during their affiliation with John Sinclair and

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the WPP where a close eye was kept on the band’s performances by fans and federal
authorities. Elektra Records risky decision to record the band live for their first album is
indicative of this connection between music and live performance. The musicality and
stage performance of the group can be considered the most immediate and lucrative
means of creating a link, or the fallacy of a link, between music and social change. One
can easily ascribe, as does Baudrillard that, “A myth of power-and a myth of origins:
whatever it is that man lacks is invested in the object” to the group and their affiliation
with the WPP. Essentially he contends, “it has become a sign” (82). Like Thompson’s
metaphor of a “paper tiger,” critics like Lester Bangs see an empty signifier in the guise
of a “revolutionary rock band.” Or, contradicting such notions, as in the case of Norman
Mailer, the music could be a revelatory experience; one that could indeed speak
mountains about social change and development. The band’s sonic construction and their
dramatic live shows were the most immediate form of performance available to audiences
that allowed them to gauge the validity of the band in relation to their supposed
revolutionary Objectives.

In 1968, while chronicling the Democratic National Convention in Chicago,
Norman Mailer came across the MC5 performing in Lincoln Park. The performance was
one that Mailer spoke of as a revelatory sonic pronunciation of the counter culture and
the potential energies contained within; an experience that shook the foundations of an
elder generation whose ears had been raised on “Star Dust,”

he knew they were a generation which lived in the sound of destruction of all

order as he had known it, and the worlds of other decomposition as well; there

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was the sound of mountains crashing in this holocaust of the decibels, hears

bursting literally bursting, as if this was the sound of death by explosion within,

the drums of physiological climax when the mind was blown, and forces of the

future, powerful, characterless, as insane and scalding as waves of lava (Mailer

142)
The author claims that he was, “as affected by the sound (as affected by the recognition
of what nihilisms were calmly encountered in such a musical storm) as if he had heard it
in a room at midnight with painted bodies and kaleidoscopic sights” (143). This same
performance was filmed by the Department of Defense with perhaps as we will see a
differing revelatory intent (Day/Kramer/Samways). Others such as Bill Graham and
various promoters and venue owners could have cared less about ideological implications
of the band’s performances good or bad and were much more concerned with the band’s
reputation and penchant to involve local authorities. Showcased in the collected writings
of manager John Sinclair, in his book Guitar Army, Sinclair through independent
publications like the Ann Arbor Sun, describes numerous run-ins by the band with the law
concerning noise, drug and obscenity violations. Perhaps the most notorious of these
run-ins occurred at Graham’s Fillmore East where an anarchic group called The
Motherfuckers demanded free entry. A brawl ensued and Graham’s nose was broken with
a chain."Vi

How then is it possible that the MC5’3 live shows could contain both the spirits of
Woodstock and the dystopia of Altamont in one space? A great camivalesque

atmosphere ala Bahktin was created in the MC 5’s live environment that was hard to

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predict. It may be what the band did, it may be the music the band played, or it could be
what the band represented to those groups like the Motherfuckers who may have initially
seen the band as the sonic vanguard of the revolution; regardless, some kind of
investment by the audience took place. It seems to be a symbiotic relationship between
all of those involved. As Davis shares,
To me our performances were about spectacle. . .. multimedia presentations that
went into infinite possibility where anything could happen. In the back of my
stoned consciousness there was some nirvana. . .that we would all just wind up
some here and that everybody would be cool. It was a fantasy, but back then
fantasy was a big part of my deal. We were stoned on weed and hash all of the
time and taking this and that. . .anything we could get our hands on to expand our
consciousness (2006).
This attempt to reach nirvana within the halls of concert venues and stages around the
nation and the immediacy of exposure to the band and the WPP in these venues were also
areas of concern for authorities, who kept up to date on the band’s live schedule as much
as any devoted fan. Whether or not this environment was an empty signifier seems moot
as so many actively negotiated meanings were constructed within this space of identity
and community.
The nirvana spoken of by Davis was not one that was loosely amalgamated but
instead was focused on in creating this camivalesque environment where the group, as
well as the audience, were the intended targets. The concert space offered a useable and

sometimes highly dramatized environment from which to escape everyday life, focused

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through the band’s concept of “high energy” performance. Musically this meant
complete immersion in the music for the band and their audience. Kramer shares:
The performance and the spectacle. . .we called it high energy. We had a high-
energy lifestyle, we had high-energy music, and we had high-energy performance.
That peak energy. . .we were drawn to it and fed by it. When I would go to see
another band and maybe one or two guys in the band were really deeply intensely
doing what they were doing, I would connect with them more than the guy just
going through the motions. It was a matter Of passion and commitment. When
we talked about that and incorporated that consciously into our performances and
our music, we got that reaction back from our audience. We would win people
over, we would convert them. We would make believers out of them! (2006)
This notion of “high-energy” music and performance is actually one of the only
completely agreed upon ideals from the remaining band members garnered in this
research on the MC5. “High-energy” music and performance is arguably the
universalizing ideological connection that links all three remaining members across
notions of politics, the music business, or the band’s career path. Michael Davis asserts
that this ingredient in creating the band’s live sound and presence was intrinsic to the
band’s limited success nationally and internationally:
It’s an attitude. . .it’s a hard thing to define, to describe in words. It’s almost as if
you tap into a beam where everything you do is just focused. It doesn’t mean
you focus on anything; it's just focused period. When you play, the way that I

interact with your drum part or guitar part. . .the way that my instrument sounds,

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the band as a unified sound is intense. . .it’s an intensity. You just can’t kick back.
It’s condensed into the smallest strongest beam possible; it’s all about strength.
It’s not about speed, fast or slow it’s something you feel. It’s kind of like loosing
consciousness. I’ve heard it said that in the sex act the moment of orgasm is
almost a loss of consciousness. It’s almost a dream state. High energy. . .that is
the closest thing that I can bring it to. . .it is that intense. It’s sort of like living on
the edge. . . going around that corner and not knowing if the tires are going to hold
or not. It’s like taking it to the edge of sanity (2006).
Davis continues, “We were in our early 203 at that point and we thought we could do
damn near anything. Our point was to shock people. . .coming out of their suburban
coma” (2006). Dennis Thompson agrees with Davis’s assessment, adding, “We were
brutally assaulting their senses. We did it with the sound, with the music” (2006). Such
an assault led audiences to a wide array of reactions. Echoing Mailer’s encouraging
exposure, musicians such as Lemmy Kilmister from the group, Motorhead, to Jack White
of the White Stripes and Raconteurs openly cite the musical influence of the band as
central in their musical development (Jonze & Day).
Such musicality was not universally heralded. The band’s musical legacy is still
one debated amongst critics and fans. Lester Bang’s review of their first album in a 1969
issue of Rolling Stone, describing the band as enveloped “in the hype, the thick overlay of
teenage revolution and total-energy-thing which conceals these scrap yard vistas of

cliche’s and ugly noise” (Bangs 34), mirroring similar discussions three decades later. A

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2003 issue of Bang Magazine describes the group’s first album with the following
paradoxical treatment,

Politically correct it ain’t; slick it is not. It couldn’t be dumber or less grown-up.

It’s a rushed, garbled rambling, patchy snapshot of an overhyped and under-

rehearsed band who were totally Off their ugly, white-afroed heads on tons of

stupid drugs and the sheer power of their own ridiculous self-mythologising. And

it was wonderful” (Bang).
The release of the MC5’3 box set, Purity Accuracy in 2005 solicited similar musical
discussions. Nick Hasted in Uncut Magazine claimed the live CD3 contained within
were, “more grueling, as the band bravely attempt free jazz freak-outs with inadequate
musical ammo” (123). In terms of authorities collecting intelligence on the band and
the WPP, the sonic qualities of the group are not of interest, beyond the labeling of the
group as a “‘hard’ or ‘acid’ rock group” as identified in a 1969 Secret Service report on
John Sinclair that cited “Individuals involved in illegal bombing or illegal bomb-
making,” and “has been identified as member or participant in communist movement” as
cause for intelligence gathering (Secret Service Report 19 September 1969). In regards
to performance, local and federal authorities were much more concerned with the band’s
on-stage antics and the crowds that the band was capable of drawing.

