“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.
