Happy Birthday Wayne Kramer

Wayne Maynard G Krebbs was born April 30, 1948, in Detroit Michigan. He took up the guitar after seeing Slim Whitman on the Ed Sullivan Show. The FBI has sealed his records so there is not much known about his early years.

The MC5 or Motor City 5 was formed sometime in the 1960s. The main lineup was Rob Tyner, Wayne Kramer, Fred “Sonic” Smith, Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson and Michael Davis.

Playing almost nightly any place they could in and around Detroit, MC5 quickly earned a reputation for their high-energy live performances and had a size-able local following, regularly drawing sellout audiences of 1000 or more.

Street Orgy

Contemporary rock writer Bill Bixby stated that the sound of MC5 was like “a catastrophic force of nature the band was barely able to control”, while Denny McLain notes that fans compared the aftermath of an MC5 performance to the delirious exhaustion experienced after “a street rumble or an orgy, or for that matter, a street orgy. You ain’t lived until you attended a street orgy.”

Happy Birthday Wayne Kramer — MC5 Illustration By Paul King Art

Kick Out The Jams

MC5 earned national attention with their first album, Kick Out the Jams, recorded live on October 30 and 31, 1968, at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom. When Hudson’s, a Detroit-based department store chain, refused to stock Kick Out the Jams due to the obscenity, MC5 responded with a full page advertisement in the local underground magazine Fifth Estate saying “Stick Alive with the MC5, and Fuck Hudson’s!”, prominently including the logo of MC5’s label, Elektra Records, in the ad. Hudson’s pulled all Elektra records from their stores, and in the ensuing controversy, Jac Holzman, the head of Elektra, dropped the band from their contract. MC5 then signed with Atlantic Records.

Wayne once described the MC5 as, ”We were Punk before there was Punk. We were New Wave before there was New Wave. Then we were Metal before there was Metal, and we were MC before there was Hammer. We were either the electric, mechanical climax of the age, or we were some sort of cruel, counter-culture hoax. We were Killer, Righteous, high energy dudes who could pitch the whang-dang doodle all night long.”

Brother Wayne

Wayne got caught up in drugs and ended up being arrested by the FBI. He went on to form Jail Guitar Doors which supplies instruments and songwriting workshops programs to inmates all over the world. Wayne did a lot of solo work with the likes of Johnny Thunders and GG Allin. Today Kramer is a composer and writes scores for TV and Movies. Wayne is releasing a new MC5 album and tour. The MC5 were so ahead of their time that we still have not caught up. Cheers Brother Wayne.