MC5 – High Time

Many things have been written about the greatness of the MC5, and while their defining moment may well have been their live debut "Kick Out The Jams" and the legend that surrounds the album, many had perhaps stopped listening to the band by the time they released "High Time".
Listening to "High Time " in the 21st century we can be asking the question of what MC5 would have done afterwards had they not broken up.
The album opens up with "Sister Anne" a lively rocker that is very catchy, its four bar blues structure may have roots in the music of Little Richard and Chuck Berry as opposed to the mythology of the revolution that was promised during the 1960s and perhaps back in 1971 people who held the MC5 a beacon of revolution would have been scratching their collective heads.
Revolutionaries are not musicians and musicians are not revolutionaries, we have to that the band were only young men with their hearts on their sleeves, at the heart of the band was snippets of soul music as well as the twin guitar attack of Fred "sonic" Smith and Brother Wayne Kramer, but such songs as "Future/ Now" and "over and over" revisit their world view, and I think people who pointed their fingers at the inactivity and apathy that hung around the world at the time are no different from now.
When I heard this album, I was rapturous. I wanted to write a letter to Wayne Kramer to thank him for his music and the message of peace that over 40 years, it still resounds. This record needs to be heard, it needs to be played, there is no shtick, no pretence, even though the band was imploding at the time, "High Time" is a record that contains the band that could not be contained....isn't it time to play it again?