Kick Out the Jams

Kick Out the Jams is the debut album by American rock band MC5. A live album, it was recorded at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit over two nights, October 30 and 31, 1968, and released in February 1969, by Elektra Records.

The album peaked at No. 30 on the Billboard 200 chart, with the title track peaking at No. 82 on the Billboard Hot 100. Although the album initially received an unfavorable review from Rolling Stone upon its release, it has gone on to be considered an important forerunner to punk rock music, and was ranked number 294 in both 2003 and 2012 editions of Rolling Stone's "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" lists, with it dropping to number 349 in a 2020 revised list.

The album peaked at number 30 on the Billboard albums chart, "in the wake of a publicity blitz", wrote Robert Christgau in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981). In Canada, the album reached #37.

While "Ramblin' Rose" and "Motor City Is Burning" open with the band's typical leftist and revolutionary rhetoric, it was the opening line to the title track that stirred up controversy. Vocalist Rob Tyner shouted, "And right now ... right now ... right now it's time to ... kick out the jams, motherfuckers!" before the opening riffs. Elektra Records executives were offended by the line and had preferred to edit it out of the album (replacing the offending words with "brothers and sisters"), while the band and manager John Sinclair adamantly opposed this.^{[citation needed]}

However in 2002, Wayne Kramer explained to NPR's Terry Gross on her show, Fresh Air, the band understood and accepted the single needed to be recorded without the profanity.

[W]e weren't complete idiots about it, you know, we knew that that would never be played on the radio. So we recorded an alternative intro, which was kick out the jams, brothers and sisters. And, you know, it might be an interesting footnote to look at it because what happened was we had agreed – we knew that, I mean, kick out the jams MF was not going to be a hit single. So we did this other version. And what we told Elektra Records was that we knew when the album version, the real version hit the stands that the stuff was going to hit the fan. But let the single get as firmly established in the charts as it can. Wait till it starts coming back down the charts before you put the album out ... because then we'll be a bona fide hit band. And then the controversy will work in our favor ... And the record company, in all their shortsighted lack of wisdom, when the single started going up the charts, they rushed the album out. And when they rushed the album out, of course, the stuff did hit the fan and the – and people started to be arrested for selling the album.

The original release had "kick out the jams, Motherfuckers!" printed on the inside album cover, but was soon pulled from stores. Two versions were then released, both with censored album covers, with the uncensored audio version sold behind record counters.

The controversy escalated further when Hudson's department stores refused to carry the album. Tensions between the band and the Hudson's chain escalated to the point that the department stores refused to carry any album from the Elektra label after MC5 took out a full-page ad that, according to Danny Fields, "was just a picture of Rob Tyner, and all it said was 'Fuck Hudson's.' And it had the Elektra logo". To end the conflict and to avoid further financial loss, Elektra dropped MC5 from their record label.