The Mojo Collection. Various Mojo Magazine
and any momentum it may have gathered was lost. Barely promoted, it sank without trace – but its reputation and price tag have never stopped growing since. As Sando puts it today, ‘it’s great to get a little credit – even after 35 years!’
The MC5
Kick Out The Jams
Bucking tradition, these Motor City rock revolutionaries released a live album as their debut.
Record label: Elektra
Produced: Jac Holzman and Bruce Botnick
Recorded: Grande Ballroom, Detroit, Michigan; October 30 and 31, 1968
Released: February 1969
Chart peaks: None (UK) 30 (US)
Personnel: Rob Tyner (v); Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith (g, v); Wayne Kramer (g, v); Dennis Thompson (d, v); Michael Davis (b); Bruce Botnick (e)
Track listing: Ramblin’ Rose; Kick Out The Jams; Come Together; Rocket Reducer No. 62 (Rama Lama Fa); Borderline; Motor City Is Burning; I Want You Right Now; Starship
Running time: 36.17
Current CD: Elektra 7559740422
Further listening: High Time (1971) – the band’s final studio album was a return to their rough and tumble roots, after the more sanitised ‘commercial’ sounds of 1970’s Back In The USA; Babes In Arms (1973), rarities and never released tracks; The Big Bang Beat: The Best Of The MC5 (2000), a well-chosen collection of the 5’s grittiest tracks and free jazz masterworks
Further reading: MC5: Kick Out The Jams 33 1/3 (Don McLeese, 2005); MC5: The Future Is Now! (Michael Simmons, 2004); www.mc5.org
Download: HMV Digital; iTunes
Detroit’s MC5 fuelled their vision of revolution by grafting it onto high-octane garage rock, using their guitars as assault weapons against a lethargic status quo. Under the guiding hand of poet and activist John Sinclair, The MC5 created the soundtrack for the nascent White Panther Party, promulgating the incendiary ethos of ‘Rock’n’roll, dope and fucking in the streets’.
Over the years, the leftist politics may have become quaint, but Kick Out The Jams remains a fine blast of serrated rock rage. In addition to polemics, the ‘5’ established their own religion, Zenta, and it was on the Zenta New Year in 1968 – Halloween weekend – that the band planned to record their debut record at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, where they’d been gigging weekly for two years, opening up for better known bands. In fact, the band dubbed their album after a phrase they used to heckle the star attractions.
‘More often than not, the bands were really tired,’ explains guitarist Wayne Kramer. ‘They’d come from San Francisco and play all this kind of electric folk music. I mean they were wimpy, they had no passion, they were posers, slackers, and we were young and aggressive fellows and so we used to harass them. We’d scream at them from the wings, “Kick out the jams or get off the stage.” Or, “Get down, brother or get the fuck out!”’
MC5 were offering up a gritty, cacophonous rock show, complete with atonal industrial din of the Detroit factories and unapologetic distortion that was best experienced live, so it was not a surprise that they chose to debut with a live album.
‘We really worked hard at perfecting a performance that on a bad night would be great and on a good night would be unbelievable,’ remembers Kramer. ‘The MC5 were a mercurial band. All of a sudden this was “the” night, we were making “the” record, the posters were up, the fans were there and the recording truck was in from California, and the record company was there, and it was a lot of pressure for us to be under. In fact it rattled us. I hear it every time I listen to the record.’ Though he admits it’s not the band’s best work, Kramer acknowledges, ‘Our power is concentrated in that record in a way that you can’t deny. Kick Out The Jams is a powerful statement of a time.’
Silver Apples
Contact
Second album from pioneers of loops and ambience. Now active again after belated recognition.
Record label: Kapp
Produced: Silver Apples and Barry Bryant
Recorded: Universal Studios, Los Angeles and Apostolic Studios, New York; late 1968
Release date: February 1969
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Simeon Coxe III (oscillators [often known as ‘The Simeon’], banjo, v); Danny Taylor (pc, v); Jack Hunt (e)
Track listing: You And I (S); Water; Ruby; Gypsy Love; You’re Not Foolin’ Me; I Have Known Love; A Pox On You; Confusion; Fantasies
Running time: 40.21
Current CD: Radioactive MCD 11680 adds: Silver Apples; Oscillations; Seagreen Serenades; Lovefingers; Program; Velvet Cave; Whirly-Bird; Dust; Dancing Gods; Misty Mountain
Further listening: Long-lost third album The Garden (1970) is now available; two recent albums, Beacon (1997) and Decatur (1998): see also the collaborations The Alchemysts And Simeon (2000) and A Lake Of Teardrops (1998), with Sonic Boom from Spacemen 3
Further reading: Long interview with Simeon in Ptolemaic Terrascope 22, February 1997 (www.terrascope.org); www.silverapples.com
Download: Not currently legally available
In 1967, Simeon Coxe III began to spice up the performances of his conventional rock band by adding electronic effects. ‘One of my best buds then was a serious composer called Harold Rodgers. He had an old Second World War oscillator. He used to get loaded on vodka and try to play along with Beethoven, Bartok, etc. One day I put on a Stones record and played along. I was hooked!’
The band quickly became a duo, based around Simeon’s rapidly multiplying and interlinked battery of audio-generators and Danny Taylor’s massive, carefully tuned drum kit. Their 1968 debut introduced the maverick coupling, but Contact marks the apotheosis of their sound. ‘The first album was a recording studio project, whereas Contact was recorded during and after a three-month tour and my pipes were road-toughened,’ says Coxe. It’s a harder record than their debut – titles such as A Pox On You and the harsh, edgy wailings of Cox’s electrickery speak volumes.
‘I was fortunate enough to know Hendrix [Danny Taylor had drummed with Jimi’s Blue Flames]. We traded gear and talked about new sound distortions. He called me Mr Apple and I called him Mr Experience.’ The influence is apparent on the bucking electro-ballistics of You’re Not Foolin’ Me and Gypsy Love, while Taylor’s urgent, human-drum-machine beats provide the perfect underpinning. Coxe: ‘By 1969 a lot of the hippy dream had faded. I’m not sure the world had become dystopian, but I was sure feeling the darker side.’ This finds a perfect expression in the dissonant flower-power anthem I Have Known Love, a perfectly curdled pop song. And if things didn’t sound weird enough, Simeon – who was raised in the Tennessee mountains – found time to play banjo on Ruby and Confusion, to create a sort of techno-bluegrass.
Unfortunately, Kapp had no money to promote Contact, and Silver Apples went into cold storage for almost 25 years before enjoying a renaissance thanks to the patronage of bands like Stereolab, Moonshake and Spacemen 3. ‘At the time,’ Coxe notes ruefully, ‘electronics as a musical concept had not yet been embraced by musicians and fans as something that could stand on its own, other than in universities and laboratories. We embraced that concept.’