Jail Guitar Doors
By Milo Reed
“Let me tell you about Wayne and his deals with cocaine.”
This is the opening lyric to the song Jail Guitar Doors written by the famous British punk band, The Clash. However, when this song came out, Wayne Kramer’s drug dealing life and prison sentence were mostly behind him. What didn’t get left in the MC5 guitarist’s past was the burning anger he had towards authority, injustice, and the establishment. These feelings did not only stay with him, but were amplified and directed at the people who took away over two years of his life.
The two years that the legendary axe-man spent behind bars for drug charges in the federal penitentiary in Lexington, Kentucky, added a new spark to the rebellious fire that had consumed Kramer’s adolescent and young adult years. Before he was indicted, Kramer was a part of one of the most influential and revolutionary rock groups in music history. MC5 transformed their Michigan home and then the entire punk and counter-culture movement forever. Kramer and his band used fast, loud, politically charged, and at some points volatile music to express their utter disgust with the world. Previously taboo topics like drugs and sex became symbols of the counter-culture revolution as the members of MC5 yelled and sang to waves of intoxicated and angry teens around America. MC5 were a revolution and no one was safe from their wrath. Kramer and the rest of the ‘White Panthers’, as they called themselves and the members of the rebellion, attacked everything from traditional christian values to the Nixon administration. Unsurprisingly, the band was not well received by the more conservative members of society and even became a problem for the government after their lively concerts instigated massive riots in cities like Chicago. Drugs and violence led countless MC5 fans to be arrested during concerts and festivals. Not even the band members themselves were safe from Big Brother. Kramer and his revolutionary allies were consistently harassed by the police and many of the members spent time in jail. In 1975, the former MC5 guitarist was caught selling cocaine to an undercover police officer and was pulled away from the explosive counter-culture, punk rock scene. Kramer now had to find a way to express his anger and overflowing creativity within the confines of a cell.
To try and express his artistic spirit while incarcerated, Kramer played in a prison band and even began experimenting with jazz music alongside be-bop trumpeter and fellow inmate, Red Rodney. After prison, Kramer didn’t miss a beat (literally and figuratively), and was able to resurrect a music career and is still touring and releasing albums. However, this musical resurrection is not the only interesting redemption Kramer found after prison.
The contempt he held towards the government never went away. Prison did not reform Kramer because our prison system is not set up to reform.
“Prison time doesn’t help anyone, the way we approach punishment in America.”
Our current judicial system rests entirely on an authoritarian approach to punishment. While it may be easiest to just allocate certain sentences to certain crimes, it is not a successful form of rehabilitation. There is no correlation between time spent in prison and the extent that a prisoner is able to reintegrate positively into society. The fear of going back to prison may be enough for some ex-criminals to fix their ways, but many prisoners merely revert right back to a life of crime because they see no other options. Prisons make up a multi-billion dollar industry and U.S prisons alone make up 22% of the entire world’s incarcerated population. This is where business and morality collide. The millions of people in prisons are not all dangerous criminals. In fact, the majority of prisoners are serving sentences for crimes like drug possession and non-violent offenses. These people can be rehabilitated. Instead they are incarcerated and brutalized in prison and many times can not recover after life in a cell. The simple fact is that America’s judicial system is regressive and counter-productive. However, prisons are not going to go away (nor should they), and any positive prison reform is a mere fantasy in our current political climate. This is where people like Kramer come in to support and innovate privately, through their own methods, to show prisoners alternative ways of rehabilitation.
Today, Kramer is just as angry as he was when he was kicking out the jams, shuffling across the stage with his screeching guitar and shaking his unruly mane of hair. However, now he has found another method of expression. Kramer currently works for Jail Guitar Doors (fittingly named after the song written for Wayne), a non-profit organization which provides musical instruments to prisons that are open to attempting rehabilitation through songwriting.
“It has allowed me to give a voice to an anger that has built up from the time I was released, as I watched more and more people like me go to prison – and for more severe sentences than I got.”
Now Wayne doesn’t need a stage to make his beliefs known. Starting with a life filled with drug addiction and crime, Kramer now takes positive action to fix the issues he sees in the world. Through Jail Guitar Doors, prisoners have the ability to play instruments they may not have even been able to access while free. This form of rehabilitation promotes a way of expression for prisoners that does not manifest in violence and actually encourages cooperation and creativity.
Many people view the punk movement as a mob of upset adolescents that want to yell and scream while launching their bodies at each other to a lightning-fast backing track of unintelligible wails and distorted guitars. However, legendary punk groups like the The Stooges and MC5 sound more like your typical 60s rock band than any punk bands from the last three decades. The difference was in the subject of the songs and how
they were delivered. The bands and the music they played were in your face, opinionated, and unafraid. This new social group of ‘punks’ were unsatisfied, upset and fed-up. The music and the culture became a safe haven for these social rejects. The people who didn’t quite fit in anywhere, had nowhere to go or just rejected the way of life they were presented, now had a community in which they could freely express themselves and their beliefs. Kramer witnessed this firsthand. He saw the power that music could have and its ability to bring people from all walks of life together, united under one creative expression of feelings. He saw how music helped him in prison and now he works to share this gift with people around the world. The prison system is broken and while Wayne Kramer may not have his band of brothers, youthful energy, or audiences of charged fans, the punk in Kramer is still kicking and screaming inside him and you better believe that he is not going to start backing down now. To Kramer the revolution is still alive; only its enemies have new faces.
IT’S TIME TO KICK OUT THE JAMS MOTHERFUCKERS.
Wayne Kramer is still touring with the what is left of the MC5 and is currently celebrating the band’s 50th anniversary.