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AADL Talks To: John Sinclair (May 3, 2011)

When: December 9, 2011

In this interview from May 3, 2011, John Sinclair elaborates on the importance of Black culture and, in particular, the Black Panther Party, in the formation of both the White Panther and Rainbow People's Parties in Ann Arbor; as well as the more humorous and theatrical elements of their antics during those years. He also reflects on his brother David Sinclair, his ex-wife Leni Sinclair, White Panther co-founder, Pun Plamondon, and artist Gary Grimshaw.

Transcript

  • [00:00:00.00] [MUSIC PLAYING]
  • [00:00:04.71] ANDREW: Hi, this is Andrew.
  • [00:00:06.23] AMY: And this is Amy. And in this episode, AADL talks to poet, author, and activist, John Sinclair.
  • [00:00:13.75] ANDREW: John talks about the importance of Black culture and, in particular, the Black Panther Party, and the formation of both the White Panther and Rainbow People's parties in Ann Arbor, as well as the more humorous and theatrical elements of their antics during those years. He also reflects on his brother, David Sinclair, his ex-wife, Leni Sinclair, White Panther co-founder, Pun Plamondon, and artist, Gary Grimshaw.
  • [00:00:35.74] So why was it important to organize into a party to form the White Panther Party?
  • [00:00:41.93] JOHN SINCLAIR: Well, that's too many assumptions. We didn't organize anything, it was an idea. I don't know, I hate to say it like this, but in the practical reality of it, it was more of a joke than an effort. I mean, if it was a joke on this side and the Democratic or Republican Party, or the Peace and Freedom Party, or organized thing, we were much closer to the joke. It was an idea.
  • [00:01:11.36] And I of course, was a careful student of the great left wing media manipulators of my period, Edward Sanders, Abbot Hoffman, Gerald Rubin, these guys. We tried to follow their examples and add our own, with no false humility intended. And we had a rock and roll band, the MC5. We signed a major recording, we were the first group out of Detroit to have a major modern day recording contract.
  • [00:01:54.74] The Amboy Dukes had a hit single, they had an album deal. And we were about to record our first album, "Live at the Grande Ballroom," our first album live, because we already had greatest hits in Detroit, you see. And we were pretty bold in every way possible to us. In our house on Hill Street, we had a table maybe half as long as this. But it was a huge table, took up a whole room. And that was the gathering spot for the band and all of our friends. And people would come over and we'd sit around the table, smoke joints, eat, whatever. But it was just a hang out, 10, 12, 15 people.
  • [00:02:52.61] So this came out of the discussions around the table. If the MC5 was going to enter the national arena as a band, and compete and to have hit records and all those things that you were there for, I was trying to figure out a way that we could announce our presence, and at the same time point out that we weren't just some money grubbing kids with long hair that wanted to have a hit record. We wanted to change the social order. We wanted to confront the government
  • [00:03:36.58] Basically, we thought of ourselves-- although we presented a pretty radical edge to the world conceptually-- we thought of ourselves as embodying the ideology, hopes, and beliefs of all hippies. I always try to explain to young people when I talk to groups of people that hippies, they were a very definite thing. They've been erased from our history books, except as caricatures of themselves.
  • [00:04:08.92] But hippies, they all had long hair. None of them had jobs. They didn't want jobs. They were not consumers. The idea of things and possessions was alien to hippies as a general rule.
  • [00:04:27.41] They all smoked dope. Many of them took acid. They all liked rock and roll. Many of them liked other kinds of music as well. This would be a hippie. There were millions of them.
  • [00:04:39.83] And yet, I developed my peculiar ideology of the White Panther Party around the idea of that, or the reality that hippies were like makers. They were like any outside doer, a minority group. They had no power. They were denigrated and demonized by the established order.
  • [00:05:07.54] They didn't fit in. They didn't want a place. Not even like black people, they didn't even want a place at the table. They had been to the table. Their parents had the table. And they left the table. And they didn't want to come back to it.
  • [00:05:24.34] So if you ever study the ideology of the White Panther Party, or even worse, the Rainbow People's Party, it was pretty far out stuff. But that was the basis of it, we are a people. You'll see all these slogans. Well, I'm trying to tune this in on the question of the White Panther Party formation.
  • [00:05:49.03] As individuals and as a group, we were very much concerned about the Black Panther Party. We thought the Black Panther Party was the vanguard of the future for America. We were generally in support of all Black liberation movements and groups, thought this was a great thing, because that's what America's about at the center, it's racial oppression.
  • [00:06:17.52] We were supportive of any Black liberation. But the Black Panther Party was, for us, head and shoulders above everything else, not only in the Black movement, but in the white movement, the anti-war movement, the peace movement, SDS, all that stuff. Because we thought they had the correct outlook that it wasn't about race. The Black Panther Party was not a racist organization. They were for a unified movement against the government of all people that were oppressed, working class and below.
  • [00:07:08.80] And they, of course, also had the courage and incredible bravery to go up against the police on the streets of Oakland, California in the ghetto at 3 o'clock in the morning. They were not afraid. And this was very impressive to us.
