Nine out of 10 rock star autobiographies trace the same arc: musician achieves fame, parties too hard, becomes an addict of some sort and yet, in the end, somehow finds redemption. Wayne Kramer, leader of the revolutionary proto-punk band MC5, does double-time mining that well-trodden territory in his new book. Not only was he an addict, he spent over two years in prison for dealing cocaine before plowing a happier path. Yet, along the way, he takes so many rare, and revealing, side-trips, he wound up writing a book as suited to the sociology section as the music aisle.

“I knew there was much more to my story than most,” Kramer, now 70, said.

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Enough, in fact, to present himself as exhibit A in discussions about everything from the purposeful divisions between race and class to the in-fighting among leftist political groups to the ripple effects of multi-generational sexual abuse to the need for prison reform. Small wonder his book bears the verbose title The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the MC5 and My Life of Impossibilities. Kramer will also be touring this fall with a band called MC50 (for MC5’s golden anniversary) in an incarnation that includes Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil and key members of Fugazi and Faith No More, together filling the spots of the three deceased members of the original band.

Appropriate to an anarchic band like MC5, Kramer’s tome opens with a riot. It’s 1967, and the band, armed with anthems like Kick Out the Jams, have already established themselves as the face, and sound, of counterculture insurrection in their Detroit home. When the crowd gets a bit too excited for the police’s liking, nightsticks start swinging. “The cops’ violence was outrageously out of proportion to the situation,” Kramer wrote.

What’s most notable about the crowd that day, however, is its rich mix of black and white fans, a rarity in most rock events at that time. Yet, it was a hallmark of Detroit culture back then. Because of his rearing in the city, as well as his working-class roots, Kramer sees many issues through the lens of race and class. “Those subjects are ones I’ve been interested in my whole life,” he said. “When I see divisions, I always ask myself, ‘How did that happen?’”

The early part of Kramer’s book examines the reasons behind the transformation of Detroit, between the 50s and the 70s, from Motor City to Murder City, stoked by police harassment of black citizens and white flight. “To watch Detroit go from a booming manufacturing center of the world to what it became has been painful,” he said.

The story of Kramer’s youth, in the 50s, helps contextualize why Detroit boasted such an enormous explosion of musical talent, from the blue-collar rock of Bob Seger to the pre-punk of MC5 and the Stooges, to the starry hits of Motown. He credits the influx of black and white families who moved to the city from the south after the second world war, drawn “by good manufacturing jobs. Detroit had very powerful labor unions. You could raise a family on a working man’s salary. All those people who were coming in brought their culture with them.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Wayne Kramer performing as part of MC5. Photograph: Mike Barich

For all the city’s richness, Kramer’s home life was marked by ignorance and neglect. His father came back from the second world war with the kind of PTSD no one at the time diagnosed. Guilt-ridden, he became an alcoholic who abandoned the family. Kramer’s mother remarried, this time to a guy who used to fondle him and his sister in front of the whole family. “He thought it was funny that he’d hold this little boy down and fiddle with his penis,” the guitarist said. “My mom thought it was funny too. She had experienced the same thing as a child and each generation bases their parenting on their own experience. It was degrading and embarrassing.”

Kramer began to act out at school. He sent his eighth-grade teacher a turd in the mail, predating a plot point in the John Waters movie Pink Flamingoes by nearly a decade. “I could be very creative when I wanted to be,” Kramer said with a laugh.

As a teenager, he formed Motor City 5 along with guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith (who later became the husband of Patti Smith), singer Rob Tyner, bassist Michael Davis and drummer Dennis Thompson. They played a brand of cacophonous rock that took further influence from R&B and funk, as well as the soloing of avant garde jazz artists Albert Ayler and Sun Ra. At root, MC5 strove to translate anarchy into sound. They were equally drawn to Marxist politics and wound up aligning themselves with local radical John Sinclair, who created the White Panther Party, a corollary to the Black Panthers.

According to Kramer, San Francisco’s starry-eyed “summer of love never made a stop to Detroit”. “Bell bottoms and beads may have come,” he said. “But the MC5 and Detroit always had a hard, working-class approach to music. What we sensed coming from San Francisco was too lightweight.”

Their experience with workers’ rights gave them a natural route to politics. For that reason, Kramer always questioned the media’s tendency to cast 60s working men as reactionaries against the hippies. “We used to say: ‘Hey, those are our guys!’” Kramer recalled.

Word about the band’s radical music and stance made its way to New York, which alerted the Elektra Records talent scout Danny Fields. “When he saw a couple of thousand kids pack the Grande Ballroom to watch a band no one outside of Detroit had ever heard of, he probably thought, ‘We might convert this into national success if we play our cards right,’” Kramer said.

It was Kramer who turned Fields on to their “brother band”, the Stooges, resulting in the signing of Iggy’s legendary band to Elektra as well. Because MC5 were primarily a live band who knew little of the studio, the record company went along with their novel idea to make their debut album a concert work, titled Kick Out the Jams. Before the album even appeared, Rolling Stone put the band on the cover, with a five-page spread inside. Still, the album didn’t sell well and the band’s extreme rhetoric, brimming with “by any means necessary” encouragements to extremism horrified promoters, record stores and the label. “I guess we could have been more diplomatic,” Kramer deadpans.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest MC5 in 1967. Photograph: Leni Sinclair/Getty Images

If MC5’s actions landed them on government watch lists, they had little support from leftist groups either. When a limo came to greet them at their Fillmore East show, they were cast as sellouts, exploiting the movement for profit. “People that were grounded in Marxist analysis found it easy to attack us,” Kramer said. “The people at the underground radio stations and the underground press had some cynicism about the MC5 too. I had expected trouble from the establishment. But I didn’t think people in our own community would attack us too!”

While the band were friendly with the Black Panthers, the party’s newspaper labeled them “psychedelic clowns”.

The band even fell out with John Sinclair once he was arrested and sent to prison for up to 10 years for possession of two marijuana cigarettes. After the band imploded, felled by drugs, in-fighting and poor sales, Kramer became a full-time addict and dealer who later ended up in a federal prison. The later part of the book details his ongoing push for prison reform, elaborated by the group he founded, Jail Guitar Doors, named for a song the Clash wrote about him in 1977. After many more wayward years, Kramer got his life together. He became a solo artist, a creator of film and TV soundtracks and, incredibly, a first-time dad at 65. “That’s how long it took me to stop being a child,” he said with a laugh.

In the last decade, Kramer has become an idol to stars such as Eddie Vedder to Tom Morello. Likewise, MC5 are seen as pivotal role models for punk. Yet, Kramer finds the genre lacking. “I kept thinking, ‘I’ve heard that sound before,’” he said. “I hear more original things in hip-hop.”

He also finds fault with all three MC5 albums. “The live one didn’t catch us on a particularly great night,” he said. “The second was too restrained and the third, High Time, pointed to the future of the band that, unfortunately, had no future.”

Kramer will feature improved takes on songs from all three albums on his upcoming tour. It’s taking place at a time when the political scene seems eerily similar to that of MC5’s heyday. “Trump and Nixon – same old, same old,” said Kramer. “Again, we have an undeclared war on the other side of the world against people that are no threat to the US and there’s across the board corruption. The similarity could cause anyone to be cynical. But we have to guard against that. We always need to strive for something better.”