When the MC5’s first album, Kick Out the Jams, hit in 1969, it packed a punch like nothing else before it. Recorded live, its eight songs were delivered with white-knuckled, pedal pressed-through-the-floor energy that called on equal parts free jazz, British invasion, R-n-B and ‘50s instrumental rock. Supercharging it all with political lyrics and anti-establishment rhetoric, the Detroit five-some gave a face to punk before it had a name. Relix caught guitarist Wayne Kramer the day before he departed on a world tour with the remaining members of the band, Dennis Mitchell and Michael Thompson, under the moniker DKT/MC5 to talk – what else? – politics.
In the mid ‘60s, there seemed to be two camps when it came to music: The Beatles or The Stones. You guys were clearly about The Stones. Why?
Probably since they were the anti-heroes; their anti-establishment image appealed to us more than the cuddlily, loveable, mop top establishment image. Although, to be fair, The Beatles were an equally huge musical influence. May not show, but they were.
It seems that there was a California sound, a New York sound and a Detroit sound, as far as rock was concerned back in the ‘60s.
True, mos def. If we typify the west coast as folk players that now had electric guitars and very bad rhythm sections and the east coast was kind of a hodgepodge of Brill Building rejects and Andy Warhol attempts at incorporating avant-garde art to music, Detroit had a fundamentally working class tone to its approach to music that the people of Detroit worked hard and they played hard. The musical crosscurrents were so unique and they comprised the influx of both black and white southern music. The black blues that came up into Detroit, the music of John Lee Hooker and the white country music that the factory workers all brought with them for those good auto factory jobs. The great tradition of jazz music in Detroit, strong music programs at Calf (sp?) Tech, the arts high school in Detroit there; the strong music program in the Detroit public schools in those days. I mean that’s how I started as a drummer in the Detroit public schools. The coming of rhythm and blues and the huge success of Motown and its state of the art recording band, on us musicians, was a huge influence; that we knew those records were being recorded right over on West Grand Boulevard. And then, if you combine that with the first wave of the British music invasion, the wave “A1” which included The Who and The Yardbirds, and then for the MC5 to take all of these daily, musical influences in the fabric of our lives and then be exposed to the free jazz movement of the music of John Coltrane and Archie Shepp and Sun Ra and Albert Ayler and Sunny Murray and Cecil Taylor. That all of a sudden, we had an identity in our music that I thought everybody in the world had. [laugh] I thought everybody was up to Albert and Sun Ra and was at home listening to Bells and Cosmic Music and Ascension and everyone knew who played bass at Motown because we knew who played bass at Motown. I come to find out years later that no else knew who played bass at Motown and nobody else listened to Cecil Taylor and no else new unit structures, you know? So we ended up with a musical fabric that the MC5 championed that was rich and had depth to it, that even if you took the music of the MC5 apart, that yeah we started with those basic music forms of Chuck Berry and Bo Didley and the instrumental guitar bands of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s – the basic three chord rock idea – but then it combines with the experience of Motown and the blues and even country and then you add the free jazz component and then a literary sensibility in the text of the songs that Rob Tyner brought to it and later Fred Smith, an ability to tell a story in a classic way, an ability to take a political stance that was progressive and radical, they all combined to make a band and a music form in a time and place that I just don’t believe has been equaled.
You said recently that, “The MC5 was visceral – all sweat and muscle and the whole concept of high energy.” Given that the MC5 took a lot of those cues from the avant-garde and free jazz movement of Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman and the MC5 basically gave punk a face before it had a name through its attitude and sound, would you say those jazz greats could be called punk?
You could in the sense that you define punk as a rejection of the status quo. That you define punk, as you know, like Sun Ra said, “We come from nowhere here, why can’t we go somewhere there?” If you define punk as freedom spikes on your head and leather jackets and safety pins in your nose, then that’s a different thing. That’s fashion. But if you define it as a style, a way of life that has to do with trying to make something come out of nothing, that idea that any three or four kids could get together and start their own rock band, in that sense, the unorthodoxy of it, yeah you could say Sun Ra was the ultimate punk. [laugh] But you have to be careful with the semantics of it. Punk has a lot of other definitions. Like jail punk means something completely different again. But if we look at it, at its highest, that it means a striving to do something new, to do something original, fresh and creative and ultimately positive.
