In Memoriam: Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson of MC5 (1949-2024)

The explosive, dynamic heart of possibly the greatest rock ‘n’ roll/protopunk band ever has stopped beating.

Photo: Leni Sinclair

“TIM, WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH PEARL JAM?!”

It’s 1996. Alternative Press has launched a year-long series, helmed by me and my colleague Dave Thompson, chronicling 20 years of punk rock. I was handling the Detroit chapter, meaning I got to tell the tale of MC5, the Motor City badasses who for all intents and purposes invented punk rock, with their combustible mix of Chuck Berry, The Who, The Yardbirds, James Brown and free jazz. 

By this point, Brother Wayne Kramer — the Five’s leader and half of their mind-frying lead guitar tag team, alongside Fred “Sonic” Smith  — was my friend and frequent interview subject. In turn, Wayne got me in touch with Five drummer Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson, then part of the band’s trio of surviving members, alongside bassist Michael Davis. Which made sense: Dennis’ crazed, explosive beat wasn't just the backbone of the MC5, but the whole damn nervous system – Motor City motordrive personified. The chance to delve into his mind was like a gearhead finally getting their greasy mitts on a cherry '69 GTO. It was the only way to get a full-throttle exploration of the band.

But there’s nothing that could have prepared me for encountering MC5’s most volatile element.

He continued ranting at me about Pearl Jam: “I MEAN, SERIOUSLY! CAN YOU EXPLAIN THEM TO ME?!  I CAN’T FUCKING FIGURE THEM OUT!”

I opted for humor: “Well Dennis, Pearl Jam is to Nirvana what Grand Funk Railroad was to the MC5!”

“Oh, okay….” He understood that. That chilled him out.

He was born Dennis Andrew Tomich in Detroit, on September 7, 1948. The last surviving member of the MC5, he passed away May 9, 2024, in a Taylor, MI recovery facility called MediLodge. He was recuperating from a heart attack he suffered in April. According to The Detroit Free Press’ obituary, Thompson was still convalescing at Henry Ford Wyandotte Hospital when news filtered  through April 21st that the MC5 was being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Dennis’ passing  — as with Wayne’s February 2nd, and manager John Sinclair’s April 2nd to a lesser extent — ignited a storm of media coverage. Every single obit seemed to liberally recycle both The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News’ items, down to his response to the belated Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame “honor” (since it’s not a full induction) for the MC5: “It’s about fucking time!” The quote’s source varied from story to story, indicating whether it came from the Free Press (Five vocalist Rob Tyner’s widow Becky) or the News (Thompson’s son Chris McNulty).  

I didn’t know Dennis all that well, I don’t think. Can’t say we were as close as Wayne and I were. But I knew him well enough from the two blocks of interviews we did for various MC5 projects, in 1997 and 2013, to know he really wanted the pyrrhic victory of MC5 RARHOF nomination, probably more than anyone in or associated with the group. Knowing that the OG Rolling Stone staff, including now-disgraced publisher Jann Wenner, hated the MC5 and were in charge of the HOF’s nominating committee? The Five were never getting in. Notice the minute the man Doonesbury renamed “Yawn Weiner” was deposed following his very public case of foot-in-mouth-disease this past Fall, the MC5 got the consolation prize of an “influence” award?

But Dennis used to say things to me in 2013 like, ‘Just watch: I’m going to die in six months, and Wayne is going to be up there accepting the Hall Of Fame nomination for all of us.” 

I can’t speak authoritatively, but my observation was that the relationship between Wayne and Dennis was complex, like much about the MC5. But it was one still infused with mutual love, respect and admiration. In the day, they all referred to one another with the suffix “Brother.” This was a family, and we all know how complicated familial relations can be. Witness the admiration Brother Wayne expressed for Brother Dennis in a 2017 interview with Spin magazine, which ran upon the latter’s death: “We talk every few months or so,” he said. “We’re still close, or as close as you can be in that we live on different sides of the country and we don’t really do anything together anymore. But he’s my boyhood friend, and always will be.” 

Even more effusive was his praise for Thompson’s musical abilities: “Dennis is one of the most formidable percussionists. He has been for 50 years. And he chooses not to do much. He doesn’t play out and he doesn’t want to lead a band or anything. He doesn’t want to tour. 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.”

“You had to have the groove,” Thompson said of his contributions in Modern Drummer. “You had to roll with the rock. You had to have propulsion and a smattering of explosive trick licks. You had to lead the beat ever so slightly, creating what many used to call ‘drive’.”

Of course, Thompson felt he never could have achieved any of this unless the MC5 had “the freedom to explore new musical territory. To be bold, to be different. Be musically courageous. Take chances. In order to break new ground, the MC5 had to take risks, and above all, we had to do so by being open minded and creative, yet thorough in our study and application of musical forms and genres. In other words, do your homework, study diligently, emulate that which you love, but ultimately and finally, be yourself, and have much fun in that process.”

