venta

A few months ago one of ChrisC's gig-list trawls produced an opportunity to see the MC5 at the Royal Festival Hall. I declined, since they're a band which I know little about, and the tickets were expensive. However, someone else who did buy a ticket suddenly found themselves with a slight case of sent-to-the-US-for-work at short notice, so I adopted their ticket to stop it from feeling all abandoned.

(Yes, I did go to see Lou Reed under suspiciously similar circumstances last year. Yes, it was the same guy. He's not very good at being in the right country.)

Warning: when writing gig reviews, my tenses always get confused, because I describe the gig in present tense, and digress in the past.

The house-lights go down, and the support act, Sun Ra Arkestra, slowly file onto the stage. They are dressed in crudely-made capes of glittering material, and truly ludicrous hats; their costume person clearly received "Junior school nativity: Wise Men" as a design brief. They shuffle gently around the stage, and then begin playing apparently at random.

To digress for a moment: Sun Ra, now sadly deceased, appears to have been one of those proper too-much-acid, I'm-from-Saturn, dig-my-philosophy nutters. There used to be a lot of them around, now we're just stuck with David Icke. However, Sun Ra also founded, among other groups, the Sun Ra Arkestra. They're still going, with a new bandleader.

So, the band begins to play at random, and descends into near cacophony - people playing, clapping, shouting, singing with only a vague sense of cohesion - and I beging to get something of a sinking feeling about where this is all heading. However, after a song and a half's worth of complete wank, they suddenly break into proper, almost big-band, jazz. They then continue to slide about between the two extremes for the next hour or so.

There are approximately thirteen of the orchestra, though rarely all playing at once. At any one time some of them are playing, some are wandering about, maybe one has drifted out to the side of the stage to have a bit of a dance. Perhaps one of them is gliding round the stage, dropping sheafs of music onto music stands seemingly at random. The stage area is littered with drums, tambourines and other percussion instruments and at any stage any of the musicians seems to be free to think "sod playing the saxophone" and pick up a zob-stick instead. At one stage most of the ensemble gets up and boogies round the auditorium - remember this is the Royal Festival Hall, and the auditorium is not an inconsiderable size to boogie round.

And in their own way, the are delightful. They really are very good jazz musicians - I didn't know you could strum saxophones, but Marshall Allen, the bandleader, can. They intersperse the music with general goodwill, bonhomie, cheerfulness and cosmic waffle from beyond the stars, and it's all really rather endearing. There remain sections of really rather hard to understand music - I'm unsure whether I'm just ill-educated in my jazz, and too bound to the rhythms of Earth, or whether it really was just cacophony.

During a particularly wanky phase, I observed that while ChrisC and I were giggling like fools, the rest of the audience were nodding appreciatively or wearing expressions of concentration. I prefer to think that this is because the whole thing is a vast, cosmic joke they haven't got yet, and not that we're musical cretins. Your mileage may vary.

After a short interval (during which,

triskellian will be delighted to know, ice cream was available) the MC5 come on. Now, the proper reaction to this sentence is "aren't they dead yet?" Formed in 1964, they had the sort of hard-rocking punk-founding reputation that would lead you to expect them to have burnt out several decades ago.

The answer is that 60% of them are not dead (that's three out of the five). To be correct, the people walking onto the stage as the lights dim again are DKT/MC5. DKT/MC5 features the three remaining originals (Michael Davis/bass, Wayne Kramer/guitar and Dennis Thompson/drums) and has adopted Gilby Clarke from Guns 'n' Roses. Clarke brings huge quantities of floppy hair and a lovely bit of semi-acoustic to the party.

Clarke is, of course, noticeably way too young to be an original. Thompson, hiding under a baseball cap behind a drumkit, is barely visible. Kramer, cheerfully balding and wearing all white, looks exactly like someone's dad. He even dances like someone's dad. Only Davis, with a long, haggard, Iggy Pop-style visage looks raddled enough for the part.

They kick off with Ramblin' Rose (which I only know from the Smoking Popes cover), with Kramer taking the vocals. Although his voice is strangely light, his guitar is blistering - but the whole focus seems to be on him. I begin to wonder if Kramer, the only MC5 to enjoy recent solo success, is effectively touring with a backing band. But no, the next two songs are respectively Davis on vocals (either very bad, or very badly mixed - the singing is nearly inaudible), and much more promisingly, Clarke on vocals.

But the MC5 are aware that without Robin Tyner (who died in 1991), they're a singer short, and have taken to touring with guests. Enter Handsome Dick Manitoba, from The Dictators (of whom I've never heard, but apparently they open for The Stooges on a 70s tour, which gives you a rough idea). Despite having apparently knocked up his shirt from a leftover Sun Ra Arkestra costume, he sings, snarls and dances round the stage with the best of them.

