John Sinclair

(New Orleans, April 28, 2005) It was a beautiful thing to be back in the Crescent City for the first week of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, which is the closest music lovers can come in the flesh to actually living in the mental world of music which we usually inhabit. During JazzFest there's incredibly great music everywhere one turns on 12 stages at the Fairgrounds for seven long days and in all the bars, nightclubs, concert halls and unusual venues in the city every blessed night for two entire weeks, and everything but the music seems to fade into insignificance as long as JazzFest lasts.

Later this morning I'll leave from New Orleans to head back to Amsterdam after doing 90 days in the United Snakes, and it'll be wonderful to escape from the War on Drugs and the relentless right-wing religious fanaticism that's reducing our country into an ugly, irrational, hate-filled place without a heart. But throughout the nation there still exist the ever-shrinking little pockets of intelligence, art and resistance that make life worthwhile, and the San Francisco Bay Area continues to shine as one of the brighter spots on our battle-scarred cultural landscape.

My first trip to San Francisco was in 1960 as a pilgrimage to the literary epicenter of modern America, the City Lights Bookstore at Broadway & Columbus. I was 19 years old and newly inspired by the Pocket Poets books by Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso that made me aspire to bardic achievement. I returned to the Bay Area in the summer of 1965 for the historic Berkeley Poetry Conference, where I gave my first major reading (in a program titled Four Young American Poets  with Ed Sanders, Ted Berrigan and Lenore Kandel), attended readings and lectures by Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Charles Olson and many others, and literally sat at the feet of the mighty Olson every day for a week.

I was in San Francisco and Berkeley with the MC5 in the spring of 1969, toured the state of California in support of Proposition 19, the original marijuana initiative, in 1972, and attended board meetings of Amorphia, the pioneering cannabis cooperative based in San Francisco, in 1972-73. I was recovering from a little nervous breakdown at Marty Rossman's beachfront shack in Stinson Beach in February of 1974 when Patti Hearst was captured by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and I've visited frequently in the years since, often enjoying the hilariously manic company of old friends and companions like Harry Duncans, Chinner Mitchell, Ken Kelley and the great Detroit drummer Danny Spencer.

This trip started in late March with dinner at the ancient apartment of Michael & Michelle Aldrich, two of my oldest friends in SF. I first crossed paths with Michael almost 40 years ago when he was a graduate student at the State University of New York at Buffalo and I was directing the Detroit Artists Workshop and proselytizing for marijuana legalization as head of the Motor City chapter of LEMAR, the original pro-pot organization founded by Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders in New York City. Aldrich, known to his associates as Dr. Dope, came across some of our literature and took up the torch in a big way, founding the Marijuana Review hosting the legendary Buffalo Dope Conference in 1969, completing his PhD and moving to San Francisco, founding Amorphia: The Cannabis Cooperative with the late West Coast marijuana activist Blair Newman, and establishing the FitzHugh Ludlow Memorial Library as a repository for psychoactive drug literature and an important source of information for the legalization movement.

Aldrich has also been active in the modern-day medical marijuana movement, now firmly established and flourishing in the Bay Area despite the relentless opposition of the federal government to circumvent state law and shut down the dispensaries. But every time one patients group was raided by the feds and put out of operation, the movement intensified its resistance and opened up new outlets to deliver medical marijuana to the people who need it.

Now there are 37 functioning marijuana dispensaries in San Francisco alone, operating in the absence of any official rules and regulations, and the city government is just now beginning to deal with the question of licensing, regulating and effectively overseeing their operations. While I was in San Francisco the authorities declared a moratorium on opening any new outlets in the city until they could get a grip on the situation and figure out a scheme for bringing this unruly proliferation of marijuana dispensaries under some kind of official control.

Michael and Michelle and I had a ball harking back to the early days of the marijuana movement in the 1960s and '70s and talking over current developments in what has become our life-long struggle to legalize marijuana in our time. While we were ranting and raving behind some of Jim's delicious smoke, Mike pulled out a box of historic Acapulco Gold rolling papers and presented me with a couple packs. Amorphia produced and sold these papers to provide funds for the legalization struggle, and the pioneering cannabis organization actually went under when we tried to develop a line of hemp papers at a time when nobody had conceived of such a thing and the costs of research, development and manufacture simply wiped out the collective's treasury.

On Thursday Jim and I stopped by Open Mind Music on Divisadero to say hey to my pal Henry Wimmer and then shot across the Bay Bridge to Berkeley to pick up some copies of my new book of poems, i mean you, at Jeff Maser Books to take over to my reading at the Berkeley Patients Group. The staff and patients at this warm, clean, comfortable and efficient medical marijuana operation all treated me beautifully, and there was the special pleasure of greeting my old comrade Walden Simper and my pal Just enuf Joe  Bryak at the show. Joe had some leads for us in my quest to produce a radio show in the Bay Area and managed to hook me up with the people from Berkeley Liberation Radio who helped make the thing happen later in the week.

Friday night's gig was supposed to be at a club in Sebastopol for the inestimable Bill Bradt, formerly of the Powerhouse Brewhouse, but some important details were left to chance and I ended up with the night off. Jim and I spent the evening visiting with my old Trans-Love comrade from Detroit, the photographer Emil Bacilla, and then motored up to Philo to spend a couple of nights at the remote residence of the Honorable Eric Labowitz and his family. Eric supervises the civil court system of Mendocino County, hosts the New Orleans Music Show on KZYX-FM every Monday night, and wins awards for his scrumptious apple pies at the Mendocino County Fair. We met several years ago at the JazzFest in New Orleans and have enjoyed a special friendship ever since.

Eric had lined up the Saturday night show at Lauren's Café in rustic downtown Boonville, an iconoclastic community in the Anderson Valley where the inhabitants developed their own language, called Boontling, some years ago and continue to speak it among themselves. Lauren's has turned into an annual stop for me, and it's always a kick to get with the fellas in the band and do my numbers for the people who come in from their remote rural locations to dig some contemporary music & verse in action.

We drove down to the Bay on Sunday afternoon and arrived in time for a small soiree at the Berkeley home of pirate radio pioneer Stephen Dunifer, founder of the late lamented Radio Free Berkeley who was hounded out of pirate broadcasting by the Feds and now designs, manufactures and installs guerilla radio transformers and broadcasting equipment for fledgling community-based stations in the U.S.A., Central and South America. Stephen had summoned some activists from Berkeley Liberation Radio, the surviving pirate station in town, and a programmer who calls himself Emperor Nobody took us over to the station's clandestine studios to do a joint production for Radio Free Amsterdam that would also be aired live  in Berkeley that night.

The next afternoon I caught up with my pal Henry Petras of New Orleans Music On-line and the Forgotten Souls Brass Band, and he took me by the San Francisco studio of a great artist named Michael Dias who creates and executes all the imagery for Carlos Santana's stage sets, album covers, posters, T-shirts and other projects. Then Jim and I hurried across the Bay Bridge to make my reading at the Book Zoo in Berkeley, a tiny old-school bookstore on Telegraph Avenue that attracted a warm and attentive crowd for this last-minute booking arranged by Walden Simper. I read the poems from i mean you and had a chance to talk with my old friend Ed Rosenthal, the cultivation expert who's been persecuted by the Feds for growing and supplying weed to medical marijuana dispensaries in Oakland under contract to the city government.

[Add ending from Little Rock Free Press]