For a band that only released three LPs in eight years, the MC5 stirred up a lot of shit. The seminal '60s rock act managed to set down the roots for the future of punk, garage, and hard rock, align themselves with the radical White Panther Party (and leader John Sinclair), fall under FBI surveillance, get firebombed by the Michigan authorities, incite riots in Chicago and New York, get signed and dropped from a major label, fall prey to drug addiction, and, most importantly, become one of the most influential rock 'n' roll bands of their time. They were embroiled in the debauchery and democracy of their era, but listen to Kick Out the Jams or Back in the USA and you can also hear the future.

Sadly, the MC5's lifespan was cut short, as were the lives of frontman Rob Tyner and guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith, both of whom died in the '90s. But at a time when the band's influence is as strong as ever, the surviving members—guitarist Wayne Kramer, bassist Michael Davis, and drummer Dennis Thompson—are touring as a "celebration of the MC5's music" called DKT/MC5 (the DKT stands for Davis-Kramer-Thompson). Filling in on the North American run are singers Mark Arm and—oddly enough—Evan Dando, with talk of Soundgarden's Kim Thayil and Presidents of the United States of America's Chris Ballew sitting in for the Seattle date.

Below is a conversation between Arm and the members of DKT/MC5, on tour in New Orleans, about the good (and bad) old days of the legendary band. - Jennifer Maerz

Mark: When you guys first started, were you doing mostly cover material or your own material?

Wayne Kramer: Cover material.

Mark: What kinds of shows to what kinds of audiences?

Michael Davis: Places that then were called teen clubs, places that served Coca-Cola and French fries and stuff. It was a thing back then.

Mark: Do you remember the first original song you guys put into the set?

Wayne: The first song we just kind of made up was "I Just Don't Know," I think. I had the gear at my house (and) I took the PA amp—it was 30 watts and you could distort it really easy and so that made a cool guitar tone, so when we showed up for band practice one day, I said, "What do you think of this?" and just improvised some lyric on it and I think that was our first song.

Mark: So in the early stuff we (also) have "One of the Guys," which was a pretty well-arranged, well-crafted number, and then you have "I Just Don't Know," which is basically a one-chord riff, and you have "Looking at You," which is a two-chord riff. How did you stumble on that? 'Cause you knew how to write a well-crafted, arranged song and that shows on "Kick Out the Jams," but what drew you to that simple, driving…

Michael: Can I tell the story? This is the Bob Gaspar story, the introduction to how "Black to Comm" started. I replaced the original bass player but the original drummer, Bob Gaspar, was still there (at the time). And he hated freeform music. We'd been fooling around in the practice room and (guitarist) Fred Smith played this little riff and Gaspar was like, "That's not a song. Where's the chords, where's the chorus? Now what am I supposed to know what to play?" (Laughs.) We played one of these little teen clubs or VFW halls or something like that and Fred starts to (riff) out of the blue. Gaspar was just sitting back there like, "What the fuck are you doing? I don't know what to play." And the rest of us just jumped on it and we all started to play. Gaspar was just sitting back there like an idiot not doing anything and after about two minutes of us going (repeats staccato riffs)… the song started out there and there was nothing else to do except to make it even more.

Wayne: The band has always had an experimental edge. I think it gets lost sometimes in the telling of the tale about the MC5 politics and the (White) Panthers and music business problems and all that crap, and really what we were really about was the music and trying to do different things, trying to experiment in the music and find our own sound, that's what we were really trying to do, to sing our own blues.

Mark: When did you start listening to free jazz?

Wayne: Pretty early. (Frontman Rob) Tyner was into it. He was into it before he got into the band and then when we met (manager John) Sinclair. Sinclair really exposed us to a great deal of what happened in the free jazz movement—Albert Ayler, Sunny Murray, Cecil Taylor. I had suburban typical white-boy tastes, (I liked) whatever I heard on the radio, or Chuck Berry, I was drawn to guitar stuff, but Sinclair was really the one who turned us on as a band to the free jazz world.