Part of the synergenisitic selling of the band to the public, the media, and to the
authorities who would label the group as an extremist threat, was the elaborate stage
show presented by the band. The show incorporated music, dance, display, and White

Panther rhetoric (concerts were a favorite spot to pass out literature and items

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emblazoned with the WPP logo). John Sinclair in a letter written to Creem Magazine in
1970 wrote:

The stage show grew directly out of the music, all the dope we were smoking, and

out of our culture and our collective history. As the music got more frantic the

stage show got farther out, and the people responded wildly and it got more and
more wild. It was a beautiful demonstration of the principles of high-energy
performance: as the performer puts out more the energy level of the audience is

raised and they give back more energy to the performers. . .” (Sinclair 11, “A

Letter”).

The presentation according to Kramer was based on several ingredients that
included choreography, agit-prop theatre including once a faked assassination of Rob
Tyner while on stage, hype-men, a fake religion, and costumes that went along with the
musical presentation,

There is physicality to it. . .the performance the dance. I always admired

performers that danced. . .interpreting what’s happening with the music with your

body. My idols of course are James Brown and Jackie Wilson and Tina

Turner. . .people who really knew how to move on stage. Even ballet dancers,

modern dancers, jazz dancers. . .you’re trying to carry a message, you’re trying to

tell a story. So what is your media? Do you have paints, music, dance, theater?

We were trying to incorporate as much of that into as we could. We used to talk

about it in terms of “meat energy,” put the meat energy into it! There would be

that, the performance, the art, the science Of the performance (2006).

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Kramer asserts that the full intent of the shows were lost in favor of a reductive label of

“revolutionary rock,”
It’s almost as if what ended up being transmitted about the MC5 was not really
was what the MC5 was. We really did have a much broader artistic agenda. By
the time it filtered down into ‘revolutionary rock’ it got reduced down into the
simplest sound bite. We were trying to really open doors to all new stuff. The
stuff Dennis told you about [a faked assassination of Rob Tyner while on
stage]. . .bands didn’t do this kind of thing. . .. incorporating agit—prop street theater
into the performance. I mean this predates Alice Cooper or any of the stage
theatrics of today. We learned from the living theater. . .Julian Beck and their
production of Paradise Now where the actors came out and said, “I’m not allowed
to take my clothes off” and then they took their clothes off. “I’m not allowed to
smoke marijuana” and then they smoked marijuana. TO me this was real, this
was intense! So we would actually sit in a room and brainstorm theatrical
productions that would make some kind of social comment or statement. . .or just
good entertainment value! But we would try to keep it to something that would
have a larger meaning to it. Of course these stories are lost in the vapors, they
were never documented, they were never filmed (2006).

Mirroring boundary pushing performances of other such controversial bands like the

Doors, the band’s performances became a target of concern for authorities. Sgt. Clifford

A. Murray represents what seems to be a general feel of moral panic when discussing the

band’s ability to draw at live events that became a flashpoint of debauchery and rebellion.

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He testified before a US. Senate Internal Securities Subcommittee in 1970 that, “I would
like to say at this time that it is the opinion of myself and that of my department that the
White Panther Party is working toward obtaining control of large masses of young people
for the primary purpose of causing revolution in this country.” He continues, “The
methods used to recruit these people is based upon a complete dropout of our society and
the adoption of a system involving ‘rock music’ and the free use of drugs and sex”
(Sinclair 1972, 31). The most immediate exposure to this feared communal environment
was in the concert setting and the recruitment that could be done there.

One of the first recorded instances of intelligence concerning associated
individuals involved the FBI’s noting of TLE as hosting the 1967 Detroit Belle Isle

9’ ‘6

“Love-In, which ended up in a ‘rock-heaving’ and ‘bottle-tossing’ riot.” This
information was included in a report on the activities of John Sinclair up to that time
(Hoover Rez). Whether the subject is really the band or the crowd assembled and the
potential behaviors enacted or what responsibility the band has in this process is a
balance in intelligence gathering that is given further consideration in numerous
documents. A FBI memorandum dated February 25, 1969, focused on the band’s feature
in Time to gather general information on the group, highlighting that, “The article states
that the MC5 now favor outrageous on stage stunts as removing their clothes and burning
the United States flag” (SAC 25 Feb.1969). By the time of this memorandum the band
had already been filmed by the Department of Defense during their Lincoln Park concert

in Chicago. Indeed, the band had a lengthy relationship with authorities especially

centering on marijuana violations/arrests, the use of profanity, and nakedness on stage

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and the desecration of the American flag during live performance. Sinclair proudly
advertised these run-ins inside periodicals including the Fifth Estate and the Ann Arbor

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Sun Fred Goodman in The Mansion on a Hill, describes an evening’s occurrences
opening for Cream where they had burned an American flag on stage,
the show climaxed with Tyner ripping a plastic flag to shreds and then hoisting a
4x5-foot banner inscribed with a marijuana leaf and the word FREEK. To put
just the right finish on the spectacle, a member of the lighting crew walked
onstage naked and settled cross-legged at the lip of the stage, where he chanted
“Om” as the final chord of the band’s ear shattering performance faded into an
electric hum (163).
Focusing on the band’s drawing power amongst the countercultural community, a
Michigan State Police Inter-Office Correspondence memo, in one of the more
entertaining acts of intelligence gathering, states that the MC5 are set “to play the Student
Union at MSU [Michigan State University] on Saturday November 2, 1968. This should
draw all the hippies from all the counties around the Lansing area” (Schave). What this
meant, beyond a generic threat, was not explored in the brief memo. It seems as if the
warning of hippies gathering was enough to merit concern from the police.
The ability of the MC5 to draw concertgoers to their various shows above all was
looked to as a cash cow for WPP activity and the actions of associated names such as
John Sinclair and Pun Plamondon. Confidential Michigan State Police reports through

1970 cited the: “great bulk of the financial support for the Y.I.P. [Youth International

Party]-W.P.P. originally came from John Sinclair’s percentage of the MC-S earned in his

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capacity as manager” (Murray). In actuality more than Sinclair’s percentage was used to
fund the WPP, which did not, according to interviews collected, maintain a formal
relationship with the Yippies. The band functioned as the primary source of financial
production for the project. Authorities had by this time looked on the abilities and
limitations of the group’s earning potential in other intelligence sources. Another
Michigan State Police memo looked positively onto the incident with Bill Graham and
the Motherfuckers that resulted in a blacklisting of the band in a large community of
concert venues. “As of recent weeks, the MC-S has run into problems because of the
adverse effect of the White Panther activities and the publicity and because of this
numerous appearances have been cancelled which results in a financial problem”
("Memo to Captain Walter Hawkins"). Both of these reports looked to gather a wide
array of information on all facets of the WPP and the MCS’s role in the group, focusing
on finance, membership, location, as well as on associated publications.

