Ever hear of the MC 5? MC stands for "Motor City," i.e., Detroit, Michigan.
Quote:
MC5 was an American rock band from Lincoln Park, Michigan, formed in 1964.... the MC5's far left political ties and anti-establishment lyrics and music positioned them as emerging innovators of the punk movement in the United States. They developed a reputation for energetic and polemical live performances, one of which was recorded as their 1969 debut album Kick Out the Jams.
Playing almost nightly any place they could in and around Detroit, MC5 quickly earned a reputation for their high-energy live performances and had a sizeable local following, regularly drawing sellout audiences of 1000 or more. Contemporary rock writer Robert Bixby stated that the sound of MC5 was like "a catastrophic force of nature the band was barely able to control", while Don McLeese notes that fans compared the aftermath of an MC5 performance to the delirious exhaustion experienced after "a street rumble or an orgy".
MC5 of this period was politically influenced by the Marxism of the Black Panther Party and Fred Hampton, and poets of the Beat Generation such as Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders, or Modernist poets like Charles Olson.[9] Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton prompted John Sinclair to found the White Panthers, a militant leftist organization of white people working to assist the Black Panthers. Shortly after, Sinclair was arrested for possession of marijuana.
In their early career, MC5 had a politically provocative stage show: they would appear onstage toting unloaded rifles, and at the climax of the performance, an unseen "sniper" would shoot down Tyner. The band members were also all using the drugs LSD and marijuana. The band performed as part of the protests against the Vietnam War at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago that were broken up by a police riot.
What do these hippy-ass drug-abusing punks have to do with Chuck, you might ask. Well, the point is that like everyone else who followed him, they were heavily influenced by Chuck. They named one of their albums after his tune, "Back in the USA," which they also recorded
Many other diverse artists, such as Linda Ronstadt who sold a lot of records with it, have covered this tune (as can be said about virtually every song Chuck ever recorded).
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layman
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Fri 24 Mar, 2017 07:01 pm
Here's a tune from Chuck's last album, which will be released posthumously. Still rockin at age 90!
