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| Grande Ballroom photo by Charlie Auringer |
John Sinclair, a Motor City hippie activist, founder of the awkwardly named White Panther Party and manager of Detroit band or two in the mid to late 60s, wrote in the liner notes of Kick Out the Jams, the MC5's debut album on Elektra, that the goal of the band 's high-energy rock was drive us out into the streets and drive people "out of their separate shells and into each other's arms." Summarizing his notes for the band and the disc, he ended with what should have become their ultimate slogan, "STAY ALIVE WITH THE MC5". Stay alive we Detroit teens did, infused with jazz, rhythm and blues and the rawboned wail of guitars and hard hammering drums, and here we are today, guided by politics, a memory of raging youth, an understanding that being an adult is more than getting your way when you want it, blessed or cursed with the knowledge that there are more days behind us than ahead of us. And now the last surviving member of the embattled, legendary and indispensable MC5 , drummer Dennis Thompson, has passed on. There is much I can say about the MC5 specifically and in Thompson's drum work in particular, as I was (I think) lucky, blessed , privileged to have seen the band a half dozen times in Detroit teen venues, dances and , of course, at the Grande, before I moved to California in 1969 as the part of the white flight trying to out run the smoke, broken glass and anger that lit up a previous summer's nightscape. In short order, the MC5 , the Stooges and New York's Velvet Underground invented what we understand as both punk and credibly street savvy art rock (not “progressive”, thank you). The MC5 were a “whole thing”, as Sinclair said in his notes, and the indeed they were, a loud phenomenon, a disrupting Event that made rock and roll a dangerous and challenging enterprise again after the West Coast bands and the frippery from the Brits threatened to make the music a tame and predictable tea party, a safe space of sorts. Dennis Thompson managed the impossible, it seems, pushing an ensemble where all the musicians seemed to start and stop in different places, full of feedback and guitar squalling, attacking an audience with the accelerating, weighted inevitability of an avalanche. He was a definitive if under acclaimed rock and roll drummer, a more minimalist Keith Moon if only because Thompson had the soul band emphasis on keeping the throb, the rhythm, the vibe , persistent and insistent, pushing the MC5 into deeper and further out atonal hysterics while keeping it focused on the prize at hand. Dennis Thompson was part of a whole thing. rip
