“It Was The Sound Of Liberation”: How Wayne Kramer Invented Punk Music

“I wanted my guitar to sound distorted”

In The Big Bang sleevenotes, Kramer wrote, “I’d start working on my guitar tone and the engineer would say, ‘Turn that down, it’s distorted!’ I said, ‘That’s what I want!’, that the Motown sound is not what I do. I wasn’t looking for a tight sound, I have my own ideas. So we had an adversarial relationship with the recording process from the beginning.”

In another future portent of punk music, MC5’s radical socio-political stance also concerned the powers that be. Until he was controversially jailed for the possession of a minimal amount of marijuana in 1969, poet, visionary free-thinker and activist John Sinclair managed the band, whose collective world view was influenced by the Marxism of the Black Panther Party and Beat Generation poets such as Allen Ginsberg. Black Panther founder Huey P Newton inspired Sinclair to found the White Panther Party, whose ideas seemed radical to the era’s establishment, but now chime with modern-day beliefs surrounding ecology and human rights.

“The White Panther Party was an anti-racist, cultural revolutionary group,” Kramer wrote in The Hard Stuff. “It was a logical extension of our reefer-fuelled political ideas and it was done in the spirit of agitprop theatre. John [Sinclair] wrote up a ‘Ten-Point Programme’ to fight for a cleaner planet and for the freeing of all political prisoners.”

“The live show was the central experience of the MC5”

Fortunately, Elektra Records weren’t put off by MC5’s revolutionary spirit. After John Sinclair told the label’s director of publicity (and future Ramones co-manager) Danny Fields about the band on a US radio show, an intrigued Fields went to see MC5 play in Detroit and was impressed enough to sign the band to Elektra in the late summer of 1968. With thoughts turning to the group’s debut album, the two parties bucked industry trends by deciding that their first record, Kick Out The Jams, should be a recording of one of their concerts.

“The live show was the central experience [of the MC5],” Kramer explained in The Big Bang sleevenotes. “That was who we were. We wanted to present that on record.”

Featuring several of the best MC5 songs, including Come Together, the Kramer-sung Ramblin’ Rose and the ferocious title track, the charged, raucous and aggressive Kick Out The Jams was taped at one of the band’s many rapturously received gigs at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, on 31 October 1968. Now widely regarded as a landmark proto-punk record, the album captured MC5’s garage-rock blitz in all its glory, and it even cracked the Top 30 of the US Billboard 200, staying on the chart for an impressive 23-week run.

However, because of the title song’s infamously controversial opening exclamation – “Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!” – influential Detroit chain store JL Hudson’s banned the record and went on to remove all Elektra product from its shelves. In a series of events that seemed to presage the scenario which unfolded when EMI sacked Sex Pistols following their notorious Bill Grundy incident just seven years later, Elektra then decided to drop the MC5 – only for the band to immediately find a new home with Atlantic Records.

Though still featuring songs with socio-political content such as The American Ruse and the anti-war Human Being Lawnmower, MC5’s Atlantic debut, 1970’s Back In The USA, largely dialled back the polemics and concentrated on sharp, smart garage-pop anthems such as Tonight, Teenage Lust and High School. Overseen by producer and future Bruce Springsteen manager Jon Landau, the record had the mainstream in its sights, yet it only hit the outer reaches of the Billboard 200.

“We could combine our raw energy with studio chops”

Disappointed by this result, MC5 self-produced their third and final studio album, 1971’s High Time, with help from engineer Geoffrey Haslam. At least in the creative sense, the band were still hitting new peaks, as Kramer asserted in The Hard Stuff.

“We had enough excellent new material, and good ideas for how to go about recording it,” he wrote. “We finally had enough experience to know how to be creative in the recording studio. We could now combine the raw energy of Kick Out The Jams with the studio chops of Back In The USA, and have it sound like the MC5 on record.”

High Time undoubtedly contained some of MC5’s most imperious music. Sister Anne, Over And Over and Kramer’s Miss X all rank among the band’s finest work, while the brilliant, brass-enhanced Skunk (Sonicly Speaking) adroitly married high-octane proto-punk with the free jazz music both Kramer and Fred Smith admired so much.

“We loved Sun Ra and Archie Shepp,” Kramer noted in The Big Bang’s booklet. “We didn’t see any other rock bands trying to work them in. Skunk pointed to the future of what the MC5 would look like. The problem was the MC5 was a band that didn’t have a future.”

Despite High Time’s quality and a burgeoning European following which took the band across the Atlantic for half a dozen tours, MC5 were consumed by a combination of personal issues and drug-related problems. They split after an ignominious final performance at their old stomping ground, Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, at the end of 1972, but by then Kramer – who was now gripped by a sizeable heroin habit – had other priorities.

