Remembering Wayne Kramer, Ageless MC5 Ace
He wanted to keep playing until he died, like the old jazz guys, and he did.
Wayne Kramer, the hard-charging guitarist at the center of the incendiary 1960s band The MC5, died Friday at 75, news reports said today.
A good guy and influential musician, he seemed nonplussed about the paltry midweek crowd that he’d just faced in Danbury, Conn., where I got a chance to talk to him in 1995.
“On a weekend, it’s hard to get a major crowd,” he shrugged. “I’m not a mainstream act, nor have I ever been a pop music star. I’m an artist and an underground thing. It’s kind of a secret club for those who know about it,” he said, though he added “It’s a thing that my record company is trying to turn around, getting people to know where I come from.”
He was out on tour to promote his first solo album “The Hard Stuff” — also the title of an eventual memoir he’d release in 2018.
After all, it wasn’t MC5 fans who were coming to his shows in the 90s, he said. “They’re all home with their kids. They don’t come out to gigs. There might be five guys on tour who say they’ve seen some MC5 shows,” he said. Instead, audiences tended to be “more the guitar fans, music fans, people that study bands and who influenced what bands. Just people who are really into the music.”
Kramer had been playing since he was a teenager in the most revolutionary rock band in a revolutionary time, the MC5, predating metal and punk, providing a direct lineage to Rage Against the Machine. But he said, “To most of the world, I’m a new artist.”
The MC5’s most famous anthem began with a 12-letter vulgarity they spat out at the outset of “Kick Out the Jams” which they played at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Cops regularly interrupted shows.
“Concerts were canceled, there were busts, harassments, indictments, court cases and endless pressure,” Kramer told me. “Ultimately it culminated in sending our manager to prison for 9 1/2 years for the possession of two joints.”
It was an injustice called out by John Lennon, recording “John Sinclair” for his 1972 album “Some Time in New York City.”
But the arrest — “and the music industry’s lack of support combined to crush the MC5,” Kramer said.
“The loss of the MC5 was a major, vast loss for me,” Kramer said. “Not only did it represent the loss of my band, but a loss of that whole spirit of the day and all my youthful enthusiasm. And the biggest thing was the loss of my brothers… we had gone through the fire together.”
It “was the beginning of a downward spiral for me. It culminated in losing my freedom for a couple of years.”
Only 24 when the band broke up, he went to jail for two years on charges involving cocaine dealing.
“I needed something to replace the excitement of being in the MC5,” he said. “I read ‘The Godfather’ too many times and I thought I could drive around in big cars and go to meetings. I was in association with a lot of bad people at a time when the music scene in Detroit was all over, the whole city devastated and there were just no gigs. It seemed like there was a lot of money to be made selling various powders.
“I was lashing out at myself over the loss of the MC5,” he said. “As a way of getting attention.”
Kramer’s prison term earned him the opening line in the Clash song “Jail Guitar Doors” (“Let me tell you 'bout Wayne and his deals of cocaine”). Later, Kramer helped develop Jail Guitar Doors Inc., a nonprofit that donates musical instruments to inmates.
“In a way, it saved me,” Kramer said of jail. “It gave me time to realize what my other options were — and to make sure this didn’t happen again. Because no matter what gangsta rappers say, jail ain’t where it’s at.”
Being in jail from 1975 to 1978, “I missed the first round of punk rock, which at the time, people told me came from the MC5. But where I was, the word punk had a very different meaning I didn’t want to be associated with.” That is: victim of sexually predatory prisoners. “People get killed over that,” he said.
Mostly he tried to keep playing as much as he could.
“Musically, it was really good for me. While I was there, I was in with a man called Red Rodney, who played trumpet with Charlie Parker, who had taken Miles Davis’ place in the band. He was a tremendous musician who taught me a great deal about jazz, theory and life,” he said. “I went into jail a fairly adventurous rock guitar player and came out a competent player.”
Once released, Kramer went out to produce bands in New York’s Lower East Side and played with an array of artists, from Johnny Thunders and GG Allin to Was (Not Was). He’d go on to tour with Pere Ubu, the Gun Club and Mudhoney.
He took to his own music with more urgency as he learned of the early deaths of some of his MC5 bandmates. When I spoke to him, Rob Tyner and Fred (Sonic) Smith had both died the year before, when both were 46.
“We were all little boys together. We were like the gang together in the same neighborhood; we went to the same school and everything. It was a tremendous loss. And really, to me it kind of rang a bell that said: Your time here is finite. Time is the most valuable thing you have and not to waste it.
“I think we all had to find our own way to deal with the end of the MC5. It was just such an event to have lived through. When it was gone, it was a real loss. Grief and loss are part of the process. So you have to recognize it was a loss and give over it, and not carry that bitterness and anger around.”
He was glad at the legacy of the MC5. “The part about smashing the government — that didn’t work out,” Kramer said. “But the revolution of ideas is alive and well. And the punk ethic of the do-it-yourself self-efficacy is what it’s all about.”
It was great to see him more than 20 years later when he was the lone original member on a tour celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first MC5 album. Joined by Kim Thayil of Soundgarden, Billy Gould of Faith No More, Brendan Canty of Fugazi and Marcus Durant of the San Francisco band Zen Guerrilla.
When MC50 played the 930 Club here in D.C., it was Kramer, then 70, who was the most animated person on stage, swirling and kicking his way through the show, as he took a similarly high energy approach to what looked to be same Stars and Stripes guitar he used back with the original band.
And doing so, bringing these anthems to life for a new audience had him grinning from ear to ear through most of the show that pulled from 1950s-style rock ’n’ roll, James Brown style funk and experimental jazz from the school of Sun Ra.
As Sinclair told me in 1996, he wanted to become the band’s manager because they were as unpredictable as free jazz. “They were so anarchistic,” Sinclair said. “They would come on and play a couple of James Brown songs and then turn their backs to the audience for 45 minutes, start this wailing feedback sound and everybody would leave. Kids would just flee.”
But, he added, “I was hearing John Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders.”
The MC50 show, like a couple of tours that followed it with different lineups,was clearly not an exercise in nostalgia or cashing in, but seemed an inspiring blast of power to a century that certainly needed it.
“We have to rethink the idea that rock is a young people’s music,”Kramer told me back in 1995. “Because we’ve all grown up with it. The issue is: Is this work done with a sense of courage? Is the artist brave enough to dig inside himself and say what he sees going on?
“You can get older without getting old,” Kramer said. “I tend to identify with jazz guys who continue to explore new ideas and whose Ideas continue to grow and develop as they get older. Like Miles. Miles played great ’til the end. Louis Armstrong played ’til he was 71 and swung right to the end.”
At the time of his death Saturday, Kramer was reported to be working on a new album.