Given all the havoc the MC5 left in their dazzling but troubled wake, it’s astonishing to look back and realize that it all occurred within such a compressed period of time. It was slightly more than four years from plugging in their Vox amps into Detroit’s Grande Ballroom’s decrepit electrical outlets and recording Kick Out the Jams to imploding on that same stage, downcast, disheartened, unrehearsed, with four of the five members drug-addicted for their final show on Dec. 31, 1972. It felt like a blurry spedup movie without the happy ending.

With their twin-guitar Chuck Berry garage-band savagery, fierce primitive drumming, practical approach to songwriting—like naming a song “Black to Comm” to remember how to hook up the amps (the “comm” was the common connection on an amp, where the black wire went)—and a fondness for sticking Sun Ra jazz wank into a tune and calling it avant-rock, they had a genius for combining high and low culture to mostly great effect. The whole point of the MCS’s ethos was to be fearless, a little arrogant, but not necessarily perfect. They didn’t mind getting things wrong, just so it ended up being original. Doing that, they changed the aesthetic of ’60s music with that free noise ambition, inventing an early form of proto-punk and inspiring almost as many bands as the Velvet Underground did.