What's Going On? Wayne Kramer Wants to Know
by Mic Holwin
originally appeared in Smug Magazine Vol. II Issue#3 (1996)
It's 1969. You are in the MC5, an young but already legendary Detroit rock and roll band who, in one year, have played the Chicago anti-war rally during the Democratic convention, graced the cover of Rolling Stone, debuted on Elektra and the Billboard charts, kept the word "motherfuckers" in the song "Kick Out The Jams," and got unceremoniously dropped by Elektra, who feared the band was politically too hot to handle. Three years later the MC5, once hailed as a musical catalyst to social revolution in Vietnam-divided America, are officially history, gone out with a whimper. You're 24 years old.
For the next two decades, guitarist Wayne Kramer tries to make sense of these few fast years of notoriety. He spends a few years in jail, cleans up a drug habit, and works through the deaths of MC5 bandmates/bloodbrothers Rob Tyner and Fred Smith. Finally angry (and sober) enough to question the world again, Kramer emerges twenty-two years later in a frightening right-wing-shadowed America, signs to the hottest DIY-gone-BIG label in the world, and speaks his mind.
It's 1996. Wayne Kramer is firmly re-established as a guitar innovator, has just released an excellent second album, and, at 48, is finally getting the respect he deserves. As Kramer himself would say, he's not the disaster he thought he was.
Kramer's new album, Dangerous Madness, an outspoken follow-up to his 1992 Epitaph debut The Hard Stuff, calls to mind the cleanness of Thin Lizzy's Jailbreak and quaverings-over-electric-chaos of Live Rust Neil Young. Kramer's voice is up front, unadorned so you can hear the words. Like a more famous New Jersey spokesman for the downtrodden union worker, Kramer names specific hometown streets and corners in his songs. "Michigan and 31st" isn't just a symbolic crossroads for what's wrong with America. It's as real as the symptoms of an ailing country he points to in his lyrics: "the whole state of Michigan just signed up for welfare" ("Something Broken In The Promised Land"), "guy next door bought a rocket launcher from a mail order house called 'Urban Combat'/says we can pry it from his cold dead fingers" ("Dangerous Madness").
What keeps Kramer separated from the maudlin Mellen Camp is his dark side: the out-of-work Detroit car factory guy could be a heroin addict or a schizophrenic homicidal sicko or a radical Republican with a small personal armory. Kramer's done time; he's bucked addiction; he's been an average nobody, working in a bar band in the Florida Keys. Kramer can talk because he's been that guy you wondered about.
There's a motor propelling the music forward in Dangerous Madness--no surprise since Kramer is one of Detroit's most famous exports, somewhere down the list after Chevrolets, Motown and Bob Seger. What kicks right off Dangerous Madness is the guitar. Making his Fender burble, spit and rudely interrupt, Kramer does more than play guitar, he plays electric guitar and amplifier. He has (and maybe this is also a result of growing up in Detroit) a fundamental and intrinsic understanding of electricity, knowing how to get electrons to flow through a hunk of wood and some tubes to create fire.
He is playing tonight at New York City's Mercury Lounge. This is old stomping grounds for Kramer; he lived on the Lower East Side for much of the '80s, doing what anyone would do at that time in Alphabet City: drugs, produce bands, play with Johnny Thunders. As we talk, the band--drummer Brock Avery and bassist Paul Ill--unloads and sets up Mercury's stage. There is commotion surrounding us, but Kramer's Detroit speech cadences, and the intensity and depth of his huge suprahazel eyes keep the crack in the universe manageable for awhile, at least.
Who do you think your audience is? Because of your lineage, you appeal to the punk and hard crowd, but that's not the kind of music you do. In an age of compartmentalization, you do rock and roll.
This is a question that I'm concerned about myself. [Judging] from my last year of touring around the world, I don't really get 17-year-old Rancid fans. There's people in that crew that appreciate what I'm doing, and come to the shows, but mostly it's people that have followed what bands have influenced what other bands, probably about 25 to 35. Virtually nobody from the MC5 era comes out. They're all at home with their kids. [laughs] I mean, I have people who come to the gigs with their kids and their kids are grown and they've grown up on the MC5, which is cool. But the bigger issue is, yeah, who listens to what I'm doing? and who cares? and why should they? Can I spark the imagination of the mass listening audience? I don't know. I mean, so much of this has to do with marketing and business. Little of it has to do with art and culture.
You are given a certain amount of hipness by being on Epitaph. People will pick up your record because it's on Epitaph.
Absolutely. And it's to Epitaph's credit that they take a chance on me. I realize that it's a stretch for them to make Wayne Kramer records. Because I don't do everything at a 180 beats a minute. And some of my songs have no beats.
Like I told Brett [Gurewitz, Epitaph's head] in the beginning, I had stuff that I wanted to do that wasn't punk rock, that wasn't rock at all. And he's a real knowledgeable cat as far as I know, and he didn't know quite what I was talking about. But he said Wayne, if you want to do it, record it. So I came in the next day with the tapes from the session when I cut "So Long Hank," that Bukowski thing, and he said, ahh, do more of that--whatever that is, do more of it, that shit's great. I got great encouragement from Epitaph.
