4/24/2024 0 Comments Billboards top 100 1969![]() ![]() Supreme Court and resulted in a landmark decision that prohibited the government’s use of electronic surveillance without a warrant.Īfter those cases, Sinclair spent time living in Amsterdam - where he established the John Sinclair Foundation to promote arts and media - and New Orleans, where he continued writing and performing. Sinclair also faced charges of conspiracy to destroy government property in 1972, which went all the way to the U.S. There’s a whole (cannabis) industry now that owes him a debt.” “He took the fall, man - 10 years for two joints. “He was the Nelson Mandela of pot, he really was,” says Martin “Tino” Gross, a longtime friend and musical collaborator in Detroit who produced Sinclair’s last two albums - Mobile Homeland and Still Kickin’ - for his laebl Funky D Records. Lennon and Yoko Ono also performed at the John Sinclair Freedom Rally during December 1971 in Ann Arbor, joining a lineup that included Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger, Phil Ochs, David Peel and others Sinclair was freed three days later after the Michigan State Supreme Court deemed the state’s marijuana statues unconstitutional. (It appears on his 1972 album Some Time in New York City). Abbie Hoffman invoked his name during The Who’s performance at Woodstock that summer, and Lennon wrote a song “ John Sinclair” to champion his cause. In 1969, Sinclair was arrested for marijuana possession, after offering to joints to an undercover police officer, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. The group eventually found Sinclair’s politics stifling, however, and parted ways with him. Working with the White Panther Party, Sinclair also steered the band in a political direction, including a performance at an anti-Vietnam War rally that was broken up by police. Sinclair managed the MC5 through 1969, helping the group score its contract with Elektra Records. “And they were willing to work, as hard as they had to, to be great.” “They were very ambitious, more sophisticated than the usual rock ‘n’ roll guys in what they were trying to do,” Sinclair remembered earlier this year, when Kramer passed. ![]() Kramer credited Sinclair with helping to expand the band’s musical horizons further in the direction of R&B, free jazz and blues. He was a unique character who had this combination of coolness and vision and a kind of principled energy - along with a sense of playfulness that made it fun as well as serious.”ĭuring the mid-60s, Sinclair met the members of the MC5, who hailed from the Detroit suburb of Lincoln Park. I don’t think every city had their own John Sinclair. And in Detroit, John stood in the leadership position in the intersection of all that. Was, who considered Sinclair “one of my heroes,” tells Billboard that “in the 60s, culture - art, music, film and poetry - was weaponized in part of a global struggle for all different kind freedom. He wrote about jazz for Down Beat magazine, read at the Berkeley Poetry Conference during July of 1965 and co-founded the Ann Arbor Sun, another underground newspaper, in the spring of 1967 with his first wife, photographer Leni Sinclair, and psychedelic poster artist Gary Grimshaw. He went on to the Fifth Estate, Detroit’s counter-culture newspaper, and the Detroit Artists Workshop Press. Sinclair was born in Flint, Mich., and studied at Albion University and the University of Michigan’s Flint branch, from which he graduated in 1964 after working for the school’s newspaper and serving on its Publications Board and Cinema Guild. ![]() ![]() Grammy Award winning-producer and Blue Note Records president Don Was, who recorded and performed with Sinclair on a number of occasions, adds that, “To me he was as important and influential as any activist, any politician or any musician, doubling as a voice of a generation…as such he made the world a better place.” ![]()
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