Norman Mailer seldom wrote about rock music but he made a rare exception for Wayne Kramer and his band MC5.
In his 1968 book Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Mailer likened the group’s sound to “mountains crashing in this holocaust of the decibels”, creating a storm of noise in which he heard nothing less than “the roar of the beast in all nihilism”.
Whether the description was intended as a compliment is unclear but it seemed to capture the very essence of Kramer’s ferociously distorted guitar playing and the sonic maelstrom he created with MC5.
The performance Mailer witnessed and critiqued came in Chicago in 1968, when the countercultural revolutionaries led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, known as the Yippies, staged a free concert outside the Democratic National Convention as a protest against the Vietnam War.
Billed as a “Festival of Life” as opposed to the “Festival of Death” that the protesters claimed was presided over by the politicians in the convention hall, there was no stage and no electricity and so the band simply plugged in to a generator that was powering a hot dog stand and let rip. By the time their incendiary set had finished, a full-scale riot had broken out, with running battles between police and hippies.
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It turned out that Danny Fields, a record company executive, was also in the crowd that day. He was impressed enough by what he saw and heard to sign MC5. Two months later the group recorded its debut album, Kick Out The Jams, live at a concert in their home town of Detroit.
The album sold only modestly on its release in 1969, and peaked at No 30 in the American charts. Yet along with the debut album in the same year by the Stooges, another Detroit band, it is now regarded as a landmark that has inspired generations of bands, from the Clash and the Sex Pistols to Motorhead and Rage Against The Machine.
Every bit as angry as the searing, feedback-fuelled howls from Kramer’s guitar were the revolutionary politics that he and the band adopted under the influence of John Sinclair, MC5’s manager, a hippy leftwinger who set up the White Panther Party in sympathy with the famously militant Black Panthers. As a founder member of the party, Kramer was given the title “minister of culture in the streets”.
“We saw the great injustices in the world around us and being young and extremely idealistic, we thought it was our duty as patriots to try and straighten this business out,” Kramer recalled. “The White Panthers became a delivery system to send a message to America that we wanted things to change.”
By endorsing a ten-point manifesto that demanded a “total assault” on “the vicious pig power structure” of mainstream American society, MC5’s commercial prospects were not greatly helped. Kick Out The Jams was censored and banned by radio stations and retailers alike, promoters refused to book the band and its members were harassed and monitored by the FBI.
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To make matters worse, their own comrades turned upon them and they were expelled from the White Panthers for harbouring “counter-revolutionary ideals”. Their crime seemed to have been that they had spent part of the advance from their record label on sports cars. When they arrived at a 1969 gig in New York by limousine, they were denounced as traitors and a militant cadre in the audience smashed up their equipment.
Two further albums, Back in the USA (1970) and High Time (1971), flopped and, bankrupt and mired in substance abuse issues, MC5 split up in 1972. In his own words Kramer turned into a “small-time criminal” and was subsequently set up in a classic sting. He was sentenced to four years in prison for selling drugs to undercover federal agents in 1975.
He emerged from jail a reformed character and in later life ran the not-for-profit organisation Jail Guitar Doors, USA, organising songwriting workshops for prison inmates as well as supplying them with guitars.
The charity took its name from the Clash’s song Jail Guitar Doors, which includes a tribute to Kramer in the opening line, “let me tell you about Wayne and his deals of cocaine”.
He was born Wayne Stanley Kambes in Detroit, Michigan, in 1948, the son of Mable (née Dyell), a beautician, and Stanley Kambes, a Second World War veteran who abandoned the family shortly after his son’s birth.
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His mother remarried and in a 2018 memoir The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the MC5 & My Life of Impossibilities Kramer recounted how he and his sister were sexually abused by their stepfather.
At school he was a disruptive influence who thought it was amusing to send faeces to his teachers in the mail. Instead of studying, he spent his time at drag races and listening to the records of Chuck Berry and Little Richard, which he found spoke to him “in a secret, coded language”.
By the time he was 15 he had formed his first band, the Bounty Hunters, with his fellow guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, who would later marry Patti Smith. With the addition of the vocalist Rob Tyner and others, they became The Motor City Five, son to be abbreviated to MC5.
For several years after his release from prison he worked as a carpenter while he searched for “a way to live where drugs and alcohol were not necessary every day”.
He made a return to music in the mid-1990s and a series of solo albums and MC5 reunions followed, as well as several film scores, including work on films by Will Ferrell. He is survived by his wife and manager Margaret Saadi Kramer and their adopted son Francis.
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At the time of his death, he was preparing a new MC5 album with the band’s drummer Dennis Thompson, who is now the only surviving member from the group’s classic line-up.
His militancy always remained strong. “It is time to reignite that spirit of 1968,” he said of the forthcoming record. “We’re at a very dangerous time for our democracy and the forces we’re up against are not joking. This is not playtime. This is serious.”
Wayne Kramer, guitarist, was born on April 30, 1948. He died of pancreatic cancer on February 2, 2024, aged 75