Punk has always been political and/or anti-establishment; do you see that inheritance coming directly from the MC5?
Maybe if you narrowcast one component of the MC5, that there was a great deal of anger the MC5 felt about the direction we felt the country was going in; the frustration as young guys who were not being listened to, who weren’t being heard. And I mean that as a generation. Our frustration came from the fact that they wouldn’t listen to us. We said this is wrong, and they ignored us and they ignored us till it was too late. We know this now. We were on tour and Mark Arm brought along a DVD of The Fog of War, the McNamara documentary, and he said right from the beginning this ain’t going to work, this is a terrible mistake. It surprised me to find out how much the protests affected them and it shows me that it really does work, it really is a powerful thing when people take to the streets and say to the leadership, “You’re wrong.” It’s very powerful. We were frustrated and it came off as we were angry and I think that flice may have gotten carried over into the new generation they called the punk rock generation. It kind of runs the gamut: there’s a nihilism, there’s a surrealistic art component and there was also a political component. The Clash, Billy Bragg and these guys are erudite, involved people and they carried that into their music too. It was the nihilism and the empty headedness of “Dancing with Myself,” you know… [laugh] Which is fun and there’s nothing wrong with it…
You released your first album, Kick Out the Jams in February 1969 on Elektra, whose title lyric basically became the band’s motto: “Kick out the jams, motherfucker.” Do you know of any other musical group at that point who had commercially recorded an obscenity like that?
The only thing we had ever heard was David Peele. And he recorded for Elektra. One day, I came down to the living room where we lived in this big White Panther headquarters in Ann Arbor, and somebody was playing this record on Elektra called Have a Marijuana and David Peele was singing, [Kramer sings]: “Up against the wall motherfucker, up against the wall motherfucker. And we said, “well great, the taboo has been broken and there’s no problem for us.” And then Elektra signed us and we said well its great and they all said, “we believe you should be able to say what you want to say. This language is in common use since the beginning of time and its protected art expression and we’re behind ya.” [laugh] And they were behind us until it looked like it was going to cost them money. And then they ran for the hills.
The MC5 was targeted by the Nixon White House and generally harassed by the authorities. It must have seemed pretty bad then; but in hindsight, do you think it was better, worse or different than what’s going on now with government control/harassment?
Well it was worse but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to get worse now. The things that were going on, the Nixon/Mitchell/Holdomen/G.Gordon Liddy were pretty serious gangsters. They understood power and if you challenged their power, as we did along with many of our generation, they took it seriously and they used everything they had against us. For the Black Panther party it got them death squads. It got them murder. For the SDS and the White Panthers, it got us indicted, it got us arrested. We had physical fights with police departments, police officers, they tapped our phones. We know all these things today through the Freedom of Information Act. I have my FBI files and they are numerous with great amounts of reduction (redacted), where they black out page after page after page.
Despite the inconvenience and routine, unfair treatment, did you take pride in threat the government saw you as?
Of course. We were ultimately patriotic. We disagreed with what they were doing. Democracy requires criticism. It requires citizens to pitch a bitch if it ain’t right. Clearly we could not justify the war in Vietnam, not unlike the inability our position in Iraq today. It’s all based on lies and half-truths and political ideologies, which, in my understanding of the framers intent, this was not what they had in mind.
At what point did politics become welded with the music for you?
There was two and they’re connected, one in particular. One was the beginning and that on my birthday in 1967 I think it was, April 30th, we played an event in Detroit. There is a little island in the Detroit river that’s a city called Bell Isle and this was at the beginning of the hippie era and the love-ins and we played at the love-in and at the end of the day the Detroit police department decided the love-in was over and beat the fuck out of the hippies, merciliessly, for no reason. Just because they were the biggest gang in town and they thought this thing should be over and nobody was moving fast enough. And when I saw Detroit police officers, on horseback, playing polo with peoples’ heads, that it radicalized me. I always thought of the policeman as they guy go to as a little kid growing up in Detroit. If you were in trouble, you go see the policeman but then all of a sudden here were the police beating me and my friends for no reason. And then in 1967 when the Rebellion exploded in Detroit and I witnessed scene after scene of unbelievable brutality from the Detroit police department, it all combined with the war in Vietnman, the fact that young people didn’t seem to matter, that black people didn’t seem to matter. We used to call them the dinosaur culture [laughter] and they were absolutely lost in the ‘50s, the ‘40s even. That was the breaking point where I became totally polarized and committed to radical, progressive change.
