For decades, the MC5 has been consigned to a footnote in rock history, rebel outcasts who were more heard about by connoisseurs of proto-punk and metal than actually heard. The MC5 was once accused by the vice president of the United States, Spiro Agnew, of being part of a communist conspiracy to corrupt the youth of America and was wiretapped by the federal government for the band’s “promotion” of drugs and sexual promiscuity.

It didn’t help the band’s reputation that it posed for publicity photos bearing assault weapons and that the liner notes to its 1969 debut album, “Kick Out the Jams,” written by manager John Sinclair, declared, “The MC5 is the revolution. In all its applications.”

And yet a half-century later, the MC5’s music is now being performed by an all-star band in a tour fronted by MC5 founding guitarist Wayne Kramer. Three core members of the band — singer Rob Tyner, guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith and bassist Michael Davis — are dead, and drummer Dennis Thompson is no longer active. That Kramer is the last man standing is surely not something he could have expected when he was breaking into homes during the ’70s to scrounge up money for drugs.

By his own account, Kramer could have died several times over or spent most of his life in jail (he did spend two years in federal prison during the ’70s for drug offenses). He was in a great band that essentially got blacklisted into oblivion and was never able to release an album that matched the aggression and power of its live performances during its brief existence, 1964-72. But when looking for people to blame for his ill fortune, the guitarist points at only one main culprit: himself.

“I justified everything I did in relation to how it turned out for me,” Kramer writes in his recent memoir, “The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the MC5 and My Life of Impossibilities” (Da Capo Press). “From the time I was an eight-year-old thief on Michigan Avenue through my adult years, I could justify and rationalize anything for my own purposes. I never once looked inward to contemplate the consequences. I never considered the harm I was doing to people.”

Kramer’s life is in a much better place now, thanks to a solid marriage, fatherhood and charity work that includes his musical education of inmates in Jail Guitar Doors. His band’s influence has been touted by others ranging from the Clash and the Sex Pistols to Rage Against the Machine and Public Enemy.

It was never an easy road. Kramer grew up outside Detroit during the ’50s in a broken home. His father was a soldier who came home psychologically damaged from World War II, became an alcoholic and abandoned the family. His stepfather abused young Wayne and his older sister. Kramer found salvation as a teenager by forming a band that dubbed itself the “Motor City 5,” with a foundation of Chuck Berry rock ’n’ roll and James Brown R&B, which they later melded with the avant-garde jazz of Sun Ra and Albert Ayler.

The quintet’s manic stage performances in Detroit, primarily at the Grande Ballroom, and throughout the Midwest made the performers legendary figures long before they signed a record deal. The band’s high-energy, high-volume shows were sometimes cast as acts of insurrection, thanks to Sinclair’s revolutionary gospel. In a country torn apart by Vietnam protests and the civil rights struggle, the band became a target of the federal government.

The opening words to Kramer’s memoir are telling: “The Belle Island police riot of April 30, 1967, was the first riot I ever played.” He was 19 years old, in his glory with a band that was opening new possibilities, playing in front of a festive, racially mixed crowd. The show ended in mayhem as police enforced a curfew.

A year later, the MC5 were the only band to play the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “We were in the middle of a long space-music jam with the guitars, and I remember the police helicopters buzzing on top of us, where the sound of the blades blended with the amplifier feedback,” Kramer once told the Tribune. “It seemed our whole agenda was wrapped up in that one moment.”

The baton-waving police waded into the crowd of youths gathered for the show in Lincoln Park soon after, a spasm of the dayslong violence that came to epitomize the deep turmoil of the era.

The “Kick out the Jams” album aspired in many ways to be the soundtrack for that era. It was ushered in by a wave of hype, including a cover story in a then-new counterculture magazine named Rolling Stone. But even though it cracked the top 30 of the pop chart, the album lost momentum when the controversies over Sinclair’s incendiary liner notes and the course language in the intro to “Kick out the Jams” started to overshadow the music.

The band attracted radical groups to its shows, which in turn criticized the MC5 for behaving like “rock stars” instead of communist revolutionaries. Kramer acknowledges the group was in way over its head when it came to playing political chess, and it fumbled through a series of recordings that never quite nailed what the band was all about.

There was no denying the band’s live performances, however. The quintet’s legacy rests on a you-had-to-be-there aesthetic, preserved in a few fleeting film clips; only in performance could the explosive potential of the MC5’s music be truly appreciated.

An excellent documentary, “The MC5: A True Testimonial,” was sidetracked by legal squabbling and financial issues. It was shown at festivals in 2003-04 before things stalled. Kramer also organized a couple of partial reunions — with Thompson and Davis a decade ago — and the current “Kick Out The Jams: The 50th Anniversary Tour” by a band Kramer has dubbed the MC50, which includes Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil on guitar and Fugazi’s Brendan Canty on drums.

Given his fractured history, it’s fitting that in his memoir Kramer treats the late-arriving recognition not as vindication but as a lesson and an opportunity to do better. “My definition of success,” he writes, “is being able to continue.”

Greg Kot co-hosts “Sound Opinions” at 8 p.m. Friday, 7 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday on WBEZ-FM 91.5.

Greg Kot is a Tribune critic.

greg@gregkot.com

Twitter @gregkot

When: 7 p.m. Wednesday

Where: Metro, 3730 N. Clark St.

Tickets: $37.50-$150; www.metrochicago.com.

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