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JOHN SINCLAIR BIO [Amsterdam, October 2004] |
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Wednesday, 28 September 2005 12:39 |
AMERICAN POET IN AMSTERDAM--The Legendary John Sinclair
(Amsterdam, October 2004)-- He's been called The Last of the Beatnik Warrior Poets, The Hardest Working Poet in Show Business, an American cultural icon and a founding father of the international counter-culture. John Lennon wrote a song called John Sinclair and helped spring him from prison after the poet had served 29 months of a 10-year sentence for possession of two marijuana cigarettes.
Now the legendary poet/provocateur has fled the rising reactionary tide in the USA to resettle in Amsterdam and introduce his high-energy poetry performances to European audiences. Sinclair sets his verse to music from the blues and jazz tradition and fronts a hard-hitting band of Blues Scholars led by Rotterdam guitarist Mark Ritsema.
For 40 years John Sinclair has been a prolific cultural worker at the core of America's subterranean arts community. He's a dynamic performer and bandleader, a leading music journalist and editor, an award-winning radio broadcaster and prolific writer of album liner notes, a record producer and iconoclastic educator, a tireless crusader against the War on Drugs and an outspoken critic of corporate culture and the consumer society.
Sinclair founded and directed the Detroit Artists Workshop, managed the notorious MC5, formed the White Panther Party, produced the historic Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festivals, organized the Detroit Jazz Center, taught Blues History at Wayne State University, worked for the Detroit Council of the Arts, produced Piano Night at Tipitina's for the Professor Longhair Foundation and the live broadcast of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival for WWOZ-FM, where he was voted New Orleans Best Radio Personality for five years running (1999-2003).
Sinclair spent three years in prison for marijuana offenses, overthrew Michigan's draconian marijuana laws, helped enact Ann Arbor's epochal $5 fine for possession of weed, and served as High Priest of the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam. He's a regular contributor to High Times and writes for music journals from Living Blues and Creem to An Honest Tune and Signal To Noise. His monthly column On The Road appears in the Little Rock Free Press and on-line at The Blacklisted Journalist.
The poet's new internet radio program, The John Sinclair Radio Show, broadcast live from the cannabis coffeeshops of Amsterdam, can be heard at www.johnsinclairradio.com And Steve Gebhardt's full-length feature film biography, 20 TO LIFE: The Life & Times of John Sinclair, will finally introduce this legendary underground cultural warrior to mainstream audiences when the movie hits theatres, TV screens and DVD racks next year.
John Sinclair is known for many things to many people, but for the past decade he's concentrated on his work in poetry and music, touring incessantly throughout the United States and western Europe, performing his incendiary odes with a kaleidoscopic cast of musical all-stars billed as John Sinclair & His Blues Scholars.
Sinclair has collaborated with a brilliant array of contemporary musicians, from saxophone giants Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, Sonny Fortune, Daniel Carter and Earl Turbinton to hornmen David Amram, Michael Ray, Charles Moore, James Andrews and Kermit Ruffins, guitarists Wayne Kramer, Walter Wolfman Washington, Willie King, Jim McCarty and Jeff Baby Grand, and West African griots Bala Tounkare and Guelel Kuumba.
Sinclair has released 10 CDs six with the Blues Scholars and a highly acclaimed book of blues verse called Fattening Frogs For Snakes. This winter will see the release of two new books of poetry, Song of Praise: Homage to John Coltrane and i mean you: a book for penny, as well as new CDs It's All Good and No Money Down: John Sinclair's Greatest Hits, Volume One. In 2005 Feral House Press will issue a new edition of Guitar Army: Street Writings/Prison Writings, Sinclair's counter-culture classic originally published in 1972.
When he's not out on the road performing with the Blues Scholars, playing duets with Mark Ritsema or lecturing on the cultural revolution, the Poetry of the Blues or the War on Drugs, John Sinclair can usually be found at the 420 CafΘ in Amsterdam or by e-mail at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
. For bookings in the European Union, please contact Mark Ritsema at +31 10 465 6701 in Rotterdam or write
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October 2004
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