Far away from Detroit

This footage of MC5 playing live at Kulttuuritalo, Helsinki in 1972 actually came as a huge surprise to me. This was one of the last gigs by this legendary Detroit bunch of gun-toting quasi-revolutionary druggie hippies, and to be fair, everything I had previously heard and seen from this gig was pretty much shite.

MC5 was said to be punk before punk and MC before Hammer. They also were nonexistent after 1973. By the time the MC2 (only guitarists Wayne Kramer and Fred "Sonic" Smith were left of the original lineup) hit the cold and miserable Cold War-era Finland, they were already on their last legs, exhausted by drug problems and internal tensions.

I had previously seen a clip from this particular show of them performing "Louie Louie", and it was somewhat sad. In merely two or three years they had lost all momentum. In the late 60s they were ripe for a breakthrough, the quintessential poster boy band for the radical counterculture. America was going through some heavy political turmoil and the kids fucking loved it.

A few years passed and nothing happened. Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford survived an assassination attempt. MC5 fizzled away like a discreet fart, and the gig in Helsinki made painfully clear just where they stood at that point. Forced to play the same garage standards they had begun with in 1965, they were bored, strung out on dope, and sounded like an average bar band. To top it all off, they were playing to a bunch of pasty finns who weren't even allowed to dance (this policy became quite costly to the venue five years later when the Ramones played there and things got out of hand).

Yet, the above clip is fantastic. Right from the "what the fuck is up with these guys"-look Kramer gives when he has to explain Chuck Berry to the finnish audience, the footage is great. Not least because of Fred Smith, who sounds like he has the biggest, baddest black motherfucker trapped inside his skinny frame.