An offer came in for me to perform at the Trans Musicales Festival in Rennes, France. This is a very cool event that features only new artists. You can only play it once. This would be my first gig with a new label and a new record in the modern age.
I needed a band, so I hired Jon Wahl from Claw Hammer on rhythm guitar, Randy Bradbury on bass, and Brock Avery on drums. Jon and Randy had played on my Epitaph recording sessions, and I found Brock through Johnny Angel, another musician friend I knew from my days in Boston as a member of the James Montgomery Blues Band. Johnny had relocated to LA years before; he knew the local scene, and he highly recommended Brock, who turned out to be a remarkable drummer and friend.
We rehearsed a set of songs from the new record, and flew to France. There was no way it could have been better, considering that we had never played onstage together, and I had very little idea of what would work and what wouldn’t. We just played the songs as best we could, and it was a credible performance. What it wasn’t, was a mind-blowing, stage-proven, barn-burning show—at least not yet.
My British road crew requested a wall of Marshall amps, and when I went out to plug in, they didn’t work. Right at the very beginning of my set, the momentum slipped away. I think the wall of amps was considered gauche by the punkerati. Maybe I was over thinking it, but the Marshalls, a bit of ’60s culture in this new age of hip hop and loops and samples, made me feel like even more of a dinosaur than I already did. I heard a recording of the gig the next day, and it was pretty ragged. The other bands were Steve Albini’s Shellac and Soul Coughing, a new band from NYC that I liked very much.
The day before the performance, I did press meetings. I wasn’t prepared for what was to come. I was comfortable with the one-on-one interviews I had been doing in LA, and thought this would be more of the same. When I was escorted into a small amphitheater, I was met by a couple dozen reporters and photographers in a state of frenzy, and it threw me for a loop. Here I sat in the center of a hurricane of journalists with flashbulbs going off in my face, as if I was the Rolling Stones in 1968. One fellow took charge of the situation and translated the questions from French to English for me, and then my answers back. Things calmed down, and I started to get a sense of what was going on. I had underestimated the MC5’s legacy in Europe; having me there was a big deal to the European music press. The reporters asked me thoughtful and probing questions, and treated me with great respect. I responded candidly with good humor, and it was an amazing experience.
Later the next day, I was in the hotel elevator with the translator, and thanked him for his accurate, considered work. I mentioned that I had no idea the MC5 meant so much to all those journalists. He said, “Wayne, you don’t understand. Your records are our music, too. They are part of our history.” This was more than a compliment; it was humbling. In the ’70s, when the MC5 toured Europe, we did well wherever we played. There was a rabid European fan base for American rock groups, and we probably did six or seven tours from one end of the continent to the other. It was a great time. But I had no idea the MC5’s legacy had endured there.
Since I was released from prison, I had lost touch with what was happening musically in France and the rest of Europe. I had some writer friends that I communicated with from time to time, but the emerging European music scene was a mystery until now. Through Epitaph, I discovered that punk rock was thriving there.
A Euro tour was booked, and I reduced the band to just a trio. Brock Avery, Randy Bradbury, and I became a strong touring unit, and we worked it pretty hard for the next few years. They are both excellent musicians and good brothers. I was very lucky to have them along.
Now that I had returned to my real calling full time, I had some adjustments to make. I was not the ebullient, young, long-haired, flash-dancing, sex machine I was at 20. I was nearing 50, and the world looked a little different from this perspective. I didn’t know how to present myself onstage anymore. I couldn’t muster the gyrations and balls-to-the-wall theatrics of my youth. I couldn’t dance with the uninhibited abandon of a young man on the make; to do so would have made me feel silly, and more irrelevant than I already felt.
Shaking my booty just didn’t feel right, and I was at a complete loss as to what to do about it. Finally, I decided to take a Miles Davis stance and just grit on everybody. My musicians and the audience all got a scowling, mad-dog stare from brother Wayne. Often, I turned my back to the crowd and just played as fiercely as I could.
I did a one-time super-group tour of the States with members of Blondie, Guns N’ Roses, The Smithereens, The Go-Go’s, and others, and I overheard some of the guys I was playing with say they were concerned because I looked so angry onstage. I was having a great time, but I didn’t know how to express it.
Luckily, I ran into Lisa Mende, an actress in Los Angeles. I confessed my dilemma to her, explaining that since I wasn’t up onstage trolling for babes, I wasn’t able to bump and grind like I used to. I was a married man and trying to stay married, and being raunchy felt phony, undignified, and inappropriate. Lisa explained that onstage we were playing a role, and whatever character was being portrayed wasn’t who we were in real life. This was a revelation to me. I hadn’t considered this perspective. In the MC5, I was as real and in the moment as possible. There was no separation between my personal identity, my desires, and my professional performance.
