Supergroup MC50 celebrates 50th anniversary of landmark album

He kept hearing about this new sound — one that he helped create — but couldn’t actually hear it.

That’s because Wayne Kramer was behind bars.

After being caught selling cocaine to undercover federal agents in 1975, the pioneering guitarist/founding firebrand of the original Motor City madmen, the MC5, served a two-year stint in prison.

Around that time, a fresh crop of bands inspired by the MC5’s highly combustible, socially aware, needle-in-the-red rock ’n’ roll began to emerge.

“I read about this new movement, some of the bands, like the Ramones or the Clash, would talk about how their favorite bands were the MC5 or the Stooges,” Kramer recalls, name-checking his Iggy Pop-led Michigan band brethren. “One day I came home from prison, and I started to get caught up, started to see many of the musical ideas that we championed in the 5 had been embraced by the next generation of bands.

“That continued through the emergence of the Seattle bands, what’s referred to as grunge,” he adds, “right up through to today, with Rage Against the Machine and Rise Against, bands that take a politically active position and carry a message. It’s all the same message of self-efficacy and self-determination, that we all have unlimited possibility if we go after it whole-heartedly.”

Going after things whole-heartedly is what Kramer does, for better and — for a time back in the day — for worse. But before his battles with drug addiction in the ’70s sidetracked his career, Kramer helped incite a musical riot with the MC5, whose 1969 debut, “Kick Out Jams,” was a Molotov cocktail of blaring guitars and howled calls to arms hurled through the plate-glass window of the rock ’n’ roll establishment.

‘It’s so intense’

Imagine how synapse-frying it must have been to see something as audaciously ahead of its time as Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” in 1968.

Well, catching the MC5 blaze stages around that time was the musical equivalent of said brain-blasting.

“It’s still that way,” says Kramer, 70. “We were actually discussing that last night. It’s so intense that you either will embrace it or you’ll have to leave the room.”

“We” is the MC50, a Kramer-created supergroup celebrating the 50th anniversary of “Jams” on tour.

The lineup is top-notch, with Kramer having recruited Faith No More bassist Billy Gould, Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil and former Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty.

And on the mic, there’s towering live wire Marcus Durant, the frontman for Delaware’s seriously underrated blues-punk badasses Zen Guerilla.

Guerilla disbanded years ago and never got much attention outside the darkest depths of the indie underground, so you may not have heard of Durant.

Kramer hadn’t when his name was first put in the mix.

“I asked my friends to give me lists of players, so I could try to navigate the possibilities,” Kramer says. “My agent suggested Marcus. I did the research, I started looking him up on YouTube, I said, ‘Wow, this guy, he’s pretty intense.’ And then I started to hear his voice, and I said, ‘Oh, my God, this would be incredible.’ We call him our secret weapon. He has a voice that we all dream of.”

Going ‘Hard’

In addition to hitting the road once again, Kramer has recently released a memoir, “The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the MC5, and My Life of Impossibilities,” a read as gritty, raw and in-your-face as the MC5’s uncompromising songbook.

“One of the reasons I wrote it was to help me understand who the hell I am, how did I get to be this way,” Kramer says. “Some truths emerged in the process, and in the feedback I get. It’s been illuminating. We’re all trying to play junior psychiatrists to understand why we do the things we do, and it was a helpful process.”

In addition to reflecting on his life, Kramer has been reflecting on the times.

The MC5 notoriously played the turbulent ’68 Democratic Convention, a flash point of one of the most fractious eras of modern times in this country.

They soundtracked the chaos then — and they’re doing the same now.

“It was exhilarating,” Kramer recalls. “I felt like I was a part of the times and things that mattered, activities that counted.

“I think we’re still in that today,” he observes. “I think everything we do matters.”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.