We’re not going back

The radicalization of Wayne Kramer

Wayne Kramer, September 2016

What is a city?

Is it a place where people live and work and a million other things? Is it an idea? A concept? An experiment? Is it a collective dream and, if so, what happens when you wake up from it? What do you see?

I was watching football with Nuvia a few weeks ago and found myself cheering on the Detroit Lions. There were so many storylines that made the team easy to root for: the coach, the quarterback, the team’s own history of ineptitude. When they beat the Rams they ended a nine-game losing streak in the playoffs dating back 32 years and when they beat the Buccaneers the following week it was the first time the team won back-to-back playoff games in over 60 years.

Nuvia’s favorite thing about any sporting contest, especially the big games, is the post-game celebration when the winning team’s players, staff, and especially the fans completely lose their shit. It was a powerful thing to see the long-suffering fans crying in the stands. One video went viral and it turns out the fan was mourning his late father, a Lions season ticket holder who helped build the stadium where the team plays.

That strikes me as a very Detroit story, one of America’s most misunderstood cities. When I say “misunderstood” I don’t mean there’s something missing in your understanding that I will now correct. I mean that Detroit is one of two major American cities that’s radically different than the rest of the country. (The other one is New Orleans.)

I don’t think anyone can understand a city unless you’ve lived in it and moved around in it long enough to see it change. By experiencing moments of hope and joy and loss and sorrow in a particular place you can form something like an understanding of it.

I don’t have any connection to Detroit. I spent a few very enjoyable hours there last spring when I read at Small’s Bar in Hamtramck with

Aaron Burch

and

Jimmy Doom

.

Everything I know about Detroit I learned from Wayne Kramer.

Wayne Kramer, who passed away last week from pancreatic cancer, was a proud son of Detroit and a legendary guitarist for the MC5, a hard rock group that was active in its original incarnation from 1963 until the early ‘70s and then continued, on and off, until very recently.

The original Motor City Five recorded a live album at Detroit’s Grande Hall in 1969 during which vocalist Rob Tyner introduced their most electrifying song with the rallying cry, “Kick out the jams, motherfucker!”

You could say MC5 didn’t catch on for all kinds of reasons from the personal to the political. Or, you could say they—like their friends and fellow Michiganders Jim Osterberg and the Stooges—were ahead of their time. Most capsule descriptions of MC5 refer to the band as proto-punk, which wasn’t the revolution MC5 was gunning for, but here we are.

In 2016, I worked with Wayne on a book proposal. He’d written an excellent memoir of his life before, during, and after playing in MC5 called The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, The MC5 & My Life of Impossibilities. I love the title because it alludes to so many things: hard rock, hard drugs, hard time. He could have written separate books on all three of those aspects of his life but as someone in recovery he was focused on his family and his work with Jail Guitar Doors, a program that rehabilitates prisoners through music.

I met with Wayne a handful of times and as he told me stories about his life I came to understand how his experience was intertwined with the story of Detroit.

“After my mother and father divorced, my mother worked all day in the beauty shop and worked at night as a barmaid in the bars up and down Michigan Avenue where we lived. After I would go to bed, she would go to work. I had a lot of unsupervised time on my hands. I discovered that she had a cash drawer. In our apartment, we had the beauty parlor in the front and our living quarters in the back. I would see piles of dollar bills in her desk drawer and I knew, as a brilliant eight year old boy, that she couldn’t know how much money was there, so in the middle of the night, I would wake up, sneak up the hall, go in the drawer and take a couple of one dollar bills. The next day I’m BMOC because I could buy lots of candy for two dollars. I found that stealing that money emboldened me to start stealing from stores. There were a lot of five and ten cent stores like Krezgi’s and Woolworth’s on Michigan Avenue. I found that I could go into those stores, scope the place, watch the help, and lull them into complacency about this little boy walking around looking at stuff, and rip them off. This also made me a big deal in the neighborhood. The money I took and the items I’d steal all gave me power.”

Wayne grew up during the postwar boom when the auto manufacturing plants were cranking out cars around the clock. There was an incredible demand for these cars, which led to an incredible demand for workers. The workers were well-paid and when they got off work they wanted to blow off steam. Clubs with live music were open all day and all night. It didn’t matter what shift you worked, morning, afternoon, or night, there was a place to go afterward. It was a very good time to be a musician in Detroit.

“I actually started in junior high, playing at a kid’s party in the basement. Your friends from school are all there, the girls that you’re trying to impress, the guys that you’re trying to impress. You’re playing, and it’s hot and sweaty, and the music’s loud, and the hormones are dominating the room. Then a fight breaks out and guys are punching each other in the face and knocking shit over. It was tremendously exciting. Maybe it’s not exciting for someone else but I thought it was great stuff. That feeling carried on throughout my entire career. The MC5 started. We played in nightclubs. We did the dance concert thing. The Grande Ballroom. And we became the house band there. We could draw 3,000 people without a record deal. We had tremendous highs.”

MC5 was more than a popular rock band. It was managed by John Sinclair, one of the founding members of the White Panther Party. They embraced, and in many ways embodied, rock and roll rebellion as a means of political protest.

The riots and uprisings that spread across the country in the summer of 1967 were particularly brutal in Detroit. 43 people were killed, more than a thousand people were injured, and more than 7,000 people were arrested. MC5 was outspoken in their criticism of the catastrophe and performed during the protest during the Democratic National Convention the Chicago for eight hours.

“I witnessed and experienced things in that conflagration [’67 Rebellion] that changed me. Detroit police beating a black motorist into the ground for no apparent reason. At the riot during the Love-in in Detroit it was very disturbing to see Detroit police, mounted police, riding through crowds of hippies, striking people in the heads with their batons as if they were playing polo. Those events radicalized me. I was already of my generation. Disagreed with the war. Disagreed with how Black people were treated in America. Disagreed with drug laws. Disagreed with cultural oppression but those were the events that really focused my emotions against what I viewed as the established power structure.”

When Wayne no longer had the outlet that playing in the MC5 provided, his life took a dark turn. It’s all spelled out in The Hard Stuff, which I thoroughly recommend. It’s not just a rock book (no rock book is “just a rock book”) but the story of how the American Dream unraveled in Detroit.

The last time I saw Wayne was the day after Trump was elected. I remember waking up the next day thinking, “Did that really happen?”

Well, we all know the answer to that. Here we are seven-and-a-half years later and we still haven’t woken up from that nightmare.

I expected Wayne to be somber, angry even, but he was his usual self with something like a mischievous twinkle in his eyes, like he was already thinking of ways he could disrupt what was happening, but his words that day have stayed with me.

“Yesterday was a setback,” he said to me, “but we’re not going back to where we were.”

I think about that a lot. Wayne was probably thinking of the riots he’d witnessed in ’67 and ’68, the bloodshed, the political murders, the outrageous racism, and unchecked police brutality. Can it happen again?

Of course it can.

All those things are on the table. It’s up to every one of us to use our art, our resources, our voice, and our vote to make sure we don’t roll the clock back to 1967 or 1863 or 1773.

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Mariah Stovall’s I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both

I was honored to blurb Mariah Stovall’s debut novel, which come out next Tuesday:

“With a gift for mapping the inner lives of her characters with precision and intensity, Stovall captures the chaos and confusion of not-quite adulthood. Like the punk rock anthems we refuse to outgrow, I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both is the soundtrack to the damage we do to ourselves. It's a raw nerve, a meticulously coded manifesto, the coming of agency novel we’ve been waiting for.”

Roar Shack Reading Series: Sunday, February 14 at 4pm

Remember when I had an event in August that was canceled due to—checks notes—the threat of a hurricane in Los Angeles?

It was rescheduled for a date six months later and holy shit it’s here. Please join me at the Time Travel Mart at 1714 Sunset Blvd. in Echo Park where I’ll be taking part in the Roar Shack reading series with Louise Moore, Dayna Lynne North, Susan Hayden, Kate Maruyama, Carla Sameth and the host, Dave Rocklin.

If you’re new-ish here and you liked this newsletter you might also like my latest novel Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get Orca Alert! every Sunday. It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, culture, and science you may have missed while trying to avoid the shitty news of the day.