“Live long and stay creative is my attitude,” Wayne Kramer said just a few months before his death, aged 75, in February this year. While he may have wished to extend his stay on the first count, he did succeed in overseeing an MC5 comeback record before pancreatic cancer cruelly put paid to any further activities.
While a lot of Heavy Lifting leans into the hard rock styles that MC5 influenced, what these performances retain is the essential raging-rebel attitude that fired the Detroit firebrands’ original incarnation. When the title track opens proceedings backed by Tom Morello’s guitars, it could well suit an Audioslave-type post-grunge project, yet it’s probably what the MC5 would have sounded like given the technology and sounds available to them if they’d formed 40 or 50 years later.
Barbarians At The Gate has a similarly familiar stomp, and new frontman and co-writer Brad Brooks is in strident voice as he rails against those in society who ‘want to live a lie on the edge of hate’. There’s also something agreeably unhinged about Kramer’s guitar playing, such as the manic, psych-tastic soloing on Barbarians and Black Boots. That style stands up proudly next to more technically skilled players that are invited to the Heavy Lifting party.
And while the guests still enhance other tracks, Kramer’s voice can still be heard, in spirit if not always literally. A case in point is stomping highlight The Edge Of The Switchblade, on which Alice In Chains’ William Duvall voices Kramer’s recollections that ‘We took our stands, kicked out the jams, set some young minds free. It was all for the music… cos we rarely got paid’. Slash then sprays welcome murals of graffiti across that track, before Dennis ‘Machine Gun’ Thompson, who also passed away this year, delivers his own parting gift in the shape of powerful drumming on Blind Eye and Can’t Be Found.
Some pretty satisfying final testaments, then, but you also get the impression that Kramer in particular spent his final years having more fun than most septuagenarians can reasonably expect – witness the band’s gutsy assault on Edwin Starr’s 60s soul stomper Twenty-Five Miles, and the swaggering funk-rock romp of Because Of Your Car.
Oh, and if anyone was under the impression that MC5 were only ever a meat-and-potatoes guitar-rock affair, Hit It Hard includes saxophone on a distinctly groovy workout, in a conscious nod to the band’s penchant for free jazz. Mavericks to the end.