  • [00:07:28.58] And they started the Black Panther Party by hearing Newton and Bobby Seale going out at night in a car with a law book and a shotgun. And they would see some police pulling somebody over and make them get out of the car and assume the position and all that. And they'd drive up and then get out with the shotgun like this, and the Constitution here and, what's going on here? They just terrorized the police, because nobody had ever stood up to them for terrorizing the citizens.
  • [00:08:03.43] Anyway, they were just enormous heroes of ours. And we wanted to-- I don't know. See, we had this thing because we had a band. They were great, they were a great band. People wanted to come and see them and hear them.
  • [00:08:22.42] And so we were interested in imparting to them things far beyond, what is your favorite color? [LAUGHING] We wanted to tell them about socialism and Chairman Mao and Huey P. Newton, and all this kind of stuff. That was what we were interested in, and also arts and music.
  • [00:08:49.52] So with all of these things swirling around, I'm thinking, we need to answer this stage-- this national stage-- in a way that will impact who we are, what we're trying to do. We aren't trying to sneak in the back door. We want to bang on, Jesse Crawford, you see, we want to bang on the White House door.
  • [00:09:18.91] So all of this kind of came together. And then Pun was in jail in Traverse City. And I'm sure he explains it all in detail there. But he read in a left wing newspaper an interview with Huey P. Newton, chairman of the Black Panther Party, master, leader. And they asked Huey P. Newton what white people should do to support the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Movement, and he said, well, they should start a White Panther Party.
  • [00:09:51.69] And he presented this to me when he got out of jail, we ought to do this, man. And Bobby Seale had said the same thing. So all these things. I mean, my world with Pun was like this little world over here, really intense left wing hatred of the established order. And my main life was as a manager of this band. So I was with them at all times. That was my thing. That's what I did.
  • [00:10:23.10] But they had the same feelings. This was what I was trying to say about the universality of the hippie ethic, is that all hippies hated the war. Almost all the hippies, except for parts of the Deep South, I'm sure, supported the Black Liberation Movement. I mean, hippies were just-- we were for these things.
  • [00:10:46.92] Hippies didn't really hate women, you know what I mean? They didn't really have the correct ideology or the correct approach, but it wasn't driven by the need to belittle and control and dominate and exploit these other people. I mean, they were a pretty superior order of being, I thought. They were the best ones I'd ever seen in this country because they loved everybody, they liked people. And it wasn't all about them and what they wanted, and what they had to have. And they were interested in other people, they had hearts.
  • [00:11:23.80] And then the music that came out of the hippie-- it was music that had heart. And that's why I reached out and met more people. So out of all these things, we thought, why don't we be the White Panther Party? Everybody was laughing, yeah, why not? You know, what the hell? I'll write a statement, the White Panther statement.
  • [00:11:52.75] Now we had a guy who was part of our extended circle of people that was named David White. And they called him Panther White. He was quite a figure on campus. Him and Jesse Crawford were partners. They used to go around the campus and they'd put on this kind of act. They were just really funny. And they would just say anything and get up on stage, and then they'd pass the hat. And then they'd go buy some beer and some joints.
  • [00:12:22.85] And they called this the Church of Zenta. We met them on the Diag one day because we were doing a pre-concert on the Diag. And these guys wanted to know if they could get on the mic before we went on and make a pitch for Zenta. And we said, well, sure--
  • [00:12:42.20] [LAUGHING]
  • [00:12:44.62] JOHN SINCLAIR: --go right ahead. Anyway, I'm trying to give you a sense of this. You know, if you didn't ever get the sense of humor of the White Panther Party, then you missed the whole story, really.
  • [00:13:01.11] But we said, we've got to have officers. Ah, ha, ha, ha. We were the farthest thing from an organization. I mean, we had five guys who played the music. We had two or three days who helped get their equipment to the gig. And I was the manager, Jesse was the road manager.
  • [00:13:20.86] We had a pretty advanced organization for a local rock and roll band. We can get to the show on time, and put the equipment up, and put on a good show. Other than that, we had no organizational skills to speak of.
  • [00:13:40.62] So it wasn't like a bunch of earnest, serious college students sitting down to say we should form an organization that will challenge the hegemony of the Democratic Party. Like the Human Rights Party, they were far more sophisticated. We found it easy to join them because they had an organizational chart and everything.
  • [00:14:06.77] We're modeling it on the Black Panther Party, obviously, from the name on down. Well, you got to have these ministers. Ha, ha, ha. We know nothing about European history. We didn't know anything. We were hippies. We knew the collected works of Allen Ginsberg.
  • [00:14:25.76] But now you got to have these ministers. And Pun, of course, is the most directed toward the outside world. He, of course, had to be the minister of defense, an emulation of [INAUDIBLE] or Huey P. Newton. Well, the guy I liked was [INAUDIBLE] Eldridge Cleaver, because he was the minister of information. And that was before his weaknesses were fully revealed. So I wanted to be the minister of information. Plus, I wrote all the stuff. I was the writer.
