McCann: Street Fighting Man

I bet John Sinclair had the sunniest smile in America as the results of the mid-term elections came in on the night of November 5th. In the midst of the raucous caterwauling of Republican crazies and the doom-laded dirges of stumblebum Democrats, the radical ‘60s campaigner will likely have been singing a growly selection from his back-catalogue anthems of freedom.

Alaska and Oregon became the third and fourth states to fully legalise marijuana. Washington DC lifted all penalties for adult possession. California decriminalised possession for personal use. Colorado and Washington State had legalised last year. The bandwagon of rationality is gathering momentum. 
Readers of a certain age will remember John Sinclair.  Now 73, he was back in Oregon for most of the past year, full of manic energy, heading up the drive for Measure 91.
Sinclair had been way out front when he organised the first-ever Free The Weed Concert and Rally in 1965. He was to pay dearly for blazing the trail too far, too soon. In 1969, he was arrested and given 10 years for passing two joints to an undercover cop. He was freed after 28 months – with the help of John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Phil Ochs, Stevie Wonder, Bob Seeger, Allen Ginsburg, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale – the line-up in a legendary benefit gig that raised consciousness across the country and the wherewithal to fund an appeal.
Not everybody threw themselves into the fight. When Yippie activist Hoffman stormed onto the stage at the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and grabbed the mike to appeal for support for Sinclair’s release, Pete Townshend clenched his guitar like a club and forced him off the platform. Odd that that incident is never included in The Who man’s misty reminiscence of his super-cool youth.
Lennon sprang ‘John Sinclair’ on a television show, then included the song in “Some Time in New York City”: “They gave him 10 for two/What else can the bastards do?”
Campaigning for common sense wasn’t the only factor in Sinclair being deemed a danger to the mores and morals of Middle America. He was a street-political poet, a libertarian Marxist and counter-cultural entrepreneur. He managed MC5, a band that seems largely forgotten now, not despite but more likely because of its embrace of the rowdy revolutionism of real rock and roll. Hard to credit, in an era when bombastic poseurs can be showered in praise as they shill for the wretches who are robbing the world, that such an ethic ever held sway.
Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton was among Sinclair’s closest friends. Together, they founded the White Panthers, intended both to provide back-up and solidarity to the BPP and, which is much the same thing, to urge and organise white workers to rise up. He was close, too, to Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, cut to pieces by a fusillade of murder by the Chicago cops in December 1969.
MC5 remains, perhaps, the only band ever to have figured on the cover of Rolling Stone weeks before releasing their first record. They were dropped from their label weeks afterwards. Their raging, polemical live shows attracted appalled, ecstatic notices. In “Kick Out The Jams”, titled after the number that defined them, Don McLeese describes the aftermath of a typical MC5 performance of the era as “delirious exhaustion” as might be brought on “by a street rumble or an orgy.”
MC5 had headed the bill at the insurrectionary anti-Vietnam War Protest outside the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August 1968 when rioting cops left hundreds injured and a thousand wrongfully in jail. A number of the scheduled performers failed to show. Others couldn’t make it through the tear-gas and police violence. MC5 played for eight hours while the world went mad all around them. Norman Mailer’s description of the scene in Lincoln Park in “Miami and the Siege of Chicago” is one of the great journalistic epics of the 20th century.
Released in December 1971, Sinclair has never been entirely off the scene since, regularly erupting from his Amsterdam redoubt, to read his poem “Monk in Orbit” with The Black Crowes on their 2006 tour, for example: “they say one night/in the early sixties/after tim leary/turned him on to LSD/Allen Ginsburg went up/to monk’s place…left monk with a dose/of the excellent product/of the sandoz laboratories in switzerland/and when he went back/to check up on thelonious/monk opened the door/as far as the chain would allow/… man, have you got any/more of this stuff? So far/it don’t seem to be makin’ too/much of a difference to me.”
(Better with the music, actually.)
MC5 continued in an episodic sort of way. Robin Tyner (bass) died of a heart attack in 1991, Fred “Sonic” Smith (guitar) from the same cause three years later. The others (Dennis Thompson, drums, Wayne Kramer, guitar, and Michael Davis, bass) soldiered on with Handsome Dick Manitoba on lead vocals, until Davis died from liver failure in 2012.
But Sinclair is in fine fettle. Google his podcast, The John Sinclair Radio Show. Check him out on YouTube, rendering the winning song at the 2012 Cannabis Cup. Gruff R&B voice in jazz-inflected psychedelic setting. So cool after all these years.
Freeing the Weed was always been the cause closest to his heart. He will have smiled a smile of serene satisfaction as Oregon said yeah, 54-46.