Activist jailed for dope-smoking who inspired John Lennon
JOHN SINCLAIR, who has died aged 82, was a writer and activist who managed the radical rockers from Detroit, MC5; in 1969 he was sentenced to 10 years in jail for offering two joints to an undercover policewoman, and his incarceration led John Lennon to write a protest song in his honour: “Was he jailed for what he’d done/or for representing everyone?”
The charismatic Sinclair, with his German wife Magdelene “Leni” Arndt, had transformed the Detroit Artists Workshop into the White Panther Party to fight for civil rights, its name a tribute to the Black Panthers (but later changed to the Rainbow People’s Party to avoid confusion): “The hippies and the black people had the same enemy,” he recalled, “the Detroit Police Department.”
In late 1966 there were two newcomers to the Workshop, a long-haired guy named “Louie” and a woman named “Pat” who smoked pot and helped with the typing. “She asked me if I had a joint,” Sinclair recalled. “I rolled one, we had a smoke. She asked me if she could take it with her. I said, ‘Here, let me give you another one.’”
Louie and Pat were actually Vahan Kapagian and Jane Mumford of the Detroit Police Department, and they were soon back with their colleagues to arrest Sinclair and 55 others. After two years of appeals, in 1969 Sinclair, who had a string of previous doperelated convictions, was sent down for nine and a half to 10 years.
John Alexander Sinclair was born on October 2 1941 in Flint, Michigan; his father worked for Buick, while his mother had been a high school teacher. He graduated in English literature from the University of Michigan and became music editor and columnist for the Detroit underground newspaper, Fifth Estate.
By 1966 the hard-rock band MC5 – Motor City 5, named for the city of Detroit – had become increasingly political, and Sinclair was their de facto manager, living with them in a drugfuelled commune. He had a utopian vision of an edenic post-industrial society based on the twin foundations of leisure and marijuana, and wanted what he called a “guitar army” to fight the good fight. (He was also instrumental in nurturing the career of another
incendiary Michigan native, Iggy Pop.)
In 1969, he wrote: “Our culture is [...] a revolutionary force on the planet, the seed of the new order that will come to flower with the disintegration and collapse of the obsolete social and economic forms which presently infest the earth.”
At Woodstock, Abbie Hoffman tried in vain to raise the profile of the imprisoned Sinclair during a thunderous set by The Who (legend has it that Pete Townshend whacked Hoffman with his guitar to get him off the stage).
But things started to move when the services of John Lennon and Yoko Ono were enlisted to headline the John Sinclair Freedom Rally at a basketball venue in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in December 1971 (Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger, Phil Ochs and Archie Shepp were among the other guest stars).
Lennon prefaced his own set by telling the audience, “So flower power didn’t work. So what? We start again. Free John now, if we can, from the clutches of the man.” He and his pick-up band performed four new numbers: Attica State (about a prison riot), The Luck of the Irish, Sisters O Sisters and John Sinclair, all of which would feature on his 1972 album Some Time in New York City. Music critics were unimpressed but a few days later Sinclair was free, when Michigan’s Supreme Court ruled the state’s marijuana laws to be unconstitutional.
In the ensuing decades he continued campaigning and writing, and later moved to the Netherlands, where he started a radio station, Radio Free Amsterdam. He lived to see the legalisation of recreational cannabis in his home state, in 2018.
John Sinclair is survived by his second wife, Penny Brown, and two daughters from his first marriage.
John Sinclair, born October 2 1941, died April 2 2024