(MENAFN- Live Mint) "Guitarist Wayne Kramer, who co-created protopunk Detroit band the MC5, has died aged 75 on Saturday. Kramer's Instagram page announced the news:“Wayne S Kramer. Peace be with you. April 30, 1948 – February 2 2024\".According to the AP news agency, the cause of the death was pancreatic cancer. Kramer took his last breath at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles the late 1960s to early 1970s, no band was closer to the revolutionary spirit of the time than the MC5 (short for Motor City 5), which featured Kramer and Fred“Sonic” Smith on guitars, Rob Tyner on vocals, Michael Davis on bass and Dennis“Machine Gun” Thompson on drums. Managed for a time by White Panther co-founder John Sinclair, they were known for their raw, uncompromising music, which they envisioned as the soundtrack for the uprising to come. The MC5 band thrashed out such hardcore anthems as“Kick Out the Jams” and“Clash to Rage Against the Machine”.Kramer and Smith had known each other since their teens and played with various other musicians around Detroit before the core lineup was in place, in the mid-1960s 1968, they had built a substantial local following and were influenced by Marxism, the White Panthers, the Beats and other social-political movements. The MC5 was more radical politically than most of its peers, and otherwise louder and more daring. They were virtually the only band to perform during the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, where police were beating up anti-war protesters.“Kick Out the Jams” was their most famous song, and opened with an unprintable call to arms: \"Kick out the jams motherf-----!\" A live album of the same name reached the top 40 in 1969, their highest-charting release. They also released the studio albums“Back in the USA” and“High Time” before breaking up at the end of 1972 would lead various incarnations of the MC5 over the following decades, and perform with Was (Not Was) among other groups. But for a time he sank into the life of what he called“a small-time Detroit criminal.” He was arrested on drug charges in 1975 and sentenced to four years in prison. Jail Guitar Doors, which provides inmates with musical instruments, is named for a Clash song that refers to his struggles:“Let me tell you 'bout Wayne and his deals of cocaine.”The band had little commercial success and its core lineup did not last beyond the early 1970s, but its legacy endured, both for its sound and for its fusing of music to political action. Kramer, who had a long history of legal battles and substance abuse, would tell his story in the 2018 memoir“The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the MC5, and My Life of Impossibilities.” Thompson is now the band's only surviving member. Tyner and Smith died in the early to mid-1990s the time of his death, Kramer was preparing to release a long-awaited third studio album from the band. Last year Kramer said:“I think it was time to reignite that spirit of 1968, the spirit of my generation, when we were all young people. I think we're at a very dangerous time in our history. And I think if we don't all organise, come together, and step up, we could lose it all. Democracy could go away. The forces that we're up against are not joking. This is not playtime. This is serious,\" The Guardian reported is among the musicians appearing on a new MC5 album,“Heavy Lifting,” which comes out this spring and includes Kramer and Thompson from the original group. Slash, Vernon Reid, and William DuVall of Alice in Chains also contributed is survived by his wife, Margaret Saadi, and son, Francis.
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