  • [00:15:00.81] So a chairman, you have to have a chairman. That's the main guy. [GRUMBLING] We weren't going to follow anybody's directives in any case. What if we made Panther the chairman? Then we'd have a palindromic opening for our press releases, White Panther chairman, Panther White said today--
  • [00:15:23.98] [LAUGHING]
  • [00:15:27.79] JOHN SINCLAIR: That was my personal stroke of genius. Panther didn't last very long once there was any serious [INAUDIBLE] of intent because he wasn't the least bit serious about anything, except getting high tonight. But now he's a psychologist, or a psych-- I don't know, he's at Harvard. I saw him at Harvard a few years ago. I don't know what that says about Harvard.
  • [00:15:54.35] [LAUGHING]
  • [00:15:56.96] JOHN SINCLAIR: The Ann Arbor of the East, I guess. Anyway, does that give you sort of a-- I mean, I'm not trying to belittle this as a political effort.
  • [00:16:07.02] ANDREW: No, not at all.
  • [00:16:08.76] JOHN SINCLAIR: We hated political parties. You know, one of our ten point program was, leaders suck. We don't need any leaders. So that was kind of our philosophical orientation.
  • [00:16:22.43] ANDREW: Was there any tension between the joke of it, the tongue in cheek nature of it, and the fact that you were talking about-- these were real serious issues, racial discrimination, these were serious issues.
  • [00:16:34.99] JOHN SINCLAIR: Oh yeah. No, they were serious to us.
  • [00:16:36.02] ANDREW: Or was irreverence just so much a part of how you lived that you didn't know any other way to do it?
  • [00:16:43.25] JOHN SINCLAIR: That was the way we were, yeah. And I still maintain my two iron rules in life are, we must remain flexible and we must retain our sense of humor. We were serious about addressing these things. I think that's why we formed this, as a way to manipulate our media opportunity to take the issue onto an album, as a way to talk about the Black Panther Party, supporting the Black Panther Party, opposing the war and the government and all that.
  • [00:17:17.40] This, we thought, would put our issues in terms of the outside world. You know, these guys, oh yeah, they're the White Panther Party. [GROANING SOUND] I mean, what if somebody did that now? What if somebody came out and said they were the, I don't know, anti-Tea Party, or something? But they were a band, and they had a following. Sarah Palin would be in trouble.
  • [00:17:40.50] AMY: I mean, you weren't taking yourself seriously. But after a point, you needed other people to take you seriously-- not just your issues and the things you cared about-- because you were in trouble. So was it difficult then? Obviously you changed, eventually, to the Rainbow People's Party. You must have had some recognition at some point that, ah gosh, I don't know, this isn't working. [INAUDIBLE].
  • [00:18:02.30] JOHN SINCLAIR: Oh, absolutely. Well, absolutely. And also there was a dynamism in the Black Panther Party too, because they were undergoing a process of development and change at the same time that we were trying to keep up with-- I don't know. See, these issues, I just think they're so complex. And I don't mean to take all the time up talking about this kind of trivial thing.
  • [00:18:24.73] But I mean, the worst thing I can do to contribute to the historical dialogue would be to just pretended that the black and white type of questions and answers that you read about in a book by Todd Gitlin, or some idiot like that-- excuse me, Todd. I never did like Todd Gitlin. Now he's become like the right wing ideologue of hippiedom.
  • [00:18:50.59] But I mean, the point about us-- these people I'm talking about-- we're complex weird individuals on the fringes of the social order, trying to create a new way of life. And with the messianic idea that we got from taking LSD, that we not only had to answer but was incumbent upon. It was our duty to share this and to turn people on, and to relieve them of their terrible burdens of being squares, and victims of the American war-monger society.
  • [00:19:25.50] This is who we were. And the other thing is that we don't have any historical backdrop because they've erased it all. Where could you get a television show once a week about hippies in the '60s? You could have millions of episodes. But they don't show them because they don't want people to be like this ever again.
  • [00:19:50.52] And now if you started to have hippies, they would know where you lived, and what your preferences were in terms of what you ordered online, and what kind of music you liked. And they'd have a profile for you. And [INAUDIBLE] got about enough, they could go in like Bin Laden, to your home and take you out, like they did Fred Hampton 40 years ago.
  • [00:20:10.95] I mean, you see, the other part of this is the methodology that has developed is, there was the MC5, and there were these other guys from Lincoln Park. And they just wanted to be a rock and roll band. And this evil, Svengali, left wing guy, Sinclair, took them and used them to further his messianic power trip.
  • [00:20:35.10] So I just like to point out that we were all on the same side. When you see the White Panther Party and the people who signed the statement, you'll find the five members of the MC5, because it was us, because we all felt that way. Six months later, they changed their outlooks through their experience, which at the time I never did forgive.
  • [00:20:54.96] But now I understand it a little better. It took me about 40 years, though. [LAUGHING] Oh, man, yeah, yeah, that stuff pissed me off there for a long-- then I went to prison. So I never really got to resolve it with anybody because they weren't on my visiting list.
  • [00:21:12.79] [LAUGHING]
  • [00:21:17.44] JOHN SINCLAIR: Two guys had to die before the other four of us got back together as friends. That was pretty strenuous. So I was just trying to show how this was just-- I mean, bands weren't as dumb then as they are now. These guys weren't no Kid Rocks. You know what I mean? They were intelligent. I mean, Kid Rock got the NAACP award and he says, yeah, I love black people. Gee, thanks. Thanks for sharing. What about taking down the Confederate flag?
  • [00:21:53.14] [LAUGHING]
  • [00:21:55.57] JOHN SINCLAIR: Excuse me.
  • [00:21:58.01] ANDREW: Incredibly valid point.
  • [00:21:58.98] JOHN SINCLAIR: You know what I'm saying, though? But they wanted this, we all wanted this. We wanted to say that we were different as a band, entering into the commercial fray with our first album, recorded live at the Grande Ballroom. A totally idiotic step to take, from a commercial point of view.
  • [00:22:21.74] But we wanted to demonstrate we weren't in it for the commercial value. We thought they were giving us this beautiful opportunity to reach the masses of American music lovers with a different kind of message. We wanted to take full advantage of it. But we wanted them to know we were coming.
  • [00:22:45.01] It's the one thing I say today about changing anything. They say, what should we do? I say, don't tell them what you're going to do next, make them find out. Part of it in those days was just saying [INAUDIBLE] you had the media. The media, you could amplify what you said. [INAUDIBLE] Abbie Hoffman showed us how that worked. It was just exhilarating to see those guys do that.
  • [00:23:13.58] They could say, we're going to put LSD in the drinking water in Chicago. And all of a sudden, 10,000 police would be posted around the reservoirs. Nobody even had any acid to put in there. It's just a concept.
  • [00:23:30.29] ANDREW: Can you talk a little bit about the Yippies? And about how the group of you in the Hill Street houses felt about the Yippies and what they were doing?
  • [00:23:38.93] JOHN SINCLAIR: Well, yeah. I mean, I can talk about our collective posture. I don't know about the feeling. I think you have to get the other people to tell you their feelings. I can tell you my feelings.
  • [00:23:50.20] But our stance, or our posture, or our line on them, we tried to merge the Youth International Party with the White Panther Party. And that's when we learned that the Youth International Party was even further from the concept of a political party than we were, which was pretty far to begin with. But they made us look like General Motors. General Motors. They didn't have an office.
  • [00:24:16.05] I mean, the Youth International Party was basically Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman going on television and saying crazy shit that they had no plan to enact. They were agitators. I mean, I'm just saying that descriptively. They were a tremendous inspiration.
  • [00:24:38.55] But when we tried to do things with them as an organization, as [? our ?] organization was gaining some kind of functionality, there wasn't anything to inner-mesh with. It was like a bathtub, or something. I mean, we were trying to create mechanisms that average people, kids, could join and develop ways to live outside the way that it was, and eventually to challenge and reshape this reality. But at the very least, to create structures outside of it that could shelter you, and make it possible for you to do the things you wanted to do.
  • [00:25:27.09] So we were trying to find ways. And in Ann Arbor in the '70s, after I came out of prison-- again, I can't say really what they do when I wasn't here-- when we changed the Rainbow People's Party, we rejected the idea of being a national organization. Well, the one thing that was valuable with Pun and myself being in prison is that we got a chance to actually read the revolutionary texts that everyone on the left was always waving around. Not only did we read The Red Book, but I read the four volumes of the selected works of Mao Tse-tung, same for V.I. Lenin.
  • [00:26:17.18] I mean, we actually had time to sit and read this stuff. And then you found out that all these people that were waving these in your face were just totally full of shit. And they'd never read them. And they didn't know what they really stood for. That was quite a weapon when we went up against some of these people.
  • [00:26:34.13] But learning and studying Mao Tse-tung, he was our political, or theoretical leader, I would have to say. So I was trying to figure out ways that you could apply these things that worked so well for the people in China, and this organization that started out as a bunch of guys like us when they were 20, or something. Or like Cuba, these guys in the mountains, in a camp, living in caves, they created a thing that won over all the people. And they took control of their country. We just though, man, this is great, how'd they do that?
  • [00:27:17.62] The guys in China-- the Communist Party of China-- just went through this incredible struggle. And they had to fight the war against Japan. Anyways, we studied all this stuff. And then I was trying to figure out a way to apply this to what we were doing, what was happening here, and what we wanted to do.
  • [00:27:36.20] So we developed this thing that you had to have a revolutionary base area. That was our idea, we wanted to develop Ann Arbor into a revolutionary base area. And you not only gained political power in your home base to where you were secure from arrest, and able to develop in a neutral environment without the police at your door, but also, you could create an exemplary community.
  • [00:28:13.00] But if you could take your ideas, and by organizing politically among the people [INAUDIBLE] because the one thing Lenin and Mao say was, revolution-- you know, in America, we would talk about revolution. We were ready to go right out and be in the revolution. And they say, well, revolution is a last resort after you've exhausted all democratic means. And we thought, jeez, we haven't even tried one democratic mean yet. We just want to get out there, like the guys in the movies.
  • [00:28:46.63] So we determined to try to concentrate on where we were. And if our ideas were good, we had to figure out a way that we could turn people on to them, and organize them around these ideas to do things that we all wanted to do. And we also developed from them the idea of the-- oh, god, now my mind's going to slip-- United Front activities, what they called during the Second United Front. In other words, to combine and support and work together with other organizations on the left who shared, at least to some extent, your viewpoint and your goals.
  • [00:29:40.46] So in our case, it took the form of working as closely as possible with other groups in the community that were trying to establish some kind of alternative services, drug help, Ozone House-- which was finding places for people to sleep-- the pre-medical clinic-- which was a key idea-- food co-op, all of these things. We took sometimes a leading role, sometimes a strong supporting role, depending on the leadership. If they had strong leadership, we would try to support them.
  • [00:30:15.24] And then when the Human Rights Party started, we enthusiastically joined the Human Rights Party because they were a step beyond where we were. They wanted to compete for electoral bodies. We hadn't even gotten that far in our thinking yet. So we were just trying to organize some people to buy some food for cheap so everybody could eat, and stuff like that. And they were led by a principled veteran Democratic Party. Former Lieutenant Governor Zolton Ferency was the state leader of the Human Rights Party. He's a great guy and a very experienced democratic politician.
  • [00:30:58.57] So they knew how to organize a party, and how to get out the vote, and stuff like that. And we had a constituency that we effectively delivered to their party. That's how we got the $5 marijuana law. That was kind of our bone for the support, you got to get the police off our backs.
  • [00:31:20.62] So anyway, that was where we were, that was the difference. And we got to the point-- as you were saying-- with the White Panther Party that you can see that the more you clearly defined yourself as the White Panther Party, the worse you were making it, not only for yourself but for your cause because you were smearing. And eventually, it really alienated the masses of the people that we were trying to appeal to because the last things hippies were were violent.
  • [00:31:54.85] And the Panther concept became thoroughly demonized by the government and the media into being violent niggers. And then we were violent hippies supporting the violent niggers. And then they brought the bombing charge. And that really delivered us into their camp of demons.
  • [00:32:17.96] AMY: Why do you think the Nixon administration chose the situation with you as the test case for their wiretapping activities.
  • [00:32:27.58] JOHN SINCLAIR: Pun's got a whole analysis on that I don't really subscribe to. But certain left wing elements thought it was because of-- I don't know.
  • [00:32:35.92] AMY: Do you think that they found you a legitimate threat?
  • [00:32:37.81] JOHN SINCLAIR: Are you trying to figure out why does Nixon do something? Because it was the most evil, expeditious, and quickly rewarding, ugly activity he could think of, probably.
  • [00:32:48.21] AMY: We also spoke with former Washtenaw County Sheriff, Doug Harvey.
  • [00:32:53.57] JOHN SINCLAIR: Oh, Doug Harvey, he's still alive? Oh, god, that's scary.
  • [00:32:59.28] AMY: Do you feel he was really a particularly difficult person? Or was it just a sign of the times?
  • [00:33:06.10] ANDREW: Yeah, was it just him? Or was he just the face of things?
  • [00:33:08.94] JOHN SINCLAIR: Oh, no, he was a particularly ugly face. He was a right wing ideologue as a law enforcement officer, I think. Well, our opinion of him was best depicted on the bumper sticker that we put out. It said, recall Harvey. And on the left was a picture of a pig.
  • [00:33:31.70] ANDREW: Short and sweet.
  • [00:33:34.36] JOHN SINCLAIR: Like a clip art picture of a pig. Yeah, we hated Doug Harvey and he hated us, so it was a two way street. We were trying every way we could to humiliate, embarrass, get him out of office somehow.
  • [00:33:50.63] AMY: You know, he has a good sense of humor about that period of time.
  • [00:33:53.79] JOHN SINCLAIR: Well he should, he was on the winning side. He didn't have to do any time. It's easy for him to be funny about it, he was the one with the gun. It wasn't an equal playing field. If it was, he would have been in the ditch. We would have kicked his ass. Sorry. He had cars with things on the tops, and sirens, and they were serious characters.
  • [00:34:23.81] ANDREW: So you brought up the CIA bombing. And I wanted to ask about that bombing and the other bombings in Ann Arbor, and also the Weather Underground movement. How did you feel about these violent actions?
  • [00:34:34.94] JOHN SINCLAIR: Well, I didn't have any problem with the violent part. I'm telling you the truth, I could take the bank presidents of America and line them up against the wall and shoot them myself right now today, if I could. So it's not violence, although I'm a nonviolent individual. I'm not going to hurt anybody. But mentally, I think it's all right when you're dealing with oppressors.
  • [00:35:02.15] They're using violence to keep you the way you are. So equal playing field, throw all the guns away, and the tanks, and the planes, and the missiles, and the homing devices, and the SEAL teams, and let's go out and talk about this. But that isn't the way it works. It's like Chairman Mao said, revolution is not a dinner party, it's a violent overthrow of one segment of society by another.
  • [00:35:31.41] ANDREW: And did that cause tension, either internally or within--
  • [00:35:36.72] JOHN SINCLAIR: It was never popular with hippies [INAUDIBLE] constituents.
  • [00:35:40.05] ANDREW: Because there must've been a lot of people who felt like you, where intellectually you would say, yeah, I'd like to see the sheriff dead.
  • [00:35:46.57] JOHN SINCLAIR: [INAUDIBLE] go for it intellectually.
  • [00:35:48.54] ANDREW: Yeah, but no one actually wants to pick up a gun and do it.
  • [00:35:51.60] JOHN SINCLAIR: No, they didn't want you to even think about that. I mean, that was exactly the opposite of their basic world view. It was a contradiction, as we used to say. But it was one that we felt we had to face because you were dealing with these people who were putting you in prison, trying to kill you, tapping your phone, harassing you as you walked. You know, they were awful.
  • [00:36:16.20] I was never a fan of the Weather Underground. I felt the Weather Underground, first of all, they were kind of like kids from upper class families, whose experience was having political battles within SDS on a college campus. We had a certain contempt for that because we were more from a working class background, proletariat-- what'd they call it, the Panthers call it? Lumpenproletariat. It means working class people without jobs.
  • [00:36:50.07] Well, that described hippies to a T. We were the lumpenproletariat of the white people. The difference being, we didn't want any jobs.
  • [00:36:58.99] ANDREW: And one of the reasons I was wondering about the Weather Underground is--
  • [00:37:02.62] JOHN SINCLAIR: Don't feel funny about dragging me back over and over again because--
  • [00:37:05.64] ANDREW: Yeah, I don't.
  • [00:37:06.39] JOHN SINCLAIR: OK, good.
  • [00:37:06.67] ANDREW: Yeah, no.
  • [00:37:08.17] JOHN SINCLAIR: I need that.
  • [00:37:09.22] [LAUGHING]
  • [00:37:13.23] ANDREW: Because they looked at the same things that you looked at. I mean, they looked at Cuba, specifically, and they said, this is what happened. They started this and they got the people to follow them by showing through action what they could do.
  • [00:37:27.61] Was there ever any discussion where anyone ever said-- and if I had to guess, I would say Pun would have been the one to stand up and say-- hey, we need to stand up and take action? We need to do this. We need to throw off the mantle of being nonviolent. And even if it's repugnant to us, we need to do something, do something violent, do something that will get attention.
  • [00:37:49.84] JOHN SINCLAIR: Well, I don't think within our circle that nonviolence was a big-- maybe among the women members, they would be more [INAUDIBLE] nonviolent. I don't think any guys in the MC5 or me or any of the male components had any problem. Macho engagement with the enemy was perfectly acceptable.
  • [00:38:17.32] Now, what I thought with the Weather Underground was that when they became the Weather Underground, they undertook a strategy of consciously alienating and isolating themselves from the mass movement. And they posited themselves as the ones who knew everything. And they knew how it should go, and they were going to do it this way, and kiss my ass if you don't like it. They were very arrogant.
  • [00:38:45.36] Now, arrogance was an extreme component of our makeup. But we were going in the other direction, of trying to win over people. Still, we made a lot of mistakes toward this, but about the same time that they-- I don't know. We transformed ourselves into Rainbow People's Party as a conscious effort to try and make our outlook and our activities and what we were doing more palatable and acceptable to the masses of hippies. I call them hippies now, but young people.
  • [00:39:25.25] We thought-- having read Lenin and Mao Tse-tung-- that like I said before, you owed it to yourself and to the people to try and organize legally and go as far as you could. Well, their idea of doing things above ground was like, they go to a high school in Macomb County, and the female members of the Weather Underground would take off their shirts and run down the hallway. They thought this was the way to organize youth.
  • [00:39:52.72] Well, see, we put on dances. We were talking, we had thousands of them that would come to our events. I mean, it was just a whole different form of address.
  • [00:40:05.62] ANDREW: Is that what cultural revolution means? That phrase, cultural revolution, that you used, does it mean using culture to have revolution?
  • [00:40:15.19] JOHN SINCLAIR: Well, no. It means that culture is the basis of life, and that if you have a revolutionary culture, you can have a revolutionary social order. And that if you have a culture like today, which is ugly, vicious, capitalist to the extreme, and all of these things, then you have the kind of social order that you have today. When you have good music, people are better people. When you have art that promotes the idea of heart, compassion, doing for others, sharing, you have a better social order, like we used to have here when they still revered artists and poets, and like that.
  • [00:40:52.49] But this shit they got now, you know. And it's the culture, that was my-- as an ideologue, as a philosophist of this-- the idea that the culture was the basis of revolution, that if you had a revolution, you overthrew the people but you kept going with the same culture, like they did in Russia. Then it was doomed to failure, that you can't have a revolutionary culture that's based on a police state.
  • [00:41:26.25] That's the opposite of a revolution. That when you got people spying on the citizens and all that, that's not a revolution. That just means economically, politically, some people took over. But it's the same ugly content of everyday life, it wasn't really an event. The buildings didn't become more beautiful, they became uglier. Daily life didn't become richer and fuller and more exciting, it became terrifying, from what I read about it, talked to.
  • [00:42:02.89] And that's why Mao Tse-tung-- starting in '67-- had the cultural revolution. Well, he went way too far in the wrong direction, really. But what he recognized was that they were building a revolutionary society without dealing with the ideological dregs, the idea that a doctor is a higher level of being than a farmer, that a manufacturer is a higher level of being than the guy who does the manufacturing. They were trying to overturn that and create a-- like they have [INAUDIBLE] in Cuba, where a taxi driver and a doctor make the same rate of pay. Well, that's democracy to me.
  • [00:42:45.64] AMY: Can you talk about your brother?
