High Times And Misdemeanours

I blame that Vincent Damon Furnier fella, I really do.  His fabulously rocked out version of MC5’s ‘Sister Anne’, served to us hot with Wayne Kramer on guitar, on his Breadcrumbs EP was to blame.  Somehow repeat listening to this track over a whole weekend breached my ironclad ‘no more records for me this month’ willpower and I ran out and bought MC5 High Time on the Monday.  Wham-Blam good goddamn it is great!

But how come a distinguished international tastemaker like me never owned this in the first place? I know, I know, it was a definite omission from the 1537.  I blame university.  I knew Kick Out The Jams as a teenager, but while I liked the way it all kicked off* it didn’t sustain my interest.  Later on as a student a mate leant me Back In The USA and High Time and I just remember thinking that I quite liked 3 tracks across the two tapes and that was that.  I would point out that this was back in the Cider Years** when all manner of fermented apple-based craziness was going down, laced with (and I can admit these things now) a frankly prodigious intake of seventeenth century poetry.  Crazy times man, but I came through them, stronger.

By 1971 MC5 were going through their own Cider Years and I don’t think I am overstating their own chemical excesses with the comparison.  Everything was stiffing around them, their sales were rotten, reviews iffy and Detroit was increasingly fractious as the counter culture split and writhed around them and hard drugs entered their orbit.

So they just screwed their courage to the sticking point and laid down their hardest rocking LP, playing for their very lives themselves; they’d go down swinging at least.   High Times, man.  

High Time is just everything I love about rock and roll in one lit-up blast.  Geoffrey Haslam’s production is clear, warm and tough as teak, unlike Jon Landau who neutered the band’s power on their second album, Haslam understood the value of some heavy-duty bass. Funnily enough I think High Time sounds much better on my comparatively crappy suitcase turntable than on the 1537-O-Tron sure you need to whack the vols up to distortion levels but this is an LP built for mass transit and dissemination, rather than audiophile study.

The rockers like the strident ‘Over And Over’ and the epoch-marking ‘Sister Anne’ sound righteous and fully-charged, but never one-dimensional.  The band all just lean right in to these tracks, giving it absolutely everything and Rob Tyner sells every vocal a hundredfold.

Personal favourites here are … just every damned thing.  Okay, let’s break it on down a tad:

• Baby Won’t Ya – Fabulous lurching, hyper-wired and lustful.  Like the Stones playing real fast through a faulty PA, on the Titanic, surrounded by hot mer-chicks; probably.
• Gotta Keep Movin’ – Crosstown Traffic gone Downtown.  Some superb guitaring-ing.
• Poison – Ooh, this cleans out the skull a bit.  Everything recorded far too loud and with a talky bit in the middle, just to thrill me even more.  they mean this one.
• Skunk (Sonically Speaking) – An all star^ freak-out drum and percussion workshop, with added cojones.  When those guitars kick in, they do kick hard.  The skronking brass section is particularly great at the end.

Then as always I just come back to ‘Sister Anne’ that truly righteous strong hymn to a truly righteous strong woman.  Damnit Fred Sonic Smith, no wonder Patti fell for ya.  It just sounds so great barrelling out of cheap speakers.

High Time is just a hotbed of flat-out rocking excellence.  Ignore the very-of-its-time gnomic nonsense in the gatefold and just concentrate on soaking up the yellow rays of sonic genius from the back cover^^.  Something this great, this pure, this condensed just couldn’t fail.

Well, except commercially, of course.  The MC5 flew off the rock n’ roll racetrack on the next curve, fracturing via discontent, drugs and all round bad juju.  Nobody wanted this in 1971.

A whole bunch of nice folks used this as rocket fuel to power the punk moonshot in 1977 though and the MC5, burning briefly as they did, burned real bright again; High Time, man, High Time.

977 Down.

PS:  Wrong LP, but this is just so great I had to share it – forget the squeaky vocals on the first track – how fucking cool is Wayne Kramer?!! the footwork, the tonguework!! Forty years ahead of their time … at least.

*censored version only back then.

**as my biographers will undoubtedly call them.  The capital letters are on purpose.

^including Bob Seger on ‘various drums and percussion instruments’.  

^^always something great about LPs with yellow covers, dontcha think?