THIS ARTICLE WAS produced by Capital & Main. It is co-published in partnership with Rolling Stone.
In many ways, rock musician Wayne Kramer was a true radical. The former guitarist for the protopunk band the MC5 — who died Feb. 2 of cancer at age 75 — was known for the revolutionary fire in his music, but also for the activism for prison reform that defined his later years.
That cause was informed by his own life-changing experience as a federal drug offender imprisoned in the mid-1970s. It led to his creation of Jail Guitar Doors USA, an initiative to promote rehabilitation in prisons through the donation of musical instruments and on-site instruction, while lobbying for change in what Kramer called an increasingly inhumane and unfair prison system.
“What we do is damage people. We damage them for decades,” Kramer told me in a 2015 interview, biting on his words. “Where we are as a country is an international embarrassment.”
The central mission of Jail Guitar Doors, he said, was to reach inmates through music on a “human level, on the street level of actually putting guitars in prisoners’ hands and encouraging them to figure out a way to process their problems that is positive and nonconfrontational.”
He could still easily recite his prison serial number from his two-and-a-half-year stint in federal prison: 00180-190. As he spoke that day, sitting in his studio office on Fairfax in Los Angeles, a row of guitars waited to be shipped out to a prison in Chino the following week.
In both music and content, his band the MC5 (aka the Motor City 5) were at the forefront of 1960s rock acts confronting the U.S. political establishment, with a group manifesto that promised “rock ’n’ roll, dope, and fucking in the streets!” The Detroit quintet were blue collar at their core and aligned with the radical White Panther Party, a hometown anti-racist collective, and took their message to the doorstep of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago for a protest concert, as police helicopters hovered. None of the other scheduled bands showed up.