Dennis Thompson, MC5 Drummer and Last Surviving Member, Dies at 75
Dennis Thompson, whose powerhouse drumming drove the MC5, has died, according to the Detroit Free Press. The MC5 were one of the most aggressive and politically active bands of the 1960s and their driving brand of rock music was a foundation of punk rock, Motorhead and every strain of hard rock that followed.
According to the Free Press, Thompson passed away at MediLodge of Taylor, where he had been rehabilitating following a heart attack in April.
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His death follows the passing of the band’s guitarist, Wayne Kramer, in February and its influential manager, John Sinclair, last month. Just weeks ago the band was finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a long-overdue accolade that only Thompson had lived to see. His first reaction, Becky Tyner, widow of MC5 singer Rob Tyner, told the Free Press was: “It’s about fucking time!” He told her he was eager to attend October’s induction ceremony in Cleveland.
Thompson was born in Detroit into a musical family (his mother was a singer, his father played upright bass in local bands) and began playing the drums at age four.
“When I was 8 or 9, my family would get together — my brother would play guitar and my sister would play piano so we’d play together,” Thompson told Perfect Sound Forever in 1998. “My brother also had a rock and roll band. They’d rehearse in the basement and leave the drums downstairs. So I’d go down there and play until Mom would say ‘Get off those drums Denny, those ain’t yours!’ Little did she know… To raise a son who plays the drums, you have to be a beautiful and insane parent. I was playing in bars when I was 13 with my brother, playing weddings when I was 10.”
Thompson met Kramer in 1963 at Lincoln Park High School, and the two played together as teenagers in a local band called the Bounty Hunters. By 1965, the drummer joined Kramer, guitarist Fred Smith, singer Rob Tyner and bassist Michael Davis in the MC5 in 1965 and the group quickly became popular on the vibrant Detroit music scene.
“We were the black jackets and pointed shoes crowd,” said Thompson. “The MC5 actually played at my graduation in ’66 at an all-night party.”
As rock evolved in the mid-1960s, the MC5 rapidly evolved with it, moving from its beat-group origins to something brutally aggressive. The bandmembers’ hair grew longer, their politics (deeply influenced by Sinclair) more radical, and their sound grew quickly into a vibrant form of hard rock spiked influenced by free-form jazz.
“Right about the time we graduated from high school, we met [John] Sinclair, the resident beatnik poet/philosopher at Wayne State University in Detroit,” Thompson recalled. “They used to have an artists’ workshop with poetry and jazz. That’s how we met John. Rob met him and struck up a conversation — they were both deep into jazz… Rob brought us down to the workshop, where you had all these jazz bands doing stuff like Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders…. It took a while but John Sinclair fell in love with us. All of a sudden, we went from high school heroes who used to win all the battles of the bands to the audio vanguard of the artistic community at Wayne State University.”
In an interview with Divine Rites magazine, Thompson talked about bringing the “consciousness” of free jazz to rock and roll.
As rock evolved in the mid-1960s, the MC5 rapidly evolved with it, moving from its beat-group origins to something much more aggressive. The bandmembers’ hair grew longer, their politics (deeply influenced by Sinclair) more radical, and their sound grew quickly into a vibrant form of hard rock spiked influenced by free-form jazz.
In an interview with Divine Rites magazine, Thompson talked about bringing the “consciousness” of free jazz to rock and roll.
“It was ‘high energy rock,’ which sort of was the evolutionary term we coined to describe our music,” Thompson said. “That happened as a result of having avant-garde jazz rave ups… We’d just go for it – try and create an energy buzz through music that was beyond.”
The group was incubated in Detroit’s famous Grande Ballroom, where they opened for countless top acts of the era — ranging from the Who and Cream to Sun Ra — and their debut album, the classic “Kick Out the Jams,” was recorded live at the venue in 1968. True to form, the original cover artwork the group submitted for the album was a psychedelic painting featuring a giant marijuana leaf (its label, Elektra Records, used a collage of live band photos instead).
“I wish we could have done it a little better,” Thompson told Perfect Sound Forever of that first MC5 album. “We were promised that we could do it again if we didn’t like it and to a man, we didn’t like it. The actual sound recording could have been better. We didn’t like the mix. Back in those days, no record company had gone to a ballroom and recorded a crazy band like us live, especially for a first record by a band. It was [either] very ballsy or very stupid. [Elektra Records founder] Jac Holzman and John Sinclair told us that we could redo it if we didn’t like it.”
The group’s politics, as much as its rebellious attitude, caused problems every step of the way. The MC5 was the only act to perform in Chicago during the infamous Democratic National Convention in 1968 where police attacked thousands of young demonstrators. The stance suited Sinclair and Kramer but did not sit well with Thompson.
“We became a political band. The media tagged us as a band that was the vanguard of ‘the revolution,’” he said in 2003, according to the Free Press. “I didn’t want to be the band of the revolution. It’s not what we started out to do. Looking back from a 30-year vantage point, I can see it was beneficial because of the notoriety. It was powerful stuff, and that media notoriety helped make us a household word. But at same time it was ending our career. It was killing us.”
The group also feuded with Elektra and were dropped. They released two strong albums for Atlantic — 1970’s “Back in the USA,” which was produced by future Bruce Springsteen producer/manager Jon Landau, and “High Time” the following year.
“The way it worked was that we signed with Atlantic and Jon Landau had become the favorite son of Jerry Wexler,” Thompson said. “He was assigned us as his second project. His third project was J. Geils. So Landau produced our second album and we became friends with him. But when they heard our record, they fired Landau straight away. Jon had no experience as a producer.”
The group parted ways with Atlantic and fell into drug addiction, with Thompson sitting out their final European tour in 1972. He kicked his addiction, but the MC5 petered out in 1972.
Thompson continued to perform with Detroit-area bands over the years such as the New Order — a band formed in the mid-1970s by ex-Stooges members Ron Asheton and Scott Thurston, not to be confused with the similarly named British group — and on Wayne Kramer’s albums with the Pink Fairies such as “Cocaine Blues: ’74-’78.” Thompson also worked with Kramer and original MC5 bassist Michael Davis in the touring ensemble DKT/MC5 in the early 2000s, and was rumored to have recorded tracks for a new MC5 album, produced by fellow Detroit legend Bob Ezrin, that remains unreleased to this day.
“Dennis is one of the most formidable percussionists,” said Wayne Kramer told Spin in a 2017 interview. “He has been for 50 years. And he chooses not to do much. He doesn’t play out and he doesn’t want to lead a band or anything. He doesn’t want to tour.
“He was the guy who was able to put a lot of thinking together on the drums that no one else had put together, you know? He listened to Sun Ra and Elvin Jones. He listened to Charlie Watts, Keith Moon and Mitch Mitchell. He was able to put these things together in a way that no one else had done before, and to take it further than certainly rock drummers had ever taken it. He had the ability to play outside of time, which was just genius in my opinion.”
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