Free Apathy for the Devil by Nick Kent Page B

falsetto.
    Then the power came back on and he and his co-workers -
guitarist Mick Ronson, bassist Trevor Bolder and drummer Woody Woodmansey - immediately went to work. What they unveiled that night was a more upmarket, cerebrally involving strain of glam rock than the fizzy pop/rock then being made by Marc Bolan’s T.Rex or America’s Alice Cooper. Bolan was mainly for the teeny-boppers anyway, whilst Cooper appealed specifically to shock-rock aficionados, but Bowie’s new approach had unlimited commercial range. Teenagers struggling with their sexual identities were able to instantly relate, whilst bookish students and young adults could obsessively sift through the lyrics and unravel subtle references to Nietzschean philosophy. Suddenly he’d struck the mother lode, becoming the era’s most adored teen idol, sex symbol, rock star and Dylanesque pop sage in one fell swoop.
    I wanted Bowie to be my first in-depth interview for Frendz but his management and press officer were always erecting obstacles; ‘I’m sorry - David’s at the dentist’s all this week’ was one line they kept using on me. What they were really saying was that their client was already way too high and mighty to waste valuable time explaining himself to some small-circulation rag. But then a call came through to Frendz headquarters that the MC 5 had freshly debarked from their native Michigan to take up residence in London and try their luck on British shores. Ronan O’Rahilly - an Irish-born would-be cultural provocateur who’d been a prime mover behind the UK pirate-radio boom of the mid-sixties - had bankrolled the move and was now busy contacting the underground press offering access to the group. I ended up doing my first-ever interview with them at their press officer’s ground-floor Chelsea flat in early February.
    The MC5 had been a big noise back in early 1969 when their debut album Kick Out the Jams - a rambunctious audio vérité capturing
of a typical live performance - was released. A biker named J. C. Crawford opens proceedings with the most unforgettable blast of verbal rabble-rousing ever committed to audiotape. ‘Brothers and sisters, you have five seconds to decide whether you are going to be the problem or the solution,’ he intones mesmerisingly in a hellfire preacher’s resonant baritone. Then the group hit their first chord and you can hear the room they’re playing in being suddenly rent asunder by the sheer volume and intensity of their evolving performance.
    The 5 were a truly phenomenal live act - the only white US band who could potentially upstage the Rolling Stones in a concert hall - but they also liked to cultivate a rough and ready image of themselves as ‘anything goes’ political revolutionaries that quickly backfired on them in the marketplace. Elektra, their record label, let them go shortly after Kick Out the Jams ’ release because their soulmates in Michigan’s White Panther Party had alienated a leading record-selling outlet with a controversial advert campaign in the local Motor City media. Shortly after that, White Panther kingpin John Sinclair - also the group’s manager - was jailed on drug charges and the 5 were suddenly cast adrift from their social circumstances. They signed to the Atlantic label and made a couple of studio albums but never seemed to find a solid supportive fan base outside the Midwest. It was at this point that heroin started finding its way into the less affluent areas of Michigan state and various group members began falling under its spell. Moving to England then was partly a way of distancing the group from bad acquaintances and the dangerous places they tended to frequent more and more whilst still resident in their old home stretch.
    The group looked like they’d been dragged through a bush
backwards when I met them. They still talked a lot about starting a revolution but this time it was a less specific revolution of the mind, not one involving ‘drugs, loud