LONG LIVE THE MC5: the MC5's history in Southwestern Michigan

On Saturday, after six previous attempts, the MC5 are finally being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It is the wrong category (Musical Excellence instead of Performers), and it has taken entirely too much time to get here. It is absolutely bullshit that they were not first ballot hall of famers.

However, during the various commemorative activities here in the Motor City last weekend around the book launch for the new oral history, MC5: An Oral Biography of Rock's Most Revolutionary Band (which I wrote about for the cover story of Detroit's alt-weekly, the Metro Times) I learned that very few people are making the distinction between the Performer category and the Musical Excellence category – what matters to most people who care is that they are in the Hall of Fame, period.

On Saturday, the city of Lincoln Park – where the band got their start – decreed it was MC5 Day and held a day of community festivities in a local park adjacent to the town bandshell, where the MC5 played in their early days. Proclamations were issued, a tree was planted, Becky Tyner spoke, Jackson Smith was present, Sugar Tradition played a set of originals and covers (if you are not hip to them, check them out – easily Detroit's best new group). The plaque adjacent to the tree is below. No one was pointing out the difference in the induction categories. I mumbled something about it to a friend and we both agreed that it was bullshit but that we were not going to be the ones pointing out the discrepancy. [You can see more photos of that day here.]

PSA: There is a fantastic exhibit of MC5 memorabilia in the Lincoln Park Historical Society, which is only open on Wednesdays and Saturdays (and during special events, which is how I saw it a few years back). You need a car to get there, but you need a car to sightsee in Detroit anyway.

That brings us to this week's research project. Because of the MC5 book I learned that the MC5 and I were actually in the same city multiple times, although I was 5 years old at the time. My family lived in St. Joseph, Michigan, from 1969-1974, and during that time period, the 5 played about half a dozen shows which had great impact on the local populace. In the book, Rob Tyner mentions that the Benton Harbor police passed an ordinance forbidding the band from moving onstage, and while I couldn't (yet) run that down anywhere (trust me that I am absolutely going out there to dig into local archives), I did find a treasure trove of ads for shows as well as letters to the editor in the Benton Harbor Herald-Palladium.

Springsteen fans will be familiar with the Hullabaloo clubs, which were a chain of teen clubs located around the country, including one in Benton Harbor. The August 9 show is the one that got them in trouble, as we learn in this letter to the editor that appeared in the August 19th edition of the Herald-Palladium.

In my mind, Eddie Trainor looks like Sam the Eagle. But he definitely started something.

There were no less than five additional letters of support for the band printed in the ensuing weeks, as well as another dude expressing his Sam the Eagle-esque outrage.

I'm including the dates because even though I remember the world before the internet existed, it's kind of like watching smoke signals. People used to... read things, and then write letters and send them through the mail. Then someone had to open them, read them, and typeset them into the newspaper.

I love that this next letter brings the Who into the discussion.

"There will probably be two people out there and I think they know who they are." Pretty harsh words for Terry Lenz and his fellow L7 Eddie Trainor, especially for someone who is signing her name and her street address in the public newspaper!

Between these shows and the next one, apparently the police did in fact issue some kind of edict, based on the letter below. However, remember Pam Kettlehut? Well, she had some friends and they authored a joint letter which was printed on September 26:

This letter from October 2, once again written by the Kettlehut sisters and their associates, gives us some insight into the objections of the constabulary:

Now we've got a flame war going on. This is basically the 1960's version of "well if you're such a big fan, name their 10 best songs." He probably wore some kind of hat.

In the second letter, we've got the newspaper version of "some people are saying."

I was five years old when all of this was happening in the corner of the Mitten closest to the Indiana state line, but even at the age of five I was of the opinion that we were living in the middle of nowhere (we didn't even have sidewalks, a thing I often complained about as a child) but my opinion of the area has greatly improved with having unearthed this information.

I know that these were minuscule towns and that the daily paper was only too happy to have something that young people were going to be interested in reading. In between the ads for shows and the letters to the editor, the paper also featured every AP story about the MC5 getting arrested, smoking marijuana, protesting the war, and swearing in public.

Yes, I'm tickled because I have a personal connection to this particular locale, but I think it's a very potent microcosm of the extent of the band's influence at a time where you couldn't hear music without it being on the radio or buying a record and you couldn't see a band without, you know, physically going to see them. This is a lot of press for a band appearing in a town so small and backwards that when we lived there, my mom used to have to go to the mall in South Bend when she wanted to shop for clothes that she would actually wear.

LONG LIVE THE MC5.