MC5 legend Wayne Kramer has died

Hot Press is deeply saddened by the death of Wayne Kramer, guitarist with the legendary MC5 and an ardent prison reform campaigner. He passed away on Friday in Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai hospital aged 75.

Punk before the term was coined, the MC5 were arguably the most dangerous band of their generation, walked it exactly like they talked it, and were an inspiration on everyone from The Ramones and the Clash to Rage Against The Machine and Guns N' Roses.

Our man Stuart Clark was lucky enough to spend the afternoon with Wayne in 2006, and got the whole remarkable story straight from the horse's mouth...

STRAIGHT OUTTA MOTOR CITY

Not since Andrea Corr emblazoned her chest with the New York Dolls has there been such a t-shirt related furore.

Seconds after Jennifer Aniston appeared on the Friends’ The One With The Lottery episode wearing a skinny-fit MC5 number, fans of the Detroit rockers were on the world’s messageboards condemning her heresy.

What MC5 fans were doing watching such flaccid yuppie fare we don’t know, but it demonstrates how the musical wing of the White Panthers have had their legacy hijacked.

If you’re not au fait with the ‘60s radical counterculture group, here’s an extract from the manifesto that was written by their Minister of Information and MC5 manager John Sinclair: "There’s only two kinds of people on the planet – those who make up the problem and those who make up the solution. WE ARE THE SOLUTION. We have no problems. Everything is free for everybody. Money sucks. Leaders suck. School sucks. The white honkie culture that has been handed to us on a silver platter is meaningless to us! We don’t want it! Our program of rock and roll, dope and fucking in the streets is a program of total freedom for everyone. We breathe revolution. We are LSD driven total maniacs of the universe. We have developed organic high-energy guerrilla bands who are infiltrating the popular culture and destroying millions of minds in the process.’"

Either Ms. Aniston is more of a mind destroyer than we’re giving her credit for, or she didn’t have a clue what she was advocating.

Formed in 1966, the ‘Motor City Five’ managed to release three suitably angry albums (Kick Out The Jams, Back In The USA and High Time) before heroin addiction caused an acrimonious split in 1972.
They reformed last year for a lap of honour, but minus original singer Rob Tyner and Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith who both died of heart failure in 1991 and 1994 respectively.

Theirs is a fascinating story, which is told to us here by their second guitarist, Wayne Kramer whose post-band career got off to a bad start when he was jailed on drugs charges. So, if you’re sitting comfortably, it’s time to kick out the jams, motherfuckers!

"It’s been turned into an episode of The Wonder Years, but in ‘68 and ‘69 there were a lot of people in the US who were beyond angry at what was being done in our country’s name, and prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to make it stop. We’d been lied to by our president, and railroaded into an illegal war with a tiny little country that had done nothing to warrant being bombed out of existence.

"Did the MC5 care? Absolutely. Were we afraid for our lives? Definitely. Were we in big trouble with the authorities? All the time. Did we sit around in a warehouse on the Westside cleaning our guns and planning our next bombing? No, the White Panthers and ourselves were surrealists and absurdists. Make no mistake, there were Che Guevaras out there, but ours was a revolution of the mind. We represented a new way to play music, a new way to wear your clothes, a new way to engage in politics, a new way of changing things with your own two hands. Rob Tyner called it the new paleo-cybernetic lifestyle, and we lived it with all our hearts.

"Being a completely improvisational concept, we made a lot of mistakes like adopting the image of the gun. The image of the gun got our heroes, the Black Panther Party, death squads. It got the MC5 arrested, jailed and kicked out of the music business. Through the Freedom of Information of Act we now know that when we thought they were tapping our phones, they were tapping our phones. When somebody blew up a CIA office they indicted us on the strength of a wiretap that they had no warrant for. During the Imperial Presidency of Richard Nixon and John Mitchell, they were allowed to subvert the constitution under the banner of ‘National Security’. Ironically, some of the best footage of the original MC5 is courtesy of US government surveillance!

