The Ultimate MC5 book has arrived! MC5: An Oral Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band is hands down the best account of the rise and fall of Detroit’s hardest rocking and most notorious band by a country mile.
Perfectly timed to help celebrate the MC5’s long overdue induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the book’s triumph also serves to underscore the fact that the last two surviving band members, Wayne Kramer and Dennis Thompson, along with former manager John Sinclair, have all passed away during 2024.
The oral biography is primarily based on a decade of tape-recorded interviews made over 30 years ago by rock writer and former Creem magazine editor Ben Edmonds. Despite possessing a treasure trove of revelatory information and opinions from Kramer, Tyner, Thompson, and Sinclair, along with other important interviews with Russ Gibb, Danny Fields, Jon Landau, Ron Asheton, Gary Grimshaw, Leni Sinclair, Chris Hovnanian, and Becky Tyner; Edmonds put off writing what he had envisioned as an epic book about the MC5. 
This changed in 2015 after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He called his friend, music journalist and former Creem writer, Jaan Uhelszki to help him finally write the book. She read through all his transcripts, but they were not able to make much progress prior to Edmond’s death nine months later. Before he passed, however, he made Uhelszki promise that she would finish the book for him.
During a recent interview with Cary Loren and Susan Whitall on Book Beat: The Backroom, Uhelszki shared why Ben Edmonds was unable to complete his MC5 book despite his love for the band and all the work he had done. She disclosed that he was afraid he would reveal the MC5’s many long-held secrets and reignite old feuds and grudges. She also said that he told his friend, Ben Blackwell of Third Man Records, “I can’t do that book and keep everyone happy. If I put out the book the way I want it, everybody’s going to be pissed off.”
Faced with a monumental task without benefit of Edmonds' help, Uhelszki made some very important decisions. The first was her plan to make the book an oral biography rather than the more traditional magnum opus that Edmonds had originally wanted. Another was bringing on Brad Tolinski, former editor-in-chief of Guitar World and noted for his organizational skills, as co-author of the project. After having the roughly 1,000 pages of Edmond’s handwritten notes transcribed into text, she and Tolinski were able to move things around and assemble all the parts and voices chronologically. Uhelszki added some interviews she had done with Michael Davis into the mix, and she and Tolinski wrote some additional material to supplement Edmonds’ interviews.
There are many great Michigan rock and roll stories but few can match the MC5 saga. The authors have done an outstanding job of pulling the interviews together to paint a vivid picture of the band’s tumultuous career and the times in which they lived. The book lifts the veil on the events at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the recording the “Kick Out The Jams” album at the Grande and the censorship issues that followed, the split with Sinclair, the much maligned “Back In The USA” album, how the MC5 functioned through all the turmoil, the drug use that helped bring them down and much more - primarily using the voices of the band members and the people closest to them.
Perhaps the most interesting interviews in the book are those of lead singer Rob Tyner. In 1990, Edmonds moved into the home of Rob and Becky Tyner and conducted a series of interviews. Some of Rob’s many revelations include the roots of the “Kick out the jams” catchphrase, his self-concept issues and sometimes difficult relationships with the other band members, and behind-the-scenes looks at record company dealings. His wife Becky also provided an eye-opening view of communal life with the White Panthers.
One of my favorite Tyner interview segments involved “Kick Out The Jams.” After the album was released and in the wake of all the controversy that followed, Tyner spoke of the challenges the band faced with both promoters and the police outside of Detroit over saying “motherfuckers.” Even though it might cause their show to be shut down and result in the band not getting paid by a club owner, the MC5 looked at it as an issue of free speech.
On another level, however, Tyner stated that it became a gimmick and a kind of a trap. The crowd would be screaming for “Kick out the jams, motherfuckers” or waiting for the band to do something else like dry humping one of the girlfriends on stage during “I Want You Right Now.” Tyner admitted that having a crowd that was just waiting for something outrageous to happen made the music appear more superficial and lessened the possibility of saying anything more. In 1991, not long after the interviews were conducted, Rob Tyner died unexpectedly from a heart attack at the age of just 46.
As fascinating as it is, the oral biography does have one notable omission - the voice of Fred “Sonic” Smith. He was a man a few words and granted no interviews about his time in the MC5 prior to his death in 1994. Smith is mentioned throughout, but Uhelszki understandably wanted to fill that hole in the narrative. In that regard, she contacted Smith’s first wife, Sigrid Dobat, to see if she would share her memories of Fred during the band years. Sadly, she declined to participate and whatever she may have contributed to Fred Smith’s MC5 legacy was lost forever when she passed away in 2023.
I don’t think there are any awards for the year’s best Michigan music book, but MC5: An Oral Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band would take top honors if there were. The three authors should be commended for their superlative job in providing us with such an engrossing and insightful testament to one of Michigan's iconic rock bands. They “done kicked ‘em out” in a major way with this book.
