Koss Vs. Sonic

Two legendary guitarists in two hair-tastic live clips from the summer of 1970

Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers, and welcome all you new subscribers!

If you’re new here (and even if you aren’t), please make yourself comfortable and be sure to dig around the JTL archive, which now contains over a hundred posts concerning all manner of the sort of music that makes life worth living. I will of course be hitting your email box with new “content” 2-3 times a week, but the vast majority of those previous JTL entries are evergreen. That’s the great thing about music — once it’s been recorded and released, you can always go back to it again… and of course there’s no shame (or at least there shouldn’t be) in discovering something months, years or decades after its original release.

While I don’t have a lot of time to write this week due to pressing deadlines — and prepping for my acoustic gig this Friday at the Morton Memorial Library in Rhinecliff, NY, should any of you find yourself in the neighborhood — I just couldn’t let September 14 go by without observing the birthdays of two legendary (yet somehow still underappreciated) guitarists: Paul Kossoff and Fred “Sonic” Smith.

If you love the hard and heavy rock of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, both gents will undoubtedly already be quite familiar to you. But household names they sadly are not, despite the fact that their respective bands — Free and the MC5 — both achieved a decent amount of commercial and critical success in their day.

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Kossoff was one of the finest guitarists to emerge from the British blues boom of the 1960s, a player of rare sensitivity and feel with a stunning finger vibrato technique that could go from a whisper to a scream and back again. Smith was a rock and roller from the get-go, who formed his punchy rhythm and lead style while banging out Chuck Berry covers in his Detroit bedroom with neighborhood friend and eventual MC5 guitar partner Wayne Kramer. But while their musical approaches were considerably different, both men made the most of their era’s high-volume advancements in guitar amplification — and, as these two clips from the summer of 1970 demonstrate — neither were afraid to work up a serious sweat onstage.

I adore both of these clips so much, and not just because of the dynamic, dynamite performances they preserve. They also really capture the intrinsic funkiness of what rock concerts were like back in 1970, with jerry-rigged stages and sound systems that bore little resemblance to the highly professional set-ups that would soon be par for the concert industry course. This was also the summer after Woodstock (and Altamont), when outdoor shows were the scene to make, be they gigantic (like England’s Isle of Wight Festival, which attracted an estimated 300,000-700,000 attendees in 1970) or relatively modest (like the MC5’s concert at Wayne State University’s Tartar Field). Concertgoers were dressed fashionably for the occasion, and there’s a tremendous amount of tremendous hair on display in these clips, both offstage and on.

The first time I ever saw this Free footage was during a theatrical screening of Message to Love, the excellent 1995 documentary about the chaotic 1970 incarnation of the Isle of Wight Festival. (It’s hard to believe that it had only been 25 years since the festival when I first saw the film, while it’s now been 28 years since that screening; but then, that kind of accordioned music/time continuum is what this Substack all about!)

Sure, I was a little high at the time, but I remember being thoroughly taken aback by just how unrepentantly unkempt and unwashed the members of Free looked onscreen. (Well, three of them — bassist Andy Fraser always looked sharp, including here.) It’s like they took the stage minutes after waking up from a long, sweaty and uncomfortable afternoon nap in the back of their band van. Free frontman Paul Rodgers is so lycanthropically hairy, I can’t help but think of SCTV’s Gino Vannelli skit every time I watch this. (I mean, is it just me, or does his beard seriously double in thickness by the end of the song?) But goddamn were they a killer band, and watching/hearing the diminutive Koss digging into the strings of his Les Paul like he’s trying to lift a piano into a truck always makes me smile.

I first saw part of this MC5 footage back in the early 2000s, when a friend hooked me up with a bootleg DVD of MC5: A True Testimonial, a fantastic documentary whose own history unfortunately turned out to be as fraught and frustrating as that of the band it celebrated. “Looking at You” was featured in the doc, but a clip also including “Ramblin’ Rose” and “Kick Out the Jams” thankfully later surfaced on YouTube.

This is, quite simply, one of my all-time favorite pieces of rock footage. I’d put it up there with The Who’s Rock and Roll Circus performance of “A Quick One While He’s Away” and maybe The Stooges at the 1970 Cincinnati Pop Festival; not a hell of a lot else even comes close to its visceral impact and jaw-dropping spectacle.

There’s so friggin’ much going on here, in fact — from Wayne Kramer’s fancy footwork and Rob Tyner’s righteous ‘fro, to the dudes toking up by the backline and the transfixed kids in the crowd getting up as one when “Kick Out the Jams” kicks in, to the cars cruising by on either I-94 or I-10 in the background — that the beanpole-thin “Sonic” almost gets lost in the shuffle. But he’s definitely there at stage left, driving the high-energy rhythms, barking backing vocals into the mic, matching Brother Wayne pose for pose, and literally getting down on the stage for some pelvis-pumping action without ever missing a chord.

Both men left this world far too early — Kossoff in 1976 at the age of 25, Smith (who would go on to marry and collaborate with Patti Smith) in 1994 at the age of 46 — but they both definitely left their mark while they were here. Cheers, gentlemen; thanks for the music. Long may your fiery spirits rock.

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