Wayne Kramer: From MC5 to OneMan Band

NEW YORK (AP) Through the dissolution of his band, his time in jail, and
his years as a junkie, Wayne Kramer never lost his faith in rock 'n' roll.

``I've spent a lifetime trying to write great songs to convince people of
things,'' says Kramer, the legendary guitarist with the infamous late 1960s
band, The MC5. ``Of course, I still believe in the power of the word and the
song. There is a role for music in our culture.''

For Kramer and the rest of The MC5, that once meant mingling rock 'n' roll
with street politics. They played the 1968 Democratic National Convention as
Chicago's police battered protesters, and also embraced the White Panther
Party.

Kramer's message still takes in many of the same causes, but it's much more
subtle now. On ``Citizen Wayne,'' the message is strictly in the music and
his razorsharp lyrics.

Unlike the typical rock star, Kramer's concerns personally and musically
are more working class: Can we pay the bills this month? Will we have the
same jobs next month? Next year?

``I'm famous, but I'm broke,'' the protopunk guitarist says goodnaturedly
from his California home. ``Everybody wants to get rich and famous. Well, I'm
already famous. I just ain't got no money.''

``Citizen Wayne,'' a riproaring rock 'n' roll record, was released in early
May. David Was onehalf of Was (Not Was), another lost, lamented Motor City
band signed on as collaborator and producer, while Kramer handled most of
the musical chores himself.

``Citizen Wayne'' is Kramer's third album in as many years after a jail stint
for drug dealing, recovery from heroin addiction, and more than two decades
on the extreme fringes of the music business.

``It's all about work for me now,'' says Kramer, whose late '60s work
inspired the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. ``If you don't have a record out,
you can drift from the public consciousness pretty quickly.

``This is the time of kiddy culture and throwaway entertainment Beavis and
Butthead, the Spice Girls, Hansen. I'm here to last as long as I can,
anyway.''

For years after the demise of The MC5, it seemed Kramer wouldn't last very
long. He was 24 when the band revered by critics, reviled by most everybody
else broke up in 1972.

``They despised us,'' he recalls of the early '70s musical mainstream. ``In
the retelling of the tale, we end up the heroes. We were the goats at the
time.

``The music industry had just learned how to market three days of peace, love
and music, and here come these guitarslinging gangsters from Detroit, in
leather jackets, with Marshall amps, screaming about kick out the jams. ...
They didn't want to know.''

Kramer eventually became a junkie, selling stolen goods to support his habit.
He spent two years in jail for peddling cocaine to an undercover cop during
the '70s.

Once released, he landed in New York, went back on smack and spent a decade
as an ``underground anarchist record producer,'' he now says dryly. ``There
are great retirement benefits in that package.''

By the start of the '90s, Kramer had cleaned up but he was laid low by the
fatal heart attack of MC5 lead singer Rob Tyner. A band reunion for a benefit
concert helped Kramer shake the ghosts of The MC5, and he moved to California
in search of a record contract.

He found one in an unlikely place: Epitaph Records, home to a new generation
of artists, like Offspring and Rancid. Label president Bret Gurewitz quickly
found a place for the middleage rocker amid his stableful of kids.

Kramer rocks just as hard as any of Gurewitz's other acts. Much of ``Citizen
Wayne'' loudly addresses what Kramer calls his ``automythology'' his life
and times, enhanced by countless retellings across the last quartercentury.

In ``Down On the Ground,'' he details The MC5's storied appearance at the
1968 Democratic convention a gig that, given the Chicago police's
takenoprisoners policy, no one else would play. ``Count Time'' is a
matteroffact prison diary. ``Snatched Defeat'' covers his failed bid to
start a band with doomed guitarist Johnny Thunders.

Kramer says his years in and out of the business have taught him a variety of
hard lessons.

``Here is one of the great rock 'n' roll lies: Live fast, die young, leave a
goodlooking corpse,'' he says. ``Johnny Thunders, God bless him, might have
lived fast, but he didn't die young and he didn't leave a goodlooking
corpse.

``The rock 'n' roll motto should be stay strong, stay creative.''

Kramer has gained a bit of notoriety in two recent books: ``Please Kill Me,''
the acclaimed oral history of punk, and Fred Goodman's music business study
``The Mansion on the Hill.''

```Please Kill Me' is everybody's favorite rock stars at their worst
behavior,'' Kramer says with a chuckle. ``Fred shows how Landau kind of took
a lot of The MC5's ideas and replugged them into his good soldier, Bruce.''

That's Bruce Springsteen, now managed by John Landau, who produced The MC5's
second album. Kramer, like Springsteen, is approaching age 50 with no
intention of turning his back on the music of his youth.

``The cultural icons for me are Pablo Picasso and Howling Wolf, not just Kurt
Cobain and James Dean,'' Kramer says. ``I believe passionately that this
music can be done all your life, and be meaningful and relevant in your 40s,
50s, 60s right to the end.''