Wayne Kramer, the co-founder of the Detroit proto-punk band the MC5 that crushed hardcore anthems like “Kick Out the Jams” and influenced everyone from The Clash to Rage Against the Machine, has died at age 75.
Kramer died Friday (Feb. 2) at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, according to Jason Heath, a close friend and executive director of Kramer's Jail Guitar Doors nonprofit. Heath said the cause of death was pancreatic cancer.
From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, no band was closer to the revolutionary spirit of the time than the MC5, featuring Kramer and Fred “Sonic” Smith on guitars, Rob Tyner on vocals, Michael Davis on bass and Dennis “Machine Gun”. Thompson on drums. Managed for a time by White Panther co-founder John Sinclair, they were known for their raw, uncompromising music, which they envisioned as the soundtrack to the rebellion to come.
“Brother Wayne Kramer was the best man I ever met,” Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello wrote via Instagram on Friday. “She possessed a unique blend of profound wisdom and profound compassion, beautiful empathy and tenacious conviction. His band the MC5 basically invented punk rock music.”
The group had little commercial success and its core line-up did not last beyond the early 1970s, but its legacy has endured, both for its sound and for fusing music with political action. Kramer, who had a long history of legal battles and substance abuse, would tell his story in a 2018 memoir The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the MC5, and My Life of Impossibilities.
Thompson is now the only surviving member of the band.
Kramer and Smith had known each other since their teenage years and had played with various other musicians around Detroit before the core lineup was formed in the mid-1960s. At Tyner's suggestion, they called themselves the MC5, short for the Motor City Five, and emulated the Rolling Stones, the Who and other hard rock bands of the era.
By 1968, they had built a significant local following and were influenced by Marxism, the White Panthers, the Beats, and other sociopolitical movements. The MC5 was more politically radical than most of its peers, and otherwise louder and bolder. They were virtually the only band to perform during the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where police beat anti-war protesters.
“Kick Out the Jams” was their most famous song, reaching No. 82 on the Billboard Hot 100 and marking their only appearance on the chart, and opened with an unprintable call to arms: “Kick out the jams mother- -er!” A live album of the same name reached No. 30 on the Billboard 200 in 1969, their highest charting release. The studio albums were also released Back to the US and High time before breaking up in late 1972.
Kramer would front various incarnations of the MC5 over the next few decades and play with Was (Not Was) among other groups. But for a time he immersed himself in the life of what he called “a Detroit petty criminal.” He was arrested on drug charges in 1975 and sentenced to four years in prison. The Jail Guitar Doors got its name from a Clash song about his struggles: “Let Me Tell You About Wayne and His Cocaine Deals.”
Survivors include his wife, Margaret Saadi, and son, Francis.
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/music/rock/wayne-kramer-dead-mc5-obituary-1235597017/