Dennis Thompson: When John moved (with his leftist organization) Trans-Love Energies and they had their own building, John had his record collection in the basement and that's when I started listening to free jazz. I got exposed to all of it, the whole wall was just loaded with albums, they had Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, and Sun Ra, and they just kept putting them on their turntable and listening to them. Personal favorites for me were Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp and John Coltrane. I gravitated towards the drumming, the interaction between the drummers and bassists, the rhythm sections. I said these guys can really take it places, there's a lot of energy, a lot of style, a lot of structure and polyrhythms and modalities and this was all brand new for me, so that was an area I was really attracted to.

Michael: (Mark), you've said that a lot of tunes in our show were incredibly tight, (but that's) because we worked on our (records) to have songs (that) people could identify with, so we were always conscious of writing a certain kind of song with the description of "you could play it on the radio." It'd take up two to three minutes. But we were always drawn to jazz because with jazz players you have the element of musicians actually playing music together so it's not an orchestrated piece that's played the same every time. It's chemistry that happens between musicians.

Dennis: Yeah, so we listened to everything from A to Z, where A was AM radio playing structured pop hits of all stripes and the Z spectrum was totally free jazz.

Mark: These days a lot of musicians aspire to a sound (like your early singles), and they don't even come close, but that total dried-out, deeply saturated (sound), some people say it's lo-fi but I think it's extremely hi-fi, but everything is more in your face than almost anything. How did you hit upon that? That wasn't the norm at the time.

Wayne: Somebody left the keys in the bulldozer. (Laughs.) We didn't know what we were doing. We knew how we played live and we were into this idea of high energy, so we just went in and did what we did and played the way we played and the engineer and Sinclair were kind of producing the session but none of us knew, we had no idea what we were doing. It was just an artifact, a record of what happened that day, by a bunch of maniacs.

Michael: I think we aspired to surpass anything anybody else was doing. (Take) the songs "Looking at You" or "Black to Conn." (They're) so simple in nature, the structure is just made for improvisation, so we were always trying to surpass everything that had been done before because we felt that if we could do that, we would provide our own unique place.

Mark: You're definitely doing something no one else was doing at the time. My favorite part of any kind of music is when something is not totally formed yet and people are making up their rules as they go along.

Michael: The danger.

Mark: Yeah, before something becomes punk rock or before something becomes heavy metal or before something becomes whatever form it's known as down the line, and you guys were definitely making up the rules as you were going along.

Wayne: But that's the way it is in all art. It's best right before you get it right.

Mark: But not a lot of bands do that.

Wayne: Not a lot of painters do that either, or dancers. It's that point where you've just about got it, and that's when it's the best, when you're just striving for it.

Dennis: One of the things about being from Detroit was we were all into the drag strip, the fast cars, high-powered engines, and this deep acceleration and power—more power, high energy, we all had that in common. And that was symbolic of Detroit, the Motor City—it was loud, it was crushing, it's banging and it's noisy and it's gritty and it's tough, it's rough. I think that's a lifestyle that comes through in the music, especially in the drumming category.

Michael: I was obsessed as a teenager with model cars, antique kits, and melting the plastic so no one else had one just like that.

Mark: So you toured before Kick Out the Jams came out, right? You came to Seattle in 1968, I believe. And you opened for Jethro Tull?

Wayne: They hated us in Seattle. (Laughs.) They threw eggs at us.

Michael: We played a benefit for an underground newspaper.

Wayne: Your parents hated the MC5 (laughs) and we're coming back to get our revenge.

Dennis: But they loved Jethro Tull, they loved Jethro Tull.

Mark: So let's talk about 1968 in general, that was a pretty heavy year. It seemed like things were really picking up in 1967, (they were) very optimistic. And then the Summer of Love hit a brick wall. The assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and this is when you find yourself putting out your first record. What did you guys think at that time that the future was going to look like? I'm talking big picture.

