MC5, "Back in the USA" (Atlantic, 1970)

Revisionist history sometimes makes superstars of musicians who weren't all that incredibly popular when they actually plied their trade.

Such was the case with the MC5, a Detroit-based ("MC" stands for "Motor City") quintet that gained some notoriety in the late '60s, but not a ton of sales. In later years, essays by various rock journalists extolling the band's groundbreaking status helped the MC5 attain celebrity status among more discerning music fans. By then, the group had been defunct for years, having given up the ghost after recording just three albums.

The first of those, "Kick Out the Jams," easily is its best known. Recorded live at Detroit's Grande Ballroom in late 1968, the band's performance represents one of the first sustained examples of the type of music that later becamed labeled as heavy metal. Its real selling point was its politics: The MC5's manager, John Sinclair, was a self-styled radical who steered the band in a direction to capitalize on the radical nature of the late-'60s "underground."

As such, the band wasn't shy about using strong language, and the on-record introduction to the title track contained a famously placed piece of profanity that basically led to the band's downfall. When Detroit's leading department store chain, Hudson's, refused to stock the album because of the offending word, the MC5 launched counter-publicity against Hudson's, using the exact same invective.

In the fallout, Elektra Records decided to dump the MC5 despite the relatively decent showing of "Kick Out the Jams," which peaked at No. 30. The band parted ways with Sinclair and signed with Atlantic, casting its fortunes with a young rock writer named Jon Landau who wanted to try his hand at production.

Their collaboration, "Back in the USA," is generally regarded as the MC5's masterpiece of sorts, perhaps in no small part because of Landau's place among the scribes. A good part of the album's reputation, though, was built on its apparent influence on the punk-rock movement half a decade or so later.

The reason, according to Dave Marsh's liner notes in Rhino's 1992 CD reissue, is "a sonic attribute (that) resulted from a production lapse." Apparently, Landau insisted that the equalization be pushed as high as possible. As Marsh writes, "Back in the USA sounds like it was played out on high tension wires, as if the treble clef had asserted dictatorship over the bass." The result was "a sound that was at times virtually bottomless."

The punks picked up on that approach, and when they became critical darlings, the writers naturally looked back to punk's roots to proclaim the MC5 a band of visionaries.

Does "Back in the USA" live up to the reputation? At times, yes. The best songs on the album (which clocks in at under half an hour) deliver the rock 'n' roll ideal of havin' a good time; the direction that good time is going is evident in the titles of songs like "Call Me Animal" and "Teenage Lust."

Not all of it fits, though. Politics rears its head again in "The American Ruse" and "The Human Being Lawnmower," and listening to singer Rob Tyner emote on the atypical ballad "Let Me Try" can be somewhat painful at times. Plus, the decision to bookend the album with covers of two '50s classics, Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" and Chuck Berry's "Back in the USA," seems a bit odd considering what the band was doing otherwise. But if the objective is to make a rock 'n' roll album, going back to the beginning seems like a good place to start.

That being said, the highlights quickly put to rest any reservations about some inconsistencies here and there. "High School" is a blast of energy that should have served as far more of an anthem for the '70s than Alice Cooper's over-the-top "School's Out" a few years later. The chorus of "High school, hey-hey-hey, you better let 'em have their way" still could be a great rallying cry today, if anyone ever decides to cover the MC5.

Even better is the hair-raising "Looking at You," a two-chord, all-out attack with Tyner setting the tone right off the bat: "When it happened, something snapped inside of me." What follows is his lament of heartbreak, punctuated by the screaming dual guitars of Fred "Sonic" Smith and Wayne Kramer. Regardless of the high equalization, this is what you call metal.

And regardless of whether the MC5's "Back in the USA" is a rock 'n' roll classic, it failed to sell in 1970, as did its followup the next year, "High Time" (later to inspire the name of a magazine still in publication). Atlantic dropped the group, and after a short stint trying to find an audience overseas, the band went its separate ways.

At that point, they didn't feel very much like superstars.