Book Review: “MC5: An Oral Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band”

Author’s Note: This review contains specific details and quotes from the text at hand. If you haven’t yet finished the book, or haven’t bought it yet: consider this your spoiler alert! I highly recommend holding off on reading this review until you do. After this message, I cannot be held liable for any spoilers you bump into along the way.

So many of you have been requesting book reviews on my YouTube channel! But I feel a book on my favorite band is a natural enough place to start.

My review of MC5: An Oral Biography boils down to this:

Holy shit, I would have killed for this resource a year ago.

I don’t know who it was on the Sound Opinions podcast who said oral histories are lazy, but I thoroughly disagree. I can only imagine the sheer volume of STUFF Brad and Jan had to sort through to put this concise and fairly comprehensive history of the MC5 together. It took decades. Furthermore, assembling an oral history is one great big game of telephone. You have to call back and forth on your contacts list a lot, asking ad nauseam, “Hey man, did this really happen?” By far the best instance of cross-time telephone surrounds the miniskirt thing.

Wait, what??

Okay. From what I can find, the rumor in question first came from the MC5’s 1969 cover story in Rolling Stone Magazine. Eric Erhmann wrote:

“Lead vocalist Rob Tyner, 23, lifelong Motor City inhabitant. Teases his hair and wears bench-made dancing boots – often wears miniskirts and tights on stage.”

(quoted from: Eric Erhmann, "Detroit's MC5: Kick Out The Jams!” Rolling Stone Magazine, 1/4/1969)

Now we have this book, in which everyone else swears up and down that Robin Tyner wore a skirt, and Robin Tyner swears up and down he did not wear a miniskirt. I was rolling on the floor laughing at the Rob Tyner having nothing short of a hissy fit in print over this:

“Bullshit over me wearing a miniskirt! Goddamn lie. I wore a green sparkly shirt that was long, had long tails on it. And I had tights on underneath, and high boots, and the press said that I was wearing a fucking miniskirt...That’s the one thing I really want in the book. I did not wear a fucking miniskirt.” (Brad Tolinski, Jaan Uhelski, Ben Edmonds: “MC5: An Oral Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band” 2024)

...tights aren’t much better, Robert!!

I neglected to mention the miniskirt thing in “MC5: A Brief History” because it just seemed like a crock of shit. In hindsight, I regret leaving it out because...come on. It’s really funny.

This, and most of Rob’s appearances in the book I believe, came from a series of fantastic interviews Ben Edmonds conducted while staying with Rob for a time. Why am I so focused on all this brouhaha over a maybe-skirt? Because one of the most special things about this book is that this is the most that most of us (all the fans who came along after 1991, I wasn’t even born yet then,) this is all we will ever get to hear from Rob Tyner. When I picked this up, I thought we’d hear from him a few times here and there, and that the narrative would be mostly driven by Wayne. That’s how it’s always been since I became a fan. Until now, the most substantial resource on their history we really had was his book, The Hard Stuff. I used that extensively for ABH. MC5: An Oral Biography’s narrative is really driven by Rob. One can imagine why that’s significant to me.

I wish I’d gotten my reaction to hearing Blood Brothers all the way through for the first time on film, and hearing the surprise interview tacked onto the end of the record. That was the first time I’d ever heard Rob speak. I just didn’t know what to do with myself. I still don’t. The MC5 were once in a lifetime, but I can’t shake Rob Tyner. Like Wayne said on the Track By Track podcast, there’s only one of him.

This book has, in a lot of ways, solved the mystery of Rob.

I was also really pleased with hearing from the women of the MC5 story: Becky Tyner, Rob's wife, and Wayne’s girlfriend at the time Chris. My god, Chris made young Wayne look like a jerk. Correction: young Wayne made himself look like a jerk. Chris only delivered us the picture of Wayne Kramer in 1969, and you couldn’t tell that guy shit. He was young, talented, and hot, and he knew it. It’s the classic guitarist’s ego. An OralBiography presents two totally different Waynes at once: the one who had a lot to learn still, and the one who was forced to learn from his mistakes.

Wives and girlfriends are different tiers in the rock-and-roll hierarchy. There’s the wives, girlfriends, and groupies. We got to hear from two of the three groups. Given my particular affinity of groupie history, I do wish we’d get to hear from the groupies someday. I know they’re out there, and I’m not sure why they haven’t been interviewed officially or not.