The other guest singer, who takes over later, is Lisa Kekaula of Basement Jaxx[*]. Kekaula is a proper diva who can sing, shimmy, play maraccas ad have huge hair all at once. She has a big, fat, black voice (I hasten to add that she's neither big nor fat, though she is black) which seems designed for Motown, and is thus a somewhat unlikely match with a punk band. Even a Detroit punk band.

And yet, somehow, it all just works - some songs do come out almost as soul reworkings - Lookin' At You, one of the few MC5 songs I'm familiar with, sounds fantastic, and I'd love a recording of it.

With some bands, there is a song. A song which everyone expects to hear, and would be disappointed to miss. I guess those songs are often the bane of the band's life - I know Violent Femmes have gone on record as saying they hate Blister in the Sun. And so, towards the end of the set, Handsome Dick comes on stage, and says "It's time to..." He prowls among the feedback monitors, "Now it's time to..." He stares at the audience and yells "It's time to.... kick out the jams, motherfucker!".

Now, I'm not a big fan of the song. The shouted intro is an oft-sampled rallying cry, a scream of defiance and a seminal moment... but the rest of the song is a bit of a disappointment. The performance is great: despite the song's ubiquity they don't sound jaded and it comes out, spiky and defiant. I just don't really like it all that much.

Knowing very few of the songs, I'm a little stuck for remembering individual details otherwise. Suffice it to say that the MC5 still rock. I was long ago forced to ditch my reformed-punk-bands-suck attitude, but I still feel slightly guilty for liking a band I feel I ought to be shouting "sell-out" at. The MC5 still sound fresh and still sound relevant, and they've still got more energy than you might reasonably expect. The different singers' styles (and I believe DKT/MC5 vary their guest singers on different tours) have forced a certain amount of reinvention, and it's a great sound.

Their finale is, well, it's a little odd. The MC5 and Sun Ra co-wrote a song, and it would be performed "like never before", with all the members DKT/MC5 can rake up, all of the Arkestra, and a guest-ranter in the person of Dr Charles Moore.

Does anyone know who Dr Charles Moore is ? I feel I ought to know the name, and for some reason on sight I associated him immediately with Robert Anton Wilson. A huge, rotund guy wearing all black (except for red braces and bare feet), who strides on stage brandishing a bunch of notes at the audience. He assortedly wanders around, brandishes the notes, yells, rants, and generally sounds like a hell-fire preacher, before ultimately ripping up his notes, throwing them into the air, and commencing to be a didgeridoo.

In the meantime, the remaining 20 people on stage all pretty much do their own thing, to a very loose theme and beat. I certainly didn't identiy in there any vestiges of anything that could be called a "song" that someone had deliberately "written". I think the overall feeling was of slight relief when it ended.

In summary: go see the MC5. They rock. Go see the Sun Ra Arkestra if you like jazz, like it cosmic, and want an Experience.

Which just leaves me with one problem. I said I only knew a couple of MC5 songs ? Three, to be precise, if you count Ramblin' Rose.

So when Kramer introduced a song:

"We wrote this a long time ago. There was a war going on in another country, and we didn't like it. That was then. This is now. And there's a war going on in another country, and we still don't like it."

...I was somewhat surprised to find myself singing along:

They told you in school about freedom

But when you try to be free they never let ya.

I know all the words to The American Ruse. I've been hearing it in my head on and off ever since. The question is: why do I know it ?

I don't own any MC5 albums. As far as I can tell, I don't own any MC5 tracks on compilations. I think I must know a cover. My mp3 collection at work contains no tracks with the word "ruse" in the title. The usually-reliable Covers Project only lists one cover of the song, by a band called The Hellacopters. I've never heard of them, so I doubt it's their version I know.

So, has anyone else covered it that I'm likely to have heard, and heard regularly ? I doubt that I know it from an advert clip or a film, because I do know the whole song. The version I hear in my head sounds rocky, even slightly honky-tonk (I did wonder if it might be the Hoodoo Gurus - it isn't) and has a strange guitar break inserted just after the line about Joe's primitive bar - though versions heard in my head are notoriously unreliable.

Any information leading to the discovery of where I know this sodding song from will be richly rewarded in some form of alcohol or comestibles, subject to preference.

Update: The American Ruse - MC5 has now been tracked to a tape-compilation someone made for me to listen to in the car, and which I haven't played in a couple of years. Because I only ever listened to it in the car, I never really read the tracklisting properly, so hadn't registered the name.

[*] A bit of proper research reveals that actually Kekaula isn't in Basement Jaxx, she just sang on Good Luck. She's in a band called The Bellrays, about whom I know absolutely nowt.

In brief:

bateleur is last week's Designated Hero of the Week, for rescuing me with some nifty work with Illustrator. The t-shirt designs have finally gone to the press, I'll report back when I see them in the real.