FREE THE WEED 04
A Column by John Sinclair
Highest greetings from Amsterdam, the viper capital of the world. Your
correspondent has come a long way from his humble origins in Flint, the city of
my birth and equally my young manhood, when I was chasing the music and
learning to write and enjoying city life for the first time—and smoking the first of
what would become a virtual infinity of joints over the next 50 years.
I grew up in Davison, the little town just ten miles east of Flint and surely a
country town when I was coming up in the 1940s and ’50s. I was introduced to
the outside world as a youth of 12 or 13 when the fantastic sounds of rhythm
& blues were beamed into my bedroom through the airwaves from WBBC in
Flint, where my first human idol—and later friend and mentor—the great disc
jockey who called himself The Frantic One, Ernie Durham, could be heard every
afternoon spinning the latest sounds by Ray Charles, Wynonie Harris, Clyde
McPhatter & the Drifters, Big Joe Turner, Guitar Slim, Ruth Brown, and the
Moonglows.
Frantic Ernie D’s radio show opened up a window onto a whole different world
from the one that surrounded me in Davison, and it felt and sounded better
than anything I’d ever experienced. I found out that The Frantic One owned
and operated a pair of Ernie’s Record Racks in the north end of Flint, the
outpost at 943 Leith Street near Industrial located only blocks from Buick World
Headquarters on Hamilton Avenue, where my father worked, and I worked out
a deal with my dad where he would take my little $2.00 allowance every Friday
and my list of 10 or so new records I was desperate to possess, stop in at Ernie’s
Record Rack on his lunch hour, and pick me up the two closest records to the top
of the list that Ernie D. had in stock.
So I was deep into the music at an early age, this magical thing that came in
over the radio and lit up my life. The drug of choice when I was in high school
was beer, with maybe a pint of sloe gin for special occasions. I was 15 or 16
before I even heard about marijuana by reading On The Road by Jack Kerouac,
published in 1957, and it sounded mighty good but where would you get some?
I went away to Albion College for two years and got turned on to jazz, poetry, and
even Dexedrine for staying up all night listening to records and trying to write, but
it wasn’t until I returned to Flint in 1961 to complete my formal education at Flint
Junior College and the Flint College of the University of Michigan—then housing
its student body of 550 in a single building off of Court Street—that I fell in with
some cats situated well off the campus who turned me on to codeine cough
syrup and sleeping pills and the way that recreational drug use fit perfectly into
the life of the streets of the city.
I was working in a place called Hatfield’s Musical Tent Record Shop at Saginaw
Street and 2nd in downtown Flint, managing the jazz stock and making friends
with my customers when a guy called Bimbo turned aside from his purchase of
the new John Coltrane album on Impulse Records and asked me if I got high. He
slipped me a couple of pills and came back a few days later to see how I’d liked
them. Pleased with my positive response, he invited to come up to the north end
and dig some records with him and his friends and cop some Robitussen at the
corner drugstore.
One day I was hanging with the fellows in Sweetie’s Barber Shop, high on
cough syrup and digging Gene Ammons on the juke box when this fairly
mysterious dude called Tom pulled me aside and gave me a little preachment
about downers and how that was all wrong for people seeking to grow their
intelligence. “Man, it’s time for you to smoke some weed,” is how he put it, and
he took me off somewhere to turn me on to my first joint.
This was late in 1961, an awfully long time ago for a pothead to remember
anything, and the actual details of my initial experience with marijuana have
been lost in the mists of time, but there was no question that weed represented
a significant step upward for the aspiring young beatnik in Flint. The mental
thrills derived from feeling your consciousness actually expand and the physical
sensations resulting in greater sensual awareness and increased sensitivity to
self and others made life much more hopeful and interesting, and man, the music
sounded better and better the more of it you were now able to hear.
After I had started copping regularly from Tom—that would be in $10 Ohio Blue
Tip matchboxes, seeds and all—I met a fellow student at Flint Junior College, a
piano player from Owosso named Lyman Woodard who became a lifelong friend
and collaborator, and I had the honor and privilege of turning him on to weed as
soon as we had moved together into an apartment at 923 E. Kearsley. Now both
of us could cop from Tom, but since we didn’t know how to prepare our joints
properly we had to ask him to roll the weed up for us so we could smoke it.
One night after we had finally learned how to roll we had some weed we were
dying to smoke but no papers in the house. Racking our feeble brains for a
solution, we found an old newspaper from England printed on tissue-thin paper
for overseas mailing, so we tore up a page and rolled up a big bomber (as Louis
Armstrong would put it) and as we were smoking it down Woodard laughed and
said, man, I bet we’re gonna know more about what’s happening in the world
after this.
I turned 21 in October 1962 and my birthday present from Tom was a little
package of marijuana from the crop he’d grown himself on the banks of the
Flint River somewhere. This pot was much more powerful than anything I’d ever
smoked and my mind was expanding exponentially the farther I got into the first
joint. The popular record in our set just then was the new Miles Davis album,
Someday My Prince Will Come, which I’d heard at least 100 times already, but
listening to it now on Tom’s big record player the music came to fully to life and I
heard every note, every rhythmic surge, every twist and turn of the improvisers’
minds as they worked their way through the musical material, and it opened up
a door for me in my mind that I’ve walked through every day for almost half a
century.
Yeah, it sort of illuminated the slogan advanced by Louis Armstrong and Mezz
Mezzrow and the early American vipers—jazz musicians, most of them—when
they said: “Light Up & Be Somebody!” Even in Flint you could do this, and it was
a good thing—both then and now.
—Above the Hash Museum
Amsterdam
June 20-21 >
Headpress Bunker
London
June 22, 2011
© 2011 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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