His career started with Newark basement shows. Now he sings for famed rockers MC5.

If you were a music fan in Newark in the early '90s, then you know the name Zen Guerrilla.

The rock fusion four-piece made up of four University of Delaware students stormed the scene with its raucous shows led by 6-foot-7-inch frontman Marcus Durant, including one that had them "blackballed from campus," the UD student newspaper The Review reported in the early '90s.

It's been about 15 years since the act put out a new album, leaving fans nearly falling out of their respective chairs when it was recently announced that Durant would front the 50th anniversary tour for MC5, the incendiary '60s political rock outfit behind "Kick Out the Jams."

Since original MC5 singer Rob Tyner died in 1991, MC5 has utilized different performers over the years to fill the spot, but this is Durant's first time.

The tour announcement, which identified the band as "MC50" for the dates, will begin in early September and end in MC5's hometown of Detroit on Oct 27. There will be more than 35 shows on trek, although an exact itinerary has not yet been unveiled.

The tour comes after MC5 was nominated earlier this year for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, their third nomination.

Original guitarist Wayne Kramer will be on guitar, along with guitarist Kim Thayil (Soundgarden), drummer Brendan Canty (Fugazi) and bassist Dug Pinnick (King's X). Billboard reports that the only other surviving original band member, drummer Dennis "Machine Gun" Thompson, will perform on select dates.

On tour, Durant and the band will play the album "Kick Out the Jams" in its entirety followed by an encore of MC5 material that will rotate nightly.

Wilmington's Luis Lopez, who lived near Durant in Newark in the early '90s and attended Zen Guerrilla's DIY shows, is like most Zen fans these days: totally shocked.

For 15 years, Zen Guerrilla had been quiet and Durant had seemingly disappeared.

"My jaw completely dropped onto the ground. Out of nowhere, he's back," Lopez says.

While Durant, 50, could not be reached for comment about the tour, heads are still spinning back home in Delaware.

Wilmington's Vince Kilpatrick is not only a big fan of both MC5 and Zen Guerrilla, he shared bills with Zen Guerrilla in the early '90s, playing loud rock shows in basements and churches across Newark with his band Gangster Pump.

"[Durant] reminded me of a roaring punked-out psychedelic Tom Jones -- the guy can sing, but he bellows," says Kilpatrick (Jake & The Stiffs, The Keefs, Hellbomber), who currently books rock concerts at Wilmington's Oddity Bar. "This whole thing is surprising. Marcus had fallen off the face of the Earth as far as I knew."

Durant was born in Turkey in 1967 to a black American father and white British mother, according to Seattle-based alternative weekly The Stranger, which profiled Durant in 2001. By that time, MC5 had been a band for about three years. The Durants settled in Dover when the rocker-in-the-making was 10.

Durant's over-sized frame left an over-sized wake in Newark when he, along with drummer Andy Duvall, bassist Carl Horne and guitarist Rich Millman, moved to Philadelphia for a short time before heading to San Francisco in 1995, signing with a pair of indie labels over the years, including Sub Pop Records and Jello Biafra's Alternative Tentacles.

But new albums stopped coming from Zen Guerrilla in the early 2000s and you're forgiven if you've totally forgotten about the Delaware act from yesteryear -- the guys who would kick-start parties everywhere from UD's Pearson Hall and Bacchus Theater to the Deer Park Tavern and random basements.

With those hazy UD shows in the rearview, Durant has suddenly resurfaced in a big way. He is now preparing to bigfoot his way through the classic protopunk songs that helped influence a generation of noisemakers, including Durant himself.

MC5 made its name as a politically-driven counterculture act, grounded in anti-establishment thought. The band landed on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in 1969, but their original run only lasted a few years, disbanding in 1972.

"This band will rip your head off," MC5's Kramer said in a statement announcing both the tour and his new memoir, "The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the MC5, and My Life of Impossibilities" (Da Capo Press, $28), due Aug. 14. "It's real, raw, sweaty, total energy rock and roll, like a bunch of 40-to-70-year-old punks on a meth power trip.

"The message of the MC5 has always been the sense of possibilities: a new music, a new politics, a new lifestyle," added Kramer, speaking of revisiting the band's 1969 debut. "Today, there is a corrupt regime in power, an endless war thousands of miles away, and uncontrollable violence wracking our country. It's becoming less and less clear if we're talking about 1968 or 2018. I'm now compelled to share this music I created with my brothers 50 years ago. My goal is that the audience leaves these concerts fueled by the positive and unifying power of rock music."

If Durant sounds like he's the lost love child of MC5, it makes sense. Just read an old newspaper review.

"At the forefront is lead agitator Marcus Durant jumping, thrashing, outgribing, bellowing, buttholishly through a bullhorn into a mike," The Review reported in 1993.

Durant even looks a bit like the late Tyner.

"Marcus was a big dude and had an Afro going, plus his voice will do Rob Tyner justice," Lopez says. "The size of his chest, the rumble — his body cavity will put out that same tone. It's going to be a perfect fit. I can't think of anyone better."

That's exactly why Kilpatrick and others are awaiting a Philadelphia date announcement with credit card in hand.

"This is one of those shows that I will road-trip if I have to," Kilpatrick says. "He's the perfect person for the job."

Contact Ryan Cormier of The News Journal at rcormier@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2863. Follow him on Facebook (@ryancormier), Twitter (@ryancormier) and Instagram (@ryancormier).