The MC5 was before you were 24. You've struggled for so long to get past those days and get something else going. You've lived through so much. The music industry is so different, just in the last ten years alone, let alone since the late '60s. Why do you even want to bother with it?
Because it's what I do. I've been confused and fucked up about a lot of things, but never about what my purpose on the planet is. I've been confused before, but not about that [music]. I've lost a lot of people along the way and it tells me on some level if you're gonna do anything, don't waste your fucking time anymore. Get on the fucking case. If you're going to make any contribution to the quality of existence on this speck of dirt floating through the universe, then your time is the most valuable thing you have. I feel like I can do an album a year for the next ten years; I got alotta songs to write, alotta of gigs to do, alotta records to make, and I'll worry about all the rest of it later on down the line. For now, I need to do this like breathing air.
Did it build up inside until the time came where you said, okay, I have to speak now?
Yeah. If I didn't care, I could make instrumental albums. But I feel like somebody's gotta say something about what's going on. I come from a political time and a political band and a political consciousness--and the madness has truly gotten dangerous at this point. These guys Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan, they scare the shit out of me. I think they are the bad guys, and it's worrying because there is no counter culture that stands up and says we're not going to go along with this. Nobody holds them accountable. There's no political action committee that says "where are the jobs, motherfucker? You don't come up with some fucking jobs and some fucking programs, then we're gonna vote your asses out." This is what concerns me. You combine them, and their lunatic constituency of fundamentalists, and the maniac armed right-wing that's blowing shit up because they imagine evil conspiracies--scorpions from Mars taking over their brains--and you combine it with this disastrous war on drugs, no research on AIDS, and no jobs, and we're in a world of shit here.
Do you think you can change people's minds through music?
Yes. I mean, music will never replace political activism, never replace voting, never replace lawyers and legislation and organizing, but there is a role that music plays in all this. It's kind of like the soundtrack to what's happening. A lot of us in my generation are living out Bob Dylan songs, and Rolling Stone songs; we based our lives on those songs, and I think that happens in every generation. Every generation finds its voice in its music. So music can have a role in it. It's really, what does the music represent? What does it mean? At its best, it means a sense of possibility, and it reaches out to you and tells you you're not alone. That's what it does for me.
You write rock and roll in the vein of song craftsmanship of the '70s. You can sing, you can play, you write a nice tight song with a hook. If I describe your music this way, coupled with your lyrics about social dis-ease, someone could say I'm describing a Springsteen or Mellencamp, and that's not it at all. So how would you describe what you do?
It's kind of like a slingshot. I pull it back and reach back into all the musics that originally inspired me--Motown, James Brown, Peter Townshend--that form that you're talking about, the three minute pop song form, that's where I come from. [And] the free jazz movement. You reach back into that stuff and then like a slingshot let it go, and it shoots you ahead to where the music is taking you.
Kramer's guitar tech hands him a familiar Fender Strat so he can perform the nightly string change. Slowly and methodically--almost reverently, really--Kramer restrings as we talk. When he cuts the strings with pliers, I wince. Guitar strings that Wayne Kramer have played seem somehow alive.
From the stage, Ill calls Kramer and plays him a bass line with a tritone jump: "What's the rest of it in?" he asks. They discuss the changes, then Kramer turns to me in explanation, "We've been listening to some late era Sun Ra." All three are jazz aficionados, Avery and Ill both schooled players who follow Kramer's improvisations on a dime.
Hailed in hindsight as proto-metal and proto-punk, Kramer's connections to Motown and jazz run deeper than is suggested on recordings. "Jazz guys are way more inspirational to me than rock guys," he says, telling me about his recent reading of Louie Armstrong's autobiography, which inspired his song "God's Worst Nightmare." Jazz has run through Kramer's life like a vein of quartz in granite. Influenced by "the more hard-edged stuff, Archie Shepp and Trane and the more visceral emotionally taxing stuff," Kramer respects pioneers: "I got the Ornette [Coleman] boxed set and it sounds like right now, it's contemporary, it's alive--and then you hear records that are made right now, and they're back in the '50s. There's no innovations."
That night, Kramer and Ill and Avery play for two and a half solid hours. To say they are supremely talented musicians doesn't capture the electricity that leaps from the stage. What is missing on Kramer's two records is what this night is about: high-energy improvisation. They take songs out, stretching them to snapping point in any lesser-abled musician's hands. Expecting good solid rock and roll, I get good solid rock and roll and the aesthetic muscle of Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman. And MC5. Somewhere in that dense set, Kramer does "Kick Out The Jams," rocking it and dismantling it and making it sound fresher than any five minute block on Q-104.
Earlier that evening, as Kramer is photographed, Ill and Avery soundcheck. Perhaps in honor of tonight's canceled Allman Brothers show at the Beacon, Ill does "Whipping Post" to set his amp and mic levels. Kramer soon joins them on stage, and they break into a smooth but angry rendition of another Detroit soul's societal anthem, Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On." Motown 1971 could be Anycity USA 1996: "don't punish me with brutality/talk to me so you can see/what's going on." Repeated insistently by Kramer and echoed by Ill, the refrain becomes a question. "What's going on?" Kramer demands, "What's going on?"
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