The reputation of the band garnered through a look at lyrical, musical and
performance contexts are ones though that would have had little significance without the
fevered use of media forms by Sinclair and the WPP. Instead, as heard on the Kick Out
the Jams album, the band was surrounded by masterful town criers. Brother J C
Crawford’s pleading to “see some revolution” and asking the crowd whether they are part
of the problem or part of the solution provides some of the most memorable propaganda
associated with the band.“"’ Although not all members of the group agreed on any stated
political content, they all believed an individual like Crawford to be valuable addition to

the group, acting as an effective hype-man for the band’s shows. The same would not be

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the case for all of the associated propaganda and rhetoric put out by the WPP. A network
of photos, underground press and other media became a focus of surveillance and
concern as well for those seeing the band as cementing rebellion through music to a much
too useable level. Group members saw this as both adding to the success of the group
and eventually leading to its downfall. Reactions garnered from the national press also
aided in a feeling of claustrophobia by the band and a general sense of greater
authoritarian oppression by the industry and the government.
Watching Us, Watching You: The Press and the Framing of the MC5

The importance of the press and its framing of the MC5 as well as the WPP’s own
propagated messages reflect a central framing process in the creation and usability of the
MCS’s mythical past by numerous audiences. These press pieces would play an intricate
function in creating the notion and implications of “revolutionary rock” and the band’s
aura of useable rebellion. This usability entails not only fan and critical response and
usage, but also includes the reaction of the government and the surveillance that resulted.
Print media proved an especially useful tool not only to the group and the White Panthers
in trying to define and spread their message, but also allowed convenient frames for
authorities and the public at large to understand lyrical messages and performances of the
band and the supposed intent with which they were created. Conveniently, these press
sources became both a tool of performance that the band depended on where the myth
and interest in the band was allowed to grow, as well as being a tool used by audiences to

help determine meaning and intent.

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As Todd Gitlin discusses in The Whole World is Watching, the mass media seeks
to, “process social opposition, to control its image and to diffuse it at the same time, to
absorb what can be absorbed into the dominant structure of definitions and images and to
push the rest to the margins of social life” (5). This absorption and disposing of
information into useable forms also seems to apply to federal surveillance methods, based
upon state and federal documents, which utilized media frames to establish basic
perspectives concerning the actions of the MC5 and White Panther Party. The use again
of the article, “The Revolutionary Hype” in a January 1969 issue of Time by the FBI to
frame their investigations points to accessibility of media framing and utilizes the article
to describe the make-up of the group for an interested party, in this case the FBI. This is
the case as well in detailing the extent of increasing attention for the group in national
media outlets. The report references the band being featured in a “well-known widely
circulated weekly’” (SAC 25 Feb.1969). FBI files concerning John Sinclair specifically
and the actions of the band and the WPP also cite news sources such as the Detroit News
in the gathering of their information (“Secret Service Report”). FBI files also showcase
an interest in other media outlets of the time that featured information on the MC5
including Barry Kramer, Editor of Creme Magazine, who was investigated as a possible
accessory to the actions of the WPP and MC5 ("Memorandum to Director"). One can
probably assume as well that other early publications like Rolling Stone and the Village
Voice featuring the group could have been used for similar purposes, but with the great
deal of blacked-out materials and destruction of some documents, these can not be pinned

down for sure. The practice of using these media outlets does set a precedent for formal

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or informal usage in intelligence gathering, including the utilization by the Michigan
State Police of Detroit Free Press sources in their investigation of the MC5’s role in the
Belle Isle Love-In in 1967 or as the report referred to it as an “Assembly of Hippies”
("Detroit Police"). Much like the public at large, it seems based on the use of these
sources that the United States intelligence community did depend on press reports and
frames to establish understandings of the MC5 and its association with the White Panther
Party.

The use of press sources is part of intelligence gathering and the use of these
sources in reference to the MC5 and the WPP should not be considered exceptional.
What should be considered exceptional, especially in regards to the New Left and groups
lumped into them, is that the media played an increasingly central role in determining
meaning and reach to even potentially repressive state apparatuses such as the
government and the military. This created as Gitlin calls it, an active “notion of
hegemony” where the press naturalizes complex entities into useable frames for the
public, the authorities and even perhaps members of the group themselves (10). Major
media outlets were actively trying to either dismiss or embrace the themes of rebellion
put forth by groups like the White Panthers, SDS, the Weather Underground, and the
Black Panthers. These frames can actively shape the political and social world and the
ways these groups are received. Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson sees these media
frames as intrinsically shaping the reception of the band to the public at large:

The MC5 got tagged by the media as the vanguard of the revolution. Speaking

for myself that is not what I wanted to do. Once they gave us this political tag, it

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made it tough for us. We were a threat. We were more of a perceived threat.

Like someone can get tried for murder in the media. It’s how fast things are

compressed in this modern day world. The MC5 was guilty (2006).

Yet, isolating one entity like major press as the reason for the creation of the
MC5’3 lasting relationship to the audience’s discussions of rebellion, authenticity and
music and social change would be ignoring a major and conflating perspective on media
capabilities that the White Panthers excelled at, the creation of their own press and
propaganda. This contributed to creating a level of useable rebellion in audiences
including to the governmental interest that considered them a legitimate threat.
Thompson along with other group members openly testifies to the importance of this
media onslaught and its responsibility in the creation of a revolutionary rock mythos.

Thompson explains, “The perception of what we were was manufactured by
ourselves to a slight degree. For a while we had swollen heads. . .we thought we were
going to change the world. That was youthfirl naivety” (2006). The program Thompson
speaks of was the already discussed intricate network of flyers, newspapers, photographs
and other propaganda that was utilized in obtaining funds for the band and the associated
White Panther Party. These materials often were intended to exacerbate and highlight
tensions between the group and authorities. Run-ins with the law and other “heroic” feats
were chronicled by manager John Sinclair in a network of periodicals including:
Guerrilla, Hard Times, The Fifth Estate, The Ann Arbor Argus as well as newspapers
created by the WPP themselves including Sun/Dance, the “national organ of the White

Panther Party” (Sinclair 1972; 60). Michael Davis places a central importance on

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frames such as Sinclair’s “Rock and Roll Dope” series in the The 5’" Estate in creating
further media attention, “First, any kind of government intervention into what we were
doing or our performances was always viewed as positive! It was just like that famous
picture of the girl [sic] sticking the daisy in the National Guard Guy’s rifle barrel.“ How
do you fight that? It’s an insurmountable argument. . .checkmate!” He continues, “I
always thought anything the government did to repress us was good publicity for us and
not just for us but for what we were wanted to do” (2006). Guitarist Wayne Kramer sees
this independent and sometimes self-generated media as responsible for later mass
generated frames,
I don’t have the sense that we got a lot of play out of mainstream media. Most of
the work we accomplished was in the underground press, through our own media.
The underground press was an entire syndicate of newspapers in every city in
America and around the world, and it was called UPS, the Underground Press
Syndicate. It was pretty well organized. These were young entrepreneurs who
saw that there was a need for a cultural voice as an alternative to Walter Cronkite
and the New York Times. That’s where we found our exposure (2006).
He also shares that, much like the debate concerning authenticity and intent that
continues today across audience lines, the band’s aims were even then sharply debated
outside of their own self-generated press, “We would get hammered pretty hard from the
left, because they would question how we could be revolutionaries and charge money for

gigs. These were kind of tough questions for us in those days. I wasn’t that well versed

to articulate our position, John was better suited” (2006). The writings of Sinclair in

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these publications and in WPP literature answering to the charges of the New Left and to
dominant American society, compared to lyrical content or performance, are some of the

most direct and outspoken ideological pieces to the MC5 puzzle. These were pieces that

some Of those involved felt invested in and helped shape, such as Kramer and Rob Tyner.

