Thoughts on the MC5's "High Time"

Talking about the MC5 with Paul Bamlett for a future broadcast of The Spark on Voodoo Radio a week after Wayne Kramer's passing got me thinking about this album, even though I haven't owned a copy in 20 years. (I have 5/8 of it on Rhino's "all the MC5 music you and your family will ever need" anthology The Big Bang, but that doesn't include three of my favorite songs -- which are so etched in my synapses that I was able to wake up the day after Wayne died and write out the lyrics to "Poison" from memory.)

After the cathartic chaos of live-recorded debut Kick Out the Jams and the tight-assed calculation of sophomore album Back in the USA, High Time was an attempt to establish the Five's stature as writers and players away from the influence of countercultural guru John Sinclair and wannabe industry player Jon Landau. They had a tough row to hoe. Their early radical political stance incurred the wrath of rock establishment figures like Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner and promoter Bill Graham (not to mention the FBI and the collective law enforcement agencies of Michigan), and they'd alienated their core audience (the politicized hip community of Detroit-Ann Arbor) by breaking with Sinclair.

High Time was tremendously important to me when I was 14 (when I was also listening to the Rationals' Crewe LP and Mitch Ryder's Detroit album a lot). I filled my high school English class journal with Bangs-influenced drooling over the Five and Stooges (Creem magazine having just become available via the place where I used to buy comic books), which might have contributed to my getting to go see the school shrink that year. I miss all the funny shit from inside the High Time gatefold sleeve: the pics of the band in costume (Wayne as werewolf, Fred in his "Sonic" Smith superhero costume), Rob's cartoon of the cosmic egg hatching, the funny sayings ("Show me a man who's chasing dreams and I'll show you a man who's sleepwalking"). The album's street level political lyrics were age appropriate for me as I tried to make sense of the messed up place and time in which we lived. And I stole lots of guitar licks from Fred and Wayne, at a moment when I was trying to progress from copping solos off of Yardbirds records.

After Wayne died, I started studying some of the songs as playing forms, and thinking about the album in general.

Recorded in the UK, where the Five had gone to play the Phun City festival, album opener "Sister Anne" was the Five's "everything plus the kitchen sink" production. High Time marked the emergence of the band members as individual songwriters, with Fred penning four out of eight songs. The lyrics are naive and sometimes sexist, but heartfelt and of their time. Fred and Wayne overdubbed so many guitars that it might have contributed to the album's cloudy sound as much as the presence of producer Geoffrey Haslam, who'd let Doug Yule get away with the same excessive thing on the Velvet Underground's Loaded. The arrangement here is equally overloaded. Two verses and a bridge are followed by two choruses of dueling lead guitars, then two choruses of Rob Tyner and Fred's dueling blues harps before another bridge, a final verse, and an extended tag which ends with a Salvation Army band playing something that sounds similar to "The Pledge Song" from John Sinclair's Power Trip outtakes-and-rarities compilation. 

"Baby Won't Ya" is a rollicking rocker on which Fred used a signature Chuck Berry lick in a structure that's a far cry from a standard I-IV-V. Michael Davis plays a real Motown bass line, as if to underscore producer Jon Landau's folly in taking him off the instrument and having Wayne play bass on Back in the USA. The dissonance in the IV change comes from stacking a Gm7 (Wayne) on top of a Cm7 (Fred). Like "Sister Anne," this song is a treasure trove of overdubbed guitar licks that I plundered at will as a terrible teenage tyro. I still lean on those lessons: Fred's 16th-note facility, Wayne's double stop bends. Fred's bandmate from Sonic's Rendezvous Band, ex-Rationals front man Scott Morgan, recorded a faithful cover on the debut album by his '90s European band, the Hydromatics.

Slow ballads were never the Five's forte, but "Miss X" beats Rob's sincerity on the previous album's "Let Me Try" with Wayne's classic chord progression and salacious lyrics. This song really demands horns, a B3, and a soulful singer like Sharon Jones or Lisa Kekaula.

"Gotta Keep Moving," drummer Dennis Thompson's one solo contribution to the canon, is based on the same Bo Diddley riff as pre-Elektra B-side "I Just Don't Know," and is all relentless forward motion. The breaks -- six of them -- are two bars each, with two extra beats after the last one before going to the IV change. Fred takes the solo after the first bridge, while Wayne takes the one with the key change, after the second bridge, and plays the ascending line on the outro. This shit swings. Rob was wise to adopt the half-time delivery he uses on the released version, rather than trying to spit the words out a la Chuck Berry, the way he did on the alternate take included on ROIR's Babes in Arms and Sinclair's Human Being Lawnmower. There's a version of this on the one album by New Race, a 1981 one-off that teamed Thompson and once-and-future Stooge Ron Asheton with members of Australia's Radio Birdman, a band running on Detroit fuel and founded by Michigan expat Deniz Tek.

Rob Tyner's sci-fi rock masterpiece "Future Now" was the only MC5 song we played in Stoogeaphilia (we tried "Looking At You" but dropped it after a couple of shows; not enough song there). Like Dodge Main (Wayne's 1996 project with Deniz Tek and Scott Morgan) in their cover version, we dispensed with the slow "Oh Well, Part 2"-like section that contains my favorite Five lyrics after "Poison" (and also makes a great soundtrack for the opening shots of the wrecked Grande Ballroom in the still goddammit unreleased A True Testimonial documentary). We used to segue into "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" instead. For my two cents, the version of this on High Time is Dennis Thompson's finest recorded moment.

The aforementioned "Poison" was Wayne's first great song (later revived on The Hard Stuff in 1995), and as close as Michael Davis came to singing a lead vocal; dig the way he breaks down the line "But I ripped my pants / Doing some dance / That I learned in France / And they think there ain't nothing to know." The lyrics tell the story of the Five; the Rolling Stone reviewer scoffing at the line "Nature and peace are my shelter and companion" told you all you needed to know about the cynical state of the counterculture in 1971. Wayne also got in some great licks, including one of his signature descending single-string lines, over the recitative, and the Spanish tinge at the end is especially nice.

The album's centerpiece is "Over and Over," with Fred's bemused Everyman contemplating life in the USA at the cleavage of the decades. Dodge Main omitted the intro from their cover; they were wise to omit the last chorus (after verse 3), which makes the song drag on too long without adding anything to it. On the High Time version, Fred's ascending solo before the reprised intro and verse 3 is perfection. 

Fred's "Skunk (Sonicly Speaking)" is another kitchen sink production, opening with a percussion jam featuring seemingly everyone in Detroit (notably Bob Seger and some Rationals) and closing with a jazz coda featuring Dr. Charles Moore, with whom Wayne would make a jazz album in the 21st century. I dig Fred's feedback chords at the very end. In between, it's all forward motion which I understand could be quite compelling live. I think "Over and Over" would have made a better album closer. No matter. For my two cents, High Time is the best MC5 album. If you dig the rock and haven't heard it, you owe it to yourself.