THE first time I saw the MC5 was at Detroit’s Cobo Arena on December 10, 1965, opening for The Dave Clark Five. Just a few days before, the band had been playing sock hops and skating rinks around Detroit’s less-desirable suburbs, so it was a massive upgrade to find themselves performing in front of 12,000 screaming teenage girls. Despite their set consisting solely of covers, a brutal confidence and devil-may-care brashness was already in evidence, confirmed by the smirk on guitarist Wayne Kramer’s face.
“I literally was never the same after that show with The Dave Clark Five,” Kramer told me the week before his death from pancreatic cancer on February 2, aged 75. “I was so high on just being there, it was like taking acid or something. You could literally wave at one side of the
