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ben-winch-writer-rocker · 6 years

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Live, Masonic Auditorium, Detroit, 01/14/1978

Fred “Sonic” Smith and Oppositional Defiance Disorder:

The appeal of MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith goes beyond his guitar work, savage, deft and incendiary as that work may have been, and far beyond what traces of that work remain via studio and live recordings. In this era of “over-diagnosed” psychological disorders, Smith’s “condition” might well be labelled, like Kurt Cobain’s, “oppositional defiance disorder”. But unlike Cobain, Smith had neither the drive to be a frontman nor the good grace (or self-doubt) to back down in the face of physical opposition. And unlike Cobain, he was no suicide; his anger faced squarely outwards, driven by a righteous indignation that, at first, was anything but self-implicating.

A famous MC5 creation myth paints the young would-be revolutionary. While discussing the band-to-come at a Detroit restaurant with Wayne Kramer and Rob Tyner, Smith knocked a glass over mid-rant and (according to Kramer) said, “Yeah, this is what we’ll do, we’ll just knock shit over if we wanna knock shit over. We’ll be powerful. We’ll take a stand.”

“That ain’t cool,” Tyner said. “That ain’t being powerful. You’re not taking a stand. You’re not proving anything.”

Smith: “Well what are you gonna do about it?”

Tyner: “I’ll do what I have to do.”

Smith: “Then let’s fight.”

So they fought outside in the icy parking lot. After a couple of punches it went to the ground and Smith, an athletic six-foot-plus, came out on top, fist raised. “I could smash your face in,” he said.

And Tyner said, “Well why don’t you?”

As Kramer tells it, for three teenagers this was deep, and they got in the car and drove around for hours analysing what had happened. For Smith, I suspect it was a turning point, maybe not just in his relationship with Tyner (“After that they were tight,” says Kramer) but in his understanding of what nowadays might be termed his disorder. Of course it didn’t stop him fighting (he’d spar with Tyner again, and tackle two policemen when they arrested MC5 manager John Sinclair), but just maybe it started him questioning, turning his ideals from “smash everything” to “smash what needs smashing”, and giving him the dignity and true-seeming righteousness that comes across so strongly in his future wife Patti Smith’s recollections. (Fred Smith died in 1994, aged 46. See Patti Smith’s book M. Train for some touching writing on the man.)

From Detroit delinquent to doting family man, Smith’s trajectory was always up, despite that the MC5 crashed and burned due to record-company hassles and Sonic’s Rendezvous Band never had the chance to repeat that ignominy, largely or partly, if the other players’ testimonies are accurate, because Smith willed it that way—because Cobain-like he taunted and insulted any A & R man plucky enough to make him overtures.

So, like the MC5, like the Flamin’ Groovies, like even—to some extent—the Stooges (whose masterpiece Raw Power was, production-wise, a misfire) Sonic’s Rendezvous Band are one of the great protopunk should-have-been-a-success stories. In a sense they may be the greatest, because of their failure, because of their mystique. And that mystique is rooted not only in mists-of-time semi-invisibility, but in the aura of rebel iconoclast Fred “Sonic” Smith.

Scott Morgan and the Tonic:

But since Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, despite the name, were a two-singer band, let’s discuss the second singer, especially as he was, by any traditional yardstick, the better frontman—louder, more professional, with clearer diction (Smith’s was, make no mistake, awful; fans will be arguing over the substance of his lyrics forever), and more possessing of what some listeners may have taken as charisma. And in any case, the first song on the album is his: “Electrophonic Tonic”.

Scott Morgan, a veteran of fellow almost-made-it Detroit rock band the Rationals, had cut his teeth as a frontman singing Otis’s “Respect” pre-Aretha’s-version and turned that song into a regional hit, which, thanks to the last-minute non-involvement of Jerry Wexler’s Atlantic, never made it national. (Faced with the Rationals’ lofty demand of five grand upfront, Wexler demurred, handed the song to Aretha, and the rest is history.) A soul singer, then, with a hard rock edge, which may simply have been what it took to get across in the intimate and sonically inadequate venues of Detroit in the late 1960s, Morgan delivers his parts here with an R & B frontman’s panache, positioning himself on the classic-rock continuum somewhere between Ted Nugent and Steve Marriot, though when he sets his band loose they kick harder—thanks to ex-Up bassist Gary Rasmussen and ex-Stooges drummer Scott Asheton as much as to Smith’s semi-insane, close-to-breaking-point, post-Chuck-Berry guitar solos—than almost anyone except AC/DC, and with a sheer abandon which the famous Scots-Australians, ever the professionals, rarely mustered.