At a certain point, the MC5 started moving away from overt political affiliations and got more focused on just making music. With that in mind and given your recent involvement with the organization Punk Voter, to what degree do you think politics have a place in music?
I think it has to do with the role music and then musicians can play. We all have a job, you know. We all have something we can contribute. Not everybody is going to be in the infantry, some people have to be back in the supplies lines, some people have to be clerks, some people be communicators, some people have to read maps. If you use the analogy of the military, which doesn’t really apply, you get my point. The role I believe that musicians and music plays is… it’s like the meeting place. It’s like the town meeting. That you and I meet in the songs themselves. That if there is a song that tells the truth about the way the artist feels, if he or she has the courage to tell the truth in that song, and then as a listener I can identitfy with that and I connect to it, and I say, “yeah, I know what you mean. I feel that way too,” and you do that too, then we’ve met in that song. Then we have that in common and it works like a underground newspaper. We both listen to Chuck D and say “fight the power” and we both say “right the fuck on.” It becomes a way for us to connect to each other. And the other thing is, that a musician can do, is the things that we’re uniquely qualified to do. We’re qualified because people will listen to us, they want to come hear us play, that we can say, “I will identify myself with a movement or a candidate” and participate in the process of democracy. Democracy is not a theory, it’s a process and it’s participatory. If you don’t participate, you don’t have a right to pitch a bitch. You got to be in it to win it. I’d vote everyday if they’d let me.
It’s not a spectator sport.
That’s the idea with Punk Voter. If people 18-21 voted, they could change the nation. They could change the world but they don’t participate and they don’t participate because politicians ignore them. This has been true at least since the ‘60s. They just don’t talk to young people.
The last MC5 show was New Year’s Eve 1972, appropriately at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit. A popular band in our scene, Phish, has announced their last concert the end of this summer. Though I know those were very tumultuous times for you personally, and for the band, can you remember the feeling you had as you took the stage for the last time with the band?
Yeah. It was in resentment and bitterness and failure and disingenousness. I felt like a fraud. I felt like everything I had worked in my youth, from the time I was 14 or 15 years old, had all just collapsed. In the end, it was all a house of cards. In the end, it couldn’t withstand a good challenge. I was being grandiose and maudlin and self-pittying because, of course, I had a role to play in all that and I wasn’t taking responability for my part in it. But that’s how I felt at the time. I felt like the world had done me wrong. They, whoever they are – my fellow bandmates, the record companies, the culture, the people – it was everybody else’s fault. [laughter] I didn’t know at the time that I created the whole the thing and I had a role to play creating it and a role to play destroying it.
Not an easy thing to come to terms with, I’m sure.
It’s taken some time. The good news is that I have come to terms with it and I accept it. I know what happened then, I know why it happened and that puts me in a unique position today to be able to… It’s my greatest gift because I can work with a younger musicians and even though I can’t stop him from making mistakes, I can say the one thing that nobody else can say to him: “I understand. I know what you’re going through cause I did that too.” His priest can’t tell him that, the rabbi can’t tell him that, the psychiatrist can’t tell him that, but I can tell him that. That turns out to be a great gift to me.
Do you think the current music climate would allow for a festival headlined by Chuck Berry, the MC5 and Sun Ra like the Rock Revival Festival you all played?
Well… I don’t know. [laughter]. It was a great gig then. That was the way we saw things going, the way we made things work but who knew that Albert Ayler was going to die and Coltrane was going to die and that Miles become the chief proponent to lead us into the terrible events of fusion and that jazz would end up as smooth jazz. This is terrible. That the MC5 was going to fall apart, that everything we had championed was going to kind of drift off into the either. Nobody knew then. We saw the future as a future full of this high energy music, this free jazz and this free expression and a new kind of politics and a new way to live. Rob Tyner used to call it the “paleocybernetic culture.” The idea that you could work at home on your computer, these are things he though of 30 years ago. That’s the gift of today is to be able to participate in a DKT/MC5 tour and carry this music to a whole generation of music fans that didn’t know the story. Never heard this music, that would have never heard it. Because what we did was that we developed a methodology, we developed a way to play music. A style of music that we called high energy. Like we were talking about before in punk, parts of it were narrowcast and applied in what became heavy metal, what became punk rock but none of it was the content we started with. The great gift today is to carry the work of Rob Tyner and Fred Smith and the MC5 to this whole new audience. I mean this is a world tour we’re on.