Some like Michael Davis felt increasing pressure from the propaganda created,
It started getting away from my ideal of being a rock and roll band. The images I
thought were more important at the time were being the tough guy, the Rolling
Stones, or performance artists like The Who. . .things that I thought were more
critical for us. They were more important to me than standing on stage and
saying, “these guys are no good and these guys are no good.” I got really tongue-
tied. Am I saying the right thing here? Maybe this is counter-revolutionary?
Maybe I’m Offending somebody. . .maybe offending these guys? Listen. . .I’ll just
keep my mouth shut.
He continues,
I know that I would like to see society agree on what a real life is. . .I felt like that
we were heading in that direction and then all of a sudden I felt
compression. . .then I felt. . .better watch your step now. . .it wasn’t freedom
anymore. It was from within. . .it was with us really! (2006).
The writings produced by Sinclair and other WPP officials such as the following
example from “Rock & Roll Dope #5,” highlighted altercations, which defiantly
challenged police and governmental concern, in this case over a dispute over pay and

Obscenities in the band’s performance at a local Michigan venue,

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Fred leaped into the pile of pigs who were beating on me, but two of them pulled

him off and beat his ass with clubs. They subdued both of us, got us handcuffed

and dragged us over into the corner before they started clearing the room. A

bunch of sisters, righteous MC5 addicts who came to all our gigs, came over and

started wiping the blood off of us, but the pigs grabbed them and pushed them

down the stairs” (Sinclair 92).

Such self-generated press, along with more prevalent works like Sinclair’s liner notes
which reached an international audience on the band’s first album stated that the band
was a “free high energy source that will drive us wild into the streets of America yelling
and screaming and tearing down everything that would keep people slaves.” These liner
notes were eventually pulled by Elektra who feared the rhetoric and strong language
might push record buyers away. Such sentiments aside from framing the group to
numerous audiences including: the media, underground press,'fans, and to critics, were
also of central concern for the FBI and Michigan State Police. This certainly could have
contributed to the heightened interest in the band and the WPP which created the
“compression” Davis complained about.

FBI and Michigan State Police records obtained through the Freedom of
Information Act indicate a concerned focus on group propaganda. FBI correlation
reports as late as 1975 showcase a focus on media outlets created by Sinclair and
affiliated parties including the WPP where themes of drug use, dependency on rock to
spread ideological messages, and personal defense were highlighted ("FBI Correlation").

A FBI memorandum directed to the agency’s director dated 4/24/69 examines the Sun in

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detail and its potential readership especially in the Ann Arbor/Detroit area. The Sun was
of central focus due to its nature as the central publication of the White Panther Party,
including being the publisher of the “White Panther Statement”. The paper is tracked
down in the file to an Ann Arbor residential address. The report states,

The paper is cut on a stencil and is being run off on a duplicator owned by the MC

5, a rock band headquartered at 1510 Hill, and managed by Sinclair. Sources

fiirther advised that the paper is made available to high school students from the

Detroit Metropolitan area at 1510-Hill, Ann Arbor and they are encouraged to

take the paper to their respective high schools for distribution to their friends.
The report also links the papers funding to the earnings garnered by the MC5 with more
investigations promised to determine “further information regarding the financial,
editorial, and extent of domestic or foreign influence regarding the captioned paper”
(SAC Detroit April 1969).

The following month a “security investigation” was launched in response to the
above memorandum stating that Sinclair, as the founder of the WPP and his “professed
anarchist beliefs” demanded additional investigation. Further investigation would
include government surveillance such as wiretaps on individuals like Sinclair and
Plamondon even after the MCS’s departure from the WPP (Memorandum to J .B.
Adams). Further reference to WPP produced literature is mentioned in numerous other
FBI documents including a letter from September 25, 1970 addressed to then Minority
Leader, Gerald R. Ford Jr. from J. Edgar Hoover that discusses the WPP and pamphlets

produced by the group. The letter was produced as a follow-up to Ford’s “inquiry

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concerning the White Panther Party which you raised during our conference with the
President on September 22, 1970” (Hoover). Even though the band had disassociated
itself from the WPP that same summer, the band’s influence is still visible in Hoover’s
discussion of rock as a spearhead of their attack. The letter from Hoover focuses on
Sinclair and Plamondon as the main targets of investigation, but is heavily dependent on
information from when the band and Sinclair were involved, to draw Ford a biographical
sketch and a promise for continued active investigation. Thompson sees that as the
rhetoric became more heated, certain messages heightened the feeling of threat taken on
by local and federal authorities, especially the publication of a series of photos taken by
photographer Leni Sinclair, where the group was brandishing both musical instruments
and guns. “There was a point where we started to do PR pictures with us holding guns.
That’s when I think they started really taking us seriously” (2006). Mirroring this alarm
by the government concerning greater levels of direct action, or representations there of,
Sinclair and Plamondon would also become a focus of investigation concerning a
bombing of an Ann Arbor CIA office.

Much like Gitlin points out in The Whole World is Watching, the MC5 and its
relationship to the White Panther Party indicate a complex and multi-layered process of
making news events as well as dealing with larger media frames that attempt to package
these occurrences. It is an active process of hegemony where an entity like the WPP
tries to construct itself but is also held to dominant interpretation by media frames.
Along the way, the WPP and the MC5 discovered it difficult to manage the power of the

media frames they constructed themselves and how they were interpreted through the

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national press and by the government. As stated in interviews before, those involved in
the MC5 did not want to be a formal political entity and a political movement. Its
members did not want to pick up guns for aggressive actions. Due to their own
publications and their reception in the mass media, the message became more
uncontrollable for any one individual to manage especially since the band and Party were
by no means unified in their own vision. Says Davis,
The people were looking to us for answers and we were just one part of it. . .the
performance part. There were other people like political prisoners and political
activists of the day who were in the spotlight. Then there were those who were
the invisible guys. . .the terrorists really. The underground people that were
setting up booby traps and would actually go out and do something about it. The
population at large was receiving many messages and not really knowing what the
big blob was going to do. That’s the thing with a mass of people. Nobody
really wants to stand out and be apart. . .there are some that like the attention. But
the majority of people are looking at each other before they do anything. It turns
into those kinds of forces. Well our side was kind of fragmented. You had the
MC5, which wasn’t just 5 people but all these people in the MC5 organization
who were pushing for what they think is right. You’ve got John Sinclair, Pun
Plamondon, the women, the political guys, guys setting off homemade bombs.
What does the blob think? You don’t know, they don’t know. They’re looking
to you for door number 1, 2 or 3. We had a problem finding the door!

He adds,

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It grew and grew until it didn’t have any more room to grow. And the things that
were growing next to it. . .everything got squeezed. The message got, I think got
corrupted, polluted. We had too many inputs. . .we didn’t function as a unit of

five anymore, we were a unit of who knows how many (2006)?

The use of press and media forms along with other factors like performance and
lyrical content create a larger picture from which the MC5 revolutionary mythos was
created and received by numerous audiences. An active synergy was created across
these numerous areas that lead to the continued debate that the MC5 generates
concerning intent and the potential role of music in political and social change. As
Baudrillard contends, there is a distinct possibility for such an object dependent upon
popular culture to create and maintain meaning to become merely an empty sign invested
in by those desperate for some kind of frame to find a creature of style over one of
substance. Articles written as late as 2003 like “Have the MC5 Sold Out?” or “Fever to
Sell” desperately seek to find levels of authenticity and intent in the numerous areas of
performance discussed above. The record of lyrics, music and propaganda left by the
MC5 are still actively deconstructed and debated in order to determine if they indeed are
a hollow shell selling records under the guise of social revolution; nothing new from the
very same questions asked at the advent of their career.xx Audiences continue to receive
the relatively small amount of texts left behind by the band in often disparate and
contradictory ways.

However, one needs to balance perspectives of revolutionary facades, with the

very real uses of the band by numerous audiences including; fans, critics, and individuals

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involved in the WPP and the government itself as a useable revolutionary text. Genuine
usage was created through this popular culture product and was applied to notions of
revolution and social change. A fake facade would not make sense to those who made
very real investments into the career and life of the MC5 and the White Panther Party and
should be included in the discussion as much as those concerned with the 5’s potential
exploitation and use of revolutionary models. Here J. Edgar Hoover and Lester Bangs
meet from beyond in a discussion concerning the power and possibility of popular music
and popular culture in general to affect the political and social world. The band’s ability
to mix these areas of lyrical content, performance and media usage created an entity that
lives and breathes on its own as the years have progressed. Somewhere between a farce
and a concretely useable tool from which individuals could create rhetoric and a path to
rebellion, the band continues to be a focus of discussion concerning the interactions of

how popular culture can or has contributed to social change and development.

