Rock ‘n roll revolutionary Wayne Kramer, best known for fronting the proto-punk group MC5 (Motor City Five), has passed away from pancreatic cancer, aged 75.
He helped set the template for punk rock and wasn’t just a musician. He was an experience, combining radical politics seamlessly with the kind of music that rips stadiums apart and incites riots.
Kramer famously said of his bandmates:
“They wanted to be bigger than the Beatles but I wanted them to be bigger than Chairman Mao.”
A complex personality who was as angry as he was articulate, Kramer was born Wayne Stanley Kambes on 30 April 1948 in Detroit, Michigan — known as the Motor City in the United States because of its plethora of automobile factories and plants.
Following his parents’ divorce, Kramer’s mother remarried and Kramer was raised by an abusive stepfather. As a teenager, he turned to music to escape from the situation and befriended fellow guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith. He also changed his surname from Kambes to Kramer in an attempt to distance himself from his stepfather.
Rolling Stone magazine described the partnership between Kramer and Smith as a ‘twin guitar attack’.
‘[They] worked together like the pistons of a powerful engine [to] kick their band’s legendary high-energy jams deep into space while simultaneously keeping one foot in the groove.’
In 1967, the pair found regular work as a house band at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit and called themselves MC5 (Motor City Five). Their lineup also included vocalist Rob Tyner, bassist Michael Davis and drummer Dennis Thompson.
The band soon attracted the attention of a radical Left-wing writer called John Sinclair, who went on to become its manager.
Sinclair was the co-founder of an anti-racist political collective called the White Panthers, which had close links to Marxist-Leninist Black Power group the Black Panthers. Under Sinclair’s mentorship, Kramer embraced free jazz, poetry and radical politics.
In 1969, Sinclair was sentenced to nine and a half years in gaol after giving two marijuana joints to an undercover police officer. He and Kramer remained close friends, not only throughout Sinclair’s incarceration but for the rest of Kramer’s life.
The same year Sinclair was gaoled, MC5 released their first studio album, Kick Out the Jams, which peaked at number 30 on the Billboard 200 chart. Although the title track only reached number 82 on the Billboard singles chart, it was critically acclaimed and went on to inspire many future generations of punk rockers.
Its title also became a rallying cry for the counterculture, which took it as a call to action and a means of “sticking it to The Man”. At the time of its release, the whole world was exploding with opposition to the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, the burgeoning women’s liberation movement and political protests of all kinds. It was a very exciting time to be alive, and Kramer fully embraced it.
In one rave review, Andy Williams of PopMatters wrote:
For my money, Kick out the Jams is one of the greatest records ever pressed. It is a magnificent time portal into the past, a fleeting glimpse of a band that actually had the balls to walk it like they talked it.
... no live recording has captured the primal elements of rock more than the MC5’s inaugural effort.
In its review of the album, Rolling Stone magazine said:
‘Kick Out the Jams writhes and screams with the belief that rock ‘n roll is a necessary act of civil disobedience.’
Although legendary Detroit music critic Lester Bangs initially gave the album a bad review, he later recanted and called it ‘my favourite album or at least one of the two or three most played for about three months now’.
When Kramer was asked to explain the title of the MC5’s signature song, he said:
People said ‘oh, wow, kick out the jams means break down restrictions, etc’ and it made good copy but when we wrote it, we didn’t have that in mind. We first used the phrase when we were the house band at a ballroom in Detroit and we played there every week with another band from the area.
We got in the habit, being the sort of punks we are, of screaming at them to get off the stage, to kick out the jams, meaning stop jamming. We were saying it all the time and it became a sort of esoteric phrase. Now, I think people can get what they like out of it; that's one of the good things about rock and roll.
MC5 produced two further studio albums — Back in the USA in 1970 and High Time in 1971.
After the band split up in 1972 due to almost constant police harassment, Kramer turned to petty crime and, in 1975, got a harsh four-year prison sentence for selling drugs to an undercover police officer. It could be fairly said that the courts probably threw the book at him because he had been a thorn in the authorities’ sides throughout his career. This was probably the case with his old friend and mentor John Sinclair as well.
Reflecting on his experiences in Rolling Stone magazine, Kramer said:
“My life back then wasn’t boring and my life now isn’t. I’m motivated by the sheer terror of being an old person with no money and no health insurance and finding myself homeless and sick. That’s what gets me out of bed and motivates me to write new songs and get going. This is not fun and games — this is serious.”
During his incarceration, Kramer befriended jazz trumpeter Red Rodney, who had played with the Charlie Parker quintet and formed a prison band called Street Sounds. Following his release in 1979, Kramer moved to New York City and briefly teamed up with Johnny Thunders, the drug-addled former member of the New York Dolls, to form an ill-fated band called Gang War.
The 1980s were not kind to Kramer, who battled drug and alcohol abuse and sometimes had to resort to menial work as a carpenter to make ends meet.
In 1994, Kramer moved to Los Angeles and was signed to a punk label called Epitaph Records, releasing four albums with them. By 1998, Kramer was clean and sober with a reasonably successful solo career and collaborations with grunge acts, including The Melvins and The Vandals.
He remained politically active and in 2009, he joined forces with political balladeer Billy Bragg to form a prisoners’ reform group called Jail Guitar Doors, USA. It got its name from The Clash song by the same name, which included the line: “Let me tell you 'bout Wayne and his deals of cocaine.”
The organisation donated musical instruments to prisoners and sponsored songwriting workshops in prisons.
Explaining the group’s aims, Kramer said:
“The guitar can be the key that unlocks the cell, it can be the key that unlocks the prison gate and it could be the key that unlocks the rest of your life to give you an alternative way to deal with things.”
In 2001, Kramer formed a band to play MC5 music following the deaths of his former bandmates Rob Tyner and Fred “Sonic” Smith. His dream team included Lemmy from Motörhead and Ian Astbury from The Cult.
The same year, he released his memoirs in a book called The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the MC5 and My Life of Impossibilities.
Active up until the time of his passing, Kramer had planned to release a new album in the spring of 2024.
Kramer’s death prompted a flood of tributes from both music critics and some of the key figures in rock ‘n roll.
Billy Bragg said:
‘Wayne Kramer was a revolutionary artist who walked it like he talked it. His own incarceration gave him an instant bond with the prisoners he helped through his leadership of Jail Guitar Doors USA. My thoughts are with Margaret and their son, Francis.’
Tom Morello, guitarist with Rage Against the Machine, said:
Brother Wayne Kramer was the best man I have ever known. He possessed a one-of-a-kind mixture of deep wisdom and profound compassion, beautiful empathy and tenacious conviction.
His band MC5 basically invented punk rock music... Wayne came through personal trials of fire with drugs and gaol time... and emerged a transformed soul who went on to save countless lives through his tireless acts of service.
Slash of Guns N' Roses wrote on Twitter:
‘My life was forever changed for the better when I met this man.’
Meanwhile, Vernon Reid of Living Colour described Kramer as a ‘punk rock pioneer’ and a ‘guitar badass’.
Just before his death, Kramer said:
“I think it was time to reignite that spirit of 1968, the spirit of my generation, when we were all young people. I think we’re at a very dangerous time in our history. And I think if we don’t all organise, 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.”
Jenny LeComte is a Canberra-based journalist and freelance writer.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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