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"JOHN SINCLAIR" |
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Thursday, 12 January 2006 09:59 |
"John Sinclair"
By John Sinclair
It ain't fair, John Sinclair
In the stir for breathing air.
Won't you care for John Sinclair?
In the stir for breathing air.
Let him be, set him free,
Let him be like you & me.
They gave him ten for two--
What else can the judges do?
Gotta, gotto, gotta, gotta, gotta,
Gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta,
Gotta, gotta, set him free.
--John Lennon
Northern Songs Ltd., 1971
The trusties' visiting room at the State Prison of Southern Michigan at Jackson is a brutal place. Men ore brought in from their cellblocks or farm assignments to spend a carefully guarded hour or two with wives, babies, older children, parents, friends or other loved ones-their only contact with the world from which they were forcibly removed upon incarceration. The ubiquitous prison guards (better known as "screws") keep close watch on all parties present to insure thot contraband is not passed, sexual liberties ore not taken, extended caresses are not shared.
Some men are enjoying various types of "business visits," anxiously awaited conversations with attorneys, business partners, government agents, reporters or investigators who offer some small glimmer of hope for better days ahead to these desperate inhabitants of the grim shadow world of penitentiary life.
It's eorly in December, 1971, and I'm sitting on the edge of my seat on the prisoners' side of one of the tables reserved for such visits, right leg wildly a-jiggle with 28 months' worth of pent-up energy, listening incredulously as Dennis Hayes delivers the latest of what have become almost daily reports by the disheveled young Ann Arbor attorney on developments in the on-going battle to gain my freedom from a 9-1/2-to-1O-year prison sentence for possessing two joints of marijuana one December day five years before.
An all-out drive is on to spring me. My brief on appeal, an unprecedented challenge on several grounds to the constitutionality of Michigan's oppressive drug laws, has been heard two months previously in the Michigan Supreme Court, and we're waiting for a decision. The Michigan legislature is about to vote on a long-debated measure that would reclassify marijuana from a "narcotic" to a "controlled substance," making the "crime" of possessing a few joints subject to a maximum penalty of one year in jail. We've taken out a full-page ad in the Detroit Free Press, undersigned by prominent citizens from all over the country, calling for my immediate release.
Even more urgently, a mammoth rally and concert--the latest and by far the largest of a long succession of rock & roll benefits staged regularly by my comrades in the White Panther Party (by now re-named the Rainbow People's Party) to help pay my legal expenses and keep up the steady stream of "Free John Sinclair" propaganda among our supporters and the public at large--has been scheduled for Friday, December 10th at the 14,000-seat Crisler Arena at the University of Michigan.
Every possible contact, no matter how remote, in the rock & roll and radical activist communities nationwide is being exhorted by our people to join the bill for this ultimate event, which has been designed to put irrepressible pressure on the legislature to pass the new drug bill before its 1971 session is recessed for the holidays on or around the 15th of December.
Old friends from the musical sector like Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen, Archie Shepp & Roswell Rudd, Detroit's Contemporary Jazz Quintet, David Peel & The Lower East Side, and The Up (themselves members of the RPP) were committed to appear at Crisler Arena, along with poets Allen Ginsburg and Ed Sanders, Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale, anti-war activists Rennie Davis and Dave Dellinger, radical Milwaukee priest Fr. James Groppi, Shiela Murphy from the Labor Defense Coalition in Detroit, Johnnie Tillmon of the National Welfare Rights Association, and Jerry Rubin of the Yippies, who was planning to bring along his pal Phil Ochs, the great left-wing folksinger.
Our central concern for this event was filling the arena with people--far more people than we'd ever turned out in one place before--in order to demonstrate what we now considered the enormous breadth and depth of popular support for a drastic reduction in the scope and severity of Michigan's draconian anti-marijuana laws (ten years for possession, a mandatory 20-year minimum sentence for selling or otherwise dispensing this benevolent herb) and for my immediate release from prison pending the disposition of my appeal.
A massive turnout was definitely called for, and anything less than a smash success at Crisler Arena would seriously undermine our efforts to persuade the media and the Legislature that public opinion was with us on this issue like never before.
My old friend Peter Andrews, the producer of the event and our inside man at the University of Michigan (he had been summoned from the rock & roll community to develop an Office of Major Events which would present official rock concerts at UM venues for the very first time), was particularly concerned about the attendance issue. Peter and I had known each other since he was managing a band called SRC and I was working with the MC-5; we had played many great concerts together at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit and at dancehalls and regional rock festivals all over Michigan during 1967-69, including the legendary Saugatuck Pop Festival, the Detroit Rock & Roll Revival at the Michigan State Fairgrounds, and a mammoth all-Detroit show at Olympia Stadium--then the home of the Detroit Red Wings and the place where both Elvis Presley and The Beatles had played--which drew a capacity crowd of 16,000 people in the spring of 1969 to an all-day concert heedlined by the MC-5 and SRC.