But let’s back up a little. Harder than anyone? What about Sabbath, Zeppelin, Deep Purple? I’ll make it clear: Sonic’s Rendezvous Band doesn’t do lumbering. Much as they’re classic, classic as hell, you couldn’t call them dinosaurs because they’re too fleet-footed. But nor do they sprint, they’ve got too much distance to cover; every other track here clocks in at over five minutes, and two of them (Smith’s masterpieces “Sweet Nothin’” and “City Slang”) are nearer to seven. The tempo is Sex Pistols and up, the beat almost motoric. (Asheton focusses on hitting hard and keeping the pace; he hasn’t got time for fancy flourishes.) Their roots are in R ’n’ B boogie, just as Sabbath’s were in blues. And I’d say they were just about as ahead of their time as Sabbath, if inevitably (given they had no record deal) nowhere near as influential.

But back to the “Tonic”. It’s a good song: deft, workmanlike, shuffling the same old three classic-rock chords in a natural and not entirely expected fashion. There’s a nice halftime breakdown in the middle. It’s got grit. Those who weren’t bemoaning its classicism (this was a support slot at a Ramone’s gig, after all) were probably shaking their heads in disbelief at its onslaught, unless they were shaking their asses with sheer abandon, tearing up seating, going wild. As an opener and a mission statement, it kicks ass. But for me, it’s only in track two, “Sweet Nothin’”, that the magic happens.

Sweet Nothin’:

Who can say what arcane voodoo is at work here? On the surface it starts out not so dissimilar to track one. We’ve jumped from E to B though, a good sign. (B is a great guitar key, enabling riffs that E makes obscure.) But to start off with, at least, it’s the same three-chord theory. There’s a subtle key-shift in the pre-chorus, and then with the chorus we’re in new territory: the minor sixth—the “Raw Power” chord, the “Suffragette City” chord, the “Sonic Reducer” chord—rears its head and Smith puts his cards on the table. Like Sabbath’s embrace of the devil’s interval, this is a chord-change that would inspire an entire genre—postpunk—and it darkens proceedings and ups the drama as soon as Smith unveils it.

What can I say? “Sweet Nothin’” is an anthem, despite or maybe because of the fact that I can’t hear more than a few words of it. It’s a love song, that much I’m sure of, maybe penned for the soon-to-be Mrs Patti “Sonic” Smith. (Patti Smith was on the scene intermittently in Detroit around the time: the two had sparked up an affair—she was still married to her last husband—and SRB would support her in bigger venues, breaking away from their intimate, not to say dead-end, bar gigs, where according to legend they played for as few as six people.) Whatever the “message”, I don’t care; I feel it in my bones. And when Smith, after repeating the simple refrain “You’re really really something sweet nothin’” in the plainest of minor-key melodies five or six times before the final solo, sing-shouts “You take my breath away”, barely caring if he’s in earshot of the microphone, I know exactly what he’s saying. Besides, whoever said an anthem has to meansomething? What does “Pretty Vacant” mean? “There’s no point in asking, you’ll get no reply.” You either know it deep down, deeper than words, or you never will. “There’s more to the picture than meets the eye” after all, and “Sweet Nothin’” is as good an illustration as any.

To make it clear, “Sweet Nothin’”, in my opinion, is one of the top twenty rock songs ever. It gets in. It obsesses you, or obsesses me, and I say this as someone who discovered it at age 43, via Spotify, through a $200 portable Bluetooth player. As Roberto Bolañosaid, if you want to find out if something’s a masterpiece, translate it. Translate it badly. If it stillretains its power, there’s your answer. And this album, smothered in tape saturation and poorly mixed from the live desk, was hardly a good translation to begin with. It’s not a classic like Bowie’s Low, or Abbey Road, or even the flawed Raw Power—not a finely-wrought work of art. It’s more like a jam tape. And what’s more, like a jam tape that doesn’t half sound familiar. I’ve beenat those jams. I’ve played in them. Not that our jams were as powerful, but I’d say Sonic’s Rendezvous Band stake a convincing claim to sounding like what, to this day, many rock bands want to sound like.

