Wayne Kramer
America has a gun problem. Most prisoners shouldn’t be in prison. We need rock’n’roll. Being a parent is tough but can be rewarding… These and more life lessons from the MC5/MC50 guitarist.
America has a gun problem. Most prisoners shouldn’t be in prison. We need rock’n’roll. These and more life lessons from the MC5/MC50 guitarist.
Fifty years ago, Detroit’s Motor City 5 released their debut live album Kick Out The Jams, a record so feral it inspired successive generations of sonic insurrectionists to take rock’n’roll to new peaks of intensity. The MC5 were Wayne Kramer’s baby. It was the blistering firepower of his lead guitar that defined the band’s sound. After delivering three landmark albums, the 5 split in ’72. Kramer fell into addiction and found himself in federal prison for two years. Hooking up with Johnny Thunders in Gang War upon his release, Kramer latterly joined Was (Not Was), before he embarked on a solo career.
Sharp, witty, street-smart and gregarious, the keeper of the MC5 flame set up Jail Guitar Doors in 2009, a rapidly-spreading programme to teach guitar and music lessons to prison inmates in the USA, and has just published The Hard Stuff, a raw and unflinching autobiography.
Today he continues to celebrate the MC5’s potent legacy with MC50, featuring Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil, Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty, Faith No More bassist Billy Gould and Zen Guerrilla frontman Marcus Durant. They tour the UK in November.
WHERE THERE’S GUNS, PEOPLE GET SHOT
There’s a very small minority of Americans – but they’re very loud and well funded by the NRA [National Rifle Association] – who, when they talk about freedom, are meaning the freedom to shoot somebody. Not necessarily because they’re trying to harm you, but because you don’t like them.
Most Americans don’t want to shoot anybody and are really ambivalent about the Second Amendment which, incidentally, doesn’t say you get to have an AK47 or a rocket launcher. A focus group of gun owners was asked: ‘Wouldn’t a pistol be enough? Why do you need a thirty-round clip?’ And one said: ‘Well, what if I miss?.
DRUG PROHIBITION IS DEADLIER THAN DRUGS
“Drug prohibition’s been killing people for generations, and kills way more people than drugs.”
The opiate crisis in America stems from a massive campaign to market oxycontin. It’s interesting that when black and brown people in the ghetto and musicians were facing addiction, it was: “Lock ’em up, throw away the key, fuck ’em.” But now it’s white kids from the suburbs and rural America, it’s: “We need programmes to help these people.”
The mills and manufacturing centres that served small-town America have gone, as the economy shifted to service and technology, and left a void in their wake. Communities have become redundant. Regular patterns of survival, the point of your existence and any sense of community have gone. Addiction fits perfectly in there. It gives you something to do with your time. You feel better for a minute in the beginning, then pretty soon you feel shitty all the time and you’re in a mess. Which used to be the exclusive preserve of poor neighbourhoods – no school, job, place to go, no options, no future. Now it’s everywhere, and so drugs are proliferating. It’s a perfect storm, the greatest failure of social policy in America’s history. Certain people should be in The Hague for crimes against humanity. Drug prohibition’s been killing people for generations, and drug prohibition kills way more people than drugs.
TRUMP: THE PERFECT CAPITALIST
From the Right’s perspective, everything’s going great. All my colleagues in the justice reform movement say America’s a system that’s broken. But it’s not. It’s a big hit, a ninety-billion-dollar-a-year industry. What we have now is a result of at least twenty years of systematic organisation by powerful interests on the Right. The Republican Party’s obstructed the Democrats for years, certainly throughout all of Obama’s presidency. The trouble is that nobody expected Donald Trump to emerge as their champion, and they can’t control him. Trump doesn’t care. His interests are the interests of Donald Trump.
He’s the perfect capitalist, who puts profit ahead of people. From infancy he’s been entitled. He never had to be responsible for anything, he buys his way out of everything, and I’ll be delighted when he’s indicted and sent to prison. I don’t want to see anybody go to prison, but for him I’ll make an exception.