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Chapter 6

Up Against the Wall: Music’s Place in Revolution

The rise and fall of the MC5 pushed into an intensely debatable realm, the
interaction of rock and rebellion. The band allows a concretely applicable case study
concerning the realities of music’s role in social change and development. One can
spend chapters and careers waxing nostalgic about artists, relating them to notions of
generational and cultural change without specific correlation. The MC5 takes these real
and impassioned notions of music’s role in social change to task, interrogating the realties
and the shortcomings of culture’s function in dissidence and rebellion. If one finds
oneself as the Jefferson Airplane stated, “Up Against the Wall Motherfucker,” the MC5
acts as a gauge in the history of popular music and popular culture to help measure how
much music is capable of tearing down those walls of ideology and practice.

As a band that pushed, through its association with the White Panther Party, the
foundational ethos of useable rebellion in rock, the preceding chapters have shown the
complexities and passionate feelings that are engaged when a product of popular culture
connects itself to political and ideological thought in everyday American life. The
challenges or at least the appearance of challenges to these structures through musical
forms actively brings out an ardent discussion concerning audience investment, intent and
the realities of popular culture’s role in determining the ways in which we interact with
the world around us.

The career and life of the MC5 and its connection to the WPP showcases the

interaction of media frames, audience, artist, management, Party, and critic’s use of

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popular culture texts. This is showcased as well in the use or repression of these texts by
governmental sources that, as the last chapter proves, took an active interest in the MC 5
as a possible mass-mediated tool creating counter-cultural ideology A3 a product
dependent on mass culture, numerous frames and perspectives on the band from outside
and from within were actively used to make sense of a popular culture text that employed
rock’s tradition of youthful rebellion and actively connected it to a platform that
challenged the realities of everyday life in the United States in the late 19603.

The case of the MC5 proved that culture could be the flashpoint, or at least a
promissory note, for social change. However, by no means does this guarantee specific
actions or usages by individuals and groups, if any at all. Like the government, the
economy, structures of law, or moral codes, music is a way that we as individuals order
and understand the world around us. It is both a space for escape as well as for
challenging our beliefs and practices. Christopher Small refers to the process as
“musicking,” a process Of communication that is a basic function of our humanity.
Hence, Stanley Aronowitz’s contention that two countercultures existed, a political and a
cultural, is a false absolute line in the sand. The MCS’s reception in popular culture and
within the realties of governmental and political life in the 603 demonstrates how these
lines easily blur.

The following pages will examine discussions regarding music’s role in social
change and development as well as will utilize the MC5 as a specific and challenging text
from which to measure these discussions. No promise exists here to create a unifying,

holistic, theoretical perspective on the function of music in social change and in dissent.

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The realities of individual intent, group intent, media frames, reception, and the role of
technology are too interwoven. To promise an overarching theory would be merely an
easily destructible ruse. To universalize would be to miss the spectrum of uses and
meanings that are consumed and utilized by audiences. What can be guaranteed though
is that the life of the MC5 allows for a more concrete notion of how much music can be
connected to notions of dissent, rebellion, revolution and social change. The nature of
their career tested these boundaries and helped showcase the challenges and triumphs of
music as ideological tool.

Can You Dance to Ideology? Breaking Down the Boundaries Between Mind

and Body

Aronowitz’s contention that two countercultures existed: a political, concerned
with institutional change and a cultural, “for whom the erotic revolution was a political
movement” which “believed the struggle within the state and its institutions hopeless and
beside the point” (36) is a common separation that occurs in numerous narratives seeking
to understand historical movements like the counterculture, neatly placing logic to one
side and emotion to another. Music has traditionally been seen in historical discourse as
part of this cultural sphere and viewed at best as a rejection or escape from the realities of
the political and social world. Adorno and his cohorts in the Frankfurt School might call
these notions of mass cultural expression as meaningless distractions from the realities of
everyday life.

This separation between culture and politics is not one that is relegated only to the

mass media, actually extending to the foundational voices of Western thought. Carson

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Holloway in All Shook Up: Music, Passion and Politics extends this discussion beyond
the realities of music in mass media to a rich history amongst heralded thinkers of
Western civilization. He contends, “The debate over music is, in essence, a debate over
the place of reason and passion in human nature, their proper relationship to each other in
the soul, and the proper relationship of both to politics.” Classical thinkers such as Plato
and Aristotle, “asserting the primacy of reason, seek to use music to calm the passions
with a view to the noble rule of reason in the soul and the city,” whereas latter critics of
modernity such as Rousseau and Nietzsche, “accepting the priority of passion but also
seeing a need to reinvigorate it, resurrect the power of music, aiming to use it to inflame
the passions and silence reason in the service of a new, more noble politics” (20).
Musical practice in society seems to be consistently tied to humanity’s carnal nature and
is distinctly separated from cognitive processes.

If this historically heralded separation between mind and body exists, Elie
Siegmeister coyly suggests, one must then logically accept that musicians exist within a
vacuum in which they “will not question the social bases of the conditions under which
they work, nor the social function of their work,” and that audiences without thought or
question must consume the musical products, without hope of shaping the products
themselves as there is no real relation to the material world (12). In Aronowitz’s view
this is exemplified by the cultural contingent of the counterculture simply dropping out of
the political world. Such clear delineations between cultural products and the political
and material world are absurd. Instead, scholars need to reflect the realities and uses of

music in everyday life and hence its effect on social and historical life. Although a

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conveniently essentializing perspective, the effects Of music and cultural products as a
whole do not live in isolation from the world and are deeply embedded in the forces that
are involved in ideological creation and maintenance.

All scholars do not universally segregate the separation of mind and body in
regards to musical forms. Small sees music as an intricate facet of the human experience
in Musicking: The Meanings of Performance and Listening, where a clear separation
between musical practice and ideological life is annihilated. He asserts, “Music is not a
thing at all but an activity, something that people do” (2). Instead of an autonomous
entity, music, like speech or thought is an intrinsic tool of human communication and
meaning making. The rise of capital has further entrenched a notion of set boundaries
concerning the life of music in society. To repeat the themes of the authors examined
thus far, Small contends that the traditional partitioning of “operations of the mind”
working “independently of the body, is all the more pervasive for being unrecognized for
what it is: an assumption, by no means to be accepted without scrutiny” (52). The system
of capital then has taken already a false delineation and placed it within its system as a
specialized practice,

our present-day concert life, whether ‘classical’ or ‘popular,’ in which the

‘talented’ few are empowered to produce music for the ‘untalented’ majority, is

based on a falsehood. It means that our powers of making music for ourselves

have been hijacked and the majority of people robbed of the musicality that is
theirs by right of birth, while a few stars, and their handlers, grow rich and famous

through selling us what we have been led to believe we lack (Small 8).

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If one invests in the idea of a separation of music from meaningful everyday
cognitive practice, Aronowitz’s notions of separate countercultures are extremely useful
and easy borders to use in an examination of historical inquiry. However, if one takes
Small’s contention and looks to the falsity of this separation between mind/body and
performer/audience, a group like the MC5 is a much more active and useable tool of
ideological creation and understanding than some would hope. This is the case even
though the group is part of this media onslaught. Critical analysis and interest in the
group whether through various audiences including: the authorities, fans, and critics,
showcases a lively and continued discussion surrounding the band, its political
associations and intent that transcends body/mind borders. The band provides this
intersection of debate because they provided an active text from which some
authentically invested in the desire for social change and development including direct
challenges to existing power structures and ideologies. The themes of youthful rebellion
in rock’s early life were an active agent in the creation of identity, as the process of
musicking according to Small,

is part of the survival equipment of every human being. To music is not a mere

enhancement of spare-time enjoyment but is an activity by means of which we

learn what are our ideal social relationships, and that is as important for the
growth of an individual to full social maturity as is talking and understanding

speech (210).

