Rockpedia

In short

Two bands in a car-factory town who played louder and uglier than anyone had a commercial reason to.

The scene

Detroit in the late sixties was a city of assembly lines and a curfew, and the two bands the Grande Ballroom is remembered for made music that sounded like both. The MC5 were a political project with a manager who declared war on the culture; the Stooges were the opposite, a band with no programme at all beyond Iggy Pop's willingness to do anything on a stage. Neither sold records. Both were understood a decade later in New York and London, by people who had worked out that this was what rock without permission or craft actually sounded like.