Peter and the SRC, along with literally scores of other area bands and their managers, had contributed repeatedly to the Free John Sinclair campaign since I had been incarcerated in the summer of 1969, playing the countless benefits, rallies and free concerts organized by our people to build support for the cause and bring in money for legal and survival expenses.
Now Andrews had put his incipient career as UM's in-house concert promoter on the line, using his position to help us secure the use of the university's largest indoor facility for our most insanely ambitious effort to date, and the reports I had been receiving at Jackson indicated that he was growing increasingly nervous about our ability to secure enough top-of-the-line talent to fill Crisler Arena December 10th--a date which was growing disastrously closer every day with no true headliners yet under our sway.
Just a day or two before, Andrews had reviewed the list of projected participants proposed by my brother David, Chief of Staff for the RPP and, along with my wife Leni, my personal representative in all matters pertaining to my freedom as well as Party affairs. Peter's lengthy experience as a concert promoter brought a frown to his face as he studied the scribbled line-up. There was no way this rag-tag assemblage of poets, political radicals, way-out jazz artists and small-time rockers would attract more than a thousand people, let alone 14,000!
With less than a week to go before the big show, Andrews explained with a grimace, we were in serious trouble, and nothing short of a miracle of some sort would save the day. Lacking any serious head-liners, he counseled, the only way we could avoid a serious public-relations setback would be to drop our plans to use Crisler Arena and reschedule the event for a smaller venue or, in the alternative, to cancel out the whole thing at once.
This is where Hayes had left me at the end of our last visit, and I had lost a couple nights' sleep trying to figure out how this potential masterstroke would be salvaged before Andrews lost all patience and--reasonably enough, I was forced to conclude--decided to shut the project down rather than take the chance of having it cave in on top of him.
The indefatiguable young attorney held out hope that our contacts across the country would soon be successful in enlisting the participation of sympathetic rock stars who were familiar with my case, but I was in a blue funk contemplating the consequences of a collapse and wouldn't stomach the slightest shred of phony optimism.
All was quickly being lost--without a powerful prod from the great unwashed public demanding my release, the Legislature would let their session lapse once again without bringing the drug reclassification bill to a decisive vote, and I'd languish helplessly in prison for another year before we'd get a chance like this again.
At this point I was quite literally at my wits' end. The long months of plotting and scheming to mount an effective campaign for my release, so close to paying off in a big way, were about to go down the drain with the rest of my hopes and aspirations.
We had decided early on that only the most relentless program of constantly increasing pressure on the media, the courts, the Legislature and the general public would force a positive turn of events, and the Free John Now rally at Crisler Arena had seemed such a perfect stratagem. We would demonstrate the size and strength of our outlaw culture and use it against the forces which had meant to suppress it by locking up people like myself.
Instead of recanting and "reforming" myself under the ultimate pressure of a long prison sentence, I would be freed by sticking to my principles, fighting back and winning the support of thousands of hippies, activists and liberals led by a cultural vanguard of poets, rock & roll bands, jazz musicians, psychedelic artists and underground journalists. It was like a sheet of White Panther Party propaganda come to life!
As a political prisoner, a radical cultural and political activist jailed and held without bond as a "danger to society," I had been selected by the established order to be "made an example of" for the rest of my generation.
Potential refugees from the straight and narrow who might have been tempted to join the revolution would certainly have to think twice, the authorities reasoned, now that they'd drawn the line. Ten years for two joints! Why shit, nobody in their right mind would keep smoking marijuana, freaking to rock & roll, wearing jeans and long hair, throwing off the shackles of conventional morality and fighting against racism and the war in Vietnam after they saw what happened to that loud-mouth Sinclair. Get it straight, kids: You can't get away with that shit here in the USA!
Conversely, my entire public career to that point had been dedicated to the opposite proposition--that you could get away with defying the way things were supposed to be.... and have a natural ball doing it.
As a cultural activist on and around the Wayne State University campus in the mid-1960s I had organized countless jazz and poetry events, established a large collective of weirdos with a base at the Artists' Workshop and a beatnik housing cooperative west of campus, published an endless stream of mimeographed poetry and jazz magazines, books, and pamphlets, printed and passed out "free poems" on the streets, wrote for and edited underground tabloids, started a Detroit chapter of LEMAR to demand the legalization of marijuana, suffered arrests for possessing and distributing marijuana, served six months in the.Detroit House of Correction on the second bust, and came out of DeHoCo on August 5, 1966 to find an incipient mass movement of long-haired rock & roll dope smokers and acid heads about to burst upon the scene.
