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The MC5:

Kick Out the Jams

Whoever thought when that dirty little quickie Wild in the Streets came out that it would leave such an imprint on the culture? First the Doors (who were always headed in that direction anyway) grinding out that famous “They-got-the-guns-but-we-got-the-numbers” march for the troops out there in Teenland, and now this sweaty aggregation. Clearly this notion of violent, total youth revolution and takeover is an idea whose time has come—which speaks not well for the idea but ill for the time.

About a month ago the MC5 received a cover article in Rolling Stone proclaiming them the New Sensation, a group to break all barriers, kick out all jams, “total energy thing,” etc. etc. etc. Never mind that they came on like a bunch of sixteen-year-old punks on a meth power trip—these boys, so the line ran, could play their guitars like John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders played sax!

Well, the album is out now and we can all judge for ourselves. For my money they come on more like Blue Cheer than Trane and Sanders, but then my money has already gone for a copy of this ridiculous, overbearing, pretentious album, and maybe that's the idea, isn’t it?

The set, recorded live, starts out with an introduction by John Sinclair, “Minister of Information” for the “White Panthers,” if you can dig that. The speech itself stands midway between Wild in the Streets and Arthur Brown. The song that follows it is anticlimactic. Musically the group is intentionally crude and aggressively raw. Which can make for powerful music except when it is used to conceal a paucity of ideas, as it is here. Most of the songs are barely distinguishable from each other in their primitive two-chord structures. You’ve heard all this before from such notables as the Seeds, Blue Cheer, Question Mark and the Mysterians, and the Kingsmen. 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 scrapyard vistas of clichés and ugly noise.

“Kick Out the Jams” sounds like Barrett Strong's “Money” as recorded by the Kingsmen. The lead on “Come Together” is stolen note-for-note from the Who's “I Can See for Miles.” “I Want You Right Now” sounds exactly (down to the lyrics) like a song called “I Want You” by the Troggs, a British group who came on with a similar, sex-and-raw-sound image a couple of years ago (remember “Wild Thing”?) and promptly disappeared into oblivion, where I imagine they are laughing at the MC5.

Rolling Stone, April 5, 1969

Charlie Haden:

Liberation Music Orchestra

Charlie Haden is one of the most hypnotically inventive bassists in contemporary jazz. Maturing in Ornette Coleman's revolutionary quartet of the early Sixties, he revealed early (in pieces like “Lonely Woman”) highly developed improvisational abilities and a bent for strange, moving harmonies. Now he has formed his own group for the purpose of presenting his furiously humanistic musical polemics to the world. The results are not the most innovative sides to emerge from the new jazz, but are certainly among the most earthy and impassioned.

Too many of this decade's jazz pathfinders are so intent upon cutting across all barriers to break on through to the other side that they’ve forgotten to play with their hearts as well as their fingers, minds, and nervous systems. This record, with its recurrent mournful Spanish sonorities and sudden interludes of pure piercing song, should do much to balance the situation. The songs are all anthems of various revolutions past and present; they range from Bertolt Brecht's “Song of the United Front” to “Los Quatros Generales” (a fiery Andalu-sian folk anthem from the Spanish Civil War) to Ornette's starkly beautiful “War Orphans.” Whatever one may think of the vaguely defined politics and somewhat labored New Leftist atmosphere of the undertaking, the music all speaks for itself as a raw multivoiced cry for the ever-distant prize of true freedom.