Wayne Kramer, the co-founder, lead guitarist and lead singer of iconic Detroit proto-punk outfit MC5, has died. The news was shared on Kramer and MC5's official social media pages. The cause of death was not disclosed. Kramer was 75 years old.
Kramer and his bandmates got their start at a young age, forming the Bounty Hunters while attending Lincoln Park High School in suburban Detroit in 1963. Kramer and Fred “Sonic” Smith played guitar. Rob Tyner sang. Michael Davis was on bass. and Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson was the drummer. Shortly after forming, the group adopted the new name of Motor City Five, which was later shortened to MC5.
“The MC5 played everywhere: school cafeterias, dances, jumps, bars, clubs, outdoors, indoors, on the side, upside down, you name it, we were there,” Kramer said of his band's early years. “When you love playing music, it doesn't matter where you play it. You just put together a good band and put your 10,000 hours into playing your asses off wherever you can.”
The MC5 released their first two songs—a cover of “I Can Only Give You Everything” and their own “One of the Guys”—in 1967 through Detroit's AMG Records. After its release, Kramer and his bandmates continued to attract attention through touring and radical left-wing politics, encouraged by their manager and White Panther Party co-founder John Sinclair.
“Politics is obviously the power to change the country, but I don't mean John Sinclair politics, youth politics,” Kramer said. Rolling rock in 1972. “Sinclair was talking about all this alternative shit, and one of his big plans was the tribal system where there would be little tribes in each city and then all the tribes from the different cities would get together for a youth-tribal council -powwow, and that's just a bunch of crap to me, man. Because politics is where the power is, man, and if you want to change this shit, man, you've got to put somebody in power that has the ideas and the philosophy that you're entertaining, you know.”
Under Sinclair's guidance, the MC5 released the live album Kick Out the Jams in 1969. For his second record, 1970s Back to the US, the group went into the studio and recorded with Bruce Springsteen's producer and eventual manager, Jon Landau. The MC5 only released one more album, in 1971 High timebefore disbanding in 1972.
From 1975 to 1978, Kramer served time in a federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky, for selling what he once described to NPR as “a big pile of cocaine” to undercover officials. While in Kentucky, Kramer played in a prison band with Red Rodney, a jazz trumpeter who had played with Charlie Parker. His experiences in prison informed his 2014 free jazz album Lexingtonwhich doubled as the score to a prison documentary chronicling his time, The Drug Farm.
