Wayne Kramer in the ’90s.
Poet, author, patriot, rebel, felon, jailbird-turned-prison-reformer, and—most important—part of the twin-guitar engine of the influential rock band the MC5, Wayne Kramer died on February 2, at age 75, leaving a gap in the world of activist musicianship and a tear in the fabric of American music history. The cause was pancreatic cancer.
Kramer was just 19 when his career began with the founding of the Motor City 5 in Detroit, alongside fellow guitarist Fred Smith, singer Rob Tyner, bassist Michael Davis, and drummer Dennis Thompson in 1963. The group were as tough and complicated as their hometown—musical firebrands, playing with an energy and intensity rarely seen in the then still-evolving rock genre—and Kramer performed like Chuck Berry and Sun Ra in one body. Which made sense, for while rock was their voice, they embraced the cultural explosion of the times in all its glory, including free jazz, and in particular figures like John Coltrane and Sun Ra, whose music reflected the Black freedom struggle in its themes as well as the purity of self-expression.
As a result, before Hendrix began recording, the MC5 were blazing a trail in rock improvisation. “We attacked that concept like a dog on a steak,” Kramer told me at our first meeting in the ’90s, which was arranged by our mutual friend, the band’s original manager and counterculture icon John Sinclair. “The people we idolized were Coltrane, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor … and the Yardbirds and the Who. We saw a connection between those kinds of music. I was pushing Chuck Berry-inspired solos into the territory Coltrane was in. We cultivated music in the moment, coming up with it on the spot. Taking risks is what makes something unique, no matter what it is.”
“It’s those moments when everyone in the room is on the same wavelength, and the barriers between us explode.” —Wayne Kramer
And so, for their raw, unbridled, and at times practically unhinged sonic attack, the MC5 are an important element in the bedrock of punk rock. “The context of punk,” Kramer explained, “is to try to move away from the status quo and do things of principle that are of value. Most people today understand it as something that’s been commodified to mean Green Day or the Offspring, which are mainstream music business success stories, not my understanding of what punk really meant.”
The MC5 almost immediately became a cultural force, in both music and American politics. “Kick out the jams, mother****ers,” the shout that singer Rob Tyner used to lead the charge of their every performance, became not only a call to rock, but a call of the rising tide of youth culture in America. On their own turf, the band used its record-deal advance, the largest scored by a rock group at the time, and concert proceeds to fund a food kitchen and for their local community’s medical needs.
After raising the ire of the American political establishment with a conflagrant performance in Lincoln Park, Chicago, during the 1968 Democratic Convention, they landed in the crosshairs of the authorities and their slow erosion began, complicated also by drug use and other internal conflicts, and the arrest and imprisonment in 1969 of their colorful manager Sinclair, who had founded the White Panther Party in support of the Black Panthers, and later co-founded the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival.
The MC5’s battle cry of a live album, from 1969.
Nonetheless, by then the MC5 had laid enough groundwork to be widely acknowledged as progenitors of punk rock (by virtually everyone but the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in which they surely deserved a place while Kramer was alive). Drummer Dennis Thompson remains the only surviving member of the original recording band, which broke up in 1972.
That spirit of activism and DIY creativity stayed with Kramer throughout his career—although it was sidelined by a four-year prison sentence in the mid 1970s for selling drugs to an undercover agent. While in prison in Lexington, Kentucky, he met Red Rodney, who was also incarcerated there on a drug charge. The jazz trumpet genius took Kramer under his wing and continued Kramer’s musical education in prison.
After serving his time, Kramer moved to New York City and teamed up for a short-lived band with Johnny Thunders, and produced and played in a series of other groups. He also worked as a carpenter during a brief stint in Nashville. But in 1991, he ignited his solo career with a series of albums, including the beautiful gut punch of 1995’s The Hard Stuff, which features his acolytes from the Melvins and the Vandals. These albums blended Kramer’s songs and his poetry set to music, and his list of collaborators grew to include Dee Dee Ramone, Chris Spedding, Bad Religion, David Was, Nels Cline, and, perhaps most importantly, kindred spirit Tom Morello, for whom the MC5 and Kramer were profoundly influential. Kramer eventually launched his own record label and a U.S. branch of Jail Guitar Doors—the latter an offshoot of the U.K. organization started by Billy Bragg, dedicated to reforming inmates through music.
The classic MC5 lineup.
