John Sinclair

(Detroit, April 4, 2005) I flew out of Amsterdam on February 1st and landed in Detroit with exactly $1.22 in American money in my pocket that's four quarters, two dimes and two pennies to begin a 12-week tour of the United Snakes playing a series of gigs and promoting our Radio Free Amsterdam internet broadcasting project.

The idea was to introduce the John Sinclair Radio Show to American audiences at performances and media appearances from Detroit to New Orleans, Jackson and Oxford MS, Little Rock, Memphis, Nashville, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area, back to Detroit and around Michigan before returning to Amsterdam at the end of April.

There was also the prayer that I might be blessed with the opportunity to link up with fellow internet broadcasters and community radio programmers all across the country to produce and record a number of on-the-road editions of my radio show, making as many 60-minute joint productions  as circumstances would permit and then posting them on our website at www.RadioFreeAmsterdam.com.

The Radio Free Amsterdam Tour would also incorporate a series of live performances and bookstore and record shop appearances to promote the release of the first two CDs from Big Chief Records: No Money Down: Greatest Hits, Volume 1 and It's All Good featuring the Dutch rappers LangeFrans & Baas B alternating with an ensemble of Blues Scholars featuring Wayne Kramer and Charles Moore. (Interested readers may order these discs at $10 each from Big Chief Productions, 645 Griswold, Suite 56, Detroit, MI 48226 or at www.JohnSinclairRadio.com.)

After my loved ones picked me up at the airport and drove me into Detroit, I caught up with my boy Dimitri Mugianis, the ibogaine street healer back home from Brooklyn for a visit, and he quickly mashed a $100 bill on me to ease the immediate pain. Now I was solvent until my first gig of the tour: Friday night at the New Dodge Lounge in Hamtramck with Jeff Baby  Grand & the Motor City Blues Scholars. My commodious Detroit digs at the Maribel Building weren t available this time, so Matty Lee & Tam took me in at their place in Royal Oak, and the great Bruce Cohen came by often to get me high and take me out to eat.

I hooked up with Nearly Normal Warren from www.a3radio.com in Ann Arbor, the internet station that carries my radio show, and he brought his remote outfit to the New Dodge to cut an episode of the show before the concert began. We had a bunch of guests from Adam Brook to James Semark, Tom Sylvia, Jeff Grand with his new CD, and Dimitri on ibogaine healing in America. I shipped off the master to my producer, Henk Botwinik, in Amsterdam and he got it up on the website without delay.

Leaving Detroit for New Orleans by Amtrak on February 5th, I stopped to change trains and enjoy a brief but wholly satisfying layover in Chicago with my pal Fritz Kielsmeier before boarding the City of New Orleans to get down to the Crescent City for the Mardi Gras. There I enjoyed the warm 9th Ward hospitality of Wallace Lester & Shannon McNally until Shannon's producer, Charlie Sexton, came down to work with Mark Bingham at Piety Street Studios on the final mixes for Shannon's new album and I moved over with the great photographer Barry Kaiser & Ms. Mary Moses in the 8th Ward.

Mardi Gras came early this year, on February 8th, and the celebration was somewhat subdued as a result, giving the revelers a little more space to have their fun. But the Zulu Parade on Mardi Gras morning was as spectacular as ever, rolling down Jackson Avenue from Claiborne through the 3rd Ward to turn downtown at St. Charles Avenue and bring indescribable joy to hundreds of thousands of ecstatic citizens and their many visitors.

Around the corner at 2nd & Dryades after the Zulus had passed, Big Chief Bo Dollis & the Wild Magnolias gathered in all their holiday finery to greet Big Chief Monk Boudreaux & the Golden Eagles as they surged down Dryades with my old pals Bill Taylor, David Kunian, Henry Petras and a raft of other familiars chanting up a storm in the second line. The Wild Indian action by Shakespeare Park at Washington & LaSalle was well below its usual fever pitch, so I headed downtown to join the street party at the Backstreet Cultural Museum on St. Claude.

