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Kramer Bio:
Kramer’s work in music covers a vast spectrum of sound, unified only by an unwavering commitment to experimentation and collaboration. Even a straight telling of his bio reads like a wild tall tale.
As a bassist & multi-instrumentalist, he’s toured with The Fugs, Shockabilly, Jad Fair, Danielson, B.A.L.L. (his band with Don Fleming), Gary Panter, and with Butthole Surfers on their infamous 1985 debut European tour. At his Noise New York and Noise New Jersey studios, he’s produced and recorded hundreds of artists, including Daniel Johnston, Royal Trux, White Zombie, Pussy Galore, Mo Tucker (ex-Velvet Underground), and Half Japanese.
While he has operated successfully on the extreme fringes of 20th century American Indie music, Kramer has also shown an equal mastery of ‘pop’ music, producing influential recordings by artists like Galaxie 500, Will Oldham, and LOW.
Kramer also scored a bonafide hit in 1994 as producer for Urge Overkill’s take on Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” chosen by Quentin Tarantino for his second film, the Palme D’Or winning Pulp Fiction. The film’s extraordinary soundtrack broke sales records worldwide (earning 25x Platinum Sales awards internationally along the way), and the song itself climbed as high as the #59 spot on the Billboard Hot 100. The band paid Kramer $500 to produce the song (along with two others, in a single day at his Noise New Jersey studio), and never gave him another penny. And so it goes.
But it was the creation of his Shimmy-Disc label in 1987 that would prove to be one of Kramer’s most enduring achievements. It was therein that Kramer coalesced his varied talents as a producer, curator, and musician/collaborator into one inextricably linked whole. In the words of Joyful Noise Recordings’ founder Karl Hofstetter, “His label became his art medium.”
Through Shimmy-Disc, between 1987 and 1998, Kramer released over 100 albums from a fascinating roster of artists that included WEEN (“The Pod”), gore metal heroes GWAR, King Missile, John Zorn’s Naked City, Japan’s noise rock masters BOREDOMS, and Kramer’s collaboration with magician Penn Jillette, The Captain Howdy, to name but a small few.
There is perhaps no other living figure with a greater connection to outsider music than Kramer. A brief sampling of the fruits of his collaborative genius would read as follows:
In 1985, while playing bass with Paul Leary and Gibby Haynes in Butthole Surfers, he recorded their classic songs, “American Woman,” “Whirling Hall Of Knives,” “Creep in the Cellar,” “Florida,” and others that would soon appear on their groundbreaking Rembrandt Pussyhorse LP, and on their Cream Corn From The Socket of Davis EP. Later that same year, with the help of a small loan from his uncle, he put a down payment on the recording studio, Noise New York, moved in, and made it his home base of operations for the next seven years.
In 1988, Kramer produced Daniel Johnston’s seminal masterpiece, “1990”, featuring two of his greatest songs, “True Love Will Find You In The End,” and “Some Things Last a Long Time,” on which Kramer played every instrument. Together, these songs established Daniel’s one-of-a-kind genius, and they remain today as twin seminal anthems of one of the most vibrant periods in American Indie music, and one of its greatest artists and songwriters.
Between 1988 and 1991, Kramer produced all three Galaxie 500 LP’s, and toured the world with them behind the live-mix console, “…so I could be 100% certain that they sounded even better live in concert than they did on the records, which I could easily do if the venue had just one halfway decent reverb, and one echo machine”, he said. This genre-defining trilogy of LP’s firmly established Kramer as one of the founding fathers of “Slowcore,” and cemented the band’s eternal resting place in the movement’s pantheon of greats.
In 1992, Kramer’s daughter Tess was born, and he released his first solo effort; a triple LP he called “The Guilt Trip”. Two more solo LP’s followed in 1995, and 1998.
In 1994, following the release of Pulp Fiction, Rolling Stone Magazine named Kramer “Producer of the Year” (aka; “Hot Producer”).
Also in 1994, he discovered LOW and produced their first two LP’s, I Could Live In Hope and Long Division in 1995, for Virgin’s Vernon Yard Records. Those recordings are now considered two of the foundational pillars of the Slowcore/Sadcore movement.
In 1995, he co-wrote “Free Will & Testament” with ex-Soft Machine legend Robert Wyatt, which became his signature song. That same year, he produced perhaps the most beautiful recordings of Will Oldham’s storied career, the 7” single “Gulf Shores,” b/w “West Palm Beach.”
In 1996, years after producing King Missile’s college radio mega-hit “Jesus Was Way Cool” for their Mystical Shit LP on Shimmy-Disc (which inspired their signing to Atlantic Records), Kramer reluctantly agreed to work for a major label and produce their 2nd LP for Atlantic, “Happy Hour,” which spawned two new hit songs and accompanying videos, “Detachable Penis,” and “Martin Scorsese,” both of which enjoyed worldwide notoriety, thanks to extensive MTV airplay.
In 1998, following a nightmarish 5 year lawsuit brought against him by Ann Magnuson over the Bongwater catalog and a subsequent disastrous partnership with The Knitting Factory in NYC, Shimmy-Disc went bankrupt and Kramer quit making music. He spent the next five years studying Theater & Directing under Arthur Penn (Bonnie & Clyde, The Miracle Worker, Little Big Man) at The Actors Studio, and the next two decades making four solo LP’s for the “Composers Series” of John Zorn’s Tzadik Records label, including one featuring guitarist Bill Frisell entitled, The Brill Building, Book Two.
Now living in South Florida, Kramer found the time to wonder whether or not, if, in the future, he had the chance to run a record company again, he would by then have become mature enough (“or crazy enough”, in his own words) to actually take that chance.
In 2020, Joyful Noise Recordings named him their “Artist in Residence,” commemorating his career with a 5LP vinyl box set and over 400 minutes of newly recorded music.
In 2021, after a 23 year hiatus, Shimmy-Disc was born again. In December of that same year (ie; NOW), Kramer releases his first solo LP since 1998; AND THE WIND BLEW IT ALL AWAY, produced and recorded entirely alone in his home studio in South Florida during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Make Art, Make Love, Die.” – Kramer, 2020
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