Bill Morris interviews rock journalist Jaan Uhelszki of CREEM Magazine about MC5.

Bu Bill Morris 

The MC5 came roaring out of Detroit in the late 1960s with their first album, recorded live at the Grande Ballroom, which opens with the iconic call to arms: “Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!” From that blowtorch birth until their sad demise four years later, the band established itself as avatars of punk rock and the face of the White Panther Party, which, under the leadership of the band’s manager, John Sinclair, dreamed of an all-out assault on the status quo guided by the three-pronged mantra of “rock ‘n’ roll, dope, and fucking in the streets.”

Now we have a chronicle of that wild, short ride. MC5: An Oral Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band is a collaboration between the music journalists Brad Tolinski, Jaan Uhelszki and Ben Edmonds. Uhelszki, a native Detroiter who sold soda pop at the Grande as a teenager and went on to co-found the influential Detroit-based rock magazine CREEM, spoke with Belt Magazine about the book’s long journey to publication — and the MC5’s enduring relevance to American politics and pop culture.

Belt Magazine: This book had a long, strange gestation. How did it begin, and when did you get involved?

Jaan Uhelszki: I was one of the editors of CREEM magazine, and the longtime editor-in-chief, Ben Edmonds, was a really close friend of mine over the years. I knew when the MC5 had broken up in 1972 onstage at the Grande Ballroom that Ben’s whole life was dedicated to this band. That’s why this Boston kid came to Detroit. He’d seen the MC5 in New York and thought wherever they’re from, I’m there. I’m following this band.

BM: He really drank the Kool-Aid.

JU: He drank the Kool-Aid so early. He showed up at CREEM in Detroit in 1970 asking for a job. He got in deep with the White Panther Party, used to go to their house in Ann Arbor. When the MC5 broke up, he decided he wanted to do a book on them, so he moved into Rob Tyner’s house, the lead singer, for about three months and interviewed Rob and his wife Becky. That was the beginning of the book. For the next decade he interviewed everyone except (MC5 guitarist) Fred “Sonic” Smith, for reasons I don’t even know. Because Ben was so embedded in that camp, the more he knew the more stymied he became because he realized that if he wrote what he planned to write, then half the band would hate him. He would lose friends, he would lose his social base in Detroit — and just break a lot of hearts. So he had writer’s block about it.

In 2015 Ben was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he made me promise that I would help him finish his MC5 book, and I said, “Yeah, sure,” thinking that he had almost completed it. So in the fall of 2015 I booked a flight and stayed in his house for three weeks. I had my own little room, but when I got there I discovered he hadn’t written anything. What he did have was floor-to-ceiling banker’s boxes filled with hand-written interviews that he’d done with all the band members. So for the next three weeks I sat for twelve hours a day on the floor of my bedroom and read them and made notes. Then I went back home to California and wondered what I was going to do.

BM: What did you do?

JU: We talked on the phone once a week about it. Like everybody does, he thought he could beat the cancer, and he also wanted to do a Jonathan Richman book with me. I said, “Yeah, sure, whatever you want to do, let’s just do it.” He died in March of 2016. There’d been no movement on the book except those original notes. This was my closest male friend, so I was paralyzed. I spent the next year just kind of numb. I really didn’t know what to do.

This is where the story turns weird. I’m not all that superstitious, but I started noticing something in my bathroom. I thought, this is weird, what could it be? Every time I went into the bathroom, there was a presence. I kept asking myself, who is it? I kept going, “Ben, is it you? What the hell!” There was this nagging presence, it wasn’t such a friendly ghost kind of thing, it was just nagging, nagging, nagging. Then I decided one night it’s probably Ben and he’s pissed off that I haven’t written his book.

So I called up Ben’s widow, Mary Cobra (singer and guitarist with the Detroit Cobras), and I told her, “OK, I’m going to do the book, I’m going to start working on it.” Mary started scanning the handwritten transcripts and sending them to me and I got my transcriber to turn them into text. It was still such a gargantuan task, and I realized I needed someone to help me organize this so I called up another Detroiter, Brad Tolinski, who I’d worked with on an oral history of Alice Cooper about ten years before. I asked him if he’d help me with this MC5 book. The two of us worked on it for probably the next two years, culling the better parts of the interviews and placing them like we were writing a play. It was all about the construction.

