MC5 I Can Only Give You Everything - I Just Don't Know (7inch, 45rpm, BC, RSD)

(Modern Harmonic) 2 tracks - Record Store Day release

It's the same old story as millions of other bands – the energy goes into it, you play and you write, but you're too crazy to control it,' guitarist Wayne Kramer said in 1977, looking back at the birth of his band, the MC5 – and, by extension, these twin blasts of high-energy distortion-fueled destiny from their first visit to a recording studio in the winter of 1967. By then, Kramer, guitarist Fred 'Sonic' Smith, bassist Michael Davis, drummer Dennis Thompson and vocalist Rob Tyner were the incendiary house band at Detroit's psychedelic dance hall, the Grande Ballroom.

This session, at the city's famed United Sound, was soaked in local R&B aura; John Lee Hooker cut his studio debut, 'Boogie Chillen',' there in 1948. 'I Can Only Give You Everything' was in that spirit and faster: a rolling-thunder feature of the MC5's live sets pulled from Van Morrison's 1966 album with Them, Them Again. 'I Just Don't Know' was the band's own bravado, a Bo Diddley-style gallop with a boxer's barrage of power chords. The March, 1967 pressing of AMG 1001 had a different B-side, 'One of the Guys,' rapidly put to tape at another soul factory, Tera Shirma, to make way for an Edwin Starr session. But the 1969 repressing with this full, first date with infamy at United Sound—issued in the wake of the MC5's landmark broadside of rage and feedback, Kick Out the Jams—was the definitive account of a new, electric Detroit, coming straight out of the garage. Here was the original genesis—on the way to revolution. —David Fricke Rolling Stone/Sirius XM