“The Five were always on the fast track to reach new territory inside and out of the rock format,” he noted later in the same interview. “Plus I had two great guitar players and a monster bass player to keep up with.”

Or did they have to keep up with him? I can recall one tale he told me of a noted drum manufacturer – I can’t remember if it was Pearl or Ludwig – flying him to the corporate HQ sometime in the early ‘70s, at the MC5’s peak. Dennis knew the son of the company’s owner, who wanted his father to witness what this power-hitter could do with their goods. He wanted to impress upon Dad the necessity of strengthening everything, to withstand the punishment of modern rock drummers. Junior grinned while his father looked on in horror, as Dennis gleefully demolished about six different models of their snare drums, within a few seconds and a single stroke roll.

He lived like he played: Hard, with incredible articulation, intelligence, and an unerring sense of swing. Music was in his blood. His parents, John Tomich and Leona Hicov, were musicians, and his older brother was a singer/guitarist. Dennis began drumming as a 4-year-old, eventually joining his brother’s band and playing taverns as a teen. In high school, he joined Wayne’s band The Bounty Hunters, playing Duane Eddy songs and the like. He told The Detroit Free Press in a 2003 interview that Lincoln Park High School “tried to boot me because my hair was a quarter-inch over my ears. But they didn’t end up doing it because I was in the National Honor Society with an A-minus average.”

He was already embedded in the MC5 by the time he graduated in 1966 and began a course of study in mechanical engineering at Wayne State University, his father supporting his matriculation by working two jobs. The Five won out.

“I chose fun,” he explained in a 2020 YouTube interview. He added in an autobiographical post at his website: “I had the bug for playing music at weddings with [his brother] Pete at age 13. My parents were disappointed that I chose the band over school, but they supported my decision….If my parents ever thought I would wind up on a high performance search and destroy team as the MC5, I think my drums might have magically disappeared one night.”

In the same essay, Dennis lamented the band’s/John Sinclair’s politics, and the commercial opportunities their radicalism cost them.

“Would the MC5 have been more successful in the mainstream without Sinclair's pot politics or just been another band from Detroit?” he wrote. “You tell me. To me it was about making music not legalizing pot or overthrowing the government. And NO the MC5 were NOT communist! We were American!”

There was always a little vestige of the band’s parents’ shoprat backgrounds in the Five, as well as a sliver of the conservatism he held prior to his membership. He told me the band’s phenomenal musicianship and jazz-level chops came from them essentially using that Detroit work ethic, “punching the clock” at the rehearsal space and playing eight hours – maybe breaking for lunch, maybe not. Sure, sometimes it was on LSD. It was the late ‘60s, man! After he’d spent the post-MC5 years manning the tubs for The New Order (NOT the Joy Division spin-off, but an LA hard rock band of the mid-’70s, also featuring Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton), the early ‘80s Radio Birdman semi-reformation called New Race (also featuring Asheton), and reuniting with Wayne for a GG Allin single, “Gimme Some Head,” he held a shoprat job of sorts. Typically for this extraordinary man, it involved both brutal physical labor and that finely-tuned intelligence that began training for a life in mechanical engineering. He once gave me a highly technical explanation of exactly what he did on a day the tape recorder wasn’t running. I wish it had been.

This was also a man who would call just to talk about what big sci-fi fans he and MC5 vocalist Rob Tyner were, and how they’d read “everything Philip K. Dick wrote” between them. Then in the next breath advise me to write off guitar strings on my taxes: “You can write off equipment! And because you’re also a music writer, you can write off any books or records you buy as ‘research’ or ‘business expenses’.” Then he’d rage because he’d just read a Noel Gallagher interview in The Detroit Free Press, where the mouthy musician claimed if his band had been around in the ‘60s, “it would have been three bands – The Beatles, the Stones and Oasis….WHO THE FUCK DOES HE THINK HE IS?!!”

"He was a true, free-spirited rock ‘n’ roller up until the very last day," Dennis’ son Chris McNulty, 55 — who’d reconnected with his father late in life through ancestry records — told The Detroit News. "He was a very intense, extremely bright individual who had a really soft heart. He had a soft side that I don’t think a lot of people got to see."

Sounds to me like McNulty got to know his father very well. That sounds like the Machine Gun I knew. The only thing I can add is that Dennis was obviously very proud to be reunited with Kramer and Mike Davis for the MC5/DKT tours of the early ‘00s, and to have played on some tracks on the forthcoming now-posthumous MC5 LP Kramer worked on with a new lineup at the end of his life. And I know his would have been the broadest grin on the RARHOF stage, had he lived to truly be The Last Man Standing and accept the MC5’s consolation prize. 

"We were the undisputed heavyweights of Detroit in 1966 bar none,” he wrote at his website, “and I was proud to be a part of this squad. Damn proud." You had every right to be, my friend. I’d say the MC5 are still the champs. 

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