Are you ready to testify? Best MC5 album poll!

High Time. Very underrated.

Where's Babes in Arms? But Back in the USA gets it for "Looking At You."

American Ruse is so great I gotta go with Back in the USA.

High Time would easily take it if the production was better.

Best MC5 album poll?

...does not comprehend :-(

kick. out. jams. the.

"People talk about solutions. (Over and over). When what we need is aremd revolution. (Over and over)."

Armed, even. But it has to be High Time. For that and Skunk (Sonically Speaking) - the drums! the horns!

Also, I have the version of Kick Out the Jams that has "brothers and sisters" dubbed over "motherfuckers", which is crap.

I got a live album with a James Brown medley on it, which I was pretty excited about hearing, but it's not actually that great at all.

High Time hands down.

you know what i really like? '66 breakout. yeah.

kotj - energizing performances of weak-ish material, goes downhill after classic 1-2 punch of "ramblin rose"/"kick out the jams"

biu - much-improved songwriting sabotaged by weak production, in stronger hands "shaking street" would've been a big hit

ht - aside from 1 awful slow song, where it all "comes together"

so HIGH TIMES it is motherfuckers

High Time - the production is fine - just TURN IT UP LOUD.

high time all the way!

Mark OTM - "Miss X" is awful, as are all their other slow ones, some of which barely qualify as "songs" (but I guess that's kinda beside the point.) All 3 LPs are maddeningly flawed in their own ways - even High Time is dragged down by "Miss X" and those silly spoken-word bits. But "Sister Anne" and "Skunk" and "Baby Won't Ya" are pretty undeniable. High Times it is.

(And Babes In Arms is nowhere near perfect either.)

i dunno, i think "let me try" is pretty good as far as mc5 ballads go.

Definitely. And what's wrong with "Miss X" (apart from the PRODUCTION, which DOES suck)?

(I think that live James Brown medley ref'd upthread is pretty great - esp the There Was a Time bit! some muddy recording notwithstanding.)

i dunno, i think "let me try" is pretty good as far as mc5 ballads go.

- Agreed. But that "as far as mc5 ballads go" disclaimer kinda sums it up.

Tim, at the risk of sounding like Geir, "Miss X" has ABSOLUTELY NO MELODY. Which doesn't matter if the song has compensating factors like a high energy level (as on the debut) or maybe some clever lyrics But it doesn't. And what lyrics I can decipher are lousy; and, yes, the production sucks. I'll never understand what the hell Dave Marsh was hearing when he claimed "Miss X" sounded like a Beatles song. It's the absolute low point of their catalog. Happily, everything else on High Time is far better.

I think it has a beautiful, kind of timeless, archetypal soul melody!

Tyner was fucking great. It seems like I've seen lots of people talking about how he wasn't a good singer or was the weak part of the band or something. These people have to be kidding.

Re. lyrics: kind of not into the sexual revolution explicitness, but this bit is nice:

Causing sensations rollin' through me
Comes on strong, feels just like a spell
Sensations rollin', turnin' from me to you
Causing this aura of heat to swirl

"All 3 LPs are maddeningly flawed in their own ways"

OTM, though I'm glad someone else said it first. High Time for me. 'Gold' off Babes in Arms is incredible though.

i love the (demo?) version of shakin' street on babes in arms. i don't think of back in the u.s.a. as being all that flawed. it's a solid record! i have an original german pressing that sounds wonderful. don't know about u.s. pressings, never heard any. and i've never heard mc5 on cd. when i listen to them now i listen to my babes in arms tape or one of those great odds & sods vinyl comps like the one el sabor mentioned. i love that stuff.

i think the main "flaw" associated with back in the u.s.a. is not the material, which is definitely very solid throughout, but that jon landau thought they should take a different approach sound-wise in the studio and so they're playing out of little fender twin amps or something, i think, and i don't think those songs were written for that kind of sound.

the lyrics of "shakin' street" "have not aged well." but yeah that version on babes in arms is beautiful.

yeah, the guitars are kinda tinny and compressed, but i kinda like how they sound! i like how the whole thing sounds. i understand people bumming that it's not some walloping force of nature live sound though. for that i listen to the walloping force of nature live stuff.

