http://www.sonicsrendezvous.com/MC5/inquirer.html
DKT / MC5 is fighting over a film about its legendary past
By Dan DeLuca - Philadelphia Inquirer Music Critic - 16 June 2004
In the rock-and-roll history books, the MC5 gets its own chapter.
The confrontational Detroit guitar army, born in 1964, has an outsized reputation as a punk-rock progenitor and possibly the greatest in the long line of raucous Motor City bands that includes the Stooges and the White Stripes.
The MC5 is best known for its fist-pumping call-to-arms "Kick Out the Jams," which singer Rob Tyner - who died in 1991 - always delivered with the mother of all expletives.
Yet it released only three uneven albums before imploding in 1972. The mythic status of the band - whose surviving members, bass player Michael Davis, guitarist Wayne Kramer, and drummer Dennis Thompson, will play the Trocadero tonight as DKT/MC5 - is mostly sustained via oral history.
For fans, an MC5 reunion would seem to be cause for celebration. Instead, the tour has been marred by a dispute over MC5: A True Testimonial, a documentary all parties agree captures the band in all its gloriously self-defeating brilliance.
At issue is a rift between the filmmakers and Kramer, who is supported by the other original group members, over music licensing and what Kramer says was a deal for him to act as Testimonial's music producer. If the conflict remains unresolved, the film may never be released on DVD and the band could remain merely the stuff of legend.
"What the MC5 represent is a sense of possibilities . . . a sense that whatever it is you want to do, you need to do it wholeheartedly, and hurl yourself into it," Kramer says. (He, Davis and Thompson are the DKT of the tour name. They're joined by singers Mark Arm of Mudhoney and Evan Dando of Lemonheads, plus guitarist Marshall Crenshaw.)
"That's what 'kick out the jams' means: Live life to the fullest, do something, make something happen."
That message is everywhere in Testimonial, a seven-year project completed by David C. Thomas and Laurel Legler in 2002 and due on DVD last month after a smattering of festival screenings. Plans for the DVD were halted in March after Kramer, the charismatic star of the documentary, instructed publishing firm Warner/Chappell Music to deny Thomas and Legler access to MC5 music.
The pair's Future/Now Films has filed a motion in Los Angeles federal court to explore whether Kramer can dictate the band's licensing rights. A decision is expected in August.
A True Testimonial is a riveting film that traces the MC5 from its garage-band start through its days at Detroit's Grande Ballroom - where its debut, Kick Out the Jams, was recorded in 1969 - and where the band took macho pride in facing off against headliners such as Cream.
The film works as a shadow history of the period as it chronicles the MC5's experiments with free jazz and its alliance with John Sinclair's White Panther Party. Footage includes government surveillance tape of the band playing Chicago's Lincoln Park during the tumultuous 1968 Democratic convention. And it follows the quintet (including coleader and guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith, who died in 1994) as it records 1970's Back in the U.S.A. with future Springsteen producer Jon Landau, and breaks up two years later, riven by drugs and disillusion.
"They had that group charisma, and an intelligence and a sense of humor," says Crenshaw, a native Detroiter. "The first time I saw them I was 14 and they were opening for Jimi Hendrix. I remember I was afraid of them. They were frightening."
Crenshaw has been friends for 20 years with Kramer, now 55, but he admires Testimonial. "It would be horrible if it didn't come out," he says. "One of the things I love about it is that you see the band's rise and fall, and there's no redemption. It ends on a tragic note."
In March, Jackson Smith, the musician-son of Fred Smith and his wife, singer Patti Smith, told the Detroit News, "It's a travesty that it would be blocked. It's a great document of the band."
On July 6, the Kramer-sanctioned DVD Sonic Revolution: A Celebration of the MC5, comes out. It's a film of a 2003 London concert in which the DKT lineup is joined by guests such as Lemmy Kilminster of Motorhead. Critics allege that Kramer has blocked Testimonial to safeguard his "authorized" DVD.
The guitarist, who has released several solid solo albums since 1995, says it's untrue.
He contends that Thomas and Legler agreed he would produce the film's music and control the soundtrack rights. Thomas, 48, a longtime fan who says he aimed to capture the band's "weird, ugly glory and fabulous ineptitude" with his first film, calls the very notion "absurd": "The use of music as a narrative, with songs like 'Motor City Is Burning,' are all directorial and editorial decisions."
Thomas, who calls the dispute "a shakedown," says he entered into a partnership with Davis and Thompson to share profits from the $750,000 film, but that Kramer resisted.
On the contrary, "we had a deal" concerning his role "and they reneged," responds Kramer, who says his error was in not getting a written commitment.
Despite it all, Kramer says, "I think it's a superb film. In fact, I even think David Thomas did a fine job on the music. But . . . now they've attacked me in a court, and dragged my name through the mud in the press. And I'm not a doormat."
So will A True Testimonial be, like Robert Frank's 1972 Rolling Stones documentary with a title unfit for a family paper, a great rock movie few will ever see?
"The truth will win out," answers Thomas, who says that "despite my fury and . . . frustration, part of me still loves [Kramer]."
Though it may seem perverse that the MC5 guitarist is preventing people from seeing the movie that finally does his band justice, Kramer is sanguine.
"I don't need the glory," he says. "I've been telling the story of the MC5 my whole life. It belongs to me and my partners in the band. It doesn't belong to Future/Now Films, or anyone else. It belongs to us."