Kramer never lost his vitality onstage and, after 2011, always played the Stratocaster signature model that Fender created for him that year, with an American-flag finish and a humbucker in the middle position. Starting in 2018, Kramer put together a band he named the MC50, to tour in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the MC5’s 1969 live album Kick Out the Jams, the most furious document of their aesthetic. The band performed the MC5’s music with brass-knuckled perfection, and included Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil, Fugazi’s drummer Brendan Canty, and Zen Guerilla frontman Marcus Durant. And Kramer, then 71, led the fray with the snarl and pounce of his 19-year-old self, always heading the charge with solos that were brash, raw, and expressive, displaying his love of free jazz with unpredictable melodic lines, flurries of notes not unlike triple tonguing, and jagged riffs, and laying down self-assured and powerful chording that could drive a spike through a wall. And he did it all with a warm, midrange-ripe tiger’s growl snarling from his amps—then Fender DeVilles, rather than the 100-watt Marshalls stacks he played through with the MC5.
During that tour, in 2019, Wayne was profiled in Premier Guitar by Bill Murphy, when his fascinating autobiography, The Hard Stuff: Crime, Dope, the MC5, and My Life of Impossibilities, was published. Astonishingly, Kramer’s final recording project is an album under the MC5 name, featuring the band’s original drummer on two tracks, Don Was, Morello, Vernon Reid, and Slash—and produced by Bob Ezrin. The release of the album, Heavy Lifting, is scheduled for this spring.
Morello issued this statement following Kramer’s death: “His band the MC5 basically invented punk rock music. Wayne came through personal trials of fire with drugs and jail time and emerged a transformed soul who went on to save countless lives through his tireless acts of service.”
When I last spoke with Wayne, when the MC50 played at Nashville’s Exit/In, he still extolled his belief in the magic of the moment. “To be right there, in a club, and to hear somebody play something they’ve never played before—to take a chance, to allow risks.… It’s those moments when everyone in the room is on the same wavelength, and the barriers between us explode.”
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Listen to the MC50 and Wayne Kramer kick out the jams, mother****ers! One more time....
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Gibson originally launched the EB-6 model with the intention of serving consumers looking for a “tic-tac” bass sound.
The Gibson EB-6 was announced in 1959 and came into the world in 1960, not with a dual-horn body but with that of an elegant ES-335. They looked stately, with a thin, semi-hollow body, f-holes, and a sunburst finish. Our pick for this Vintage Vault column is one such first-year model, in about as original condition as you’re able to find today. “Why?” you may be asking. Well, read on....
When the EB-6 was introduced, the Bass VI was still a glimmer in Leo Fender’s eye. The real competition were the Danelectro 6-string basses that seemed to have popped up out of nowhere and were suddenly being used on lots of hit records by the likes of Elvis, Patsy Cline, and other household names. Danos like the UB-2 (introduced in ’56), the Longhorn 4623 (’58), and the Shorthorn 3612 (’58) were the earliest attempts any company made at a 6-string bass in this style: not quite a standard electric bass, not quite a guitar, nor, for that matter, quite like a baritone guitar.
The only change this vintage EB-6 features is a replacement set of Kluson tuners.
Photo by Ken Lapworth
Gibson, Fender, and others during this era would in fact call these basses “baritone guitars,” to add to our confusion today. But these vintage “baritones” were all tuned one octave below a standard guitar, with scale lengths around 30", while most modern baritones are tuned B-to-B or A-to-A and have scale lengths between 26" and 30".)
At the time, those Danelectros were instrumental to what was called the “tic-tac” bass sound of Nashville records produced by Chet Atkins, or the “click-bass” tones made out west by producer Lee Hazlewood. Gibson wanted something for this market, and the EB-6 was born.
“When the EB-6 was introduced, the Bass VI was still a glimmer in Leo Fender’s eye.”
The 30.5" scale 1960 EB-6 has a single humbucking pickup, a volume knob, a tone knob, and a small, push-button “Tone Selector Switch” that engages a treble circuit for an instant tic-tac sound. (Without engaging that switch, you get a bass-heavy tone so deep that cowboy chords will sound like a muddy mess.)
The EB-6, for better or for worse, did not unseat the Danelectros, and a November 1959 price list from Gibson hints at why: The EB-6 retailed for $340, compared to Dano price tags that ranged from $85 to $150. Only a few dozen EB-6 basses were shipped in 1960, and only 67 total are known to have been built before Gibson changed the shape to the SG style in 1962.
Most players who come across an EB-6 today think it was a response to the Fender Bass VI, but the former actually beat the latter to the market by a full year.