Wayne: I think as a generation we weren't sure there was going to be a future. We were like standing on the edge of a cliff and there was a divide that went right down the center of families across the dinner table, you know? It was so polarized between the direction the country was going in and there was a whole kind of hawks and doves, them and us (attitude), and it just didn't look good at all. It was highly charged, and in retrospect it was pretty romantic too, very exciting.

Michael: From my point of view, I didn't think that the rest of society outside of ours was relevant. I thought they were all kind of waiting for us to bring down our message, and "us" was the whole rock 'n' roll generation of a whole new world of counterculture. I thought we were the only relevant thing there was—that the army, and the war, and the government were all part of an archaic system. I didn't know how we were actually going to make it happen, but I thought somehow that our lifestyle was going to reach out and push all the bad stuff away, and like Wayne said, it was kind of a romantic notion.

Dennis: For me, from 1967 up through 1968 I had hope. I had hope that the movements would combine and grow and that the war would end straightaway and that more people would come on board and coalesce and there would be solidarity. We played the (Chicago) Democratic Convention in 1968 in the park and we were the only band that showed up and then there was a police riot during our set and that's when it sort of hit me that this design that we sort of had in our mind was really not going to happen. This design for a new America, a new thinking process, a new way of doing things, it seemed to be like, I don't think this is going to happen, this revolution.

Mark: Before that you were pretty optimistic about the future?

Dennis: Yeah, maybe (it was) youthful naiveté, but we thought that if we worked really hard at it and everybody got together, we could make this happen. But it wasn't that simple. There were a lot of dynamics working against us which began to take off, such as the fact that the FBI was interested in us. We knew we were being harassed on local and state levels. We couldn't even play one festival in Michigan—our roadies warned us beforehand, "Don't go there, they're waiting for you. It's a trap, there's a bunch of state police waiting there for you." So we turned around and went right back (home). In fact we were warned about going to Chicago, too, but we just kept on going anyway.

Michael: Around this time there was a growing tide of youth, of unity, and it was all coming along this rock 'n' roll thing. And so there was a lot of hope in that and it was untested waters. I think that if the youth is coming to you, the youth is the future, so you're in pretty good shape. I guess one of the so-called authorities kind of figured out what they were up against and figured out a strategy to separate the unity that we felt at the time.

Wayne: In the end, they did listen to us and it was too late. The war had already claimed 60,000 young American lives, the damage was done. And finally they did end the war and civil rights came and all the things we were fighting for came to pass, but what was so discouraging is here we are again today and nothing's changed. Clinton was of our generation, he almost admitted to smoking weed, and you know now his successor, this idiot Bush, he's my age and he's a fool and he's running the show.

Dennis: We find ourselves in the same cycle, except now it seems more subtle, society seems more fragmented, everything is categorized and celebrity-driven. They co-opted our language, they co-opted our style—the youth culture's been co-opted (and) marketed and sold back to us at twice the price.

Mark: That's a good segue…. There's photos of, like, Jennifer Aniston and Justin Timberlake wearing an MC5 shirt. Did you guys know their stylists? Tell the story of how Levi's got ahold of your logo.

Wayne: Rob Tyner's widow, Rebecca Derminer, Gary Grimshaw, the artist, and Leni Sinclair, the photographer, sold out the MC5 to Levi's. When we found out about it, we were able to rescue the trademark. (We took) a really bad situation—they didn't have the rights to license the MC5's trademark—and we applied some creativity and some positive ideas and were able to convince Levi's to create something great out of what was a potential disaster. We suggested that if they were really into the MC5, why don't they make a live show and bring me and Dennis and Michael together, get some guest musicians, film it, and make it a free show in a small club just for people who love the music of the MC5. And that was the beginning of all this that we're doing now—and now we have a DVD, Sonic Revolution: A Celebration of the MC5, with (Motörhead's) Lemmy and Dave Vanian and Ian Astbury and Nicke (Andersson) from the Hellacopters, that comes out on July 6th and has great FBI surveillance footage on it and old home movies and it's a one-hour concert DVD with a great bonus package. All the guys wrote liner notes and there are great photos and it really is the catalyst that made all this happen.

