Q: Tell me about your earliest days, before I met you.

Michael: I met Wayne and the rest of the MC5 at a bar in Detroit and was totally impressed with their Beatle boots. I just had to know where they got those boots. They said, ‘Well, come on with us and we’ll take you back to our house and we’re going to have a beatle boot jam session.’ So we got together on the basis of Beatle boot mania.

Q: How did you decide to become a band?

Michael: We didn’t. Wayne had already conceived of the MC5 with his good friend Rob Tyner and Fred Smith. That’s kind of all I know.

Q: How did you get in?

Michael: I got a fantastic pair of Beatle boots and I just stepped my way into the position.

Q: And what about you, Dennis?

Dennis: Wayne came by my house on a motorcycle one fall evening and asked me to play this really great gig called the Crystal Bar. He said, ‘It’s a fantastic gig. You’ll love it. Do you want to play in the band?’ And I said, ‘Sure, why not.’ It was officially the day I joined the Motor City 5 and it was a great venue. I just got hooked.

Wayne and I had played previously, though, in a band called The Bounty Hunters – in high school. It was an all-instrumental band. Then I left that band and then Wayne and I re-hooked up about a year later. Fred eventually played in The Bounty Hunters also. He was in another band called The Vibra-Tones, the rival band. Then I moved out of The Bounty Hunters and I believe Wayne knows what happens then; Fred joined The Bounty Hunters. That was the first band that we all bumped shoulders together.

Q: How long was it from that time until the time I met you in New York?

Wayne: 3 years

Q: It took you three years to work your way to your first gig in New York? And then you met me? How did that happen?

Wayne: Yes, and then we met you. Did you know Danny Fields? I think that was the connection. Danny was our number one supporter from the New York area and he’s kind of the person that wedged us in the door to the major label record deal (Danny was head of A & R for Elekra Records at the time.)

Q: You came to NY, you never played there before. How were you feeling?

Michael: It was kind of like standing up with your toes over the edge of a 10-meter platform at the swimming pool when you’re about 10 years old. It’s just like ‘Ahh! I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it!’ Really exciting, just great… you know, Big Apple. I’d lived there for a little bit, briefly, Lower East Side. It was a new generation kind of thing. It was great.

Dennis: Kid in a candy store. Getting to New York for the first time and it was just one huge montage of experiences and swelling enthusiasm. That’s one thing you have to remember.

Q: What stands out in your mind about that trip?

Dennis: A lot of things. Some of the after-parties at Max’s Kansas City Steakhouse – those were pretty fun. I remember one time we had a whole lot of people there and the bill was some phenomenal figure – 700-800 bucks – and we only had a couple hundred bucks. So JC Crawford, Wayne, and myself got on top of tables and had an auction, had people donate to pay this bill. We were throwing knives in the wall, and I think some (Andy) Warhol people were there. I guess we were pretty savage. Rob met Germaine Greer at some of these parties. I got my first case of the clap, I think, officially, in New York City, from one of the executive assistants at Electra. Thank you very much. That’s about it.

Q: What about you, Wayne? What were you thinking in those days? It sounds like you were the leader of the pack.

Wayne: Ummm, well. It was like, you get this idea in your head that you’re going to try to achieve something. It was like everything was being fulfilled. It was all going to happen now. It was like all those plots and schemes – they were all being realized. It was terribly exciting, really stimulating. It felt like we had power, you know.

There was the famous – I think that was right around the same time as the Battle of the Fillmore (East, operated by the legendary Bill Graham)– it was just a time in the MC5’s arc when everything was still rising and all things seemed possible and it seemed like it was all really going to work and it was all going to happen. The whole country was on a positive note ... that we were going to stop the war, that civil rights were going to be real, that young people were going to take responsibility and we were really going to make a positive change. It was still that bright, shining future ahead of us, at that point. There was a great sense of community all over the country – and all over the world. It was like the same thing was happening in Paris, the students were rebelling, and in Buenes Ares, and Mexico City. It was like everybody felt part of something.

Q: What did you think your role in all of that was?

Wayne: To carry the news. To carry the news of what was happening in one city and tell that to the people in the next city. What was the news in our neighborhood or our community, you know the way we saw things. We were kind of, like Chuck D. says, the underground newspaper, you know?