Yeah, what was John Landau thinking? Was it intended to sound good on a car radio? I'm not running it down, it just seems like a really odd production choice.

pretty sure Landau was thinkin - glam + 50s R&B

It actually always did sound a bit like the Sweet and other British glam outfits of the 70s to me, but I didn't know if that was just coincidence.

Yeah I was thinking the Sweet or Slade or Suzi Quatro - but one of the problems with that approach is that the MC5 never had vocals that lend themselves to that hyper-compressed thick-harmonies-style vocal production.

maybe if Chinn/Chapman had written/produced the record haha

I think Landau might have been thinking "You don't need to use big amps in the studio" or something.

What the hell did Landau know about hard rock anyways?

Plus I don't think their Little Richard cover worked that well - sounded kinda restrained compared to the original. The Chuck Berry cover was better. I think, all in all, Back In The USA has the best collection of songs per se, of any of the three albums. So it's just too bad the performances don't reflect that.

Maybe best collection of songs overall, but High Time trumps it for me with "Poison," "Skunk," etc.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

wtf all those votes and like 4 people posting on this thread

haha. it's like back to front for the normal MC5 polls. But like I said at the very beginning, High Time is underrated, until now.

wtf all those votes and like 4 people posting on this thread

Posting fatigue. There's a half-dozen other MC5 threads we've already posted to.

I'd pick High Time as best album, but KOTJ has something special going on. For the first four tracks, anyway...

http://devonrecordclub.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/the-mc5-kick-out-the-jams-round-20-nicks-choice/

i have .. Jams, but i've been wanting more for a while now.

i've been waiting for remastered editions a la Stooges .. but have no idea if this is going to ever happen ...

are the current editions that are on cd ok ?

Back In The US is just a mess because that's how they recorded it. High Time was pressed to CD in 1992 and sounds absolutely fine to my ears. There's a compilation covering all three albums plus some other stuff which came out on Rhino about 6 or 7 years ago which is a little beefier sounding but fine. The original CD pressing of KOTJ sounds like a late 80s CD of a 60s live album; the mess and treble is part of the energy, though.

Somebody upthread said "High Time" was badly produced? Have you heard their other two albums??!?!? Hadn't listened to "High Time" in years, almost kind of avoided it, but Jesus Christ it's great - Alice Cooper would certainly appear to have thought so! Rob Tyner's vocals can sound uncannily like late 60s Arthur Lee when Arthur is in rocking out mode.

Yeah, I think part of it was the old vinyl mastering, but there are still some things - like you wonder what happened with "Poison." It would be nice to hear the bass better in parts, too, and a different approach on "Miss X" could have been really powerful!

Geoff Haslam produced this and Loaded. Much prefer the production on this.

Back in the USA all the way--weird results to me.

BITUSA has the best songs but Jon Landau should be shot for producing it with no bass and for making Dennis Thompson sound like he's playing cardboard boxes with knitting needles

high times 1990's cd version sounded really one dimensional to me so went and picked up Japanese remasters of that and BitUSA. now they sound lively and punchy and i love it. my buddy thinks they sound "too good"

I fully admit I have crap hearing, but I really think the domestic CD of High Time sounds pretty good. Might help that I mostly listen to it either at work at the end of the day or in the car, very very loud.

Teenage Lust as it was known in the Total Energy version. The New years 1970 show that features most of BITUSA live plus a few other bits & pieces including a cover of JB's It's a Man's Man's Man's World and a stellar Black to Comm medley (though the actual Black To Comm may be better on Power Trip which I think is this performance but the song is edited to stand on its own).
Cos it features those BITUSA tracks in full on mode instead of the bassless studio versions.

The Purity, accuracy etc box set has some very good stuff in too, including a ersion of this set i think.

I rememeber some mention of studio recordings during the Elektra tenure as well as more live material from the KOTJ recordings. Would like to see both available. So the idea of a reissue similar to the 1st 2 Stooges lps reissues would be great.
Just getting whatever remains of the Elektra recordings out in one package would be fantastic.
Also the True Testimonial documentary was really good so would love to see that available.
& I heard there was a lot of footage being sorted through to make that, so any and all live footage of the band would be great to see collected and released. Not sure what is out there now.