John Sinclair | |
|---|---|
 Sinclair in 2008 | |
| Born | October 2, 1941 Flint, Michigan, U.S. |
| Died | April 2, 2024 (aged 82) Detroit, Michigan, U.S. |
| Alma mater | University of Michigan-Flint |
| Occupations |
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John Sinclair (October 2, 1941 – April 2, 2024) was an American poet, writer, and political activist from Flint, Michigan. Sinclair's defining style is jazz poetry, and he released most of his works in audio formats. Most of his pieces include musical accompaniment, usually by a varying group of collaborators dubbed Blues Scholars.
As an emerging young poet in the mid-1960s, Sinclair took on the role of manager for the Detroit rock band MC5. The band's politically charged music and its Yippie core audience dovetailed with Sinclair's own radical development. In 1968, while still working with the band, he conspicuously served as a founding member of the White Panther Party, a militantly anti-racist socialist group and counterpart of the Black Panthers.
Arrested for possession of marijuana in 1969, Sinclair was given ten years in prison. The sentence was criticized by many as unduly harsh, and it galvanized a noisy protest movement led by prominent figures of the 1960s counterculture. Sinclair was freed in December 1971, but he remained in litigation – his case against the government for illegal domestic surveillance was successfully pleaded to the US Supreme Court in United States v. U.S. District Court (1972).
Sinclair eventually left the US and took up residency in Amsterdam. He continued to write and record and, from 2005, hosted a regular radio program, The John Sinclair Radio Show, as well as producing a line-up of other shows on his own radio station, Radio Free Amsterdam.
Sinclair was among the first people to purchase recreational marijuana when it became legal in Michigan on December 1, 2019.[1]
Sinclair was born in Flint, Michigan, but grew up in Davison.[2] He was a member of the Class of 1960 at Albion College in Albion, Michigan, but he dropped out after his first year.[3] Sinclair subsequently attended the Flint College of the University of Michigan, now the University of Michigan-Flint. During his time at UM-Flint he served on the university's Publications Board, school newspaper The Word, and was the president of the Cinema Guild. He graduated in 1964.[4]
Sinclair was music editor and columnist for the Detroit underground newspaper, Fifth Estate, during the paper's growth in the late 1960s.[5] Fifth Estate continues to publish to this day, making it one of the longest continuously published alternative periodicals in the United States.
Sinclair also contributed to the formation of Detroit Artists Workshop Press, which published five issues of Work Magazine. Sinclair worked as a jazz writer for DownBeat from 1964 to 1965,[5] being an outspoken advocate for the newly emerging Free Jazz Avant Garde movement. Sinclair was one of the "New Poets" who read at the seminal Berkeley Poetry Conference in July 1965.
In April 1967 he founded the Ann Arbor Sun, a biweekly underground newspaper,[6] with his wife Leni Sinclair and artist Gary Grimshaw.[7][8]
Sinclair managed the proto-punk band MC5 from 1966 through 1969.[9][10][11] Under his guidance the band embraced the counter-culture revolutionary politics of the White Panther Party, founded in answer to the Black Panthers' call for white people to support their movement.[12][13]
The album Kick Out the Jams caused some controversy due to John Sinclair's inflammatory liner notes and the title track's rallying cry of "Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!" According to Kramer, the band recorded this as "Kick out the jams, brothers and sisters!" for the single released for radio play; Tyner claimed this was done without group consensus.[14] The edited version also appeared in some LP copies, which also withdrew Sinclair's excitable comments. The album was released in January 1969; reviews were mixed, but the album was relatively successful, quickly selling over 100,000 copies and peaking at #30 on the Billboard 200 chart in May 1969 during a 23-week stay.[15]
During this period, Sinclair booked "The Five" as the regular house band at Detroit's famed Grande Ballroom in what came to be known as the "Kick out the Jams" shows. He was managing the MC5 at the time of their free concert outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The band was the only group to perform before police broke up the massive anti-Vietnam war rally. Eventually, the MC5 came to find Sinclair's politics too heavy-handed. He and the band separated in 1969.[16] In 2006, Sinclair joined MC5 bassist Michael Davis to launch the Music Is Revolution Foundation, serving as a general board member. They issued a CD, Music is Revolution: From the John & Leni Sinclair library with Leni Sinclair. Oak Park, MI: Book Beat Gallery, 2000, a spoken word CD (compiled from 50 hours of historical recordings at the Bentley Historical Library, plus an illustrated book featuring posters and pictures of the MC5, an documenting radical political history.[17]