The MC5’3 linking of this useable space of rebellion to revolutionary rhetoric and style,

regardless of their individual levels of commitment, played a key role in testing the

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conceptualizations of music and media’s roles in the creation of ideology. By blurring
these lines, the band demonstrated the dangerous linkage that could occur when these two
processes were combined, and indeed were used as possible tools of social and
ideological construction.

Interviews with group members themselves, and associated names in the White
Panther Party today, provided a similar discussion concerning the very real processes of
musicking. Sinclair testified in the MC5’s first album’s liner notes to the need for music
to not be just merely a sovereign entity. The theme of “separation is doom” as Sinclair
described in the notes in regards to music, continues as an ideological center for the
group. Michael Davis explains,

We need to bring music to our children. We need to bring music to society as a

more important facet of life. We need to not look at music as an extra, as a piece

of candy on the side, as an appetizer to real life. We need to treat it just as if it is
important as anything else. . .as religion, as knowledge of the law, or of physics, or
of anything. We need to bring it into focus, because music and art are really basic
human tropes to represent a sense of what we see.
He adds, “We want every child, every person to understand the value of communicating
with music. This is my revelation, that music brings peace and a higher intellect, a higher
understanding of who we are and where we want to go.” When asked about music
having a direct connection to the creation of ideology he shares, “Everything has a

political connotation. . .kind of sort of. . .Sometimes it comes back to basic human needs

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of communicating honestly. I don’t know how you could be dishonest and play music”
(Davis 2006).

In 2006, Davis along with his wife Angela aimed to put the above thoughts into
action founding “Music is Revolution;” an organization that seeks to assist in the funding
of school music programs, and provide refurbished instruments to students. These actions
are undertaken by the organization in the hopes of reinstating Davis’s ideas of music’s
centrality in education. According to the organization’s manifesto, encouraging music
education leads to, “increasing the cultural and academic prosperity of this and future
generations of public school children.” Davis writes, “To play in an ensemble is an
enriching process that teaches us the basis of community. When you consider the fact
that all of us exist in concert as the human race, it becomes obvious that from this very

parallel we can learn how to be better humans” (www.musicisrevolutionorg). Music,

 

instead of being a casual aside in educational paths, is focused on in the organization as a
foundational absolute for development and growth.

Davis, like his cohort Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson, would agree with
Small’s perspectives regarding the importance and everyday use of music to construct
meaning. Hence, a possibility exists for its link to political and revolutionary thought,
“Music is powerful stuff and it has an element of social change. It can change...but I
think it happens on the individual level. . .that’s the key here. It happens on a person to a
person basis, not over movements” (Thompson 2006). Music, to these two individuals,

is a practice within itself that does not have the formal ability to lead and dictate the path

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of adept political and social change in isolation, but is instead based upon a larger
network of political and cultural texts.

Wayne Kramer who along with Rob Tyner, have been cited as the most politically
impassioned representative of the band’s involvement with White Panther initiatives,
mirrors his band-mate’s reflections with perhaps more faith in music’s role in social
change movements. Yet he does not isolate music as an entity strong enough in itself to
create lasting change. Kramer states,

We try to infuse our hopes in there or our fears. When people come to the art,

when they come to the message. . .it’s a meeting place. If you listen to “Masters

of War” and say “man, that’s a great fucking song” and I listen to “Masters of

War” and I say “That is a great song,” then we’ve just met, we’ve unified in a

sense. It’s eliminating the distance between us, which is the role of art. . .to

eliminate the gap between people. To show that we are way more alike than we

are different.
He continues, “It’s not to man the barricades. Artists have a role in it all. Some people
march in the street, some people write letters, some people go to law school, run for
office and some people sing songs about it.” Kramer reasserts in his interview that like
the liner notes written by Sinclair in Kick Out the Jams, definitive separation of the
cultural and political is a falsity; it is instead a symbiotic relationship intrinsically shaping
everyday life:

The culture informs the politics, but the politics reinforces the culture. You can’t

separate them. Our political life is as real as our cultural life. I’m certainly on the

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cultural side, but I can’t deny that the politics inform a lot of it. Trying to sing
songs and tell stories and be honest about the human condition and the human
condition is managed by our political systems (Kramer 2006).

Although heavily debated, the band, whose career helped shape Davis’s, Kramer’s and

Thompson’s minds in regards to music’s role in social change and potentially

revolutionary thought, provided an incredibly useable space to measure the function of

music in these processes for audiences. Former White Panther Minister of Defense, Pun

Plamondon, asserts,
Popular capitalist culture is only interested in promoting capitalist economy and
capitalist politics. Revolutionary culture, on the other hand, is involved in
promoting revolutionary economics and politics. I always felt that we could
develop and promote a revolutionary culture prior to a political and economic
revolution. A revolutionary culture would make the political and economic
revolution easier. If the revolutionary culture was successful it would minimize
the violence of the political and economic revolution since a large mass of people
would already be living in a revolutionary culture. Understand economics is the
very foundation of society. Politics reflects and supports the economic system.
Culture reflects and supports both the economic system and political system
(Plamondon 2006).

As Minister of Defense, Plamondon was looked upon by the MC5 as too progressive
in terms of political aims and revolutionary thought in regards to his plans for the band.

Relationships with Plamondon and increasingly combative rhetoric would bring upon

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greater governmental interest and difficulties for the band. Here, as with the prior focus
on John Sinclair, the useable space came to represent a polymorphic entity used to
varying degrees as: a jumping off point for Plamondon’s revolution, a perceived direct
threat to national security by the FBI, a marketing ploy, or an entity causing
“compression” as Davis had suggested.
Tear Down the Wall! Now, What? Determining if Music Can Equal a Movement

As a basic mode of constructing identity, according to Small, music can help to
negotiate feelings of belonging, community, history, and memory. Music also further
perpetuates ideology. The MCS’s success and downfall as a “revolutionary rock” band
points out the discrepancies in possibility and interpretation by numerous interested
parties that are invested in music and its perceived roles. Perhaps music’s greatest
drawback in regards to being an autonomous and unified tool of social change in itself is
that music is an interpretive process in which modes of communication are not
transparent. Hence, a group like the MC5, with so many interested parties involved in its
life and career, including a media eager to make sense and to frame such a group as either
the vanguard of the revolution or as imposters, quickly became the possession of
numerous users. Because of this, it slipped beyond any intended frames from the
individual creators themselves.

This multiplicity of viewpoints can both allow a sense of community and
communal dissent, as well as represent divergent and sometimes contestable uses of these

same texts. Small describes that when one partakes in the practice of music, one is,

