Over and Over
1971 · Atlantic SD 8285 · New York City, New York
- Artist
- MC5
- Title
- Over and Over
- Release
- High Time
- Year
- 1971
- Label
- Atlantic # SD 8285
- Format
- LP · Album
- Language
- English
- Country
- New York City, New York, USA
- Genre
- Rock · Pop Rock
- Primary theme
- Peace, Protest & Anti-War
Annotation
MC5 (Motor City Five) took their name from Detroit, Michigan. They formed in the city in 1963. The line-up for this album featured Wayne Kramer (from Detroit - guitar, vocals), Michael Davis (from Detroit - bass, vocals), Dennis Thompson (from Detroit - drums, vocals), and Fred "Sonic" Smith (from West Virginia - guitar, vocals - he married the garage rock singer Patti Smith in 1980). Their 1969 live album Kick Out the Jams included the song "Motor City Is Burning" which referenced Vietnam. Their 1970 album Back in the USA contained the anti-war track "The Human Being Lawnmower". They split up after the release of High Time in 1972. Their far left, anti-establishment lyrics became a prototype for the later punk movement. Early on they took political inspiration from Marxism and the Black Panther Party. The group famously performed for hours at the protest outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago along with Phil Ochs and Country Joe & The Fish. Neil Young also turned up but did not perform. Political organisations, such as National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE), Youth International Party (Yippie), and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) helped organise the protest. Eight people arrested during the demonstration became known as the Chicago Eight (and later the Chicago Seven.12 Kramer wrote in LA Weekly on 4 November 1998 that "we ruled in Detroit, and 1968 was probably the most dramatic year of the band's existence. It was the flashpoint of the anti-Vietnam War movement...and every other social movement of the day. But what you never seem to get is a sense of how much fun it all was. We weren't all hiding out in downtown warehouses cleaning our weapons and planning the revolution".3 In the song "Over and Over" (Atlantic # SD 8285) they addressed the lack of action in the Vietnam protest movement.Sources1MC5: Sonically Speaking (Brett Callwood, 2010)↩2Battleground Chicago (Frank Kusch, 2008)↩3laweekly.com: Rocket reducer (archived copy)↩
Annotation by Justin A. Brummer
Lyrics
English: Vietnam, what a sexy war, Uncle Sam's a pimp / Wants us to be whores / I see people talking over and over / Why don't I sit around waiting over and over / The cop on the street wants us down on our needs / The president says we've got to have peace / The other cat says we need our liberation / The hippies telling us we're in the love generation / I said whoa, I said hang on a minute now, this can't go on much longer
About the artist
American rock band formed in the mid-1960s in Lincoln Park, Michigan (Detroit area); disbanded 1972. [Source: Wikipedia]