TITLE: "Black To Comm"
ARTIST: The MC5
ALBUM: Are You Ready To Testify? The Live Bootleg Anthology
RELEASE DATE: 2004
As I've been laboriously moaning about for the past several weeks, it's been a bit of a bummer of a Summer, largely due to my sudden lack of employment last month. And as I've mentioned in several of the last posts, the ensuing weeks have been occupied by my tireless search to get re-situated. Things seem to be starting to happen now at long last, but I'm not out of the quicksand just yet. In any event, it's taken a toll on my mood, and I haven't really been my normal, (arguably) cheery self.
I was especially caught up in a maudlin state last week. I was on the subway, on my way home from a job interview out in Brooklyn and my head was swimming with hypothetical situations, projections, worst case scenarios, etc. My medical benefits were slipping away, and my financial responsibilities were -- if anything -- mounting. I started to fret. My confidence started to falter. Will I be able to make this all work? Will we be alright? Will I get my family out of this and find a great new job that won't drive me bananas?
In an effort to snap myself out of it, I slipped on my headphones while stuck between stations under the East River. As if by divine providence, the first song to come exploding out of my headphones was "Black To Comm" by the MC5. I knew instantly that everything was going to be alright.
I could blather on here about the storied legacy of the MC5 and how they were playing Punk Rock a good decade before even my beloved Ramones had started to beat the snots out of each other in a Queens garage. I could wax rhapsodic about their sprawling influence on everyone from Kiss, Patti Smith and The Clash through Black Flag, Rage Against The Machine and Green Day. They've been covered by everyone from Blue Oyster Cult and The Damned to Primal Scream and Jeff Buckley. I could put on my rock historian hat and explain what the title of this song, "Black to Comm," actually means. I could pound my fist against my keyboard and assert that the late MC5 frontman, Rob Tyner is one of the most sorely undersung rock vocalists the world's ever known. Outside of greasy, acne-speckled music geek circles, the MC5 are reduced to little more than a footnote, despite the fact that witless wannabes can now buy "vintage" MC5 t-shirts at crap outlets like Urban Outfitters. Justin Timberlake -- of all people -- infamously appeared on the cover of VIBE a few years back decked out in a MC5 shirt. I actually don't mind a lot of Timberlake's music, but I'll bet you fifty bucks he can't name even two songs by the MC5, if even that. In any case, if you want the history and significance of the band -- the White Panther Party, The Guitar Army, "Dope, Guns & Fucking In The Streets," the Yippies, the Chicago `68 riot, etc. -- there is a host of information out there. Check out John Sinclair's book, for a start.
But the proof in this specific instance, meanwhile, is simply in the listening. This particular recording of "Black To Comm" (there is no studio recording of it, to my knowledge) is from a box set from a couple of years back called Are You Ready To Tesfity? which culled a few widely circulated bootlegs from decades past. I already had a clutch of MC5 boots on cassette (along with their seminal live debut, Kick Out The Jams), so originally wasn't going to pick it up. As fate would have it, however, I was pitching reviews to a prominent entertainment magazine at the time, and zealously pleaded with them to let me review this box set (they declined, -- instead, they had me write an album by a "trip hop" also-ran which was basically dead on arrival). But I'd jazzed myself up so much that I just went out and bought myself a damn copy of Are You Ready To Testify? anyway. My paltry "trip-hop" review ran in the magazine, and I never wrote for them again, but I didn't care, because Are You Ready To Tesfity? had rekindled my love for the MC5, and all was right with the world.
While the sound quality varies through the three discs, there is a slew of amazing, balls-out moments of rock'n'roll here. But absolutely nothing rocks quite as hard nor taps directly into that primal wellspring of adrenalized sonic fury like the recording of "Black To Comm" from the band's performance at Michigan's Saginaw Civic Center on January 1st, 1970, captured on Are You Ready... at the tail end of Disc Two.
"Lookout!" barks Tyner just as guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith busts into that feral, relentless two-chord riff. Apart from some false-stops (allowing Tyner to proselytize and rile the crowd up some more) the riff in question will not change for the next seven minutes (there's another recording on this set that goes on for eleven minutes). Two chords. That's it. Your Mom could probably play it. But when "Brother" Wayne Kramer on the second guitar first strikes his strings (at exactly 00:41) before joining Smith and ushering in the rest of the band with that pounding, unstoppable riff, it is fucking BRILLIANT. There is no bridge. There is no middle-eight. There is no deviation. There is no apology. There is no escape. There is only "Black To Comm."
"D'YA FEEL ALRIGHT?"
Tyner's exhorting here is very much of its era and shows a studied adoration for James Brown's similarly rabble-rousing shitck (albeit a lot less funky), but his delivery is so passionate and cathartic that you can hardly fault him for it. Personally speaking, I find it nigh on impossible to not get the hell up out of my seat to strike any number of moronic poses -- legs akimbo, fist aloft, etc. -- when I hear this version of "Black To Comm," and that's probably just as Tyner, Kramer, Smith and the rest of'em would have had it. For all its ferocity and high volume, this is joyous, life-affirming music that provides a catalyst for my mood like precious little else. Back on that stalled subway car, I'll be damned if I didn't stand up (as I said, I cannot sit when this plays) and sneer discreetly behind my sunglasses, fighting the urge to maniacally strum an invisible Fender along with Brother Wayne. Everything's going to be alright. Drop The Bomb. Black To Comm. Play It Loud.
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