A big crowd of Carnival regulars was dancing and milling around outside the Backstreet to music emanating from the WWOZ live broadcast inside the front window of the former funeral home in the heart of Treme, the oldest urban African American neighborhood in America, where New Orleans jazz was born and still thrives in the streets and corner bars. Big Chief Al and the North End Bone Gang made a strong showing, with local luminaries Jerry Brock, Geraldine Wyckoff, Bruce Sunpie  Barnes, Alton and Reese Osborn all resplendent in their scary skeleton suits. Museum directors Sylvester & Lou-Lou Francis seemed to be everywhere at once, always making sure that everyone was well taken care of throughout the day.

The day after Mardi Gras I rode up to Jackson, Mississippi with Eric Deaton & Lee to meet our Afrissippi comrades from Oxford Guelel Kuumba on guitar and Fulani vocals, bassist Justin Showah, Max Williams on pedal steel guitar and Brian Ledford on banjo and mandolin for a show at Hal & Mal's that night. Guelel drove back down to New Orleans with us and we all got a big thrill the next night when my brother David came over from DeFuniak Springs, Florida to read his stirring poems for us at Dave Brinks' Gold Mine Saloon in the French Quarter. This was the first time we had shared a bill in at least 30 years, and I had the pleasure of Wallace Lester on drums, the legendary Eluard Burt one of the original jazz & poetry pioneers of New Orleans on flute, Eric Deaton on guitar and Guelel playing guitar and singing.

On Saturday the magnificent New Orleans songwriter, producer and pianist Allen Toussaint appeared with his band at the Louisiana Music Factory for a rare in-store concert, and I enjoyed the extreme honor of opening the show for this great American with Marc Stone on guitar and Wallace on drums. I had a ball playing for a storeful of old friends, and proprietor Barry Smith was his usual wonderful self in every way. I got with my comrade and publisher, Dennis Formento of the Surregional Press, who announced that he was prepared to do a second printing of my book of blues verse, Fattening Frogs For Snakes, and that made me very happy indeed.

I hit the broadcasting jackpot on Tuesday when both Marc Stone (2:00-4:00 pm) and David Kunian (10:00 pm-midnight) invited me to do a pair of joint productions of my radio show on their programs at WWOZ, where I'd spent 12 joyous years behind the board before I left New Orleans for Amsterdam in 2003. Both of these Crescent City programs can be heard now at our website.

The next day I hopped the City of New Orleans again, riding up to Memphis to spend the night at Laurence Hall's before he would drive me over to Oxford to begin a 12-day residency there with an Afrissippi concert at the Two Stick on Thursday night. Kenny Kimbrough joined us on drums, Chad Henson on percussion, there were a saxophone and trombone, and Jimbo Mathus & Knock Down South closed out the night with a ferocious set of raw blues and boogie music. A blues conference at the University of Mississippi opened that afternoon, and the Two Stick show was graced by the presence of eminent blues scholars like Jim O'Neal, Scott Berretta, Elijah Wald and a host of others.

Afrissippi recorded our first album at Jimbo's Delta Recording Service in Clarksdale, with Jimbo and Will Dawson at the controls and Mathus himself producing. Since he left the Squirrel Nut Zippers, Mathus has returned to live and work in the heart of the Delta, where he has backed up Buddy Guy on his last two albums, toured with the legendary guitarist, and opened his own primitive but highly efficient recording studio in an abandoned hotel that once housed the studios of WROX Radio. His Knock Down South band has just released the first CD from Knock Down South Records, with the Afrissippi album and a set by Oxford's Taylor Grocery Band to follow later this spring.

I love visiting Oxford, the literary center of the South, where I may dine daily on the fabulous sushi at Two Stick, drink expressos and read my papers on the gallery at Square Books, plug my iBook into cyberspace and drink more coffee at North Side Coffee on the other side of the square, stop in at Hot Dog Records on my way back to Two Stick, and bask in the unstinting hospitality offered by my hosts, the angelic Ms. Allison Borders and her insanely imaginative consort, Chad Henson. I get to hang out and sit in with splendid musicians like the guys in the Taylor Grocery Band, Eric Deaton, Gary and Cedric Burnside, Kenny Kimbrough and Guelel Kuumba, and everybody I meet in town treats me like an old friend.

There's an excellent magazine based in Oxford called An Honest Tune, the Southern Journal of Jam, under the direction of Tom Speed and his brilliant designer, Nathan Latil. I write a regular column titled Blues & Roots  for the Tune, and this time I had the extreme pleasure of getting the new issue with my cover story on the North Mississippi Hill Country Blues hot off the presses. You can check out this fast-growing publication at www.anhonesttune.com.