This seemed to provide proof that my friends and I were on the right track, and I quickly redoubled my commitment to causing trouble for the status quo by attempting to link up the early psychedelic literary/jazz vanguard--inspired by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, Charles Olson and William Burroughs, Malcolm X and Fidel Castro--with the rising tide of young would-be drop-outs weaned on the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, tuned in to Timothy Leary and Stanley Mouse and the Mothers of Invention, tripped out on marijuana and LSD, and already exploring the possibility and actual practice of living a life centered on the daily pursuit of "rock & roll, dope, and fucking in the streets."
During the three years between my release from DeHoCo and my incarceration in the state prison system on July 25, 1969, I blazed a trail of boundless energy across the skies of Detroit and southeastern Michigan to establish myself variously in the imaginations of my fellow citizens.
To people my own age (I turned 25 in 1966) and class (white, college graduate) I was a demonstrably insane renegade from the American Dream; to our elders and authorities of every stripe, as the garish embodiment of everything they were committed to eradicating from American life before their children, their very hopes and dreams would be infected; and to the best and brightest of the coming generation between 15 and 25 as perhaps an interesting character with some wild ideas, a lot of nerve, a feverish vision of the way things would and should be in modern life, and a frenetic yet unshakable commitment to enacting that vision on as many fronts as would prove humanly possible.
Inspired by the writings and practice of the poet Ed Sanders to mount a Total Asssult On The Culture and by the Black Panther Party to wage it By Any Means Necessary, I wrote inflammatory screeds for scores of underground papers, mounted a serious constitutional challenge to the state's marijuana laws in response to a third bust in 1967, organized and promoted regular series of rock & roll benefits, free concerts, and multi-media events throughout lower Michigan, appeared at schools, universities and in the media as a spokesman for the cultural revolution and the legalization of weed, co-founded the White Panther Party as a political vehicle through which white youth could openly express solidarity with the Black liberation movement and the struggle of the Vietnamese people while smoking dope and dancing to rock & roll, and wrote, edited and published poems, books, magazines and pamphlets exhorting young people to take ever more direct action against the social structure they were coming to hate and fear.
But it was my association with the MC-5 that cemented together all the disparate elements of my activity and enabled me to begin to build a mass base of support for my ideas. First as a close friend of lead singer Rob Tyner and then as the band's manager, I worked closely with the MC-5 to develop the band's musical and performance potential until, in the summer of 1968, everything fell into place and the MC-5 began to emerge out of Detroit as the most exciting rock & roll band in the country.
What made them unique in the history of the music was their explosive fusion of basic rock & roll energy with space-age electronics, the wild abandon of post-modern jazz, the supersonic stagecraft of rhythm & blues, and a series of powerful, twin-guitar-driven compositions carrying lyrics that spoke insistently to the widest concerns of the dsy--all delivered with big attitude and a belligerent, flamboyantly fearless stance against the established forces of law and order.
Kick Out The Jams, Motherfucker! / Come Together! / The Motor City Is Burning! / Human Being Lawnmower! / Call Me Animal! / Let Your Love Come Down! An MC-5 performance circa 1968-69 was a demented amalgam of rock & roll dance, Pentacostal revival meeting, political rally on acid, and potential sex orgy...with almost all the participants still fully dressed.
You came to see a band and went home a budding cultural revolutionary, ready to spread the word to people at your school or in your little town that there was finally an alternative to the square rat race concept they'd always been programmed to embrace.
Week after week we played in high school gymnasiums, teen clubs, community centers, psychedelic ballrooms, coffeehouses, churches, parks and fields--never in bars, but anywhere teenagers and the hipper college students would go, we would play for them and make more and more converts to our cause.
After a year of steady advance, including a record contract with Elektra Records and a first release--recorded "live" at Detroit's Grande Ballroom--which met with considerable national acclaim, the MC-5 was poised to become an incendiary international sensation, a rocket shot through the heart of the music industry to explode in the minds of millions of potential followers and bring them into the burgeoning revolutionary ranks.
A dispute with Elektra Rewrds over their refusal to defend record store clerks who had been arrested for selling the 5's album--coupled with their subsequent erasure of the album's liner notes and censorship of the recording itself--led to a parting of the ways after only six months of contractual bliss, but the band was quickly picked up by Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records, given a better contract and a bigger advance, and rushed into GM Studios in Detroit to begin work on a second LP between tour dates.