  • [00:42:48.83] JOHN SINCLAIR: My brother. My brother and I are very different people. I always marvel at how different two people can be that grew up in the same room. And of course, I was the older and we had a sister between us. And I was the negative example for them, as far as my parents were concerned. So I always felt bad because they kind of had to scramble to fulfill the expectations of the parents. Whereas, I never gave a fuck.
  • [00:43:28.23] I mean, I'd go along with it as far as I had to. But I really had my own agenda from a fairly early age. And since I was 12 or 13, my life was pretty much centered on Black music and the quest to get more of it, to find out where it had come from, all of these things, that was my mission. And I hated school. And I was never interested in achieving. I only went to college because my parents had saved all their lives for me to go to college. I had to go to college.
  • [00:44:12.29] So that was me. And then my brother was four years younger than me. We literally grew up, our beds were next to each other, in the same room. And my brother was like an all A student, valedictorian, captain of the football-- I don't know if he was captain, but he was a football star. He was a basketball star. He was an All-American kid. He was a-- I don't know-- the state things they have for little square kids, like Newt Gingrich. He was a big shot in that.
  • [00:44:46.89] That's what I realized in the '90s, when they had that Republican revolution, that all these guys were the nerds, that when you were in school they went to the state government day, and they competed to be-- and now they were running our country. Whoo. But my brother, I mean, but at the same time, he's a cool guy. He wasn't a typical empty-headed, he was intellectual as well. He was a pretty well rounded individual.
  • [00:45:18.96] But he cut a different path than I did. And he didn't have, for some reason, the passionate concern and commitment in Black music that I did. I mean, this was clearly the most important thing. And still to this day, I've been on that same arc since I was about 12.
  • [00:45:40.79] So my brother went to Dartmouth on a football scholarship, which was a recognition of his scholarship ability, and this football prowess. They didn't give out too many scholarships at Dartmouth for playing football, you know what I mean?
  • [00:46:01.51] And then he had a growth experience while he was a student. And I think he got injured, something like Kerouac's situation. Or something happened to chill his love for the organized sports world, and instead he got interested in poetry. And I remember [INAUDIBLE] they would do. Anywhere in the US, there wasn't any sympathetic environment for modern poetry at all. Well, at U of M you can win the Hopwood award. But I mean, if you wanted to give a reading, that wasn't going to happen.
  • [00:46:43.33] My brother [INAUDIBLE] and his friends started organizing poetry readings on campus in laundromats, which I thought, jeez, that was brilliant. You know, everybody has to go to the laundromat eventually. And through all this-- by the time he graduated it was 1967-- the Summer of Love was just opening.
  • [00:47:06.09] And so he came to Detroit and joined us, Trans-Love Energies, and like his brother, became the manager of a rock and roll band. And he was my trustee and companion and partner in crime from that point on. I mean, when I think about it in retrospect, he was so steadfast and so good at what he did, and so perfect that I never even thought about him. You didn't have to think about, what was Dave going to do? He was going to do the right thing, and he was going to do it as fast as he could, and the best that he good. And he just could step up and carry the weight, and carry it forward, and do it in good humor, and enjoy himself.
  • [00:48:02.52] He was an extraordinary individual. And when I was in prison, he was the-- whatever our organization was-- it was all on his back. You know, he carried it all. He was extraordinary. He would assume any measure of personal responsibility that was required to make something happen.
  • [00:48:26.54] That was kind of our outstanding quality, me, him and several other people I'd say. That if you thought something needed to be done to make something happen that you thought should happen, he would do it. If you had to stay up three or four days in a row, or whatever you had to do, and he was like that. And he was just the greatest guy.
  • [00:48:52.26] ANDREW: Can you talk about Leni, Leni Sinclair?
  • [00:48:55.13] JOHN SINCLAIR: I mean, as a public figure, or as my ex-wife?
  • [00:48:58.06] ANDREW: As a public figure.
  • [00:48:58.96] JOHN SINCLAIR: OK, well, she's a great public figure. She's a great photographer, one of my favorite photographers. And I'm always trying to advance her interests in being recognized as a great photographer. She's really good.
  • [00:49:17.18] And when we were partners in these ventures, starting with the Detroit Artist's Workshop, Trans-Love Energies, White Panther Party, Rainbow People's Party, everything from the '70s, she was just like my brother, she was always there. While I'm more than willing to carry her share of the load, because these things seem glamorous when you look at them from outside-- these celebrities sitting around and doing this-- but it was hard work.
  • [00:49:52.95] And there was no rewards in it. And you didn't get paid. And you had to somehow figure out how to raise the money to do the things you wanted to do from people who didn't have any money. I mean, it was hard.
  • [00:50:05.24] That's why my brother is such a tremendous hero to me in all this because he made this shit happen. Somebody was testifying to me, went on a fundraising trip with my brother one time, and my brother told him, look, we have to get $5,000 from this guy. And he said, the guy dodged it and ducked it. And he said my brother would not leave until he got the guy to give up the $5,000. I mean, after several hours of unwelcome presence, the guy wanted him to be out of there.
  • [00:50:42.93] So it was hard work. And Leni, she was a hero to me in this regard. And when I was in prison, I couldn't have had more or better support, even in my wildest dreams. And everything that she could possibly do for me, she did. So I'm very happy and grateful. And I have a lot of respect for her.
