Finding His Way Through the Jams

Most of today’s punk and alternative-rock bands are eager to heed the MC5’s famous command to “kick out the jams,” but they tend to do it in a way that guitarist Wayne Kramer and his torridly rocking, noisily exploring ‘60s band never intended.

“Kick Out the Jams” was the title anthem of MC5’s debut album, recorded live in the band’s hometown of Detroit on Halloween night, 1968.

When MC5 singer Rob Tyner screamed the phrase, it was a command to sever all restraints and burst through all limits in a headlong drive for transcendence through brutal noise. The twin-riff guitars of Kramer and Fred “Sonic” Smith spat ammo like ack-ack guns, the better to drive home the politically radical MC5’s disdain for the order of things.

Though today’s young rockers have no problem kicking out the jams in the sense of making a brutal noise, most have all too literally kicked out the jams by dispensing with the improvisational, exploratory flights that were hallmarks of all the important heavy-rock bands of the ‘60s--among them the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream, the Who and MC5. Most modern-rock shows are a matter of bands reproducing their records at unreasonably loud volume.

This is where the resurgent Kramer comes in. As he busies himself disproving F. Scott Fitzgerald’s adage about there being no second acts in American lives, Kramer tours the globe--he stops Friday at the Lava Room in Costa Mesa--fronting a power trio that is apt to stretch and extemporize on a nightly basis, proving that it’s no contradiction to keep in the jams while you’re kicking out the jams.

“I think that’s the thing I bring to the gig,” Kramer, 48, said last week in a post-midnight call from Montpellier, France, where he and his younger band mates--bassist Paul Ill and drummer Brock Avery--had just played a show.

“It’s what originally inspired me. I think a live show should be dramatic. You should take some chances; it should be dynamic,” he said. “There should be quiet bits that build into big, explosive bits, radical mood changes. All this stuff I learned from James Brown and the Who and Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor and Archie Shepp. It was music that had drama to it.”

The uninitiated might assume that, as a middle-aged rocker with a ‘60s pedigree and a penchant for elongated instrumental explorations, Kramer must have been somehow allied to, or in sympathy with, the Grateful Dead. The Dead, after all, is the band held up as a model for Phish, Blues Traveler, and most of the rest of today’s improvising bands.

“Personally, I never liked the Grateful Dead,” Kramer said. “I thought they were really [expletive] horrific. The thing that let me down about the whole San Francisco movement was the terrible rhythm sections. I’m from the home of Motown, and I know how a rhythm section is supposed to play. It’s where the power and forward motion come from. All those hippie bands to me had awful bass players and drummers.

“We’d harass those bands when they came to Detroit: ‘Kick out the jams, or get off the [expletive] stage!’ ” In fact, Kramer said, “Kick out the jams” was a taunt to be shouted at insufficiently rocking bands before it became the rallying cry in the MC5 song.

“I don’t want to kick [the San Francisco bands] too tough,” Kramer added. “They brought a lot of joy to the world with their music. There’s been a whole crowd that’s come up behind them that’s really into hearing musicians play. Those could be people who share a sense of what I’m trying to do.”

MC5 broke up in 1972. For Kramer, it precipitated a 20-year slog through drugs, prison and sideman gigs. He returned in 1994 with “The Hard Stuff” and has just followed it up with “Dangerous Madness,” both for Epitaph, the punk-rock specialty label that launched Bad Religion, the Offspring and Rancid.

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In one of the more incongruous moments in punk history, the new album finds Epitaph boss and Bad Religion alumnus Brett Gurewitz crooning backup vocals for the Seger-ish “Wild America” and the Springsteenian “Something Broken in the Promised Land.”

Kramer says he feels no pressure to be an orthodox punk. “Brett Gurewitz wants Wayne Kramer to make Wayne Kramer kind of music,” said the shaven-headed guitarist, who lives in West Hollywood with his wife when not on the road.

Kramer said he was devastated when the MC5 broke up after three commercially unsuccessful albums that presaged today’s popular merger of punk with heavy metal.

“I was only 24 years old. It wasn’t only the way I made a living, but my whole world, my whole value system, was tied into those other four men, and we walked away from it as if it never happened. It was denial on a massive scale.”

Kramer decided he would finance his post-MC5 musical aspirations by dealing drugs on the side.

“I’m afraid as a gangster I’m an utter failure,” chuckled Kramer, whose cocaine salesmanship netted him a two-year stretch in federal prison during the mid-’70s. “If it taught me anything, it’s that crime ain’t cool, jail ain’t cool, guns ain’t cool. There’s nothing romantic in it. It’s a tremendous waste of time and energy, and all you’ve got is time and energy.”

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In the ‘80s, Kramer dealt with his own drug problems, played as a sideman with the Detroit-based avant-garde R&B; band Was (Not Was) and moved to New York City and formed Gang War with Johnny Thunders.

In the mid-80s, Kramer and his friend and steady collaborator, Mick Farren--a British hard rocker Kramer met on an MC5 tour of England--composed and staged a musical called “The Last Words of Dutch Schultz.” Based on the life of the 1920-30s New York gangster, it’s the piece from his obscure years that Kramer would most like to see revived and made available on record.

Even in prison, Kramer didn’t stop playing. He joined jazz trumpeter Red Rodney in an inmates’ band. He says he never considered the possibility of giving up music.

“I’ve been confused about a lot of things over the course of my life but never about my reason to exist, and it’s to do this work.”

Though his career is now on the upswing, Kramer’s artistic vision remains full of fear and loathing at society’s prospects.

He is on top of his game when he intertwines social observations with personal memories on “Back to Detroit,” about his hometown’s decay, and when he uses surreal imagery to drive home a political point on the heavy blues shuffle “God’s Worst Nightmare.”

The shadow of mortality creeps in, especially on “A Dead Man’s Vest,” a spoken piece recounting his father’s death. “I’m a little pissed off these days about death in general. This is a mean world to live in,” he intones on the track.

In conversation, however, Kramer sounds anything but pessimistic. He holds out hope that new leaders will arise with new ideas for fighting class disparity and social decay.

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Several of his former musical associates and acquaintances have died during the past five years--the MC5’s Tyner and Smith (who had married Patti Smith), Red Rodney, Sun Ra and Johnny Thunders--but rather than bringing on a cloud of despair, their loss instills a clarifying urgency.

“I’m really saddened to see people go before their time, and it serves to remind me not to waste my time,” Kramer said. “If I’m going to make a contribution, this is the time to do it. Everything counts.”

* Wayne Kramer shares a bill with Supersuckers and Teen Angels at 9 p.m. Friday at the Lava Room, 1945 Placentia Ave., Costa Mesa. $6. (714) 631-0526.