Credit: Alamy
Sun 30 August 2026 2:00, UK
When Rob Tyner, Wayne Kramer, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, Michael Davis and Dennis Thompson, better known collectively as MC5, went to see the dentist in 1969 complaining that all the sugar in the fruit-preserves they’d been eating lately was wearing out their teeth, the dental practitioner told them that they really ought to “kick out the jams”, and thus, a legendary song was born.
If only the members of the Grateful Dead had seen the same hygienist. No, it didn’t really go quite like that. But MC5 really did all find themselves together in a dental office around that time, not for work on their dentures but for work on their debut record, of all things.
If you’ve ever seen Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s absurd 2016 sitcom Crashing, where the characters all live together in a disused hospital (as building guardians, mind, not squatters), then you’ll be able to picture the digs that MC5 found themselves in quite well in the summer of ’69.
“The band had just moved in together for the very first time”, lead guitarist Wayne Kramer once recalled in an interview.
“There used to be a building in downtown Detroit that was a dentist’s office on the second floor, and we all moved into different rooms in the dentist’s office as our bedrooms,” Kramer added. “And then downstairs was a storefront. I covered the walls with egg crates and made it a rehearsal studio, so for the first time we could rehearse whenever we wanted to, all day, all night if we wanted to, and we all lived there.”
Explaining that it was at one such informal (jam) session that Kramer and vocalist Rob Tyner first came up with the song that would go on to define not only their own output, but also inspire a generation of punk-rockers after them, he expanded on the roots of the phrase “kick out the jams”.
“We had the expression. We were using the expression for a long time, because we would be critical of other bands that came to Detroit that the MC5 would open for. They’d come into town with this big reputation, and then they’d get up on stage, and they weren’t very good. So, we used to harass them. We’d yell at them, ‘Kick out the jams or get off the stage, motherfucker!’ Finally, one day we said, ‘I like that expression. We should use that as the title of a song.’ So Tyner knocked it out.” Pretty strange, sure, but maybe not quite the weirdest place that anyone has ever written a classic song.
Credit: Far Out / Elektra Records / Leni Sinclair
It sounds like those jam bands really hit a nerve with MC5. Presumably, the rest of the songs that made up their debut album, named after their most famous song, were also written in that home-studio-cum-dentists-office, though the details are a little light on the ground. I’d need to brush up on my MC5 history to say for certain.
Anyway, in the end, the song that Tom Morello once said MC5 “basically invented punk rock” turned out to be one about jam bands, rather than fruit preserves, and it doesn’t really have all that much to do with the dentists, either. It should come as no surprise, though. There aren’t that many songs about those sugary fruit spreads (no, ‘Lady Marmalade’ doesn’t count; that one is about a different kind of sugar), but there are a surprising number of songs out there about pearly whites and trips to the dentist. Maybe even more than there are healthy teeth in most bands.
You’ve got ‘White Teeth Teens’ by Lorde (not to mention the fact that both of her best songs, ‘Royals’ and ‘Green Light’, also mention teeth in the lyrics), and Lady Gaga’s ‘Teeth’. ‘Your Gold Teeth’ and ‘Your Gold Teeth II’ by Steely Dan. Oh, yeah, and that holiday classic, ‘All I Want for Christmas (Is My Two Front Teeth)’.
Even going way back, it was a more common song subject than you might think. ‘Long John Blues’ is an old blues standard about a woman waiting for a check-up who finds herself attracted to her dentist, while ‘Toothache Blues’ is a call-and-response duet which tells of the agony that a bad tooth can bring.
And, more recently, don’t forget the most famous song about that post-dental checkup phenomenon: ‘I Can’t Feel My Face’, by The Weeknd. Wait, hang on a minute. Maybe that one is about something else, entirely, too…
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