Rock Out! An Evening with Wayne Kramer: Guitarist, Composer, Activist

Monday, June 23rd, 7:00pm - 9:00pm

Join PRA and its sponsoring chapters for an evening to celebrate the meaningful impact of music within our community. Legendary guitarist and songwriter Wayne Kramer is also a devoted activist who has channeled his personal journey into a commitment to social change spanning decades. Guided by a deep belief in the power of personal transformation through music, Wayne’s work with the incarcerated through the nonprofit, Jail Guitar Doors USA, serves as an inspiration for the psychiatric rehabilitation community for positive social change.

Kicking-off with the film, The Beauty and the Angel, attendees will get a glimpse into Wayne’s life as a long time drug and alcohol addict who was incarcerated in his 20s for selling cocaine. At the age of 50, he became clean and sober and through his growing belief in service, founded Jail Guitar Doors USA with his wife, Margaret Sandi Kramer and British singer Billy Bragg, which brings guitars and music into prisons as a tool for rehabilitating inmates.

Immediate Past Chair of PRA, Lisa Razzano, PhD, CPRP, will delve deeper into Wayne’s lived experience in a “Behind the Rock Star” interview. Wayne has recovered and emerged to reach current inmates through music to help them heal. The PRA Board of Directors will honor Wayne with an Award of Distinction for his founding role and ongoing leadership in Jail Guitar Doors USA, as well as his lifelong commitment to rehabilitation and recovery.

To celebrate the recovery workforce and the work we do, Wayne will rock the night away with a concert, playing songs from his latest album, LEXINGTON (Released April 2014), which debuted at #6 on the traditional Jazz Chart.

Biography

Wayne Kramer is a songwriter whose reputation writing music for film and television risks supplanting his legend as one of the world’s stellar guitarists. Wayne was a teenage greaser and leader of the MC5, widely recognized as the prototype for punk rock and heavy metal. In 1969, the MC5 released an incendiary album Kick Out The Jams on Elektra Records. After Elektra dropped them due to “racial antics,” they released two albums on Atlantic: Back in the USA, produced by Bruce Springsteen’s manager John Landau and the masterpiece High Time. Between world tours, Wayne scored Gold and The Living Theatre’s film production of Paradise Now.

Wayne spent 1976-1978 in Lexington Federal Penitentiary, where he was tutored by fellow inmate Charlie Parker’s trumpeter Red Rodney. It was Red who taught Wayne how to read music and the two formed a prison band. After release, Wayne co-wrote the acclaimed R&B musical The Last Words of Dutch Schulz with Mick Farren, then joined Don Was’ revolutionary acid funk band Was (Not Was) as its original guitarist. Wayne helped define the band’s sound through, of all things, the dance hit “Wheel Me Out”. In the 1980s in New York City, Wayne teamed up with infamous Johnny Thunders for a short-lived, headline grabbing, punk rock group Gang War.

In 1994, Wayne moved to Los Angeles and signed up with Epitaph Records. He recorded four records in as many years. He produced the album Full Circle with provocateur John Sinclair and produced an MCS retrospective collection for Rhino Records entitled The Big Bang, as well as a hits compilation Beyond Cyberpunk.

Wayne scored all three sections of HBO’s East Bound and Down and the feature thriller Concrete Blondes as well as the acclaimed “zeitgeist” doc Let Fury have the Hour. He is currently writing and producing original songs for Shadow Machine’s stop-motion animation feature comedy Hell & Back and the score for Nelson Algren, a doc about the outsider Chicago writer. In 2006, Wayne scored the comedy Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby for Sony Pictures where his song “Edge of the Switchblade” also runs at the films end title credits. Wayne composed the score for HBO’s controversial feature length documentary Hacking Democracy, which also utilized his “Something Broken in the Promised Land” as its title track. He wrote additional underscore for the feature film Daydreamer (Aron Paul).

While completing score and narration for the PBS documentary The Narcotic Farm about America’s decades-long failed drug war- and its free jazz soundtrack album entitled Lexington- Wayne was featured on the release of Guitar Hero: World Tour. He also scored the #1 series Why Not? With Shania Twain for the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN).

On television, Wayne’s title theme for the Fox Sports program 5-4-3-2-1 was a bona fide hit and he now has many themes running on Fox including, Spotlight, In My Own Words and Under the Lights. Wayne composed the theme for E!’s hit series Split Ends as well as the “Unlabeled” commercial for Jim Beam. His songs have been featured in a wide array of TV shows and feature films Jackass, Judging Amy, Millennium, Almost Famous, Rock ‘N’ Roll High School, I Shot Andy Warhol and Pump up the Volume. His cues are heard in NFL, NBA and MLB Playoff events and Food Network productions. He has written over 1000 cues for network production and music catalogs, including Fox, TelePictures, PostHaste and Bravo’s series Kell on Earth, among others.

Wayne’s flagship release in 2000s was his album Adult World, which also featured guests Syd Straw, the Hellacopters and others. In 2003, he music-directed a performance for the DVD Sonic Revolution: A Celebration of the MC5. That 30-minute documentary and 60-minute concert ran as broadcast staples for BBC-4 (UK) and Trio Networks (USA).

Wayne is recognized nearly as often as a vigorous social activist. Along with wife Margaret Saadi Kramer and British singer Billy Bragg, Wayne founded Jail Guitar Doors USA, a Los Angeles based non-profit organization that provides guitars for prisoner rehabilitation. Known as “the loudest charity planet earth,” JGD-USA launched a Sing Sing Prison in 2009 and has since intervened in over 25 adult and juvenile facilities. Shepard Fairey donated the charity’s logo and board member Adam McKay’s company Funny or Die donated the design of its interactive site. Shira Piven and Adam McKay directed a short film entitled “The Beast & The Angel” for PBS as part of their new Life Casters series. It is a film about Wayne and it is currently broadcasting.

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