The pictures are now rolling in from the MC5’s exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum. This one, posted by Heavy Lifting principal writer and singer Brad Brooks, caught my eye.

Do you see what’s back there? Waaaay in the back, out of the light to preserve the integrity of what has to be really fragile fabric? If my eyes don’t deceive me, that’s the shiny disco pirate shirt. I thought they were gone forever! Some guy in the comments of ABH said they were sold off! So Hall of Fame, if you see this: I beg of you, take museum catalog-quality photos of the shiny disco pirate shirt! Some random chick wants to study the pattern and remake it!

Becky and Chris provide wonderful insights about the 5’s stage garb in An Oral Biography. It confirms a conclusion I came to in ABH: that of clothing being such an important part of the 5’s act in the ’60s. They wore lots of sequins and lame to catch the light. Especially Wayne; he had some serious stage moves. They wore striped pants to show off their legs. Bright colors. Dennis would often wear just a vest because he’d be sweating buckets sat in the back, those stage lights got hot. It was all about movement. We’ve all seen the videos and marveled at how much energy they packed into each show. The clothes highlighted that: Fred wore fringe on his cowboy shirts, Wayne tied flags to his strat. Rob wore these big billowing sleeves that had a beautiful motion to them when he flailed about on stage.

None of the above would be confirmed – or even possible – without the 5’s ladies. Their contributions aremade even more remarkable by all of them independently confessing they didn’t know how to sew before this! I do know how to sew and I can tell you making menswear is a bitch!! They put in the work to give their guys their look. Wives, girlfriends, and groupies are the reason rock and roll looks the way it does.

Thank you Brad and Jaan for cementing their importance in the 5’s canon. Especially Becky, the one woman I always wanted to hear from. This book gave Becky her flowers.

We hear from Leni Sinclair as well! Between the clothes and Leni’s photography, such a macho band as the MC5 (they almost named themselves The Men and I’m glad they didn’t, that would’ve been an SEO nightmare down the line) were filtered through a uniquely female lens. I’ve always picked up on it. I’ve always appreciated it.

There are still big-time revelations to be made; like Dennis being the first one to quit the band and Rob leaving in solidarity with him. Not the other way around, like the generally-accepted narrative of the 5’s story has touted for decades. I knew Rob and Dennis were tight. I included a story in ABH that Dennis once told; of Rob taking care of him through his heroin withdrawals. Well and truly, that had me fucked up. I was bawling when I first it. Many of An Oral Biography’s revelations have to do with the very real friendships between these men; the spirit the MC5 was built on in the first place.

My only two unfulfilled wants from this book were Fred’s perspective and a history of the making of High Time. Considering the state the band was in, we’ll likely never get the story of High Time. Everyone was way too whacked out to remember much of anything. Fred was the main songwriter on that album, and he had all these big plans for the Ascension thing. He had such a hand in their later history. I’m struck by how elusive a figure he remains in the MC5 story. We do not hear from Fred Smith at all in this book.

hFrom what I know, there’s not much of him in the ill-fated MC5: A True Testimonial either. It seems he didn’t have much of anything to say about the 5.

If An Oral Biography solved the mystery of Rob, it leaves the mystery of Fred unsolved.

Overall, the narrative of this book is quite lopsided. Wanna know how many pages it takes to get from the making of Back In The USA to the end of the band? 32 pages. 32 pages of a 270-page book. Hell, I gathered more information than this book did. I know everyone’s most interested in the Kick Out The Jams-era 5, but 1970-72 were no less active. Plus, I would’ve loved to hear some drunken adventures from their Europe years.

Regardless of when it stopped being fun for each individual guy, all in all it’s no wonder the MC5 imploded the way they did. They made very little money gigging relentlessly, what little money they had at the height of their fame was funneled into a commune. A lot of times, it felt like a thankless cause. Their breakup with the Sinclairs and the White Panthers is so jagged. Brad and Jaan did one hell of a job capturing that, I can’t get it out of my head. Then the guys ran into cosmically shit luck and got beat up by heroin. Call it rock-and-roll’s great comedy of errors, call it Aristotle’s theory of tragedy. An Oral Biography captures it all.

But Aristotle’s theory of tragedy couldn’t account for the album that was to follow this storied breakdown. What do I think of Heavy Lifting?

End of Part 1

– AD ☆

This post corresponds to the Heavy Lifting episode of Vinyl Monday, originally posted 10/28/2024. To watch the full episode, visit my YouTube channel here.