After a series of convictions for possession of marijuana, Sinclair was sentenced to ten years in prison in 1969 after offering two joints to an undercover female narcotics officer.[18]
The severity of his sentence sparked high-profile protests, including an infamous incident at the 1969 Woodstock Festival wherein Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman jumped on the stage and seized a microphone during a performance by The Who. Hoffman managed to shout only a few words about Sinclair's plight before he was forcibly ejected from the stage by guitarist Pete Townshend.[19][20]
With a more successful protest, John Lennon performed his new song "John Sinclair" on television[21] and recorded it for his next album, Some Time in New York City (1972),[22] though by that time Sinclair had been released.[23] With "directness and simplicity", said one critic,[21] the lyrics lament Sinclair's intended harsh punishment: "They gave him ten for two – what else can the bastards do?"[21]
Various public and private protests culminated in the "John Sinclair Freedom Rally" at Ann Arbor's Crisler Arena in December 1971. The event brought together celebrities including Lennon and Yoko Ono; musicians David Peel, Stevie Wonder, Phil Ochs and Bob Seger, Archie Shepp and Roswell Rudd; poets Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders; and countercultural speakers including Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Jerry Rubin, and Bobby Seale.[24][25][26][27][28] Three days after the rally, Sinclair was released from prison when the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the state's marijuana statutes were unconstitutional.[29] These events inspired the creation of Ann Arbor's annual pro-legalization Hash Bash rally.[30]
In 1972, Leonard Weinglass took on the defense of Sinclair in Detroit, Michigan after he was charged with conspiracy to destroy government property along with Larry 'Pun' Plamondon and John Forrest. While awaiting trial and after being convicted, the government admitted to wiretapping without a warrant. The case went to the United States Supreme Court and was decided in United States v. U.S. District Court, also now famously known as the Keith Case, which held that not even the invocation of "national security" by the president of the United States could insulate illegal activity from Constitutional rights to privacy (407 U.S. 297 (1972)). The charges were dismissed.[A][32][33]
Starting in the mid-1980s, Sinclair wrote a newspaper column on cannabis, titled "Free the Weed". The primary focus of Sinclair's column was the social history of cannabis use in the US; however, he often touched upon the global campaign for its legalisation.[citation needed]
From the mid-1990s Sinclair performed and recorded his spoken word pieces with his band The Blues Scholars, which included such musicians as Wayne Kramer, Brock Avery, Charles Moore, Doug Lunn, and Paul Ill, among many others. He also performed as a distinctive disc jockey for New Orleans' WWOZ Radio, the public jazz and heritage station.[34]
On March 22, 2006, Sinclair joined The Black Crowes on stage at the Paradiso in Amsterdam, and read his poem "Monk in Orbit" during the instrumental break in the song "Nonfiction".[35] Two days later, he went back onstage at the Black Crowes show in the Paradiso, reading his poem "Fat Boy" during the long instrumental jam following the Black Crowes' song, "How Much for Your Wings?".[36]
On January 20, 2009, to mark Barack Obama's inauguration as the 44th President of the United States, Sinclair performed a series of his poems accompanied by a live band, featuring Elliott Levin, Tony Bianco and Jair-Rohm Parker Wells at Cafe OTO in Dalston, East London.[37][38]
In 2011, Sinclair recorded spoken-word for the intro to the song “Best Lasts Forever” by Scottish band The View, produced by Youth.[39]
In 2023, Sinclair did a eulogy at the tribute for Pun Plamondon, with whom he helped found the White Panthers party. Sinclair said, “He was a brilliant character,” but went on at such length about his own contribution — so much so that he was interrupted and reminded that 'this is about Pun.'[40]
Created in 2004, The John Sinclair Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Amsterdam, Netherlands.[5] Its mission is to ensure the preservation and proper presentation of the creative works via poetry, music, performance, journalism, editing and publishing, broadcast and record production of Sinclair.[41] To date, the foundation has produced books, zines, records, and documentaries highlighting his contribution to the historic cannabis legalization effort, rock music in Detroit and psychedelic communitarianism.[41]
Sinclair died of heart failure at the Detroit Receiving Hospital, on April 2, 2024, at the age of 82.[9] [24][42][43][44][45]
John Sinclair has recorded several of his poems and essays. On these albums blues and jazz musicians provide psychedelic soundscapes to accompany his delivery:
