Wayne Kramer - The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the MC5, and My Life of Impossibilities

Happy the youth who believes that his duty is to remake the world and bring it more in accord with virtue and justice, more in accord with his own heart. Woe to whoever commences his life without lunacy.

NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS, Report to Greco

The Belle Isle police riot of April 30, 1967, was the first riot I ever played. It was on my birthday; I was 19 years old. The hippie movement had arrived in Detroit that spring, and since the MC5 was a band on the cutting edge of the counterculture, it was only natural that wed play the motor citys first Love-in.

Belle Isle is a delightful city park in the middle of the Detroit River. The day had progressed peacefully enough, with pot smoking and acid tripping and freaks of all stripes carrying on. When we took the stage, which was in a gazebo near a wooded area of the park, it was the peak of the afternoon and everything was going great. The crowd was pure Detroit, black and white, friends and strangers, and they all moved in close to see the MC5. I resorted to my technique of brushing the crowd back by looking the other way and then crashing into them, as if I was so caught up in the moment that I didnt know what I was doing. It worked like a charmmake some room, motherfuckers, Im doing a show here! Everyone was having fun, and I enjoyed myself immensely.

The sun went down, and the Detroit Police Department decided we werent clearing out quickly enough. There was a small confrontation with some drunken Outlaw bikers, and the police threw down on them. The bikers fought back, and the crowd backed away from the mayhem.

Police reinforcements arrived and started bum-rushing everyone off of Belle Isle. We were just getting ready to leave as the cops got into position. They had probably been rehearsing their lockstep, and were overjoyed to have a chance to use itnot that anyone there posed a threat. This wasnt a cadre of highly trained Marxist revolutionaries; we were a bunch of regular folks, stoned-out weirdos and Budweiser-buzzed factory rats, simply enjoying a free concert.

At first, it was a game. When the police line came forward, everyone shrieked and laughed and ran away. But when the first heads got busted, the humor abruptly dissipated. The cops violence was outrageously out of proportion to the situation. They seemed to enjoy their total dominance over the crowd. They were sadistic.

Wanting to save our gear from being smashed, I hopped into an open-bed pickup truck with some of the instruments. Michael and Fred piled in with me. We drove slowly toward the only bridge off the island, where, to our surprise, a police roadblock had stopped traffic. The sun had gone down, and it was now dark. It was then that the mounted police arrived.

The mounted cops took a galloping start on people who were running away, and clubbed them like they were playing polo. Giddyup! Whack! Pow! Score! Women were screaming, blood was gushing, men were cursing at the cops. The trees were backlit by police headlights and spotlights. Everywhere I looked, another horrific scene was going down like some unholy Chinese shadow puppet show. After traffic started backing up on the bridge, the police finally let us drive off the island.

WE FINALLY GOT BACK to our headquarters at the Artists Workshop, and started putting out calls for help. I made inquiries to hospitals and jails as to the whereabouts of my sister Kathi and our other missing friends. I was outraged at what had just gone down. The line had been crossed; never again would I believe the myth that the police were there to protect and serve.

Later that summer, this became even clearer when the Detroit Police Department enacted one of the worst outbreaks of police violence in American history. It wasnt black people killing white people, any more than it was black people killing cops. It was the police who were doing the killing.