Wayne Kramer - The Hard Stuff

 

After reading about the band in the likes of Cream magazine for who knows how long, finding a copy of Kick Out The Jams was literally a life-changing event. I was never able to translate my love for this band properly into my own music (as much as I would have liked to, anyway), but their ethos has remained with me to this day. Kramer was, of course, one of the twin lead guitarists for the group (along with the phenomenal Fred Sonic Smith) and they were both huge influences on my playing style. I was thrilled that I was able to eventually meet both of them (separately) and shake their hands and thank them for the music that they made.

Unfortunately, in the 90's, Wayne had issues with the astonishing documentary A True Testimonial - after cooperating fully with it in every way up until it was about to be released and caused the producers to lose money in absurd lawsuits (with Wayne suddenly demanding much more than he previously agreed to, in my understanding) and blocked the release. This has tainted my enthusiasm for the man and certainly for his later work and meant that I did not/would not buy this book new but since I found it at the Founders Club Book Fair, I thought I'd see what he has to say.

At about 10 years older than me, Wayne was, of course, highly influenced by the rise of rock'n'roll, from the greats like Chuck Berry to the hip, American instrumental music and then the amazing British Invasion stars, particularly the Rolling Stones. Finding the right people for his band meant that he played with a lot of different folks along the way before hooking up with the gents that eventually became the MC5.

There is a lot of egotism here - possibly warranted, it's hard to know - as he claims to have taught both Fred and Michael how to play their instruments and he was their original de facto manager until they hooked up with John Sinclair. Of course, then things moved fairly quickly, with the recording and release - and subsequent controversy over - their debut live album, being dropped by Elektra, recording their second album and the chaos involved in all of this. Unfortunately, he does not go into much detail about the albums, which would be interesting, other than to say that the KOTJ recordings were disappointing to him, and that it was not one of their better shows. Of course, lots of bad luck, bad decisions and bad drugs eventually broke up the band, despite efforts to keep it alive with various replacement members until it became all too apparent that it could no longer go on.

After that, Wayne just became a fuck-up - wasted on hard drugs'n'alcohol, he became a common thief to keep up his habit while he pretended that he was trying to still make music. It's pretty sickening what he let himself become. His time in prison takes up a good portion of the book and while he had it pretty easy comparatively - no violence towards him and a cushy job and lots of spare time for reading and playing guitar - it is pretty depressing. 

He finally gets out of prison and returns to his drug'n'alcohol abuse, randomly travels the country and finally ends up in LA where he hooks up with Epitaph Records and finally starts his musical comeback. He's still a complete fuck-up at this point and he has no love from Epitaph's brand of punk rock, but he literally had nothing left to lose at that point so took a chance. Of course, this worked to his advantage enough that he was able to re-make a name for himself, tour consistently and start his own label.

From there on he goes off on numerous tangents about his addictions and bouts of sobriety, about collecting old money, about the reunions with Dennis Thompson and Michael Davis (after Fred and Robin had passed) and lots more.

As I said, there is a lot of ego here and while he can be honest with many of his fuckups, he does skip some, as well. It's a weird one for me - love the MC5 pretty above any other band and his playing at the time was legendary, but there's a lot of baggage since. He does seem to want to be better and those who don't know some of his history will probably get more out of this than I did, but it's a mixed bag.