Then my marijuana case--now 2-1/2 years old and long delayed by pre-trial challenges to the constitutionality of the law itself--finally came up for trial in Detroit Recorder's Court. The 'dispensing' charge (I'd given two joints to an undercover policewoman in December 1966), which carried a mandatory 20-year minimum sentence, was dropped by the prosecution the day before the trial was to start; I was tried and convicted of possession of the same two joints, sentenced to 9-1/2 to ten years in prison, denied bond on appeal, and shipped off to Jackson for processing before being transported 600 miles in chains to Marquette Branch Prison in the Upper Peninsula several weeks later.
I served a year there and was sent back to Jackson as a 'disciplinary problem' as a result of my efforts to help a group of Black inmates organize themselves to demand better educational and rehabilitative opportunities from the prison administration.
Meanwhile I'd also been charged by the federal government with conspiring to place an explosive device in the doorway of a clandestine CIA recruiting office just off the University of Michigan campus in September 1968. The charge was lodged against me by Nixon's Justice Department in the fall of 1969 and served the government as an excuse to deny my repeated applications to be released on bond pending the outcome of my appeal.
Note: My state felony conviction was ultimately reversed and the marijuana laws declared unconstitutional by the Michigan Supreme Court in March, 1972.
Pre-trial hearings in what we termed the CIA Conspiracy case began in September 1970 with William Kunstler, Leonard Weinglass and Detroit attorney Hugh M. 'Buck' Davis heading the defense effort. A motion to discover if any evidence against us had been obtained by means of illegal wiretaps led to a government admission that one of my co-defendants, Larry 'Pun' Plamondon, had been overheard and recorded on a phone that had been tapped by the Justice Department without a warrant in the interest of what they called 'national security.'
Federal District Judge Damon Keith agreed with us that the U.S. Constitution expressly prohibited warrantless intrusions into citizens' privacy and ordered the government to turn over to the defense the logs of the disputed conversation or dismiss its charges against us. John Mitchell's Justice Department refused to do either one and challenged Judge Keith's ruling by appeal to the 6th U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati and, subsequently, to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Keith was ultimately upheld by an 8-0 vote (newly- appointed Justice William Renquist abstaining because he had been one of the drafters of the Justice Department's 'national security wiretap' program). The government then dismissed its case against us rather than reveal the target of their illeqal wiretap.
Throughout my long struggle against the marijuana laws, the narcotics police, the courts, the prison administration and now the federal government, I had steadfastly refused to back down in any way and instead continued to confront the enemy at every turn.
My comrades in the Party and our friends throughout the community worked without rest to develop an ever-growing base of supporters, utilizing my case as an inarguable example of state repression of the cultural revolution and a natural rallying point for all of those opposed to such reprehensible activity.
Now the struggle was at a crucial point: we were on the offensive in a big way, public opinion was beginning to shift toward our position at last, and all we had to do was make the rally at Crisler Arena into a smashing success--14,000 people gathered in one place to demand freedom for John Sinclair!
The victory that had seemed so near was starting to drift inexorably out of our grasp, however, and I was in an irascible mood while I waited for Hayes to join me at the visiting room table for our meeting.
I had been trying for two days to prepare myself for the worst, and I fully expected Hayes to tell me that the whole thing had been called off. Yet the attorney was wearing an almost maniacal grin on his face as he bounded toward our table, bubbling with an enthusiasm I couldn't bear to countenance in my depressed state.
What's the deal, Hayes? I greeted him with a sneer, and what the fuck are you grinning about, for Chrissakes?
I should be able to recall every word of what Dennis said, because it rocked me down to my feet, but all I can recall is the sense of utter incredulity which filled my being when I heard him say that John Lennon & Yoko Ono would be coming out with their pal Jerry Rubin for the rally December 10th.
John Lennon? I couldn't believe my ears, and I turned on Hayes with barely suppressed rage. Don't bullshit me, you son-of-a-bitch! How can you do this to me? I'm strung out enough just being in this godforsaken place for the past 2-1/2 years, and now you guys think you can just tell me anything to try to make me feel better?
I'm not going for it for one minute, and I wish to hell you'd stick to what's going on with the concert instead of trying to lay this ridiculous fantasy trip on me. Don't fuck with my mind, you rat bastard, and tell me right now exactly how messed up things really are with this thing.
Hayes seemed to back up a few paces, his hands held palms out before his face as if to ward off an anticipated blow from his frantic pro bono client.
No shit, man, he pleaded, Jerry Rubin called to confirm it, and get this: Lennon's writing a song about you that he's gonna play at the rally!
Rubin's already heard some of it at Lennon's place, and he was raving about how great it was. This is going to blow the whole thing wide open--there's no way they're gonna be able to keep you in here after Lennon comes out to Ann Arbor for the concert, man!
This struck me as even more preposterous. I'd heard that Rubin had been hanging out with John and Yoko in New York City, showing them around the scene and introducing them, at their request, to movement people of every stripe. Word was that Lennon was about to make a move himself, and everyone was waiting breathlessly to see which way the popular ex-Beatle would go.
But come to Ann Arbor? To free John Sinclair? And write a song about my case to boot? Bullshit! I simply could not believe it, and I gave Hayes a pretty hard time, demanding some kind of proof of Lennon's intentions before I'd accept the news that everything was gonna be alright.
Hayes came back the next day with a tape. On the tape was the actual voice of John Lennon, sending revolutionary greetings and pledging his support in unequivocal terms.
Then he sang some of the song: It ain't fair, John Sinclair / In the stir for breathing air / Let him be, set him free / Let him be like you and me.
The little electrodes in my brain cracked and sizzled as it began to sink in: Lennon is really coming out to Ann Arbor to try to get me out of here! It's going to work! These bastards can't possibly keep me under lock and key after December 1Oth! YIPPIE!!!
An announcement was authorized by the Lennon camp, and the Rainbow People's Party called a press conference to drop the bomb on an unsuspecting public. All 14,000 tickets, which I had insisted remain priced at $3.00, sold out within a matter of hours, and every television news show, radio station and newspaper in the state rushed to bring its audience every detail of the coming Lennon visitation.
Then Stevie Wonder called up and asked if he could bring his band out, at his own expense, to play at the rally. Bob Seger's management finally jettisoned its stand against the singer's participation in the event, and he came on board with his backing band, old friends David Teegardin & Skip VanWinkle.
Once-skeptical hippies and apolitical Beatles fans all over Michigan were knitting their brows trying to figure out how to get tickets to the show, while radio station WABX-FM laid plans to broadcast the entire event "live" from Crisler Arena. Channel 56, Public Television in Detroit, wanted to videotape the concert for a later broadcast, and New York called to say that Lennon would be bringing his personal film and recording crew with him to document the proceedings for a possible film of the affair.
Everything was falling irresistably into place, and my spirits--caged for so long in a prison cell--were soaring beyond measure. I didn't know exactly how soon my nightmare would be over, but now it was going to be just a simple matter of time--and not very much of it at that!
On December 9th the other shoe fell when the Michigan state legislature brought the drug reclassification bill to a vote--and passed it! Under the new legislation, possession of marijuana would be reduced to a misdemeanor with a maximum one-year sentence; convictions for sales of marijuana would bring a 4-year max; and the new law would take effect on April 1, 1972.
Lennon had put the key in the lock, and the legislators were turning it. My attorneys renewed my petition for bond on appeal, a necessary technicality, and soon I'd be a free man at last!
The rally was held December 10th, a Friday night, and I tossed and turned in my bunk while pressing my ear to the little portable radio in my hand to hear the WABX broadcast from Crisler Arena through the static and distance which separated me from the people who were trying to get me out of prison.
Following an emotion-drenched weekend in the Lily Farm barracks, where I had been stationed in the trusty division at Jackson after 27 months of hell in a cell, I was called out to the visiting room to meet a triumphant Dennis Hayes. This time I offered no resistance when he told me my brother was on his way up to the state capitol at Lansing to post a S2,500 appeal bond, and I'd be out by nightfall--on my way home to my wife, my baby daughters (Sunny, 4-1/2, and Celia, almost two), my wonderful parents, my beloved political comrades at the RPP commune, my many friends in the rock & roll community, and my thousands of ecstatic supporters.
The hours dragged by a minute at a time as I returned to the barracks and began packing up my meager possessions. Nightfall came and I was still waiting for the word. Finally the phone rang in the barracks and I heard a guard call out those magic words: Sinclair, get your shit, you're going home!
I was driven up to the big prison walls and escorted into the reception area for a final round of formalities before the front gates opened and I staggered out into the arms of my wife and family.
Peter Andrews was waiting outside the prison compound to whisk me away in an impeccable Bentley limosine, the same car that'd been used to transport the Lennons from the airport to Ann Arbor and back over the weekend, and I worked my way slowly to the Bentley through a small army of friends and supporters, laughing and crying hysterically in the throes of my new-found freedom.
A television news reporter thrust a microphone in my face to ask me that most inane of all questions: How do you feel now, Mr. Sinclair? And what's your position on marijuana now that you've been released?
I wanna go home and smoke some joints! I roared--and that's exactly what I did: Lots of 'em!
--Detroit
May 1, 1991
(C) 1991, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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