Listen to the MC5 Play the Songs That Would Make Them Legends in 1968
On Oct. 30, 1968, the pioneering Detroit garage punks performed songs that would appear on their debut album, "Kick Out the Jams."
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Detroit’s MC5 are often labeled as precursors to the punk movement, but this is merely a superficial observation. They had a raw, thrashy sound to be sure, but this was also a band on a mission. They began, like many groups of the era, playing music for listeners to dance to. But they quickly established their own identity. Instead of “peace and love,” the MC5, in conjunction with activist John Sinclair, embraced radical left-wing politics in the late 1960s and were much more likely to espouse “Burn Baby Burn.” This and other such inflammatory rhetoric directly reflected the turmoil they were living through in Detroit. To understand where the MC5 were coming from, one must put their music in this context.
Detroit was an extremely volatile city in 1968, when the MC5 recorded their debut album. Following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King on April 4 of that year, Detroit’s police, fearing an escalation of riots in the streets, established a “protective curfew” in the city after dark. For the MC5, Sinclair and their collective, this essentially destroyed their ability to work, since their income was derived from concerts and related events that primarily took place at night. They were also regularly harassed by police, forcing them to relocate to Ann Arbor in May of 1968. It was in this highly charged climate that the MC5’s music was created.