Into the Red:

And so it goes, through the five-minute semi-psychotic choogle of “Asteroid B612” (weird name for Morgan’s declaration of righteous love for his woman, bisected by a brilliant, dexterous-soulful blues-at-11 solo from Smith) to Smith’s five-plus-minute slightly more contemplative but still excoriating “Gone With the Dogs”, which to tell the truth slightly pales, given that Smith’s voice is already hoarse and he’s just graced “Asteroid B612” with some of his tastiest guitar-work. But wait, that accolade may well go to track six, “Song L”, which attempts a truly strange percussive minor-chord motif that doesn’t quitework but adds a new-wave-like aspect to Smith’s palette (it almost sounds—wait for it—sophisticated), before the nuclear explosion of the solo. By now, admittedly, following Morgan’s “Love and Learn”, it all seems slightly like business as usual: high-energy rocker after high-energy rocker; two guitar solos a piece, apparently thrown in whenever Smith feels like it; each song culminating in a swelling classic-rock crescendo. Nonetheless it’s precisely the lack of dynamics that makes this feel so modern. It’s unrelenting.

And I wonder, was it only in the space above zero VU—well into the red—that Smith felt the thrill of being powerful, of knocking stuff over, that had made him want to play guitar in the first place, but without the need to do violence that had very nearly made him cave his friend’s face in? Whatever their motivation, for the remainder of the set he and his collaborators play their hearts out, so much so that by “City Slang”, pretty much the ultimate showstopper, it’s hard to believe they can still play at all. Yes, the performance is patchy compared to the seven-inch version (the only record released by SRB in its lifetime, and a flat-out masterpiece). Smith is barely enunciating by the last shouted refrains. But he always maintained he liked performers that stepped up to or over the line, and all four players do that here. It’s pure adrenalin.

Plainly no band could have kept up this intensity without some serious motivation. And the truth is that by “City Slang” Smith sounds tired. Probably he didn’t have what it takes to be a frontman, at least not a touring frontman, and possibly he knew it. Maybe all he wanted was to sing his songs—because they existed, because he’d written them, because if he didn’t no-one else would. And it’s this near-complete lack of ego—this hesitating on the verge of doing nothing at all, then throwing himself in regardless body and soul—that makes Smith’s performance here one of my all-time favourite perfomances by a male singer, despite its faults. It’s the tone, bluntly masculine but vulnerable, straight-talking, speaking calmly from the centre of the storm. What can I say? He means it, and he really doesn’t much care how it goes over. Or better put, sure, you can tell he’s humbled by the crowd’s ecstatic response, but get a record deal, tour the country, maybe get rich and famous? The song and its performance are their own rewards. And, just maybe, this degree of selflessness could only have come from a singer who didn’t think of himself as a frontman.

From playing back-up to Rob Tyner and sharing the stage with Scott Morgan, Smith transitioned, shortly after this recording, to playing husband and sideman to Patti Smith, collaborating on her 1988 album comeback album Dream of Lifeand its breakthrough single “The People Have the Power”. For someone who started with a will to destroy, the adult Fred “Sonic” Smith had learned humility. His story, or what I’ve managed to uncover of it, is a true inspiration, because though he never hit the bigtime he lived the dream, doing what he wanted how he wanted at maximum volume, and never with that preening strut of the peacock that suggests it’s all theatre.

Live, Masonic Auditorium, Detroit, 01/14/1978 is a flawed document, and who knows, it may be that Sonic’s Rendezvous Band were never going to break through outside of Michigan. Regardless, it’s a classic. It takes your breath away.

#sonics rendezvous band #fred sonic smith #detroit rock #mc5 #rock writing #rock n roll #classic rock #hard rock #scott morgan #patti smith

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