Wayne Kramer used to tell a remarkable story about the first time he realised how influential his music had become. It was 1976, and he read an article in Billboard magazine about the Ramones and the burgeoning New York punk scene, which “kept saying that these kind of bands were inspired by the MC5”. Kramer was so horrified, he tore the magazine up and flushed it down the nearest toilet.
He was in a federal prison in Kentucky, serving a four-year sentence for drug offences and, as he put it, “from where I was sat, ‘punk’ did not have a good ring to it”. “In jail, a punk is somebody that they knock down and make their girlfriend, you know: ‘I’m gonna make you my punk’,” he recalled. “That kind of talk could get you killed, right?”
