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Wayne Kramer: a complex and influential musician, dogged by lucklessness

The musician, who has died aged 75, co-founded MC5, a band that for all its undoubted brilliance, lurched from one disaster to the next

It was an extraordinary, incendiary debut, but its release was scuppered both by battles with retailers over the word “motherfucker” appearing in the lyrics and John Sinclair’s liner notes – which ultimately led to them being dropped by their label – and by what you might call the MC5’s strained relationship with the revolutionary stance the album occasionally espoused. He spent most of the 21st century consumed by various warmly received MC5 reunions and, increasingly, advocacy: he became involved with charities that dealt with drug addiction and fronted the American wing of Billy Bragg’s Jail Guitar Doors, which provided musical equipment to prisoners as a means of rehabilitation. He could be winningly indifferent about the band’s legacy, finding fault with every album they released (even Kick Out the Jams, he suggested, “didn’t catch us on a particularly great night”) and dismissive of the music they continued to inspire, claiming most of it missed their experimental side that he “could hear more original things in hip-hop”.

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