John Sinclair

Dedicated to the memory of Robert Creeley

(Detroit, April 14, 2005) Springtime in Michigan can be a delicious thing when the weather breaks and the sun comes out and life begins again after another long and strenuous winter. The Hash Bash in Ann Arbor, Opening Day at Tiger Stadium in Detroit, the chance to meet and eat with old friends and comrades of all stripes, plenty of quality time with my loved ones it's great to be alive!

My trip to America this time brought me first to Detroit, then out on the road for two months and back to the Motor City. I was in New Orleans for the Mardi Gras, went to Oxford, Mississippi, Memphis, Little Rock, and made a quick side trip to New York City the first weekend in March to film an interview for a Sun Ra documentary being made for the BBC.

That Monday I flew back to Memphis and hooked up the next day with my friend Will Dawson, a musician and ace recording engineer at the Delta Recording Service in Clarksdale who had offered to help me produce a Memphis edition of the John Sinclair Radio Show. Will met me at Republic Coffee, a perfectly hospitable coffeehouse in Midtown, and we set up in the front window to do what turned out to be two complete one-hour programs, with live performances by Memphis singer Lynn Cardona (with Mike Burkey) and Jonathan Bentley and interviews with Lynn, Adam Guerrero, Paulette Regan and Laurence Hall.

On Wednesday I caught the Greyhound from Memphis to Nashville and arrived just in time to set up for the gig that night, a 40th anniversary celebration of the Fifth Estate magazine at a place called The Basement with Andy Sunfrog speaking and a killer Nashville blues trio to back me up. The Fifth Estate was founded in Detroit in 1965, and I had joined the volunteer staff with the second issue of the paper, writing a column called The Coatpuller  and contributing stories and interviews over the course of several years. In the '70s and '80s the paper morphed into an international anarchist journal and, in 2002, the FE collective moved its editorial, production and distribution functions to Andy Sunfrog's communal farm in Pumpkin Hollow, Tennessee, about an hour east of Nashville.

Sunfrog had produced a fat 40th anniversary issue of the magazine that summarized its history and reprinted a wealth of stories and graphics from the voluminous Fifth Estate archives. Then he took the celebration on the road for gatherings in Detroit, New Orleans, and now Nashville, where I had agreed to join the show, and then on to Asheville, North Carolina for the weekend. We went all the way back to Pumpkin Hollow after the Nashville show and I enjoyed the generous rustic hospitality of Viva, Change, Sunfrog and their household for the next few days.

By Thursday afternoon Sunfrog had figured out the technical necessities for producing and recording a Pumpkin Hollow edition of my radio show, and we made a joint production right there in the Fifth Estate editorial office way back in the Tennessee countryside. Sunfrog contributed some of his signature rants, a brief history of the FE, and a great poem called I Hate That Motherfucker Named Bill Frist.  I shipped the program off to Henk Botwinik the next day and he posted it at www.RadioFreeAmsterdam.com without delay.

Friday Sunfrog, Viva, Chance and I drove four and a half hours east to funky Asheville, NC, the place they call Haight-Ashbury East, to do the Fifth Estate show at a tiny community arts space packed with an eager and attentive audience that included my old friend, the great artist Suzie Millions, who had left New Orleans some years ago to settle in the North Carolina countryside. Suzie made the cover design for my book and CD, Fattening Frogs For Snakes, and now she was living and working in a fantastic loft space in downtown Asheville with her husband Lance, who plays drums for the Reigning Sound out of Memphis and operates the Hand-Cranked Letterpress Co., churning out a mad succession of posters, broadsides and flyers for community music venues and arts events.

Sunfrog and I spent Saturday evening in the clandestine, literally underground studios of Free Radio Asheville, the little city's pirate radio station, where deejay Miami Dice invited us in to make a joint production for my website that also went out on the air at 107.5 FM and streamed on the station's site at www.FreeRadioAsheville.org. Dice gave us a brief history of the pirate operation and how they managed to stay on the air by constantly moving from basement to basement in the neighborhood. We've been in just about every house in this part of town,  he laughed, trying to stay one step ahead of the authorities.  After we got off the air a bunch of people showed up on the front porch to tell us they'd been listening to us on their car radios.

On Sunday we bid Sunfrog's anarchist comrades in Asheville a fond farewell, with special thanks for putting us up so beautifully, drove back to Pumpkin Hollow for the night, and in the morning Viva took me to the Nashville airport and I flew out to Los Angeles by way of Kansas City. My dear friend and L.A. caretaker Michael Simmons picked me up at LAX and then steered me through a terrific week of ceaseless activity, stashing me at night in his cozy pad in Koreatown. Simmons was back home in Los Angeles after a failed attempt at escaping southern California by hiding out at his sister's place in Ithaca, New York, a town he came rather quickly to despise, and now he was right back in the middle of things and making up for lost time.

Tuesday night we went out to dinner with Jay Babcock, the creative force behind the splendid Arthur magazine, a free arts-and-politics tabloid with national distribution that has single-handedly revived the glorious underground press tradition of times past. Jay was leaving the next morning with a bunch of characters in a van to invade the SXSW convention in Austin, Texas and promote the magazine, so we had to catch him while we could. My boy Dimitri had been down in San Diego conducting an ibogaine treatment and drove up to join us for the evening, which was an extra special treat.

Simmons and Babcock had arranged another real treat for me on Wednesday evening, a 90-minute stint spinning some of my favorite sides for the in-store shoppers at the huge Amoeba Records outlet on Sunset Blvd. A lot of old friends came by to say hello, including among others the prominent blues scholar Mary Katherine Aldin, Detroit's own Sirius Trixon and trombonist Phil Ranelin, the ineffable Mark Groubert, plus a guitarist named Dale Williams I hadn't seen since his days with the Sun Ra Arkestra in the 1970s.