The next few years were the worst of the guitarist’s life. Though he somehow kept performing with different musicians on Detroit’s club circuit, most of Kramer’s energies went into feeding his habit, which he maintained through drug-dealing and petty larceny until – after one deal too many – he ended up in prison in Lexington, Kentucky, where he did a three-year stretch starting in 1975.

The return of Citizen Wayne

Kramer had hit rock bottom, but he survived prison, remaining clean most of the time and reconnecting with his love of the guitar through playing music with another famous musical inmate, the jazz trumpeter and Charlie Parker acolyte Red Rodney. Upon his release from jail, Kramer moved to New York City and restarted his career, touring with post-punk pop act Was (Not Was) and playing on the group’s first two albums, and forming the ill-fated Gang War with fellow heroin user Johnny Thunders. Keen to quit drugs for good, Kramer temporarily eschewed music, working as a carpenter in Manhattan before moving to the Florida Keys in the late 80s, where he continued woodworking and also built custom homes.

During the guitarist’s wilderness years, however, MC5’s music was repeatedly cited as an influence by younger generations of musicians. The process had started with the UK punk firebrands (“In England, they really liked Back In The USA – you can hear what The Clash, Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe got out of it,” Kramer noted in The Big Bang booklet) and it eventually led to Kramer’s stock rising in the US – so much so that Epitaph Records (home to Bad Religion, Rancid and The Offspring) offered him a solo deal. Relocating to Los Angeles, Kramer released three well-received albums for Epitaph, The Hard Stuff, Dangerous Madness and Citizen Wayne, and toured extensively during the mid-to-late 90s.

Though Kramer successfully quit heroin years earlier, he still drank heavily and took prescription drugs during the 90s, but he decisively turned a corner when he embraced sobriety for good in 1999. Describing his entry into rehab as “the first day of the rest of my life”, Kramer also understood that he had the challenge of “duel goals: attaining sobriety and maintaining freedom from my addictions”.

Succeeding in this quest for the remaining quarter century of his life, Kramer went on to enjoy distinctions in a variety of fields. He embarked upon a highly successful career scoring music for TV and film, with commissions ranging from HBO’s comedy series Eastbound & Down to Will Ferrell’s Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby. For the ITVS/PBS documentary The Narcotics Farm, Kramer provided narration in addition to a separate soundtrack album, Lexington.

• Best Rock Bands: 30 Behemoths Who Beat A New Path For Rock’n’Roll
• Best Guitar Riffs: 20 Licks That Changed The Course Of Rock Music
• Best Guitarists Of All Time: 20 Iconic Players Who Electrified The World

Elsewhere, Kramer’s philanthropic work has also been widely celebrated – not least his co-founding of the non-profit organisation Jail Guitar Doors with his wife, Margaret Saadi Kramer, and singer-songwriter Billy Bragg. Since it was first founded in 2009, Jail Guitar Doors – named after The Clash’s song about Kramer’s travails in prison – has provided guitars and music lessons for inmates at more than 50 penal institutions throughout the United States.

“It’s still my goal to overload the guitar”

Ultimately, though, it’s MC5’s incendiary proto-punk music that ensures Wayne Kramer’s legacy will live on. Indeed, thanks to the guitarist’s active participation in keeping the band’s name alive over the past 25 years, the revolutionary Detroit act’s profile has never been higher.

MC5 initially returned to the public eye for a one-off show filmed for Channel 4 at London’s 100 Club, after which Kramer arranged for himself and the original band’s then surviving members, Michael Davis and Dennis Thompson, to undertake a world tour as DKT/MC5. During this widely acclaimed 2005 trek, the group played songs from MC5’s catalogue with help from guest vocalists and musicians such as Seattle grunge stars Mark Arm (Mudhoney), Evan Dando (The Lemonheads) and Lisa Kekaula (The BellRays). A deserved victory lap, the tour underscored how MC5’s music had all but invented punk music before going on to inspire successive generations of garage-pop and alternative-rock acts.

Following this triumph, Kramer kept both MC5 and his hometown on the map, playing on and co-writing songs for Alice Cooper’s well-received Detroit Stories, in 2021. Tragically, however, he won’t be around to see the release of Heavy Lifting – an all-new MC5 album, produced by Bob Ezrin, which was being readied for release at the time of Kramer’s death. Yet, as he confirmed in advance PR for the album – which includes contributions from the likes of Slash, Tom Morello and Alice In Chains’ William Duvall – it was the visceral spirit of the electric guitar which got Wayne Kramer’s juices flowing right to the end.

“I wanted to kind of pick up where we left off with High Time,” Kramer told Mojo in December 2023. “I put everybody to work. The record is a guitar extravaganza – everyone, and yours truly, all bashin’ away on electric guitars. That’s still my goal – to overload the guitar.”

Buy punk vinyl at the Dig! store.