Wayne Kramer on Instagram: “Wayne Kramer passed away today peacefully from pancreatic cancer. He will be remembered for starting a revolution in music, culture, and kindness. If you would like to honor Wayne, donations are appreciated to his nonprofit organization, Jail Guitar Doors @jailguitardoorsusa Link in bio. https://www.jailguitardoors.org/donate”
February 3, 2024
Impossible for me to give Wayne Kramer the memorial he deserves right now but here’s two things.
Twenty years ago, Wayne was the singular motor force of one of the best (maybe thee best?) rock 'n' roll shows I have ever been fortunate enough to witness. I tried to do that night justice in this review/tribute I wrote for the July 15, 2004 issue of the LAWeekly. Here it is, with some footnote commentary.
E=MC5
DKT/MC5 at The Echo, Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Gotta admit this gig didn’t look good: The MC5 released three all-time-great rock ‘n’ roll albums1 in three years, the last in 1971, before the band, only in their early 20s, dissolved, with nothing nearly as significant heard from any of them since. Rob Tyner, the band’s spectacular be-fro’d chubby cheerleader and lead vocalist died in 1991. Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, one of its two guitarists and principal songwriters passed in 1994. For this world tour on the occasion of nothing in particular, the surviving trio of bassist Michael Davis (D), guitarist Wayne Kramer (K) and drummer Dennis Thompson (T) have augmented themselves with a pretty random crew: original grungestar Mark Arm of Mudhoney and perennial underachiever Evan Dando on vocals, journeyman rocker Marshall Crenshaw playing Smith’s guitar parts, other guests sitting in from city to city. So, an easy call: a weird Motor City Karaoke cash-in by three guys trading on their cult following’s generosity, likely dominated by leader Kramer’s showboating (Who’ll stop the Wayne2, we wondered, now that Smith and Tyner are gone), with embarrassment all around—for the musicians, for a needlessly tarnished legacy, for ourselves for being suckered again. Let’s skip it.
But we didn’t. Because Davis, Kramer and Thompson have earned, at minimum, the benefit of the doubt. And tonight, they assemble maybe the purest display of rock ‘n’ roll spirit I’ve ever seen; it’s like seeing the way rock ‘n’ roll was meant to be played, as something capable of being fun and serious, that could be both self-expression and other-communication, traditional and explorative, able to stretch from the mundane to the cosmic, boundlessly energetic, disciplined but primed for on-the-dime abandon. On and on it goes tonight: hard-elbow-to-the-chest, Who-like cataclysms about street-rebel spirit and teenage sex, urban disaster blues, politically militant energy manifestos, two-kleenex ballads, jazz codas, space freedom odysseys, R & B-style call-and-response affirmations. As the show progressed, you realized that the MC5 three-album songbook is so strong, deep, varied and bleeding-heart-on-its-sleeve that even competently rendered it would shock an audience used to today’s niche-rock bands’ comparative lack of versatility or emotional-intellectual openness (only Soundtrack of Our Lives comes close). But this band, tonight at least, is much more than merely professional: all punch, little paunch. Kramer is a dazzling goofball joy, soloing without looking at his guitar, mugging and preening like his name is Chuck Berry; he even camel walks at one point. Arm and Dando are two kids geeking out at Rock Fantasy Camp, Arm taking the shoutier and darker songs (including a goosebumpily-on rendition of Sun Ra’s “Space Is the Place”) while Dando coos the sweets; when they’re off mic, they synchronize their maracca-shaking. Thompson is a-whirl, Davis is taut, the porkpie-hatted Crenshaw is present just the right amount. Three jazz guys from Detroit, including trumpeter Charles Moore (who played on the original records!) and trombonist Phil Ranelin, play on half the tunes; they’re great. Some guy plays harmonica on a blues; he’s great. Don Was plays stand-up bass on “Starship”; he’s great. Everybody is great. Which is why, at the end of the night, Wayne Kramer is able to do something I thought I’d never see in L.A.: he gets a room full of hipsters to sing in three-part roundelay. Completely nuts, and ever nutsier when you imagine what this band of 50somethings, working at 60% strength, must have been like in their prime. Greatest American rock ‘n’ roll band ever? Yeah I think so. (Jay Babcock)
…
Two years later, in October 2006, it was my extreme good fortune to play some role in Wayne being invited to sit in with the Sun Ra Arkestra for their set at the four-night Arthur Nights festival in downtown L.A. (Somehow this natural combination had never happened before, despite the Arkestra and the 5 having share stages back in the daze.) Wayne was so ecstatic afterwards. Here’s his account of that night.
MY NIGHT AS A TONE SCIENTIST
In the half-between world,
Dwell they: The Tone Scientists
In notes and tone
They speak of many things…
The tone scientists:
Architects of planes of discipline
Mathematically precise are they:
The tone-scientists
(Sun Ra)
Brazilian percussionist Elson Nascimento called last week and invited me to sit in with The Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of Marshall Allen. They were Saturday night’s Arthur [Nights] headliners, a four-day music festival held here in Los Angeles and curated by Arthur Magazine.
Was I thrilled? That’s putting it mildly. I have had a long-time admiration for the work of Sun Ra and his merry band of intergalactic explorers. Still do today.