While I was in Oxford I got the chance to make another edition of my radio show with Jim Dees and Justin Showah on the World Boogie show on Rebel Radio-92.3, the Ole Miss campus station. Dees is a serious character who works at the Taylor Grocery, does his radio show every Sunday and writes an eminently readable column for the local weekly paper. The problem is that we didn't get to record the program ourselves and still haven't been able to track down the guy who taped it for Dees, but it'll turn up one day and we'll get it on the website.

Another unique Oxford attraction is the Thacker Mountain Revue, a live  radio show broadcast on Thursday evenings throughout Mississippi from Off Square Books, where Dees is the host and there's a studio band with the legendary Jim Dickenson on piano. Every show has a literary guest and a musical guest, and that's where I met an incredible character named Watermelon Slim and his band, The Workers, when they followed me onstage. I would see them again a week later in Little Rock, and each meeting was a distinct pleasure for everyone concerned.

When it came time to leave Oxford on the last day of February, Chad and Allison drove me up to Memphis and we spent a beautiful evening with Laurence Hall. I took the bus over to Little Rock the next day, always a colorful experience, and I ended up in the ample bosom of the Free Press family for a few days. It's always kicks to see the irrepressible Dottie Oliver and her faithful crew, with special thanks to Cookie, and there was the wonderful musical reward of getting to play and hang out with one of my favorite blues guitarists, a young man named Thomas Jones.

Thomas took me out to the WhiteWater Tavern on Thursday night to bash out a couple of rollicking sets with his rhythm section, and we had so much fun that we decided to go out the next night on the street by the riverfront downtown to make some more music. My man Watermelon Slim & The Workers were about to play at a nearby nightspot, and Slim joined us for a number before going on to work.

Earlier Thursday Rick St. Vincent and I visited the KABL-FM studios, visited with station manager John Cain, and had a ball sitting in on Gerald Johnson's soulful radio show. We went back the next day to try to convince the host of the Friday Afternoon Blues Party to let me join him for an hour to make a joint production for the Radio Free Amsterdam project, but he didn't really get what we were talking about and told us he couldn't do interviews on his show because he was nearly deaf, and besides, he had already drawn up his playlist for the program. So I struck out in Little Rock, which turned out to be the only city I visited where I didn't get to make a radio program with somebody.

Everything else was lovely for me in Little Rock. I had intended to stay for a whole week, but my leisurely tour of the mid-South had to be interrupted March 5-7 for a hectic airplane trip to New York City (and Valerie, thanks a million for the ride to Memphis) to film an interview with the British producer Don Letts for a Sun Ra documentary Something Else Productions is making for BBC. They'd just come from the historic Sun Ra Arkestra DKT/MC5 show in London, where they filmed interviews with Marshall Allen, Charles Davis and the MC5's Wayne Kramer. They spent two days in Philadelphia filming at the Ra house on Morton Street and came to New York to interview Archie Shepp, Amiri Baraka, Thurston Moore, DJ Spooky and Sun Ra biographer John Szwed for the film. I was deeply honored to be in that number and really enjoyed sharing my treasured memories of the great composer and visionary with Don Letts.

I spent a night in Brooklyn visiting with Dimitri, paid him back the $100 he had fronted me in Detroit, and went up to Harlem with him Sunday afternoon to meet the incredible collective of street healers he's working with to bring ibogaine treatment to junkies and dope fiends in New York City and around the country. Acting without legal sanction and inspired by their own experiences with ibogaine as a liberating force in kicking ferocious drug habits, they are chipping away at what Burroughs called the Junk Pyramid one addict at a time with considerable success. Their dedication and bravery are exemplary, and my thoughts and prayers are always with them in their work.

On Monday I flew back to Memphis to spend a couple more days with Laurence Hall before catching the Greyhound to Nashville for my next gig, and I'll take this account from there in the next installment of this column. Thanks for listening &.


You can read previous On The Road  columns and tune in to the John Sinclair Radio Show recorded live in Amsterdam and on the road in the USA at www.RadioFreeAmsterdam.com.

(c) 2005 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.