Sex, Drugs, and Venture Capital
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Thomas’s film production company, Future/Now Films, has been making a documentary about the Detroit rock legends for nearly three years now. Despite several grants, including one from the Illinois Arts Council, Future/Now has only been able to raise a third of the film’s budget of more than $300,000. Thomas cited the MC5’s revolutionary stance–not just all the “fucking,” he insisted, but the band’s advocacy of thinking and doing for oneself–as a red flag for potential backers of MC5: A True Testimonial. But as MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer himself says in the 1996 oral history of punk Please Kill Me, “We had all the rhetoric of being revolutionary and new and different, but really what it was, was the boys got to go fuck and the girls couldn’t complain about it.” And with industry types buzzing about white Detroit rapper Eminem’s filthy Interscope debut throughout the conference, the MC5’s “revolution” was looking positively quaint.
For instance Marsh went so far as to say that the “rock ‘n’ roll in the streets” legacy was apparent in the revelry on Sixth Street in Austin each night–though in reality the main drag of the city’s nightlife district, teeming with stumbling-drunk frat boys and credit-card-wielding A and R scouts, bore a closer resemblance to Rush Street on Saint Patrick’s Day than to Lincoln Park during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where the MC5’s performance served as prelude to a riot. And Kramer, who records for the southern California megaindie Epitaph, took the opportunity to anoint punk-rock retreads (and labelmates) Pennywise and Rancid the carriers of his old band’s torch.
The most recent album by Chicago’s reclusive weirdo-roots group Souled American, Notes Campfire, originally released by the tiny German indie Moll in 1997, will finally come out domestically on April 6. Eric Babcock, a cofounder of the Bloodshot and Checkered Past labels, is releasing it on yet another imprint, Catamount. The band’s four out-of-print Rough Trade albums–Fe, Flubber, Around the Horn, and the exceptionally hard-to-find UK-only Sonny–are also being reissued, on Tumult, a label started specifically for that purpose by Andee Connors of the San Francisco band A Minor Forest. After playing a rare show at South by Southwest last week, Souled American celebrated the reissues with three shows in the Bay Area, where the band’s following dwarfs its hometown fan base.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Filmmaker Dave Thomas; MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer photos by Kevin Delahunty.