"We were equally unpopular with the cops who’d search our van, stop our shows, tell us what we could and couldn’t play. One time we were surrounded by Oakland County sheriff’s deputies who threatened to bust us if we sang the word ‘motherfucker’, so Rob yelled, ‘Kick out the jams'’ and the crowd finished the sentence. We were never accepted by the establishment music business. They despised us. And the whole California, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Bill Graham axis – they hated the MC5. We had a similar reaction on the East Coast with the Velvet Underground. From the avant-garde through the commercial, none of them had any regard for us back in the day. The thing that makes the MC5 such a perfect legend is that it was all about the future that didn’t have a future.

"The MC5 breaking-up was a great loss and the start for me of some very dark days. I’d lost my friends, my status and my means of making a living, which made the world seem a very dark place. I became a taker – both literally and figuratively – and ended up spending 26 months in a prison that, believe me, was no holiday camp. As a consequence of the ‘War On Drugs’, the population whilst I was there went from 600 to 2,000. You’re living in a closed community of ne’er-do-wells who have no problem with doing wrong. That said, it absolutely saved my life. The people and things I was associated with were very dangerous, and brought me way too close to an early demise on several occasions. Coming out, I knew I’d never commit another felony or conspire to deal illegal substances again. I didn’t want to go back to being ‘Wayne Kramer – 00180190’! Sadly, mine is a rare case of penal reform – repeat drug offenders make up 60% of the American prison population.

"One of the reasons I’ve shied away from the label of ‘punk elder statesmen’ is the fact that punk, in prison parlance, means the sexual partner of an older man. It’s something you really don’t want to be in a correctional facility! I’m also queasy about its destructive connotations. Why must our cultural heroes be Kurt Cobain and James Dean? Why can’t they be people like Pablo Picasso and (American jazzman) Illinois Jacquette who swing and create right up to the end? Musically, the MC5 was trying to get through the door that Sun Ra opened up, that Ayler opened up, that Coltrane opened up, that Pharaoh Sanders and Archie Shepp opened up. That was what inspired us. That’s what we were striving for.

"To contextualise things a little, I ought to explain that the Detroit I was raised in was a city of four-and-a-half-million people. This year it’s under a million, which is a direct consequence of Chrysler, GM and Ford squeezing every drop of blood and money they could out of Detroit and then abandoning it during the 1973 Oil Crisis. It’s the American Pompeii, a city where the buildings have survived, but there’s no people.

"As for the current Detroit music scene, in my humble opinion Eminem is the heir apparent of the MC5. He’s simultaneously brutally honest, terrifically brave and a knucklehead. It’s the only artist/audience connection in the world right now that means anything.

"For the MC5 to still be cited as an inspiration 30 years after the fact is very gratifying. One of the proudest nights of my life was in 2002 when Ian Astbury of The Cult, Dave Vanian from The Damned, Nick Royle of the Hellacopters and Lemmy from Motörhead, among others, joined us for the Sonic Revolution gig in London’s 100 Club. Lemmy was the only one I knew from back in the day – we met in 1970 when he was a roadie for Hawkwind, and again a few years later when him and Mick Farren were part of the Ladbrooke Grove crew. I don’t want to ruin his reputation but he sang ‘Sister Ann’ and ‘Back In The USA’ beautifully! Another wonderfully extreme bassist I had the pleasure of playing with is Mani. As Mad For The Racket, we did a gig in Dublin with Clem Burke from Blondie and Brian James of The Damned, which rates as one of my all-time favourites. At other times we had Duff and Stewart Copeland in the band, so there was some serious rock ‘n’ roll going on.

"It’s all made me realise that while there’s a lot of miles on the clock, I’ve not pulled over and parked. I’m enjoying life with a passion I never previously thought I had. Politically, I’m still about justice, I’m still about peace, I’m still anti-war. I’m still for all the things that are unglamorous about civilisation but are so necessary – health care, education, equality. I’m still anti-establishment in the sense of this current Bush regime who I think are amongst the stupidest in American history and the most dangerous.

"That’s why I thought Jennifer Aniston wearing our shirt on her breasts was brilliant. It was the perfect MC5 moment – a national TV show unwittingly broadcasting an anti-government, anti-war message."