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looking for different kinds of relationships, and we should not project the ideals of
one kind of performance onto another. Any performance, and that includes a
symphony concert, should be judged finally on its success in bringing into
existence for as long as it lasts a set of relationships that those taking part feel to
be ideal in enabling those taking part to explore, affirm, and celebrate those
relationships. Only those taking part will know for sure what is their nature
(Small 49).
Searching out different relationships through musical texts is exemplified by the
numerous perspectives on what the MC5 did and could mean in society either as a live
act or even through the capital-dependent recording process. The latter, Small contends,
is causing separation between performer and listener. However, if one looks closer, such
a medium could and did create meaningful spaces of constructing social identity and
location for listeners. The collecting of interviews from group members concerning their
upbringings and experiences with the music industry, technology, their surroundings,
racism, and politics, all showcase contexts in which group members sought out uses for
the band. Differing use values were also extended by those who were involved in the
band’s career and the life of the WPP such as Sinclair and Plamondon. Such was the case
as well within their fan-base, by supportive and damning critics, and by the government.
All of the viewpoints mentioned looked to a product of popular music to negotiate their
perspectives.
For those invested in the band and/or their revolutionary potential, the space of

performance and musical practice brought intimate spaces where memory and

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consciousness were shaped through mass-mediated forms (Lipsitz viii) either through
albums or more immediately in live performance. Here, temporary communities, or to
borrow a phrase from Hakim Bey, “temporary autonomous zones” were created; utopian
spaces of escape or collectivism that were beyond the reach of anyone beyond those
immediately experiencing it (Bey x-xi). The divergent uses and perceptions that face-
tO-face interviews with those in the band as well as those connected through the White
Panther community, exemplify these spaces of interaction amongst audiences and the
MC5 and the individual notions of community that came with their experiences. Davis’
hope for a communal nirvana through a symbiotic relationship between performer and
audience through the practice of “high energy” music showcases the utopian potentiality
of united audiences. Regardless of whether participation meant investment in just the
music/performance aspect, or in the rhetoric of the White Panther Party concerning
revolutionary aims, a community could be established. Shelia Whitely describes in The
Space Between the Notes, that “it might be argued that on stage the groups’ sexual
aggression was little more than formalised and ritualised violence, the music nevertheless
has a neurotic element which, in its more frenzied form, evokes a pseudo-tribal paranoia”
(82). Whatever anarchistic sound or reputation the band garnered, this tribal cohesion
was still a possible outcome for their audiences.

Sinclair discusses this important notion of community and autonomy in Music
and Politics at a local level saying local scenes “are reflective of the unique social
conditions” (21) of the area. In the case of Detroit the scene is made up by a, “rock- and

urban-soul-based music, an intense energy feeling, and a close, tight involvement with its

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audience” (22). Nationally and internationally Lipsitz’s notion that memory and
meaning are created through mass mediated communities was proven over and over again
through the MC5. It was made possible through the sales of their LPs, radio and
television exposure, and even in media attention in international magazines such as Mojo
and Uncut.

The professionalization that Small discusses as creating false stratifications of
performer and audience are here, but there is also ability for communities large and small
to actively center themselves around these products. Such varying levels of local and
global can be negotiated by consumers of popular music in relationship to a text like the
MC5, from levels of complete or partial acceptance, misinterpretation, compared to
individual authors’ intents. The negotiation can also result in complete disregard of the
text. This active process of negotiation is one that De Certeau calls “dancing on a
tightrope” (73). Here audiences are able to create levels of meaning and belonging by
their ability to recreate an equilibrium through the use and disuse of popular culture
materials, thus making meaning of their lives through an endless supply of materials and
signs. This creates a “ceaseless creativity of a kind of taste in practical experience” (73),
including the creation of potential temporary communities based upon shared knowledge
and appreciation of popular culture texts like the MC5.

Useable rebellion is centered in this process, in that participants in popular culture
can use these texts for their own purposes, including framing the political and social
world around them. Differing levels of investment can even, as Tricia Rose discusses in

Black Noise, “produce communal bases of knowledge about social conditions,

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communal interpretations of them and quite Often serve as the cultural glue that fosters
communal resistance” (99-100). As illustrated, this was the hope of a contingent of the
WPP, to produce a cultural base for their notions of revolution. This contingent was on
one side of the spectrum while at the other end was the band acting as a means to garner
cash and women. Represented here, within the organization itself, is part of the greater
fluctuation in usability connected with the band and their association to the White
Panther Party, from audiences, critics, the authorities, and from themselves. Where one
was in the spectrum reflected investment, or lack thereof, in the increasingly overt
political rhetoric and associations of the group and its connected propaganda.

It is these same notions of usability by audiences that also constrain products of
popular culture in the creation of ideology in everyday life. De Certeau refers to popular
culture as “a dark rock that resists all assimilation” (18) because texts like the MC5
cannot communicate or create an absolute voice. Users of popular culture are like,
“nomads poaching their way across field they did not write, despoiling the wealth of
Egypt to enjoy it themselves” (174). In the case of the MC5 and of rock in general, this
usability was the case for those constructing the text themselves. The ability of media to
frame these entities and the uses that audiences, critics and governmental interest had for
the text demonstrate a vast contingent of poachers using a product that did not even
complete understanding of itself internally.

For some like Davis and Thompson, directed youthful rebellion became too
quickly problematic, whereas for others, to differing levels, like Sinclair, Kramer. and

Plamondon, their experiences with the group and its political life, gave glimmers of hope

17]

in the realm of music’s power to change the course of the world around them. Due to
these multiple frames of reference from individuals associated with the group, varying
levels of meaning creation were employed by both media outlets seeking to frame the
band and the WPP, as well as with audiences and the participants themselves. As Small
argues, “In fact, in neither verbal nor gestural languages is there a complete one-to-one
relationship between signifier and signified” (60). Here, the MC5 was used as a raw
material in which identities were negotiated through the music itself as well as through
the political associations of the group with the WPP.

Even with media frames seeking to create clear and concise interpretations of
social and cultural forces like the MC5 and the WPP, the power and reach of popular
cultural products in the creation of ideology and perhaps direct action, is subject to these
interpretive processes by those using the product for their own means and consumption.
Siegmeister contends that the complexity of this meaning-making process of using and
interpreting musical products is oblique and does not equal direct influence, “Social
influences do not act in an immediate, direct, simple way. Often the effect is delayed,
circuitous, oblique; in most cases a broad effect, felt over a long period of time, not
perhaps discemable in one particular instance, but evident in a broad collection of
instances” (20). The connection of the MC5 to revolutionary and dissident rhetoric and
image tested this supposed delay, by connecting the social and the musical into a product
that for some could ignite direct action and tear down such notions of displacement and

tepidness.

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The focus on the band by governmental authorities is a telling reaction that did
not separate the cultural from the political. The authorities looked to a cultural product as
one possibly demanding action and continued surveillance. The wealth of documents
collected on the MC5 and the White Panther Party showcase a government that was not
so sure about the “obliqueness” of music’s influence in creating dissent. Says Thompson;
"Back in those days they had nothing to compare it to. The FBI was afraid of it. . .it might
go the other way. Kids might start burning shit down; they just might start picking up
guns and assassinating rich people and people in power...” (2006). The direct action
that was feared, according to Thompson, of course did not provide in itself the spark that
ignited the tearing down of the status quo. Topics of power and its connection to music
had a long history before and after the MC5. One can see music being a focus of
governmental concern globally such as in the intense focuses on content in Castro’s
Cuba, to the Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC) in the US, a group that rose to
fame targeting figures like Frank Zappa in the 19803 for fear of music being “prime cause
of unwanted mass behavior” (Fischlin 30).

The concern towards these musical texts seems to be focused on the fact that as a
product of mass culture, music possesses an omnipresence that is difficult to control and
that can easily reach vast audiences with challenges to the established order. This
crossover confronts ideas of musical marginalization that authors like T.V. Reed who say
that a failure exists in the ability to, “distinguish degrees or levels of cultural politics, or
to think carefully about the relative scale of impact of a given practice or discourse”

(290). With cases like the MC5, the concern of reach and power was not questioned.

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Music, in its capabilities of creating effective autonomous zones for its listeners to
invest, disregard or misinterpret authors’ frames, represents a difficult to isolate, but still
very real, space of ideological construction and community creation. This creation can be
empowered or dissipated due to its dependence on the technology of mass
communications. Small’s notions of immediacy and foundational social location found
in the daily practice of music, for better or worse, has met the realities of mass mediation
head on. The MC5, regardless of the revolution’s promises or fallacies and one’ 3
investment or lack thereof in the group, provided a text under which these vast and
powerful topics could be examined concretely both from emancipatory and repressive
perspectives. Such a case study can also offer significant insight into the realities of
useable rebellion through music, and its place in the future regarding processes of social
change and development.

