Wayne Kramer

Guitarist, songwriter, activist, and author Wayne Kramer is best remembered as guitarist with the MC5, one of the most incendiary American rock bands of the 1960s. Kramer's work with the MC5 would prove to be wildly influential; their blend of blazing hard rock, free jazz-informed improvisation, and sociopolitical rabble-rousing, as documented on 1969's Kick Out the Jams, made them heroes in their hometown of Detroit, and much of what happened in hard rock, punk, alternative, and grunge in the decades that followed would owe a clear debt to the MC5. Kramer went through years of misadventure following the breakup of the MC5, but in 1995 he made a belated solo debut with the acclaimed album The Hard Stuff. While he was busy as a producer, collaborator, and composer in the 2000s, in 2022 he toured with a new edition of the MC5, with an album in the works.