Richard Goldstein—Village Voice's "secret service man"—on the MC5 in 1968
In 1967 pop critic Richard Goldstein, in what might charitably be called a minority opinion, laid into the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. A longtime Beatles fan, he was bummed out by the record's grandiosity ("Like an over-attended child, this album is spoiled") and disappointed that the Beatles had disconnected themselves from everyday, gritty reality. "Nothing is real [in Pepper], and nothing to get hung about," he wrote in his New York Times review. "Too bad; I have a sweet tooth for reality. I like my art drenched in it, and even from fantasy, I expect authenticity," adding, "What I worship about the Beatles is their forging of rock into what is real. It made them artists; it made us fans; and it made me think like a critic when I turned on my radio." A year later in the Village Voice, hungry for a dose of real-world spectacle, Goldstein tuned in to the dangerous MC5.
I'm always eager to read on-the-ground, in-the-moment accounts of bands and artists whose presences were urgently felt. Goldstein begins "Kick Out The Jams" with a journalistic establishing shot. "Detroit may have gone for Humphrey, but it’s Nixon country—," he writes,
a vast, gray flatbed gone dour with the resignation of an industrial spa. The streets are straight, the houses frame, and the people—well, the best one can say is that they form a city of rank and file. It’s hard to guess whether the giant tire which hovers over the airport expressway is someone’s idea of an L.A. joke, or an authentic religious symbol. At very least, that plaster imitation of a rubber wheel is the totem of Detroit.
Half of Motor City natives with a pulse might have taken offense at the "rank and file" jab, and Humphrey supporters may have gotten their collective hackles up, but Goldstein does effectively dramatize the simmering cultural conditions of the teetering city. He was writing as an East Coaster, careful to avoid sentimentalizing the Midwest and yet open to its mythic charms, both the warm and the burned-out varieties. He'd dug the MC5's brave appearance at Lincoln Park in Chicago during the '68 Democratic convention, "a special kind of commitment bordering on joy," and the fact that the band members and hangers-on commune in a house in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a college town where it's presumably easier to organize rabble-rousing ("around the taking of exams") than it is in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. "For one thing, it's spacious, and for another, there are plenty of townies to offer tea and sympathy to a resident freak." Goldstein objectively reports: "The floors are clean, the stereo system is in good condition, and the dope facilities are excellent."
He offers a brief history of the band, highlighting, among their charms, their championing of "spasm rock" against the prevailing gentleness. "It’s been a lean time for raunch," Goldstein observes sympathetically, "what with the jazz-folk-raga blend in vogue. You couldn’t picture the MC 5 [sic] playing before an audience of 20,000 stoned love children—not with the fire and brimstone in their sound. No wonder they hate all ornate music, as well as the light and flower cosmology that goes with it. The whole hip circus is what kept them down." Goldstein then links the band's mammoth guitar riffs with the power they project, and assume, en route to a kind of strange observation: "Dissecting their music into riffs and fills, you sense an immense void in the area I can only call literacy."
We have been conditioned to accept experimentation in the guise of primitive music. The primacy of the recording studio, coupled with an abundance of stereo home equipment, has resulted in a compartmentalization of the rock experience. Today’s solos—even when they are improvised—sound diagrammed, as though the ebb and flow of energy were being fed through channels.
I'm not sure I understand here what Goldstein means by "literacy," maybe an over-intellectualization of rock and roll? That the MC5 are rendered toothless under too much analysis? I dig his take on the "compartmentalization of the rock experience" and the studious approach to guitar solos, both of which Wayne Kramer and Fred Smith sought to destroy.
In Goldstein's eyes the MC5 is "definitely a kid’s group" in that "far from the random ecstasy of a California freak-out, theirs is a highly directed release of energy. These are the children of insurgency; no wonder they expect their culture to coerce." He adds,
To watch them standing under the strobes, hands raised in youth-salute, is to understand how pop art can serve as a political mirror, refracting through slogan and myth. Undeniably, there is fascism in the the ecstasy they provide. Not just because they make to kill the foreigners (in this case, adults), but because they suggest the terrible relationship between right and might which is at the core of all art.
Goldstein concludes his piece with a glimpse of the MC5's post-Grande home life, where there's "music and dope and spaghetti cooking in the kitchen. Girls scurry about, brewing tea, changing records, making conversation." A neighbor arrives with two pumpkins as a gift. "And the group sits around an immense dining room table, rubbing their bellies and pounding their forks. They put my head into Huns. Warriors. The conqueror race."
I tell Wayne his music is very violent, because that’s all I can think of to describe fifteen minutes of sheer volume punctuated by the stab of a strobe light. He gives a soft, certain smile, and answers: “Well, that's rock 'n' roll."
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"A good snapshot stops a moment from running away." That's Eudora Welty, relaying both truth and fiction. Time always slips from our grasp and goes galloping ahead. More than half a century later, Goldstein's takes on the MC5's rock and roll urgency and sonic voltage are still vivid, if naive. The depiction of the girls lounging around the commune like submissive figures from a Playboy cartoon date the piece, of course, though that's not all Goldstein's fault, and the immersive reporting is of-the-era in that it served the band's public manifesto, the revolutionary aims of which now seem quaint.
What Goldstein wanted in and from Sgt. Pepper's was more reality. He closed his review of that album by arguing that "We still need the Beatles, not as cloistered composer, but as companions," adding, "And they still need us, to teach them how to be real again." Goldstein found companions of a sort in the scruffy, beery, stoned-out, politically righteous MC5, guys he felt he could figuratively hang with from afar, a community that he saw forged, movingly, at the packed Grande, in the communal shrieks in response to Tyner and "spiritual advisor" J.C. Crawford's exhortations. That reality felt awfully real. The decades following have suggested that some of the reality that the Five were promoting was rifle-toting political posturing rather than daily, lived-in existence. "I only wanted to be in a rock and roll band," Davis confessed in his memoir, I Brought Down the MC5: "This crusade to forge a new world seemed ludicrous, a Quixotic lunge at an imaginary adversary."
In short, things got far too real for all concerned in ways that Goldstein might've predicted. As a fading snapshot taken at the onset of earnestness and idealism before stubborn, everyday life takes over, "Kick Out The Jams" is an evocative, valuable piece of writing. The celebratory night before the morning of reckoning.
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Incidentally, Wayne Kramer was twenty when "Kick Out The Jams" ran in the Voice, singer Rob Tyner twenty-four. In 1970 Goldstein gathered the piece in Goldstein's Greatest Hits: A Book Mostly About Rock 'N' Roll, his first book, the back cover of which features this gently-dated gem of a biography note:
Well, that's rock 'n' roll.
Photo of The MC5 by Leni Sinclair (Getty Images); photo of Goldstein via Richard Goldstein
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