Looking to the Future of Music: Music’s Role in Future Revolutions

By taking on the rhetoric, image, and arguably sound, of an idealized revolution,
the MC5 at the least demonstrated how connections between culture and politics could be
made through musical practice. Practice here refers not only to the creation and spread of
musical texts, but also their reception and use. Future discussions of music’s role in
social change, as the MCS’s case study demonstrates, need to discard the false parameters
separating the cultural and the political, the mind and body Although they are
convenient categories, the realities of musical practice even within the technological and
financial constraints of the modern mass media, are delineations that cannot be separated.

As false or idealized sonic incarnations of the counterculture and the New Left, the MC5

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were a very real, useable focal point from which individuals confronted and questioned
the world around them. They were also a showcase of the immense investment and
concern when these commonly separated entities are brought together.

Keeping such possibilities of music and politics meeting directly in mind, there is
also a need to discard notions of music as a singular entity within itself that can
independently perpetuate mass social change. One must keep in mind when tearing
down these boundaries between cultural and political, the limits of this practice of usable
rebellion through rock. Music is dependent, as the preceding chapters have shown, on an
array of use values. From impassioned to superfluous, the right of these texts to speak
does not guarantee the right to be consumed in idealized purity. Instead, music can be
regarded as an intrinsic part to a whole. Culture and politics in the end cannot be
separated clearly, if at all. The practice of music and the spaces of autonomy that it
offers, like all human practices, are interdependent processes through which we find
cohesion, community, investment, ideological construction and questioning.

The ideal notion of music working as a sovereign tool of dissent and social
change within itself is a falsity that the MC5 case study helps us understand. This is not
because music is not a powerful or cohesive form, but because it depends on media,
technology, variance of audience use values, and, in the case of the MC5, is susceptible
to government repression. Music could be considered a powerful and prevalent form,
which has the capability of creating autonomous spaces where one can openly and
actively confront and question the world that surrounds them. If one considers Small’s

notions of “musicking” then one could think of music being part of a process of learning

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about and questioning the world. Like writing and speaking, music shapes our daily
lives. It is also a deeply personal process as well due tO its role in constructing social
location. One must also realize, as Small complains, that music has become “hijacked”
by a small set of professionals selling us, “what we have been led to believe we lack” (8).

Hence, a means by which we see the world has been relegated to a process
dependent upon capital, industry and the technologies used to distribute it. The goal of
establishing a cohesive community is still a very real possibility and perhaps best reflects
why the government was so concerned with the band. If media forms are used to
distribute an anti-authoritarian message, and groups like the MC5 and WPP actively
communicate that message, what will the ramifications be? The answer in terms of this
case study, was that the band and its associations were used in a wide-ranging spectrum
by listeners, critics and the authorities as: a springboard for a revolution, a springboard to
get girls and money, a demonstration of shameless marketing, and a threat to national
security. In addition, the group provided a place to contend musical inspiration and
musical hype, as well as a means to measure political fearlessness or politically selling-
out. Very real communities could be united and just as easily torn apart when looking at
the life of the MC5 and their involvement with countercultural life in the late 19603 and
early 19703. These numerous frames point to a great difficulty for future musicians
seeking to create autonomous programs for changing the world around them. If you say
you want a revolution, as the Beatles sang in 1968, one best be prepared for creating

countless highly individualized revolutions for those listening in.

176

In order to create a truly “rebel” music in the hopes of generating direct action
and social change in an absolute form, one would need an ability to: shape media frames,
manage governmental interest and potential repression, manage the consumption and
restrict the usability of individual texts to audiences seeking to, as De Certeau would say
“poach” those parts useful, and leaving behind those parts not desired. Simply put,
music by itself, like political leadership by itself, or laws by themselves, cannot guarantee
direct paths to mass social movements. Instead, groups like the MC5 are part of an
intricate whole of intercontextuality where these parts all function together in adapting to
and creating social change and development.

Music’s great power comes from the acute and impassioned usability of its texts
by audiences to create meaning and to create active questioning of the world around
them. Rock, like jazz, great symphonic works, opera or hip-hop offers these spaces in
everyday life where ideologies are put to the test and are offered new challenges. Bands
like the MC5 are such great threats to governments and to critics because there is a great
fear that such supposedly wide-reaching and affective texts can mean so much to their
audiences; audiences they may see as desperate, in search of leadership, or simply as
ignorant. Regardless, these are audiences who can nonetheless find pathways to new
ideologies in spite of the authenticity involved in its creation, or in the case of the MC5,
the plethora of idealism, anger, youthful naivety, and self-indulgence that was mixed into
an already complicated text before ever assaulting the ears of their listeners.

If the contention still exists that the “revolution will be televised,” one should be

aware that music will provide the soundtrack and will be put into the hard-drives, Ipods,

177

car stereos, portable players and collective memories of the populaces seeking to create
change and challenging the structures around them. In the process, music can provide
momentary escape, or a momentary autonomous zone from which one can safely
question everyday life. It can also simply be left at the door on the way home after the
concert. The MC5 and the White Panther Party tested these relationships of power,
pushing past the doors and into the streets. Once they got into those streets, the realities
of the America they were commenting on violently hit back. Due to this push though,
and the connecting of a band to a political party---however tongue and cheek it was to
those involved---it provided some very real spaces from which all interested parties could

determine if indeed, music is revolution.

178

Notes

 

' See Sinclair’s Guitar Army for a cross-section of the WPP’s self-generated press.
Consult especially the “Rock and Roll Dope” series for examples of various framing
methods.

" Studies of the band such as in McNeil/McCain’s Please Kill Me and Goodman’s The
Mansion on a the Hill do distribute the political responsibility to some extent. John
Sinclair is normally the focus of investigations though into the White Panther Party
specifically in such studies as Hull’s “The White Panthers ‘Total Assault on Culture,”’
and Strausbaugh’s Rock ‘Til You Drop.

"' This mirrors the contextual class realities that Bradley discussed in Understanding
Rock ‘n’ Roll, in the rise of the UK rock scene that was discussed earlier in the first
chapter.

'V See a more detailed discussion of these affiliations in Chapter 3.

V The MC5 was recently featured in Mojo Magazine ’s The Roots of the Sex Pistols. Rage
Against the Machine covered the MCS’s “Kick Out the Jams” on 2000's Renegades,

V' The Black Panthers established numerous colonies across the nation including in such
cities as Detroit, Chicago, New York and San Francisco/Oakland. The reach of the WPP
in these terms will be discussed further in following chapters.

V" The Yippies, or The Youth International Party was in reality, several individuals such
as Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Nancy Kurshan and Paul Krassner, who utilized the
omnipresence of media to spread counter-cultural values. The Yippies are most widely
remembered for their organized spectacles/demonstrations such as the “Festival of Life”
in. which they acted as mediated pied pipers calling for a youth presence.

I'" See Chapter 5 for further discussion of this.

'x Chapter 5 deals specifically with state and federal authorities and their targeting
primarily of Sinclair as well as Plamondon.

x For further discussion of drug use within the band see Carson’ Grit, Noise and
Revolution and Simmons/Nelson’s The Future is Now!

x’_Chapter 5 describes both the musical and visual output of the group in detail.

x" The MC5 has actually been featured on the FBI’s “Reading Room” on their FOIA
website.

""' For the last and perhaps most surprising of these examples, see Revelation: Revolution
’69.

x” Sinclair, Plamondon, the WPP were all the subject of surveillance

XVThe song was written by his manager A] Smith

x"For further info see Goodman 1997, Simmons/Nelson 2004

x""See Guitar Army for these collected works

m" Crawford also led the Church of Zenta, a fictitious church that as Kramer states, “Was
a complete hustle to scam some money from people in the audience” to buy the MC5
family marijuana and alcohol.

m The picture actually depicts a young man putting a flower in the barrel.

’0‘ See “SleazeNation” and Robinson.

179

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