NO ONE LEAVES PRISON A BETTER PERSON
The criminal justice system is a total abject failure. I don’t know anyone who ever came out of prison better. I know people who have grown up in prison and have changed, but prison didn’t do that, time did that. Guys age out of crime, especially violent crime, around fifty. They get tired of prison, they want to have a house, a wife and job. They just want to get along in the world, they’re not tough guys or gangsters any more. Only ten per cent of people in prison need to be there, because they’re so damaged they can only relate to other human beings violently. That means ninety per cent of the 2.3 million people in prison in America have no business being there. You can be held accountable for breaking the social contract in your community. When you put people in penitentiaries hundreds of miles away from friends and family you isolate them from the things that humanise them and keep them engaged in the world. Prison is a traumatic experience. You don’t know what’s going to happen to you. You’re never safe, you’re with people who are dangerous. They’re not dangerous because they tell dangerous stories, they’re dangerous because they do dangerous things. They’re killers. Prison is almost medieval in its fundamental concept. And, like the firearms issue, I don’t see it changing in my lifetime.
THE AMERICAN DREAM: EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF
That we can all get rich is an urban myth. The system isn’t set up for you to get rich. But America clings to the dream. Take Las Vegas, a city built by Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Seigel, gangsters whose life’s purpose was to separate you from your money. All Las Vegas does is separate suckers from their money. But people go there and think they’re gonna win. And it’s the same with our unique brand of American capitalism.
There’s nothing wrong with success. I’m happy to see people succeed, especially if they contribute or invent something useful and helpful, but
I’m not too big on hedge fund guys who don’t contribute anything but just accumulate hundreds of millions of dollars.
BEING A GOOD FATHER IS NOT AN INHERITED SKILL
I rejected family until recently. The very concept was an anathema to me. Who needs a family? Families are terrible. You’ve got to hang out with people you’d never normally associate with because they’re family? That’s bullshit, bourgeois. But I’ve discovered it at this late stage of the game.
So many things that happened to me I’d buried because they were too painful. The whole idea of not having a father. Then realising being the father I didn’t have for my son could be incredibly liberating and rewarding. I don’t do it perfectly, but I work really hard at it. People say there’s no manual for raising kids. Yes there is. There’s a lot of them – go read a fucking book. There’s a lot of people who have a lot of good ideas about raising kids and how to build in their dignity, autonomy and resilience, and we began that at birth with our son. We listen to him. I mean, I have to be the grown-up in the relationship, but he counts. He’s a complete sentient human being and I try to treat him with respect. He doesn’t like to be tickled, so I don’t tickle him. I wouldn’t go up and tickle you. Why would it be any different just because he’s little. That should be more reason to be respectful, not less.
When I was younger I was too self-obsessed to be a father – artists and musicians are self-obsessed to begin with – and my shallowness knows no limits, but I figure I’m just about done being a child myself so maybe I can look after one. I can’t claim maturity, but I know what it is and like to think I’m moving in that direction.
ROCK’N’ROLL CAN STILL SAVE YOUR IMMORTAL SOUL
The arts feed us. The arts confirm all we hold dear and our humanity, which is the best thing we’ve got going for us. Can a rock’n’roll song bring down Donald Trump or a rightwing government? Probably not. But it’s an essential element of our existence: food, air, water, music, art. It tells us the stories of who we are and confirms we’re not alone. If we ever feel isolated and separated, the solution’s always in connection.
Back in the sixties, music was gonna change the world, and maybe it did on some levels. It certainly created a community and inspired people, and it still can – and does. One difference between now and then is that back then young people around the world were all in agreement that the older generation was for shit. They were blowing it and we’d a better idea. It was universal; students in Paris were taking over the Sorbonne, American students NYU, it was happening in Mexico City, and we all smoked reefer and listened to crazy rock music and we all got laid and it was great. But agreement doesn’t exist now. Right now people are more fragmented and there’s more distance between young people.
HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL
When I was eighteen I was absolutely certain I was correct and was going to live forever. Now I’m confused most of the time, know less about more things and I’m definitely not living forever.
As [Marxist philosopher] Antonino Gramsci says: “The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned.” And this is where I find myself at this point in my career. What’s the real deal? I’m an optimist and always have been. Even in my deepest, darkest midnight of the soul, I never wanted to destroy myself, even though a lot of my behaviour was self-destructive. I still wanted to get up every day and see what the day would bring.
Wayne Kramer’s autobiography The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime And My Life Of Impossibilities is out now.