Michael: We get to tour and bring today's interpretation of today's MC5 music to multiple generations of people that were touched by the band.

Wayne: This is as good as it's going to get and this is only going to happen once. I don't know what the future holds. It's such a gift to be able to play this music and see what this music means to people. I just didn't know it would mean so much to so many. It's a minor miracle.

Michael: For me it's a major miracle. (Laughs.)

Wayne: But oh come on, we're not curing cancer, it's a rock band.

Mark: One story that wasn't touched on at all in that (recent documentary) MC5: A True Testimonial that I wanted to ask you about was the (1968) show in New York City with the Motherfuckers. Relate the story and tell me what that did to you guys.

Dennis: We escaped from New York with our lives.

Michael: We'd gone to New York (because) Elektra Records was presenting us to the New York media at the Fillmore East with (promoter) Bill Graham in control of the house and the tickets. And it was devastating. (It was) where the business collided with the revolution and it was like… shit sparking all over the place that shouldn't have.

Dennis: Essentially the audience was comprised of a lot of the "Up against the wall motherfucker" people, street people, anarchists. And as it was free, a lot of them couldn't get in and so there were a lot of people milling about and there was this tension in the air… but what I remember briefly is that there were people shouting out in the audience two, three songs in about, "Let's start the revolution right now, just give us the word," talking to Tyner. "We'll burn this place down right now; give us the word, give us the word." Rob (took) a moment to say, "We didn't come here to start the revolution, we came here to play this music."

Mark: The revolution getting started by burning down the Fillmore East—that's a pretty goofy thought.

Dennis: Insanity. The dichotomy that was so obvious was that (Elektra Records A&R man) Danny Fields made a bit of a (mistake). He graciously admitted that, "Oops, I think I made a boo-boo when we had those limousines pick us up." It was standard fare to have limousines (for bands) and he just missed (that this might be a problem) as an oversight. So we had these street people who were relatively poor, angry, pissed off, wanting to go and tear it all up right now and we had three limousines waiting for us out there, so it was a (crazy) scene. The eggs came out and this one woman who was lactating was squirting milk at us and throwing rocks and bottles at us.

Michael: And there were other types of weapons besides eggs. There were knives and switchblades and ball bats and things like that. It was a dramatic power struggle taking place.

Dennis: A big canvas screen that dropped down on stage was ripped with knives and they smashed and trashed our equipment. Wayne and myself were surrounded by about 150 of these lunatics and they were asking questions and we were trying to answer them without either of us getting more tense. (It felt) like somebody was going to get killed there. (It also) might have sent a message out, though—to the powers that be at the clubs and the corporate establishment that books the bands—(about) the MC5 guys. (Bill Graham) thought that Rob Tyner punched him in the face, because some guy with an Afro hit him, I guess—that's the third-party story—but I think there was a story in Mojo that said that (show) had been the beginning of the end of the MC5 because of the collision—if you want to call it a collision—of the MC5 music and philosophy and the corporate world.

Mark: I assume that before this show you would've thought of these (anarchists) as being on your side.