BM: So the job, really, was editing. It was about selecting and arranging.

JU: Exactly.

BM: You had to do some supplementary interviews, didn’t you?

JU: I did. I knew the MC5 really well because I worked at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit when they were the house band, and I’d interviewed them quite a lot over the years for various publications. They were one of my bands. I had really good interviews with (guitarist) Wayne Kramer, and actually all of them. I found that Ben’s Wayne Kramer interviews were a little confrontational. You know what they say about male rock critics — that they just want to be in bands. Ben was not that guy, but I noticed that some of the things Wayne told me were absent from Ben’s transcripts. So I put some of Wayne in and I had a lot of (bassist) Michael Davis, so I added that. My greatest find was Becky Tyner, Rob Tyner’s wife, who I grew up with. When I interviewed her she was always super-candid. She was the one who told me that girls in the MC5 commune couldn’t wear eyeliner and they couldn’t watch television. She just threw open the doors and let me see inside the commune.

BM: It was a man’s world, right? The women cooked and sewed and the men sat around and ate and drank and smoked weed.

JU: Exactly, and the women couldn’t even eat with them! Oh my God, it was supposed to be so enlightened: “We’re the MC5 and we’re making a better world.” But you know what, who are we making that better world for?

BM: You said earlier you worked at the Grande Ballroom, which was sort of like the Fillmore East of the Midwest, the big rock palace in Detroit. What did you do at the Grande?

JU: I was the soda girl — or I guess the pop girl, since we’re speaking of Detroit. I worked behind the counter with two other girls, and every time the band finished playing there was a rush of people. My job was to make sure no one dosed the pop with LSD.

BM: You might have served me a Vernor’s ginger ale because I was in the Grande Ballroom more than once and I drank a lot of pop — but I never got high off it, so you must have done a pretty good job.

JU: That’s good to hear (laughs).

BM: You mentioned that Ben Edmonds was anxious about publishing the book in his lifetime because he was afraid he would piss everybody off. Did you have similar fears? I mean, this is not a puff piece; this is a pretty tough book.

JU: No, I think because I knew everybody so well. What you find is that very few bands are kumbaya about each other, very few bands get along superbly. In fact, one could say the tension adds to the creativity. So having known them all since I was a teenager and then as a journalist, there was no love lost. Even in modern times when I would interview (drummer) Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson, he expressed his loathing for John Sinclair, and he tended to blame him and the politics of the White Panther Party for the demise of the MC5. It was already public record, and I thought, “Why not tell the truth?”

By the time the book came out (in late 2024), we had to keep revising the intro and the epilog because one by one people kept perishing. A year ago I was interviewing Wayne Kramer and a week later his wife called me and said I’d gotten the last interview with Wayne Kramer. I said that couldn’t be possible, he was in such great form. No, no, she said, he’s in hospice. He died the next day. Then John Sinclair was gone. Then Dennis Thompson, then Fred “Sonic” Smith’s first wife, Sigrid Dobat, died. Fred had left Sigrid for Patti Smith after meeting Patti at a press party held at Lafayette Coney Island in Detroit in 1976, during her Radio Ethiopia tour.

BM: Shortly after all these people die, the book finally comes out — and the band finally gets inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which called them “an unapologetic garage band that influenced countless punk and heavy metal bands.” They never got the recognition they deserved when they were at their peak, and they’re all dead before they get recognized by the powers that be. Is that ironic, or fitting for Detroit, or just plain sad?

JU: I think it’s a miracle they got in at all. This was a band that shook up the status quo from their very beginnings. A band that proudly didn’t fit in. And do you think they cared? Honestly, they wouldn’t have given a toss one way or another. I want to believe their induction was not sad, not long-awaited, or even long-overdue, but an act of guilt and contrition by voters who should have known better, nudged through by stalwart supporters Tom Morello and the MC5’s one-time producer Jon Landau, who knew how historic, important and soulful this band really was. They were a dangerous outfit for dangerous times, a band that burned shit down.

