Wayne Kramer, Rock Legend And Failed Outlaw, Assembles A Supergroup In The Rearview
One Monday morning in early June, the guitarist Wayne Kramer, 70, sinks into a couch in a black-box rehearsal space in Hollywood. He and his backing musicians have spent the last few days here, getting ready to perform the entirety of Kick Out the Jams — the debut album by Kramer's infamous first band, The MC5, recorded live on Devil's Night and Halloween at Detroit's Grande Ballroom 50 years ago this October — on a string of European festival dates leading up to a U.S. tour in September.
After Jams — an album that generations of loud, fast bands from The Clash to The Hives and beyond would go on to crib from — the MC5 made two uneven studio follow-ups and packed a lot of hard living into the three years before their unceremonious 1972 breakup. Only two founding members of the MC5 are still alive — Kramer, and original drummer Dennis Thompson, who'll join MC50 at a few of the upcoming shows. To fill out the rest of the lineup, Kramer has assembled a group of A-list ringers who'll rotate in and out as their schedules permit. Today he's practicing with guitarist Kim Thayil and drummer Matt Cameron, both of Soundgarden fame, towering Zen Guerrilla vocalist Marcus Durant, and Don Was, the record producer, on bass.
Thayil's wearing a fedora and a black Sunn O))) t-shirt and sports a wizardly gray beard. Don Was — who's in the hallway, finishing up a phone call — is dressed entirely in black, from the sandals he kicks off on the studio carpet to the dreads crammed under his broad-brimmed hat. Kramer, who turned 70 this past April, is wearing a short-sleeved plaid button-down. He looks less like a rock star than nearly anyone else in the room — except maybe Cameron, who's wearing a Greg Norman golf polo — and more like he teaches math and driver's ed at a high school.
This is something of a false cue, as Kramer is also the only person in the room who's served time in federal prison — in Lexington, Kentucky, from 1975 through 1978, after selling what he characterizes as "a big pile of cocaine" to some acquaintances who turned out to be federal law-enforcement officials working undercover. By the time he turned 30, Kramer had been the lead guitarist in a legendary but star-crossed rock band, a playacting Detroit gangster, and a guest of the American carceral system. All this living is covered in his new memoir The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the MC5 and My Life of Impossibilities, along with Kramer's roundabout path to the life he leads today — a solo career, sobriety, a functioning marriage, a mortgage-paying job composing TV and film music, and a fulfilling sideline as a prison-reform advocate.
Today Kramer has a cold. He's