That wasn’t where I found myself in 1995, but Lisa gave me permission to bump and grind, dance like a demon (if my body would allow it), and generally act a fool onstage if I wanted to. She instructed me to have fun performing, because that’s what it was—a performance.
This was liberating. I love playing music for people, and I love entertaining them. I never met an audience I didn’t love. Now, the newly liberated Wayne Kramer could go out and wiggle my guitar without being chained to my old ideas about who I was supposed to be. I could rock, and keep my dignity at the same time. As Rob Tyner so aptly put it, “Let me be who I am.”
Touring was grueling. A bunch of blokes in a van driving across Europe and then the States in the middle of the winter is no holiday. Fortunately, we were all sober on the road, and professionalism and good camaraderie was a priority. We had fun, and we made good music.
No one got rich on these tours, but it was steady work and it helped my record sales to be out there hitting the boards every night, winning over new fans. I ran into a few MC5-era people, and it was usually nice to chat about the old days. I enjoyed playing night after night. When I play every night, my playing starts to get focused. I begin to lean into it more, and the music takes on a force that is very enjoyable. I can think about what I played the night before, and go a little further the next. This is one of the good aspects of touring. There aren’t many others.
I never drank on these early tours. Never used opiates either; the work itself was enough for me. The travel and lack of sleep was brutal. I was running on pure willpower and ambition, and for a while, that was sufficient.
The Hard Stuff sold pretty well; Brett and I were seeing some success.
Back to Los Angeles to write and record a new record. Dangerous Madness was released in 1996, and another round of touring started. I’ve lost track of the number of European tours I did. Offers came in from Australia, and we went down there. Then Japan. It was all good.
I never cheated on my wife during these tours. I was 48 years old, and the idea of picking up groupies after gigs had no attraction for me. The reality was, I was emotionally numb, and sleeping with the damaged girls that made themselves available after gigs was, for me, unmanly and unseemly. It wasn’t worth the emotional cost, not to mention the STDs. On these tours, I just had no sex drive.
Gloria hated my touring. Something exciting would happen out on the road, and I’d want to share it with her on the phone. Her response might be, “How much longer are you going to do this?”
I didn’t know what else to do. I was a musician, and this was how I made a living. Plus, I liked what I did, and not many guys had the good fortune that I was enjoying. But she didn’t make it easy for me. She liked me better when I was making cabinets and drinking myself unconscious every night back in Nashville. Somehow, I thought it would all work out, and one day she’d come around and appreciate what I did. We would finally be happy, someday, someway.
I still drank and used prescription narcotics when I was back in LA. I drank alone at home; getting loaded had stopped being a social activity decades ago. My wife went to sleep early due to her own medication, and I would walk down to the liquor store and buy another pint of Popov vodka. Slam it down mixed with Diet Dr Pepper, one or two pints a night. Plus whatever pills were around.
I reconnected with my old band mate, David Was. He had relocated to Los Angeles a decade earlier and was working as a writer and occasional jingle composer. We shared a love of avant-garde music and art. He was an intellectual, and I enjoyed his company. I asked David to come on board for my next Epitaph record as co-producer.
He had just learned how to slice and dice audio files using the then-new tool computer sequencers. He was able to take guitar parts I had recorded or drum beats from the sessions, and decontextualize them to create new and exciting sounds. We wrote some songs together and had a good rapport.
The record was a change from the style that Epitaph was used to. Where the first two records were explorations of the guitar-driven, high-energy style that I had pioneered in the MC5 and brought up to date as a corollary to modern punk rock, this was going to be different. I wanted to explore some new things that departed from the punk aesthetic: slower tempos, horns, samples, and loops, deeper bass tones and aural collages. I wanted to dig into my love of experimental and free music. We brought in producer Jason Roberts to raise the octane level on a few tracks.
This was a problem for Epitaph. It seemed to me that their most popular bands had perfected a sound that fit the relatively narrow parameters of punk rock, and then they never deviated from that formula. The bands were doing great, and I couldn’t argue with success, but I felt it would be better to follow my own instincts about the kind of music I was creating.
To their credit, Epitaph encouraged me to follow my muse. I played Brett some rough mixes, and he was visibly excited, shouting out “Artistic integrity!” as he pounded the dashboard of his car. If he really hated it, he did a great job of convincing me that he loved it. I think the musician in him liked what I was doing, but the label executive was troubled.
Guiding an artist’s career is a full-time job. I had been self-managing my career since the mideighties, and sometimes it put me in a tough spot. I had to advocate for my own best business interests while maintaining the image of the creative artist.
In midwinter 1996, I was in a secondary market in the Midwest for another club tour. I was on the phone with a record plugger, trying to get reports on how many stations were playing my records. It was one of the most awkward conversations I’d ever had. The guy was a big fan, but he hadn’t placed my record anywhere. I hung up, thinking, What in the hell am I doing here? I’m playing another punk rock shithole tonight, and I’m trying to work my own records, and nothing is making any sense.
