Icons in a musical and cultural divide

NO MUSICIANS more sharply embodied the cultural divide that has riven this country for the last couple of generations than Toby Keith and Wayne Kramer, both of whom succumbed to cancer (stomach and pancreatic, respectively) during the first week of February.

Other than adopting stage names (Keith was born Toby Covel, Kramer was born Wayne Kambes), they had ­little in common.

Keith was a burly-voiced country star from Clinton, Okla., with 11 platinum albums and 20 No. 1 singles, 13 of which landed after the 9/11 attacks and four of which had “America” or “American” in their titles. Kramer was a free-jazz-loving electric guitarist from Detroit who achieved notoriety in the late 1960s and early ’70s as the primary noisemaker of the MC5, seminal proto-punks affiliated with John Sinclair’s revolutionary White Panther Party. Their only album to break the Top 100 stalled at No. 30.

Keith was a Blue Dog Democrat who eventually went independent for the same reason that Ronald Reagan went Republican (the party left him). He saw what was good about the United States and celebrated it with a brawny, patriotic fervor that at times bordered on jingoism (when he wasn’t singing about perennial country topics such as drinkin’ and cheatin’). Kramer, a Bernie Sanders supporter by 2015, saw what was wrong with the United States and decried it with a fervor that at times amounted to agitprop.

Their differences didn’t stop there. Keith came from a strong, intact family. Kramer’s father went AWOL early on. Keith married young and remained married to the same woman for 39 years. Kramer didn’t find marital stability until 2003 at the age of 54. At the approximate age that Keith was playing semi-pro football and paying his dues on the bar circuit, Kramer was abusing drugs, committing crimes, and doing time.

In an interview conducted shortly before his death, Keith credited his “faith” with helping him cope and cited John 3:16 as his favorite Scripture. In his 2018 autobiography The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the MC5 & My Life of Impossibilities, Kramer, who’d been turned off by Catholic and Baptist versions of Christianity as a child, had this to say of a sobriety support group to which he’d belonged: “When I heard God mentioned, my mind closed to whatever anyone was saying.”

Kramer was, however, open to Buddhism. And he numbered Ted Nugent and Alice Cooper—hardly left-wing fellow travelers—among his friends. Had he and Keith survived, who knows? They might’ve someday joined forces, if only in the spirit of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” to raise funds to fight cancer.

In a life of impossibilities, after all, anything can happen.