MC5
Heavy Lifting
★★★
EAR MUSIC
WHEN THE MC5’s irrepressible guitarist, Wayne Kramer, departed this earth on February 2 this year, aged 75, he did so knowing that he’d completed the first LP to be issued under the incendiary Motor City combo’s name in 53 years.
Three months later, the passing of drummer Dennis ‘Machine Gun’ Thompson, who played on two tracks, meant that these Detroit “action rock’n’roll” legends’ fire had finally been extinguished – but for the combustible energies ever crackling within their three landmark records from 1969-71, and the incalculable torch-carrying that continues across all subsequent music of a heavy and/or revolutionary stripe.
It was Canadian producer Bob Ezrin, best known for his half-century association with Alice Cooper, as well as helming ’70s classics ranging from Pink Floyd’s The Wall through to Destroyer by Kiss, who urged Kramer to brand Heavy Lifting as an MC5 record.
The pair first properly met during the making of Cooper’s Detroit Stories, 2019-20, where the so-called Godfather of Shock Rock examined his roots in the US automobile industry’s gritty home city, and on most of which Kramer played guitar (he also co-wrote three numbers). Kramer reached out to him in autumn 2020 toting material co-written with an Oakland journeyman named Brad Brooks, some of which channelled the inescapable fury of ‘Trump times’, prompting the storied producer to coin the persuasive slogan, “Right now, we are all MC5!” Kramer slept on it, and the following morning green-lit the project.
The original quintet’s drug-crazed yet fiercely ethical struggle as the counter-culture’s radical hardline was never invalidated by compromise, careerism or cop-out. With politics having mostly drained out of pop/rock in the last four decades, it’s mind-blowing to ponder their mentor/manager John Sinclair launching a white adjunct to the revolutionary Black Panther Party and issuing a 10-point programme including advocacy of “rock & roll, dope, sex in the streets and the abolishing of capitalism.”
The MC5 crashed and burned with a ferocity that outstripped even their “little-brother band”, The Stooges. They fought the law and the law really did win, as both Sinclair and Kramer were imprisoned on narcotics charges, and the band itself blew apart with an acrimony which ensured that Kramer had seldom spoken to either singer Rob Tyner or guitarist Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith in the intervening decades before they died in 1991 and 1994 respectively.
In his 2018 autobiography, The Hard Stuff, Kramer not only detailed his own addiction and subsequent activism/philanthropy, but also called into question the perceived perfection of the original ’5 catalogue: he revealed that he’d tried to halt Kick Out The Jams’ release, because, incredibly, he felt that the band’s tumultuous performance that night was below par. Its studio follow-up, 1970’s Back In The USA, mean-while, was “too tight, too clean, too controlled”, causing internal ructions as bassist Michael Davis couldn’t hack it technically, and the next year’s finale High Time for him only documented their disintegration.
Post-millennial activity has been a catalogue of self-defeat and questionable moves: 2002’s inspirational documentary, MC5: A True Testimonial, never got beyond advance screenings due to a dispute with Kramer over music royalties. Then, 2003’s Wayne-brokered partial reunion as DKT (Davis-Kramer-Thompson, plus guest vocalists) brought an overdue payday, but was already sinking amid old resentments before Davis’s death in 2012.
So: what chance, Heavy Lifting, itself delayed since full-blooded, completion in October 2022? On paper, it resembles a travesty of clusterbomb collabs, with Kramer, riotous and Brooks and Ezrin calling in 20-plus superstar favours deliciously from the likes of Tom Morello, for the co-written funky record.” title track’s inevitably Rage Against The Machine-like rap-rock crunch; Slash, on a trademark shred on the Ballad Of The MC5-style Edge Of The Switchblade, where latterday Alice In Chains yelper William Duvall also guests; and, on bass for most tunes, sometime Dylan and Stones producer Don Was. Thompson’s two appearances notwithstanding, everything you know tells you that one member alone can’t uphold a band’s inherently collective vision. To wit: the tale from The Stooges’ first reactivation record, 2007’s The Weirdness, where Iggy Pop floated a highfalutin self-penned opus called O Solo Mio, only for guitarist Ron Asheton to shoot it down with a withering, “Oh, solo record!”
No such checks and balances here, and needless to say, anyone craving Smith/Kramer’s pile-driving interlocked guitars, or Tyner’s ramalama stoner poetry, will not find them on Heavy Lifting.
Get past the branding issue, however, and there’s a great deal to love about this full-blooded, riotous and often deliciously funky record. Largely rooted in alt-rock LA, where ‘Brother Wayne’ resided for his last quarter-century, it majors in melody-rich punk detonations like Barbarians At The Gate, where MC5 ’24 respond fiercely to the Trump-orchestrated assault on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, during the first weeks of production. After the two-year delay in the album release, it now serves as an urgent reminder for US listeners in the run-up to November’s presidential election.
On these, Brooks yowls commensurately without ever aping Tyner and also carries side two’s pair of Springsteenian, Thompson-featuring grenades (Can’t Be Found; Blind Eye) with gravelly gusto.
In reactivations as well as solo outings like 1997’s Citizen Wayne, Kramer has strenuously referenced the MC5’s ground-breaking free-jazz leanings. Not this time. Perhaps surprisingly, Heavy Lifting instead frequently keys into the groove of primetime P-Funk, as well as his time spent in that low-slung proclivity alongside Detroit-raised Don Was on Was (Not Was)’s self-titled 1981 debut.
I Am The Fun (The Phoney) slow-grinds scathingly on contemporary car-crash politics, while Change, No Change seethes over never-ending racism with a Curtis Mayfield falsetto and a miniature Maggot Brain solo. Finally, Hit It Hard’s “fight the power” incitement to the disenfranchised masses is, obviously, in message if not in actual music, 100 per cent true to the turn-of-the-’70s purpose, with Nixon, Vietnam and Kent State University swapped out for big bad Donald and escalating bloodshed in Gaza and Ukraine.
The same goes for Heavy Lifting overall: if taken entirely on its own terms, it’s profoundly agitational, a whole lot of fun, and a fittingly vigorous farewell from one of the classic rock era’s wildest legends.
Heavy Lifting is out now on Earmusic.
LISTEN/BUY: Spotify | Amazon| Rough Trade | HMV
Tracklisting:
Heavy Lifting (feat. Tom Morello)
Barbarians At The Gate
Change, No Change
Edge Of The Switchblade (feat. Wiliam Duvall & Slash)
Black Boots (feat. Tim McIlrath)
I Am The Fun (The Phoney)
Twenty-Five Miles
Because Of Your Car
Boys Who Play With Matches
Blind Eye (feat. Dennis Thompson)
Can’t Be Found (feat. Vernon Reid & Dennis Thompson)
Blessed Release
Hit It Hard (feat. Joe Berry)
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