Wayne: Actually we were allied with them and they were militant radicals. We had just performed in Boston and we gave them some time to make their appeal, carry their message, and we had even made an accommodation with them. We played for free the week before for the community. When the (radicals) came in, they expected us to ignite their revolution and Tyner was very clear that he did not come there to burn the place down. He came there to rock it. And when they saw the limousines as the symbol of capitalist pigs, they thought they were betrayed and sold out, and I got out of the car to deal with them because I thought this was going to be a terrible disaster if these fellow revolutionaries didn't know that we were who we said we were. And like Dennis said, we tried to reason with them out in the streets, all these speed freaks and junkies and anarchists raising ideological questions and philosophical dilemmas and we're trying to address their questions as knives are flashing in the background. Finally, two of the heavies in the Motherfuckers came in and actually wrapped themselves around me and carried me out of the crowd. I think they saw that we had enough heart that we were willing to go all the way with it. And they just walked us down the street. But I think it was the tip of the iceberg that there was no satisfying the hard-line left wing. The MC5 was always criticized for not being revolutionary enough for the revolution. (Laughs.) That's the kind of days they were. It was very volatile times. And I think it did destroy our relationship with Bill Graham vis-à-vis the music industry. 'Cause like Dennis said, (it was) quickly established that we were more trouble than we were worth. There were a lot of other bands that didn't attract that kind of trouble. Like Jethro Tull. (Laughs.)

Mark: Back in the USA (came out in) 1970, and you'd split ties with the White Panther Party, and John Sinclair was in prison, right?

Michael: We didn't sever our ties; they purged us from the party. For being counterrevolutionaries.

Mark: In what way?

Wayne: Because we refused to pay their rent. (Laughs.) We didn't have the money. We couldn't run their house and our house too.

Dennis: We picked up the tab all the way along. We picked it up for the party, for the newspaper people, for the seamstresses, and roadies, and hangers-on.

Wayne: Our allegiance was to John Sinclair.

Mark: So your (first) $20,000 advance you guys got…

Wayne: We didn't get anything from the $20,000; that paid our bills. We got $50,000 from Atlantic, which was the biggest cash advance anyone had gotten (at that time) and out of that we got $1,000 each, and we were happy to have it.

Mark: What happened to the rest?

Wayne: It paid bills. It was expensive running a revolution.

Mark: When you signed to Atlantic, that was after John Sinclair, so you were with Jon Landau at that point.

Michael: Everything came to a head around then.

Wayne: We had huge bills. We were supporting all of us and our women—and we had lots of women, thousands of women. We lived in a bacchanal. (Laughs.)

Dennis: We were living in a farm community north of Ann Arbor called Hamburg and we had a beautiful house in the country.

Mark: So it was like the revolutionary Monkees, you all living together.

Wayne: More like gorillas. We needed a band house, we needed to live together because we were so fucked up that we couldn't get together to practice. So we had to live together. It was just impossible. We could shuffle down to the band room and maybe we could practice. Before we got together, Fred Smith, God bless him, he was impossible to get to rehearse. So one reason we moved in together was survival; it was just too hard to have a band.

Dennis: And Jon Landau at that point in time filled the vacuum of Sinclair being in prison. Landau came and lived with us prior to the recording; during the rehearsals he stayed with us and he'd get up in the morning and would have the whole New York Times consumed before any of us woke up. The thing about Landau is that I can look back in retrospect now and say thank you. At the time we had an antagonistic relationship because I didn't like what he was doing to my drumming and my band and "Clean this up" and making us play tight because we were still coming out sloppy—or "freeform" would be a kinder way of saying it. There's no freeform on Back in the USA. And some people say it's a 180. If the first album is more freeform, the second album is tight and concise and two minutes and 20 second (songs) and the third album is the blend of the two. And we coproduced it ourselves. So that whole learning experience was necessary for us. Now, as a more mature adult, I can say that was actually a good machine we went through, learning how to play tightly.

Mark: That record seems really subversive to me. It starts out with "Tutti Frutti" and ends with "Back in the USA," probably two covers you did, I assume, in the early days, and in between there's all this bubblegummy stuff like "High School" but it's all about revolution. It's fantastic.

Wayne: It was certainly overtly politically leftist but it was also revolutionary in its honesty—that Tyner could write a lyric like (those in) "Teenage Lust" and speak that honestly about trying to get laid in the culture we live in and finding an answer and being in a rock and roll band is brilliant.