There was quite a bit of “discussion” over the show you did with the remaining MC5 members Dennis Thompson and Michael Davis in London last year under Levi’s endorsement, the first of its kind at the time. In responding to comments then, you said you didn’t know if you would tour or not. You now very clearly are. What catalyzed the decision to get back out on road as DKT/MC5?
Well after we did the London show, I came how and we started to mix the tapes and put the DVD together. I listened to it and some of it sounded pretty good. Dennis and Michael were really excited that they got a chance to play again. We talked it over a great deal and we said, “if we’re going to put this DVD out, maybe we could play a couple of shows.” I really thought we could do Detroit, because we have a lot of friends there and I thought we could probably get a job there. I thought we could do New York because the MC5 had a lot of friends in New York and we could probably do Chicago. So we thought three shows. We could probably afford to do three. It’s very expensive: we’ve got special guests that will come and help fill out the band and everybody has to eat. It’s funny, musicians are like that. You have to feed them. I don’t get it myself, but anyway. So we went to our agent and said see if you can get some offers from Detroit, Chicago and New York and the minute he put it on the wire that we wanted to play some shows, in 48 hours it went from three shows to a world tour. It was phenomenal. It was a minor miracle. This was the shock of it all- that there was so many people that wanted to hear this music played live.
It seems that people always new the MC5 was finite in some ways; that it would burn bright, but burn short. Did you feel the same way at all?
I don’t think I thought it through that deeply. I was so engrossed in the day to day experience of it. Let me speak for myself, I had grandiose plans and plots, schemes.
On your first album, Kick Out the Jams from 1969, your former manager John Sinclair wrote in the liner notes, “The MC5 is a whole thing. There is no way to get at the music without taking in the whole context of the music too – there is no separation.” That certainly seemed to be true of the time but now you’re performing again with the remaining members and while it’s not the MC5, it’s certainly close. Where do you see that notion of context falling with what you’re doing today with the remaining members?
I would have to put the context of that as an unasked for gift. I never thought I would be doing this. I had made my peace with the MC5. Events that began very badly turned out very good. To have the opportunity to play with Michael and Dennis, while there’s still time and play with each other as mature men [laughter] and come back together with guys I did so much important work with early in my life, this just nothing but a gift I am very grateful for. And to be able to play this music for a whole new generation is very humbling.
There seems to be reoccurring parallels between this election year and the major issues and 1968.
Mark Arm puts it pretty well. He introduced our song “The American Ruse, and said, “We’re going to play this song. The bad news is that the song as relevant today, if not more relevant. We have another pathological liar in the Whitehouse, we have a war we can’t justify and that the same people who made money on the Vietnam war are making more money today.” This is a huge question for me that I don’t have the answer to. I am actively look for an answer for this. After 8,000 years religious, moral principals, after 3 or 4,000 years of Jeudeo- Christian-Islamic-Buddhist-Hindu practice, how is it that this keeps happening? Philosohpers say those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And here we are repeating it again, and again and again. I think I’m starting to see a trend that says we’re getting better. I just saw one study that tracked, based on population, that from a period of 8,000 years to today, that then 30% of the population was killed in wars. Today, only 2 or 3% of the population is killed in wars. The trend is a good trend, but we seem to be learning really slowly. [laughter] There’s a lot of this that’s déjà vu over again.
If you could see one person get hit in the nuts with a bullhorn, who would it be?
Me. Cause I’m the only one, in the end, that I can do anything about. If I don’t change, if I don’t get better, then I’m doomed to repeat my mistakes of the past. And I don’t even really need a guy with a bullhorn because life itself will do it to me. So I’m the one that has to chance. I’m the one that has to step up. I’m the one that has to find a better way to do things and a better way to live. A better way to be of service to my fellows. I’m the one that has to be a giver and not a taker. I’m the one that has to create something from nothing to hopefully leave the place a little nicer than I found it.