MC5 “’66 Breakout!” 1966/1999. Total Energy Records. Today, September 14th, is MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith’s birthday (b. 1949 d. 1994). This album is a compilation put together by Wayne Kramer from MC5′s early recordings and demos. Some of the tracks were recorded at Cody High School, complete with kids howling in the background (”Looking At You” and “Black To Comm” – Kramer calls “Black To Comm” the band’s “traditional room clearing device. People didn’t start to get this kind of playing till much later at the Grande Ballroom. Dropping acid helped.”). A few were laid down in Kramer’s mom’s basement (including the Van Morrison cover of “Baby Please Don’t Go”), one (”Break Time”) at a Polish wedding! One of my favorite MC5 songs, recorded at a normal studio during their first true studio session, appears on the comp: “I Can Only Give You Everything.”

According to Kramer’s liner notes, “The MC5 on this record are at the beginning of the process of finding out who we were. Not yet the zealous revolutionaries to come. Not yet conscious of the work of Coltrane and Sun Ra or Archie Shepp or Albert Ayler, but stretching and searching for own voice. Working out these new ideas in music. Pushing the sound further than any of our contemporaries in the Detroit music scene.”