John Sinclair RIP

Hero of the cannabis revolution dies in Detroit

    By now you’ve probably heard, John Sinclair has joined Timothy Leary among those beings who are outside looking in. He died on April 2 in Detroit. As I became a hippie I grew up in the shadow of John Sinclair. I never met the man.    

    When he and the other early heads of Detroit decided Plum Street was going to be our Haight-Ashbury, I was in Nam. When he was putting up the MC5 at the Grande Ballroom in ’68 I was working as a janitor in a factory and drinking the Gold Door closed every working night. It was because of the hippie thing happening that I was able to sweep my way out of that dead-end.

    John Sinclair was at the center of that vortex. His head was always above us. He was doing things that we would do later; making musical things happen like the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival; making news on an international scale when he defeated Tricky Dick Nixon in the U.S. Supreme Court; making waves in the underground by creating the White Panther Party, the only political party with a band (the MC5); making us love him so much that we got together and sang and played him out of jail with a little help from our friends John and Yoko.

    But with all that there is still something lacking in John Sinclair. Maybe it is a hierarchy. Here he is obviously being our leader yet there’s no form for us to attach too, except the raves and merry prankings of the White Panthers

    I decided I’d better acquaint myself with exactly what the White Panther’s program was. A few clicks and the Ann Arbor District Library supplies a facsimile of an original typed document, which I took the liberty to type for you myself. Paid subscribers - see below.

    John Sinclair as Minister of Information makes a statement beginning: “Our program is cultural revolution through a total assault on the culture ….” It may seem hyperbolic now, but back then, December 5, 1968, we were doing our best to step out of that culture. That’s what the Whole Earth Catalogue was all about, access to tools to build a new culture, the Whole Earth Culture. Still underway, btw.

    Pun Plamondon, a codefendant with Sinclair in that Supreme Court victory a few years later, here as the White Panther Party’s Minister of Defense, names “our heroes” as “Eldridge Cleaver, Rap Brown, Fidel. The Red Guard are our Brothers … we join them in the liberation of the planet.”

    When you get serious about revolution, and both John Sinclair and Pun Plamondon took the revolution seriously, at some time or other you have to pick up a gun. That’s where I broke away from their program. I’m a peace and love hippie. John Sinclair was a militant hippie.

    In a newspaper interview he recalled when he brought the MC5 to San Francisco. He said, “They hated us.” Sinclair figured it was that same militancy that the Haight hated. I have to admit, I never really dug the MC5, Iggy and the Stooges, and that Detroit factory rock sound. I worked in a factory. I didn't want to hear it in my music.

    As I read Sinclair’s words above, I remember my early hippie days. We were all hippies back then. It was a fad, but obviously it was a little more than that. The fad fell away with the fashion, but some us us found ourselves fixed to the core.

    While the struggle for the liberation of the planet is still on-going, the Sinclair hippie’s of southeast Michigan circa the ’60’s can claim a more tangible accomplishment — legalizing cannabis. The public revolt that followed John Sinclair’s arrest for giving an undercover policewoman two joints, let to Ann Arbor leading the nation in liberalizing marijuana use laws. Before it was legal in Michigan, you could always smoke safely in Ann Arbor. We can declare John Sinclair a hero for that. John freed the weed and the beat goes on.

    Freeing the weed nationally and internationally is one little thing that is coming about as a direct result of 50 million of us lighting up, looking around and seeing it all happening everywhere. We can thank John Sinclair for that. He’s big enough to be symbolic. In life he could always wear it well. In death it suits him even better. If there’s a single face superimposed over that gorgeously budding cannabis leaf a flagging in the halls of the future, let it be John Sinclair.