Wayne Kramer, the co-founder of proto-punk Detroit band the MC5 who influenced groups from The Clash to Rage Against The Machine, has died aged 75.
Kramer died on Friday at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, according to Jason Heath, a close friend and executive director of Kramer’s non-profit Jail Guitar Doors USA.
Mr Heath said the cause of death was pancreatic cancer.
From the late 1960s to early 1970s, no band was closer to the revolutionary spirit of the time than the MC5, which featured 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 for the uprising to come.
“Brother Wayne Kramer was the best man I’ve ever known,” Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello wrote on Instagram. “He possessed a one of a kind mixture of deep wisdom & profound compassion, beautiful empathy and tenacious conviction. His band the MC5 basically invented punk rock music.”
The band had little commercial success and its core line-up did not last beyond the early 1970s, but its legacy endured, both for its sound and for its fusing of music to political action.
Kramer, who had a long history of legal battles and substance abuse, would tell his story in the 2018 memoir The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the MC5, And My Life Of Impossibilities.
Morello is among the musicians appearing on a new MC5 album, Heavy Lifting, which comes out this spring and includes Kramer and Thompson from the original group. Slash, Vernon Reid and William DuVall of Alice In Chains also contributed.
“Pushing music forward, carrying a message of self-efficacy and empowerment — and just to have fun,” Kramer told Mojo magazine in December. “It’s all in the MC5. Creativity is the solution for the challenges we face.”
Thompson is now the band’s only surviving member.
Kramer and Smith had known each other since their teens and played with various other musicians around Detroit before the core line-up was in place, in the mid-1960s. At Tyner’s suggestions, they called themselves the MC5, short for Motor City Five, and emulated the Rolling Stones, The Who, and other hard rock bands of the era.
By 1968, they had built a substantial local following and were influenced by Marxism, the White Panthers, the Beats and other social-political movements.
The MC5 was more radical politically than most of its peers, and otherwise louder and more daring.
Kick Out The Jams was their most famous song. A live album of the same name reached the top 40 in 1969, their highest-charting release. They also released the studio albums Back In The USA and High Time before breaking up at the end of 1972.
