Ex-MC5 Guitarist Speaks, Part 1

ATN: Terence Trent D'arby sings on the title cut of your new album. At first I was surprised to see his name on an Epitaph release, but then I thought about how you've said that when you were growing up in Detroit, there was no distinction between black and white music, and the pairing seemed fitting. How did working with him come about?

Kramer: I bumped into him at the Schenker guitar factory. I was building a guitar and he was also building one. He said he'd wanted to meet me, and of course I'm a big fan of his. He said on his first tour he took two CDs: Pet Sounds and Kick Out the Jams! We we're talking, and I said I had a track that needed backing vocals, and he wanted to help out.

He's a real bro. He showed up on time, worked hard...he was a real collaborator and a co-conspirator.

ATN: Is he someone whose albums you listen to in your spare time?

Kramer: I have, sure. We both come from the same area of the country, I think he's from Cleveland, the mid-west industrial belt. None of us were part of the east coast intellectual scene or the west coast hippy scene....

ATN: I'm glad you mentioned that, because sometimes the new album has a very heartland, rootsy sound ­­ I'm thinking of the lead guitar on "Wild America," and the ringing rhythm guitar in "Something Broken in the Promised Land." To me, the music in these songs seems to speak to where you're from geographically, just as the lyrics to "Edge of the Switchblade" [from The Hard Stuff] speak to where you're from historically. That sound surprised me, though, because I've been thinking that you're out in L.A. now, working with L.A. punk musicians. Is that sound something you were aiming for at the outset with this record, or did it come about as the lyrics began to take shape?

Kramer: The best way I can explain the process is that I reach back to the music that inspired me in the beginning ­­ the free jazz that I use on "Dead Man'sVest" or "Dead Movie Stars" or "So Long Hank"; or the Motown stuff, the James Brown, all these bass parts that originally turned me on, the earthy Pete Townshend guitar chords. It's like a slingshot. You pull the slingshot back to those things that originally inspired me, and it shoots me out ahead to where all the new music is going.

And the new music...if I'm influenced by a song Brett Gurewitz wrote, or an Elvis Costello song, you bring it all with you.

ATN: There's a line in "Promised Land" that goes, "The cats sing along with Neil Young records / How much more damage can I stand?" How much does that line reflect the frustration you've expressed before about the lack of respect or even mention that the MC5 received in the music industry's version of the history of rock 'n' roll?

Kramer: Well that line wasn't directly connected to that. On one level, the MC5 did get, and all along has got, mad props from musicians, which was always more important to me. It was the suits that left us out....

ATN: As one of the people who's proven his mettle over the long haul, where do you see your niche in '90s rock 'n' roll? Are you out there doing your job, showing you can keep up with today's young guns, or is it more that you have the task of showing today's bands how to be a challenger with substance, or is it something else entirely? What do you see as your role?

Kramer: To be as irritable as I can! The conditions we find ourselves in the latter part of the '90s, in an election year...I look at my job as the town crier, riding through the neighborhoods on horseback, saying "The fundamentalists are coming! The fundamentalists are coming!"

This shit is out of control in this country. The reason Pat Buchanan is getting all this attention is that he's talking about, "There's no jobs." He's hitting the nail on the head for a lot of people. When I was growing up, my parents had jobs, not great jobs, but jobs...everybody got along. That was before the rebellion of '67. There's no jobs today. The gap between the working poor and the rich [keeps getting bigger]. Wall street is not making any less money this year, and big corporations aren't making any less money.

I agree with Pat Buchanan's analysis, but not his solutions. He's a lunatic! To get down on immigrants ­­ America is a nation of immigrants.... The average guy gets squashed in the process. There is a real mean spiritedness in the Phil Gramms, the Gingriches, Buchanans. It's really worrying.

I'm trying to tell it the way I see it. It may seem gloomy sometimes. But I gotta believe there are solutions. Twenty year old law students, or a political scientist who will take some responsibility.... These are dangerous times we're in.

To be continued...