Michael: I would say all the songs on Back in the USA didn't sound like that when we practiced. That album was a production and it was a process of learning how to make a proper record in the studio. They really did sound rough and rugged and revolutionary or whatever with the hard-edge thing. What's ironic is that even though, as you say, these songs have an almost bubblegum tinge to them, 30, 40 years later, those are the songs that everybody knows the words to.

Dennis: "The Human Being Lawnmower" is an orchestrated piece with absolutely beautiful poetry. (Tyner) is talking about violence, the evolution of violence and weaponry. And the artistry of his lyrics, combined with the ensemble of orchestrated playing—I think it wasn't as subversive but it's artistic. It's not in your face, whereas the first album was more in your face—revolution time.

Mark: WWhat's interesting is that what's most revolutionary about the first album to me isn't necessarily the lyrics or the songs but the intros—most of the songs in the first album are about fucking?

Wayne: They're self-referential—about being in a band. Or fucking. Those were two things that were on our mind.

Mark: And the third, I think, is being blown to outer space.

Wayne: That's what we were concerned with.

Dennis: Going to other places. Getting to other places up here between the ears, you know? "The American Ruse" is another one of the leaning-to-the-left political statements. Talking about the American ruse, which is a political statement packaged in a pop (radio) format.

Mark: I guess the only other thing to cover is High Time, which, like Dennis said earlier, was a synthesis of the first two records—and I totally agree. I think it's a great record, and at the time it sold the least (number of copies)?

Wayne: Yeah, at that time Atlantic Records had given up on us completely. They just put the record out because the contract required it.

Mark: How long were you together after that?

Wayne: About 30 seconds.

Dennis: Literally. I don't think we even played any High Time material on the road.

Mark: I think "Skunk" is a fitting end to that record; the last verse is like, "The song's been sung, the deed's been done, staring you right in the face."

Wayne: It was the last gasp; we all tried to make a great record, we knew how to make a great record at that point, and I think we made a great record, but it was too late. And that song really spoke to the future when the band didn't really have much of a future anymore. It was like, that's where we were going.

Dennis: If anything it was a visionary record. There was a little bit of science fiction involved, futurism, a little bit of let's-get-hope in another format. Instead of talking about partying.

Wayne: I think we were able to codify what a classic song was. We had done our homework at that point, we'd learned what good songwriting was, what good storytelling was, what a good arrangement was. We were kind of learning our job with that one and really learning to be creative. But this business requires fresh blood and they don't like it when you cause too many problems for them. (The Atlantic label rep) sat across from us at his desk and I asked him for some money 'cause the band was struggling and he said, "Wayne, we have a concept in the music business called sending good money after bad, and we're not going to do that with you and your band." Then he turned around in his chair and began talking in French to someone on the phone. I stood there with my dick in my hand. That's the music business and it happens to all bands. All bands break up, all bands get dropped from their record companies, all these grandiose schemes come to an end. The MC5 isn't singled out for a single tragedy, it happens to almost everybody that tries to do anything.

Michael: There's a lesson to be learned in all this, that it's all part of a process. You have your three swings and at the end of that you figure out what the pitcher is throwing and you can always come back.

Wayne: The MC5 in a way accomplished everything we tried to do in the beginning before we ever made albums. We were hugely popular in our community, we could make a living as professional musicians, we could pay our rent and have food money and had all the girlfriends we could handle. We had nice cars before we even started making albums and it was the claim for more success, for bigger international stardom, that did us in. But that's just the way that it goes. Anytime artists get together to make something happen they'll achieve their goals, but after that, things fall apart. The center never holds. And that makes what we're doing today such a gift: that the work we put into it held up over 35 years, that every generation seemed to rediscover the work of the MC5. In the end it's the music—it's the music that sustains over all of the years. And it's the music we see in people's faces.