Williams told us some great stories about being recruited at age 15 and then fully schooled by Sun Ra into early manhood, and how the first record he bought as a teenaged guitarist was Kick Out The Jams by the MC5. That's where I learned how to shred,  he laughed. I wanted to hook him up with Wayne Kramer at once, but Wayne was laid up and incommunicado all week in recovery from serious oral surgery. For my part, this was the first time in the last 10 years of playing Los Angeles that I was denied the opportunity to perform with the brilliant guitarist and the terrific bands he would assemble for me, and I missed hanging and playing with one of my most favorite Americans like crazy.

Munz and I capped off Wednesday night with a trip to the Blues Hotel at KXLU-FM, where program hosts Papa John & The Late Morris Beef put together a joint production with us for Radio Free Amsterdam. Simmons backed me up on guitar for a little set of live  numbers on the air, and Papa John contributed some of his relentless ranting and raving and some killer blues tunes to the mix. I'll never forget my first visit to the powerful little station on the campus of Loyola-Marymount University on the White Buffalo Tour in 1997, when Simmons had brought me and an incredible band of Blues Scholars led by Wayne Kramer to do a live  on-air performance of my White Buffalo Prayer and Homage to John Coltrane suites much of which can now be heard on my new Big Chief CD, It's All Good.

Thursday evening provided one of the highlights of this entire trip when Adam Parfrey, the fearless publisher of Feral House Books, opened up his fantastic home for a gala literary salon in my honor to announce the forthcoming Feral House release of a new edition of Guitar Army Street Writings/Prison Writings, published in 1972 and out of print for more than 30 years. Adam screened Steve Gebhardt's film 20 To Life: The Life & Times of John Sinclair for a houseful of guests and then joined Simmons to lead a question-and-answer session afterwards.

Friday brought another thrill when Michael and I stopped by the outlaw studios of killradio.org to make a joint production of my radio show with Deejay ChickenLeather and Blackwoman's Sidekick that featured another live  set by Simmons and myself and was streamed out over the station's popular website at www.killradio.com. This courageous guerrilla radio operation has beamed out on the internet from Los Angeles for the past several years and is rumored to invade the public airwaves from time to time in true pirate radio fashion. Once again I was amazed at how easy it was to realize this entire series of programs on the road with the eager assistance of our intrepid radio comrades in Ann Arbor, New Orleans, Oxford, Memphis, Pumpkin Hollow, Asheville, and now from two locations in Los Angeles.

We finished making the program just in time to hustle over to 33-1/3 Books & Gallery, a vibrant community arts center where a warm and especially attentive crowd of poets, painters, musicians and other young creative artists had assembled to join me for the premiere reading of my new book of poems, i mean you: a book for penny, just released in a tiny edition of 176 copies by Jeff Maser's palOmine press in Berkeley. This beautifully designed little book collects the series of poems I've written for my wife Penny over the 25 years of our continuing love affair that are part of an elongated work in verse inspired by the music, life and times of Thelonious Monk titled thelonious: a book of monk. If there are any copies left when you read this, they may be ordered from BookBeat, 26010 Greenfield, Oak Park, MI 48237, or at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Since 1991 March 19th has found me celebrating St. Joseph's Night in New Orleans with the Wild Magnolias and the rest of the Mardi Gras Indian Nation, but this year I was still in Los Angeles and the order of the day was another sort of celebration: Fear & Loathing in Los Angeles,  a memorial gathering and reading at Skylight Books in tribute to the recently departed Hunter S. Thompson. A star-studded consort of local literati including Iris Berry, Michael C. Ford, S.A. Griffin, Michael Simmons, Mark Groubert and my dear friend John Feins came together to read their favorite passages from the writings of the Gonzo Man, and when my turn came I was blessed with the chance to intone Thompson's magnificent opening passage to his master work, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.

On Sunday this long and productive week in Los Angeles was capped off with a delightful brunch and early afternoon salon at the home of filmmaker Tyler Hubby and the lovely Gabriela Tollman. Tyler was just back from SXSW in Austin, Texas and the widely acclaimed premiere screening of The Devil and Daniel Johnston, a film by Jeff Feuerzeig or which Tyler served as editor. Tyler and Michael Simmons have begun work on a filmic study of the Yippies, and we taped an interview for the project. At one point everybody retired to the back yard, formed a rough circle on the grass and read poems and stories to each other. My pal Janet Cunningham, fellow member of the now-disbanded Blue Monday Social Aid & Pleasure Club from the 6th Ward of New Orleans, came by from her cozy residence just a few blocks away, and that only added to the fun.

Monday morning Simmons drove me to Union Station, we enjoyed a fond farewell and I hopped on the Coastline train north to Emeryville, which is the closest Amtrak gets to the city of San Francisco. I stepped off into a rainy Bay Area night 12 hours later and right into the well-tuned automobile of Jim Epstein, my esteemed host and caretaker in San Francisco. Jim is another great American friend I first met in Amsterdam at the Cannabis Cup several years ago, and since then we've spent quite a bit of time together over there, he's helped me out with my plane tickets a number of times when I was in a desperate jam, and he puts me up, drives me around and keeps me good and high when I'm in the Bay Area. Thanks, Jim!

This is a good place to bring this installment of On The Road to an end, but the report will continue in the next edition. Stay tuned to www.RadioFreeAmsterdam.com to hear the results of my trip to the USA, and thanks for listening.


(c) 2005 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.