I was first exposed to them in the 1960s with their ESP Disc, The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra and others. Those records – and the fact that John Sinclair booked us on a concert co-headlining with them at the Community Arts Auditorium at Wayne State University in Detroit – changed the way I would think about music for the rest of my life.
We continued to perform on concerts with The Arkestra over the next few years and I came to spend some time with Sun Ra himself. His ideas about Art, Music and culture helped form my own. In the Modern Age, with the resurgence of interest in the MC5, we have been able to reconnect with The Arkestra for concerts in London, New York and Los Angeles.
Although Sun Ra and some of the other founding members have gone on to Saturn, the band continues to travel the space ways under the able leadership of alto genius Marshall Allen. Many of the players on the band have longtime membership and the spirit remains completely intact.
So when I got the call, it was as if I was at once being asked to enter into a fifth dimension of my own past and future.
When I arrived at the gig, I took some good-natured kidding from the musicians about the traditional black suit and tie I was wearing. (I had just come directly from a TV studio where my current project, The Lexington Artists Workshop Ensemble, had performed a couple of numbers for the Hep C Awareness Telethon.)
I was informed that, in order to perform with The Arkestra, I would need to be outfitted with the appropriate space uniform. No problem. I put on the dark blue sequined robe and matching headwear with joy.
Brother Wayne (foreground) as guitarist on stage in full regalia with Juini Booth (left, stand-up bass) and the entire Sun Ra Arkestra.
When I asked Marshall what numbers I should play on he said, “Play it all. Just be ready, because there is no way to know what might happen.” This has been my personal attitude for years and here it was being conferred on me by one of the masters. Was I ready? Yes, brother! I have been waiting for this night all my life.
I was talking in the dressing room with trumpeter Fred Adams about the music Sun Ra composed and left to them. He told me they have just scratched the surface on the mother lode of unrecorded material. Marshall talked with me about the dilemma of having so much music and so little time to perform it.
I’m not someone who goes for the ritual of a group hug or prayer before a performance, but when I was told to “join-up” right before time to play I was honored to be included. This wasn’t a religious rite, but an invocation to recognize together who we were and what we were doing right then and there. That we were about to “create music for a better world. On this planet and all other planets!” And that we were all, “Sun Ra”.
I took the stage with the players and never felt more proud to be an artist punching in on the job.
The music was expansive. We played inside and outside the forms. Some tunes I could grasp the basic 16-bar II-V-I structure and others were way too difficult to attempt. I was standing next to bassist Juini Booth and could read some changes from his charts but often they came just too fast and furious for me. Other tunes were deep, deep space grooves that I locked into and worked as relentlessly as I could.
This kind of playing takes a great deal of concentration and my sore wrists reminded me of it later. Marshall was so gracious in granting me a few solo passages. For me, this was Heaven. Of course there were interludes of music that some might call “free music,” although this is a misnomer. When and how you play in this context is anything but free. This is about discipline, not freedom, which was one of the principles at the core of Sun Ra’s philosophy.
Marshall was a consummate bandleader in directing us through these sections. He was very clear and confident about what he wanted and when he wanted it. The Arkestra played, danced and sang and the audience enjoyed every minute of it.
Arkestra guitarist, David Hotep is a master chordist and I was trying to keep up, but it was like trying to catch a comet.
Dave Davis on trombone showed his great enthusiasm for music throughout the set, along with baritone saxophonist Rey Scott. As usual, drummer Luquman Ali drove the band with cosmic precision. The final notes played were a joyful exchange between Marshall Allen and tenor saxophonist Yahya Abdul-Majid.
Before I realized it, we had played for an hour and 30 minutes and it was time to go. We had traveled the space ways from planet to planet and returned to earth, all the better for it.
Sometimes it just doesn’t get any better.
Wayne Kramer, Los Angeles. 10.23.06
Everybody was great,
but especially Wayne,
Jay Babcock
Arizona
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Most critics will tell you that each of these albums is deficient in some way: the first one is a live recording that doesn’t give the songs the studio oomph they deserve, there’s too many covers, blahblah; the second is too short, too treble-y, too pop, not political enough, basically ruined by producer Jon Landau, yadda yadda; the third is…well, I never really understood what the received objections to High Time were (it’s not enough of a band effort in terms of songwriting? it didn’t sell enough? not Trans-Love Energies enough?), cuz that thing is fierce and gorgeous and truly rips. Anyways, the objections/caveats are both basically fair and these are still three of the all-time great rock ‘n’ roll band albums, because that’s how great this band was. And if the studio albums still don’t do it for you, there are about 900 bootleg releases to search out. For more on all of this, by people who know a lot more than me, check out “Ten Out of Five,” a comprehensive guide to the MC5’s recordings (circa early 2004), for the curious, the enthusiast and the hopeless completist by The Seth Man, James Parker and Ian Svenonius, from the old Arthur Magazine.
It was 2004. Wayne Kramer’s reputation locally was based on his four solo records on Silver Lake punk label Epitaph, which no one I knew enjoyed, and his live performances, which…ditto. Perhaps expectations weren’t properly managed, perhaps the 20-30-year-olds just wanted to sneer at an older guy, perhaps he really was going through a fallow phase, or maybe—I think this is the simple truth—he was just into doing stuff that nobody wanted to hear…I dunno. People were rude; Wayne seemed headstrong. So it went.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD91p78pnas