re: Endless Sleep - The Obituary Thread

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Dennis 'Machine Gun' Thompson, the founding MC5 drummer and the last surviving original member of the pioneering proto-punk group, died Wednesday, The Detroit Free Press reported. He was 75.

Thompson’s death comes just a few months after the February death of his MC5 bandmate, guitarist Wayne Kramer, and the April death of John Sinclair, the group’s manager. 

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Thompson met his future MC5 bandmates in high school in the early Sixties, and the group came of age and cut their teeth in the thick of Detroit’s garage rock heyday. 

The MC5 rose to prominence playing left-wing rallies in Detroit and cut their classic debut, the live album Kick Out the Jams, in October 1968. After that, the band released just two studio albums, 1970’s Back in the USA and 1971’s High Times, before breaking up in 1972. The group’s acrimonious split was fueled in part by differing political visions, money, and clashes with Sinclair, but Thompson also acknowledged that his struggles with heroin addiction were a factor as well. 

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Kramer, in an 2017 interview posthumously published this year in Spin, called Thompson “one of the most formidable percussionists,” adding: “He was the guy who was able to put a lot of thinking together on the drums that no one else had put together, you know? He listened to Sun Ra and Elvin Jones. He listened to Charlie Watts, Keith Moon and Mitch Mitchell. He was able to put these things together in a way that no one else had done before, and to take it further than certainly rock drummers had ever taken it. He had the ability to play outside of time, which was just genius in my opinion".

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