MC5 - Kick Out the Jams

Let Freedom Ring

1. Kick Out the Jams is the loudest, simplest declaration of human empowerment in the entire history of 20th-century music. Here, on the second track of their debut album, Occam’s Razor slices into the Motor City’s idea of equality. “Let me be who I am…” It transcends all social constructs, and all borders, real or imagined. How’s that for a demand? A revolutionary idea, I know. You occupy your space and we’ll occupy ours in this land of the free. If you don’t care for us flying these freak flags then don’t fucking look at them. Then “…let me kick out the jams,” and I will, with or without your permission. Deal with it. In fact, you don’t have to “let” me do a damn thing. I’m going to do it no matter what. Kick Out the Jams was punk before New York and London finally got our rescue signal. It would be eight years before the Sex Pistols, Ramones, the Damned, and the Clash would arrive with banners stitched together with fabric the MC5 and Stooges wove together. Ha! Detroit was the Betsy Ross of punk rock.

2. Did you ever bounce around your bedroom soaking sweat into your headphones, volume cranked all the way to the right, brains completely scrambled as you tried to navigate the cognitive dissonance of what you’re hearing in the moment against what you’ve been told your entire life? Did you ever consider blasting through cinder-block walls at Mach 1.5 because you’ve been shot out of a circus cannon and you have no eyebrows but you do have a flaming red mohawk on your head? Did you see a vision of God and she was Pam Grier in four-inch heels with a 13-inch Afro playing bass alongside Bootsy Collins during a Parliament-Funkadelic show at Madison Square Garden on New Year’s Eve? If so, then you likely stole my copy of Kick Out the Jams during a house party I had in San Diego in the summer of 2002, and I’m mad as hell. I’m unhappy with you, but I understand.

“And right now...
Right now...
Right now, it's time to...
KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFUCKERS!”

-Rob Tyner, lead singer, MC5

3. Sometimes, only sometimes, do I reach for what MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer called the hard stuff when I’m spinning records in my vinyl den. When I need a thing, when I need a primal jolt out of The Blues that takes hold of me from time to time, I reach for the hard stuff. Kick Out the Jams is the earliest version of the hard stuff. This is the A1 prime original punk rock ground zero. This is the launch pad. It puts me in direct orbit with the Stooges, the Sonics, the Velvet Underground, Radio Birdman (Thanks Matt), the New York Dolls, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, the Ramones, Wire, and those aforementioned British behemoths. The other MC5 guitarist, Fred “Sonic” Smith, would go on to marry the punk poet priestess Patti Smith. She would form a band featuring the lunatic Lenny Kaye, who curated the most comprehensive document of the first psychedelic era, Nuggets. To give Tyner his due again, this is “the sound that abounds and resounds and rebounds off the ceiling.” More to the point, this is the rocket that became NASA, the punk rock Book of Genesis. Like Moses, the MC5 would be marched up to the top of the mountain only to look down at the Holy Land and be told they weren’t allowed to enter. That’s okay. You let my people go, and let them kick out the jams.