Photo by Ken Lapworth
It’s sad that so few were built. Sure, it was a high-end model made to achieve the novelty tic-tac sound of cheaper instruments, but in its full-voiced glory, the EB-6 has a huge potential of tones. It would sound great in our contemporary guitar era where more players are exploring baritone ranges, and where so many people got back into the Bass VI after seeing the Beatles play one in the 2021 documentary, Get Back.
It’s sadder, still, how many original-era EB-6s have been parted out in the decades since. Remember earlier when I wrote that our Vintage Vaultpick was about as original as you could find? That’s because the model’s single humbucker is a PAF, its Kluson tuners are double-line, and its knobs are identical to those on Les Paul ’Bursts. So as people repaired broken ’Bursts, converted other LPs to ’Bursts, or otherwise sought to give other Gibsons a “Golden Era” sound and look ... they often stripped these forgotten EB-6 basses for parts.
This original EB-6 is up for sale now from Reverb seller Emerald City Guitars for a $16,950 asking price at the time of writing. The only thing that isn’t original about it is a replacement set of Kluson tuners, not because its originals were stolen but just to help preserve them. (They will be included in the case.)
With so few surviving 335-style EB-6 basses, Reverb doesn’t have a ton of sales data to compare prices to. Ten years ago, a lucky buyer found a nearly original 1960 EB-6 for about $7,000. But Emerald City’s $16,950 asking price is closer to more recent examples and asking prices.
Sources: Prices on Gibson Instruments, November 1, 1959, Tony Bacon’s “Danelectro’s UB-2 and the Early Days of 6-String Basses” Reverb News article, Gruhn’s Guide to Vintage Guitars, Tom Wheeler’s American Guitars: An Illustrated History, Reverb listings and Price Guide sales data.
Originally released in the 1980s, the Victory has long been a cult favorite among guitarists for its distinctive double cutaway design and excellent upper-fret access. These new models feature flexible electronics, enhanced body contours, improved weight and balance, and an Explorer headstock shape.
A Cult Classic Made Modern
The new Victory features refined body contours, improved weight and balance, and an updated headstock shape based on the popular Gibson Explorer.
Effortless Playing
With a fast-playing SlimTaper neck profile and ebony fretboard with a compound radius, the Victory delivers low action without fret buzz everywhere on the fretboard.
Flexible Electronics
The two 80s Tribute humbucker pickups are wired to push/pull master volume and tone controls for coil splitting and inner/outer coil selection when the coils are split.
For more information, please visit gibson.com.
Gibson Victory Figured Top Electric Guitar - Iguana Burst
Released in 1983, the Roland SDE-3000 rackmount delay was a staple for pro players of the era and remains revered for its rich analog/digital hybrid sound and distinctive modulation. BOSS reimagined this retro classic in 2023 with the acclaimed SDE-3000D and SDE-3000EVH, two wide-format pedals with stereo sound, advanced features, and expanded connectivity. The SDE-3 brings the authentic SDE-3000 vibe to a streamlined BOSS compact, enhanced with innovative creative tools for every musical style. The SDE-3 delivers evocative delay sounds that drip with warmth and musicality. The efficient panel provides the primary controls of its vintage benchmark—including delay time, feedback, and independent rate and depth knobs for the modulation—plus additional knobs for expanded sonic potential.
A wide range of tones are available, from basic mono delays and ’80s-style mod/delay combos to moody textures for ambient, chill, and lo-fi music. Along with reproducing the SDE-3000's original mono sound, the SDE-3 includes a powerful Offset knob to create interesting tones with two simultaneous delays. With one simple control, the user can instantly add a second delay to the primary delay. This provides a wealth of mono and stereo colors not available with other delay pedals, including unique doubled sounds and timed dual delays with tap tempo control. The versatile SDE-3 provides output configurations to suit any stage or studio scenario.
Two stereo modes include discrete left/right delays and a panning option for ultra-wide sounds that move across the stereo field. Dry and effect-only signals can be sent to two amps for wet/dry setups, and the direct sound can be muted for studio mixing and parallel effect rigs. The SDE-3 offers numerous control options to enhance live and studio performances. Tap tempo mode is available with a press and hold of the pedal switch, while the TRS MIDI input can be used to sync the delay time with clock signals from DAWs, pedals, and drum machines. Optional external footswitches provide on-demand access to tap tempo and a hold function for on-the-fly looping. Alternately, an expression pedal can be used to control the Level, Feedback, and Time knobs for delay mix adjustment, wild pitch effects, and dramatic self-oscillation.
The new BOSS SDE-3 Dual Delay Pedal will be available for purchase at authorized U.S. BOSS retailers in October for $219.99. To learn more, visit www.boss.info.