BM: Including themselves?

JU: I said earlier that constructing this book was book was like constructing a play, but it was also like constructing a horror movie where the kids go down into the dark basement. With the MC5 it was a series of bad decisions. As you’re reading the book you go, “No! Don’t do that!”

BM: One of the real bad decisions was heroin. That, to me, was one of the villains in the book.

JU: I think it was the politics more than the heroin. They aligned with John Sinclair, who I quite liked all my life. But it wasn’t just the White Panthers, which seemed like a good idea. The MC5 had common cause with this (anarchist) outfit called the Motherfuckers. When the band would do shows on the East Coast, the Motherfuckers would come and give their spiel and ask for money. It wasn’t beneficial to the MC5 at all, except for establishing their cred. When the band got to New York to play the Fillmore East, the Motherfuckers had a beef with (promoter) Bill Graham and created such havoc that Bill Graham pulled the tickets he had promised them. So they staged a riot. Someone hit Bill Graham in the face with a bicycle chain, and he almost lost an eye. Who’d he blame? The MC5. He said they’ll never play in any of my venues. Well, he was the biggest promoter in the U.S., and he put out the word to other promoters. So that was the first thing in a series of cascading events.

BM: I’m sure you’re familiar with the book Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk.

JU: Oh, yeah.

BM: I want to read you a quote from Wayne Kramer: “When the MC5 broke up in 1972, we all lost each other. It was like losing your brothers — we were schoolboys together, we started out together, and we’d all been through the fire together. In the end, when the band broke up it was so painful and so ugly that nobody talked to one another. Nobody was friends anymore… I became a criminal after the band broke up. I was doing burglaries, dealing, and fencing TVs, guns and drugs. I mean, in ’72, ’73 and ’74, there was really no music scene in Detroit to speak of. It was brutal. The auto industry started to go downhill, so there wasn’t any clubs. So if I went out and robbed two or three houses a night, I was a star again.” Wow, that’s a pretty precipitous fall from stardom, isn’t it?

JU: It really is, but Wayne found a new purpose when he went to prison (for selling cocaine to an undercover cop). After being in prison he founded Jail Guitar Doors, which provided instruments and mentorships for inmates. The group is named after the Clash song, where he’s mentioned in the first verse: “Let me tell you ’bout Wayne and his deals of cocaine.” Wayne was a survivor, very dear to me always.

BM: I read an interview with Ben Edmonds from 1998, which was about twenty-five years after the band broke up. They asked him why the band still mattered, and he said, “I think it’s a longing for a time when people didn’t talk so much about living large. People dreamed large, and then life went that way.” He added that the MC5 was “a bunch of musical dreamers.” Now here we are twenty-five years after that, fifty years after the band broke up, with the same question: Why does this Detroit hard-core proto-punk rock band still matter?

JU: I think they wanted to inspire a whole generation of other dreamers and rebels to fight against what they saw as repression. It was a sense of activism that you could make a difference, and music would be the way to do it. They really thought music could change the world. When I did that last interview with Wayne Kramer last year, I asked him if he still thought music could change the world. He said, “No, but it changed me. And that’s enough.”

They were blue-collar, meat-and-potatoes regular guys who created something so original, so kinetic. It was a total assault on the culture — but they were just normal guys from the Detroit suburb of Lincoln Park. I think socially they matter a lot, but also they matter a lot musically. They were the first punk band in terms of attitude and being original and having that do-it-yourself ethos. They were high and low culture. They sampled Sun Ra. They were such an anomaly. I love that quote where John Sinclair said, “I wanted them to be Chairman Mao, and they just wanted to be the Beatles.” But here we are, still talking about them.

 

Bill Morris grew up in Detroit and is the author of the new nonfiction book, The Lions Finally Roar: The Ford Family, the Detroit Lions and the Road to Redemption in the N.F.L., as well as the novels Motor City Burning and Motor City.