I asked an old friend in New York, Bill Adler, to step in as manager. He agreed, at least on an unofficial basis. Bill is a very bright man, and he was a strong advocate for me. But some trouble seeped into my relationship with Brett.
I was starting to be a problem for Epitaph. First, I was older than the bands they were used to dealing with. I wasn’t about to sleep in the same single hotel room with my band and road crew, or in a punk rock crash pad after the gig. And second, I wasn’t making generic punk rock records. I was closing in on 50, and there was a culture clash. I appreciate punk rock, and I get the aesthetic completely. It’s been said I invented it. I remained a punk philosophically, but I wasn’t about to become a punk as in the latest cultural iteration. I hadn’t been that since I was 20 years old. Epitaph told me that my new record, Citizen Wayne, didn’t have anything on it that was radio friendly. There were “no singles” on the record, and we were arguing over the costs of my tours.
On top of this, my marriage was in trouble on every level. We were kind to each other, but there was a deep resentment building under the surface. I was carrying the full load, and there was no way that Gloria would be able to get a job. She hated Los Angeles, and she hated my work and my traveling and all my musician friends. I saw no way out.
I had been traveling all over the world meeting people, including, occasionally, fantastic women. I never slept with any of them. And I met a few who were substantial. These were beautiful, educated, single, ambitious women who were taking a bite out of life. Women who were actively involved in their lives and wanted to see where the future might take them. I was too fractured, too hollow, too unsure of myself to admit I was attracted to any of them.
My life may have looked okay on the outside, but inside, it was a fraud. I didn’t like myself, let alone love myself, and I was utterly incapable of loving another person. I would just get high, alone in the hotel room or at home. It was easier to black it out and do it early, so I could keep up the front again the next day.
In 1995, I had met a journalist in Cleveland named Margaret Saadi at a promo event in a record store in Cleveland. She was an editor at a business magazine and wrote about the arts for Cleveland publications. She had a sparkle that was irresistible. We had done an interview, and she really liked my new record. I had just bought my first computer, and this new feature, email, was exciting. Epitaph was a high-tech company that had been computerized for years, and I wanted to get in sync with them. I thought this would be a more efficient way to work with the label.
I started corresponding with Margaret by email. I was scheduled to go to Detroit to do some promo for Citizen Wayne, and she suggested I have Epitaph fly me into Cleveland first, and she’d set up a press day for the record. She met me at the airport and whisked me off to the first stop at a local radio station.
Epitaph had been telling me they just didn’t have the juice to get Citizen Wayne played on the radio, and that there were no singles on the record, blah, blah, blah. But here we were at a major Midwest FM station at morning drive time, and they were playing tracks off the record and raving about it.
I knew that one station didn’t make a hit, but still, they liked the album. The rest of the day was a whirlwind of print interviews and photo shoots. We finished, and Margaret dropped me off at my hotel. She was fun to hang out with, and very professional. She picked me up in the morning and delivered me to the airport for my flight to Detroit. I wasn’t looking, but there was no doubt she was an exceptional young woman. We started emailing, and she was very sharp, with a great sense of humor. We were becoming friends. Something was stirring.
Epitaph was facing major challenges. After the incredible successes of the Offspring and Rancid, serious forces were pulling the company apart. Something was definitely off kilter, and I often felt like I couldn’t connect with Brett. Bill Adler had to scale back his work with me. At one point I had asked Margaret, if she moved to Los Angeles, would she consider being my assistant? She was incredulous. “Assistant? Are you joking? I have two college degrees and I’m running a company here. I’ll run companies in Los Angeles, too.” I quickly realized the depth of my misjudgment and apologized. Bill then suggested that Margaret take over as my manager.
We had decided to make a fourth record, a live one. We had been playing a months-long residency at a nice club, The Mint, on Tuesday nights. This seemed to be the right place and time. They had a built-in recording facility, so we had Jason Roberts come in to produce and engineer the sessions. The band had evolved at this point. Randy Bradbury had joined Pennywise, and Brock Avery had moved on to work with a number of other Epitaph bands. Bass was now Doug Lunn, and drums was Ric Parnell. They had been a working rhythm section in Los Angeles for a long time, and were world-class players. Ric is the drummer in the film Spinal Tap who is interviewed in the bathtub wearing a shower cap. We had toured the states and Europe, and played well together. Doug became one of my dearest friends. Doug was my bassist for the next 20 years until his death in 2016.
We sorted out a management agreement, and Margaret started putting my business affairs in order. We were both in relationships that had run out of time. I wasn’t looking for someone new and neither was she, but we were attracted to each other.