John Sinclair

Back in 1972, John Lennon & Yoko came out with a politically radical album, Sometime in New York City, that Rolling Stone called “artistic suicide.”

I was pretty much at my radical peak at that time, so I had no problem with it at all. Just about all the songs espoused radical causes, from Angela Davis to Belfast, feminism to legalizing drugs. On that subject, there was “John Sinclair”:



Manager of Detroit’s punkish MC5 band, Sinclair was also heavily involved with the White Panthers, a radical group that backed the Black Panthers. Wikipedia does a good job of filling in the rest:

After a series of convictions for possession of marijuana, Sinclair was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1969 after giving two joints of marijuana to an undercover narcotics officer.[2] This sentence sparked the landmark "Free John Now Rally" at Ann Arbor's Crisler Arena in December 1971. The event brought together a who's-who of left-wing luminaries, including pop musicians John Lennon (who recorded the song, "John Sinclair" on his Some Time in New York City album), Yoko Ono, David Peel, Stevie Wonder, Phil Ochs and Bob Seger, jazz artists Archie Shepp and Roswell Rudd, and speakers Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Jerry Rubin, and Bobby Seale.[3] Three days after the rally, Sinclair was released from prison when the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the state's marijuana statutes were unconstitutional. These events inspired the creation of Ann Arbor’s annual pro-legalization Hash Bash rally, which continues to be held as of 2009, and contributed to the drive for decriminalization of marijuana under the Ann Arbor city charter (see Marijuana laws in Ann Arbor, Michigan).

Well, here’s Sinclair, doing some poetry with jazz accompaniment:



Oh, and, as you can see, MC5 was a pretty exciting act: