Wayne Kramer: A Guitarist Supreme
Remembering the legendary MC5 co-founder, who lost his battle with pancreatic cancer at 75
Back in the late ‘70s, The Clash draped themselves in the mantle “the only band that matters.”
But a decade earlier, another band stamped itself as the bona fide owner of that title – the MC5.
The main reason for that anointing was Wayne Kramer, the spectacular guitarist and revolutionary rabble-rouser who died earlier this week after a battle with pancreatic cancer. Kramer, who hooked up with the like-minded Fred Smith to form the Motor City 5 before he was old enough to drive himself to and from gigs, was an anti-establishment icon. A native of inner-city Detroit, he earned his tough guy card the old-fashioned way, and that came through in his playing – a combination of bulldozing riffs and peel-back-the-roof, feedback-laden leads.
The MC5 developed a rep in Motown for being the most aggressive party band in town, showcased on their wall-shaking indie singles “I Can Only Give You Everything” (a Them cover) and “Looking at You” (a steely construction of sexuality and barely reined-in violence). They pushed things even further after linking arms with White Panther Party chairman John Sinclair and taking quite literally to the streets. They were the only band to wade into battle by going to play for the protestors at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago (after loads of big names made promises to, as Crosby, Stills and Nash put it, “please come to Chicago just to sing”).
But despite all the politics – Kramer showed his colors quite literally by taking to the stage carrying a guitar emblazoned with an upside down American flag – Kramer told the Detroit Free Press “All we did was fine-tune and fine-tune and fine-tune our performance so that we left the audience just destroyed. We didn’t want to entertain them. We wanted to destroy them, so that when they left they had nothing left.”
Kramer and his bandmates were known for leaving nothing on the table. In fact, they developed a rep for using that table as a platform, then turning it into kindling – something they did within the first ten seconds of their incendiarydebut album, Kick Out the Jams, which was recorded live and opened with the then-unthinkable opening line “kick out the jams, motherfuckers.” That got them banned from stores, dropped by their label and shunned by booking agencies everywhere – all before Kramer had even reached his 21st birthday.
He’d tell Uncut magazine that the song was meant to be a generalized f— you, recalling “We used the expression to harass other bands. I couldn’t tell you which bands, because we harassed every band we played with. Well, if they were losers, we let them know that. We’d stand by the edge of the stage and holler: “Kick out the jams or get off the stage!”
It didn’t take long for the band to regroup, and revamp, for Back in the U.S.A., a collection of short, sharp shocks to the system that would’ve fit snugly into the first wave of releases from the CBGB set. Trouble was, it didn’t have the lit-fuse vibe, the sense that things could go off the rails at any moment – a state of affairs largely brought about by Jon Landau, who took them under his wing as he was waiting for “rock and roll future” to drop into his lap in the form of Bruce Springsteen.
Back in the U.S.A. flopped, and the band regrouped yet again for High Time, which would prove to be their swan song, although it showed plenty of creative life, notably in more improvisational tracks like “Skunk” – a nod to Sun Ra, whose “Starship” they’d covered on Kick Out the Jams. The band sputtered to a halt not long thereafter, effectively ending when Kramer walked offstage mid-set at their home base of Detroit’s Grande Ballroom. The the members’ personal lives did pretty much the same – none in an uglier way than Kramer, who set music aside to concentrate on a life of crime (a real one, not the cosplay a lot of future punks would take part in).
Since he couldn’t fund his drug habit from nightly concert takes – not that he could play out much with all of his guitars in hock – Kramer turned to a variety of petty crimes, from breaking-and-entering to gun and drug deals. He eventually ran out of luck and got busted for trying to sell cocaine, to undercover officers – which earned him a four-year prison stint.
He looked back on that in a 2019 NPR interview in which he said “I was in a paradoxical situation. I was Wayne Kramer, the architect of the MC5, and I’m out here competing with bar bands. That was painful. And, y’know, nobody stopped me from doing B-and-Es or setting up a ripoff or selling some guns or some TVs. Everyone was happy to see me then, you know? Yeah, Wayne, you got that thing? Got the money? Yeah, excellent, cool, let’s get high.
“I had seen The Godfather one too many times. I’m driving around, carrying a pistol. I was completely delusional. I was in a fantasy land about that world and the people that populate it. Because to succeed in that world, you have be capable of really hurting people, and I had no idea what I was doing.”
Once released, Kramer got serious about sobriety and ended up doing a lot of legal blue collar jobs, but didn’t have a lot of luck with music at first – teaming with Johnny Thunders in Gang War turned out to be a disaster for a number of reasons. But, gradually, he began to find his feet, rapidly churning out memorable albums like The Hard Stuff, Dangerous Madness and Citizen Wayne from 1995-1997.
Brother Wayne followed his muse into some intriguing corners in recent years, none more fruitful than Lexington, his 2014 collaboration with the Lexington Arts Ensemble. The full-on free jazz recording let the guitarist flex his improvisatory muscle with an almost-unhinged intensity that probably had Sonny Sharrock smiling down from above.
Kramer toyed with reunions in the early part of this century, recruiting former bandmates Michael Davis and Dennis Thompson for DTK-MC5 and putting together a crew of next-generation guttersnipes for MC50. But it took until 2022 for him to wave the Five’s freak flag high. As he told Detroit’s Metro Times, “I think it was time to reignite that spirit of 1968, the spirit of my generation when we were all young people,” Kramer said. I think we’re at a very dangerous time in our history. And I think if we don’t all organize, come together, and step up, we could lose it all. Democracy could go away. The forces that we’re up against are not joking. This is not playtime. This is serious.”
He’d been planning a new album at the time of his diagnosis and remained active in his charity, Jail Guitar Doors (a tip of the hat to the Clash’s song of the same name, itself an homage to Kramer), which works to rehabilitate jailed felons through music. The group has put instruments into over 150 institutions across America. Speaking about the idea, Kramer told New Zealand’s RNZ “I watched for 30 years after I was released from prison as more and more people just like me, went to prison for longer sentences under worse conditions. And the activist in me finally, I had it and I got angry and I decided I have to take action.
“I ran into Billy Bragg and he told me about this initiative he had launched in England to provide instruments for prisoner rehabilitation. And I thought that would fit perfectly into my ideas of artists taking political power and responsibility to affect the world in a positive way.”
There’s no disputing that Wayne Kramer did just that, with his music and his work. May he continue to kick out the jams on the astral plane.
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