  • [00:51:10.31] ANDREW: How about Pun Plamondon?
  • [00:51:12.67] JOHN SINCLAIR: Wow, there's a complex individual. When I met Pun Plamondon, he was making sandals on Plum Street under false pretenses of telling the guy he was an experienced sandal maker. And he met us because this guy-- I don't know. Well, I think it's all in there. He remembers it better than I do.
  • [00:51:36.63] I just remember this nice looking, big guy showing up. And I guess the guy he worked for told him that he had a room of his own in our warren of a place, kind of like your building, only we had separate units over a whole block. And that's why so [INAUDIBLE] reminiscent there. And this guy claimed he had a room of his own that Plamondon could sleep there, and will pay, of course, for making the sandals, in which he didn't know how to make a sandal, but he told the guy he did.
  • [00:52:16.97] So he just showed up there and he's sleeping in the room in my house. Oh, that was funny. Well, he's a great guy. He's one of my best friends now, I really love the guy, I love to see him. But there were years in the last days of our organization, I tended to avoid him like the plague. That's one of the reasons I broke it up is because it was so bizarre.
  • [00:52:47.16] My brother and I weren't talking to each other because of the pressures of what we were trying to do, and the impossibility of realizing our goals at this particular time. It had just become totally out of the question, it wasn't going to happen. And for 10 years, we'd been fueled by the idea that we were going to win, that if we gave enough of ourselves and stumbled on some of the right ideas, and gained enough support from enough people, we could turn this thing around. There were some periods when it was very exhilarating.
  • [00:53:26.74] But it got really rough. And Plamondon was one of the reasons, because he was a drinker. And drinking people in organizations like this, there's just no compatibility because they get drunk, and then they do crazy, stupid shit that impacts 15 other people that they weren't thinking about for one second.
  • [00:53:54.11] That's when I got a kick out of the book, because he'll analyze some of his behavior, but then he'll just miss the-- you know. My brother really had a beef with him because my brother spirited him out of the country and got him safely across the ocean and in the hands of people. And he had papers and money, and my brother did all of this.
  • [00:54:16.16] And the next thing you know, here this guy is turning up at a rock festival trying to get some pussy. Pardon the expression, but that was what was on his mind. He wanted to see this girl.
  • [00:54:30.33] So I mean, that kind of behavior isn't incompatible with a cooperative, communal effort. Then he got kind of carried away with-- I don't know. I'm sure we've talked about this face to face, or I'd be hesitant to say anything--
  • [00:54:45.88] ANDREW: I think he calls it lack of revolutionary discipline. That's what he cites himself for, lack of revolutionary discipline.
  • [00:54:53.26] JOHN SINCLAIR: Rampant egoism and self gratification, I think, is another way to put it.
  • [00:55:00.62] AMY: He missed being back home.
  • [00:55:03.77] JOHN SINCLAIR: Yeah, yeah, sure. Back home in the penitentiary.
  • [00:55:07.97] [LAUGHING]
  • [00:55:11.98] JOHN SINCLAIR: It was easier for my brother to take care of me overseas, and to have another guy in the penitentiary, and then the lawyers. See, my brother had to do all the work, get the lawyer, get the visas, get the [INAUDIBLE], keep money in your account, you know, all of those. [SIGH] It was rough stuff. He's a tough [INAUDIBLE].
  • [00:55:32.11] But once he got out of alcoholism-- and I think he's got it in there, but I fuse them together because I've had a lot of conversations with him since he started on this book. And some things I remember, and some things I've fused in from what I read of his writings. But he ended up in the ditch. Anyway, when he finally faced the alcoholism question, then his whole life turned around and he became a whole different person. Now I love seeing him. But I would have crossed the street at some points to avoid having to talk to him because I was so angry with him.
  • [00:56:08.84] ANDREW: In the early days of the White Panther Party, what was he to the organization?
  • [00:56:14.03] JOHN SINCLAIR: He was the conscience. I mean, knowing what I know about political development now, I hesitate to even define us as having any political consciousness whatsoever. But at the time, he was the most politically conscious of the bunch.
  • [00:56:33.89] But I was also a guy who was always politically [INAUDIBLE]. Before I knew any of these people, I was a follower of Malcolm X. I was a follower of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. Many of my ideas came from the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. I've always had this uncanny ability to pick the good stuff and leave all the rest of it like chaff.
  • [00:57:00.30] AMY: That's a talent.
  • [00:57:00.73] JOHN SINCLAIR: And then take the good things and merge them with some other good things, and leave all that. So at least there's some crazy, hybrid ideas. But I got a lot of them from Elijah. Do for self was their basic motto. And that was self determination.
  • [00:57:18.76] AMY: How about Gary Grimshaw?
  • [00:57:20.03] JOHN SINCLAIR: Oh, man, now you're talking about a great American, without reservation. In our scheme of things, the revolutionary artist and servant of the people that we envisioned ourselves, Grimshaw was the greatest guy of all time. Now in the '90s, after he moved to California, he developed a drinking problem. And I remember seeing him a couple times in San Francisco. I'd go to see him and he was garrulous. He was just talking nonstop, taking shots of vodka and just talking from the minute you saw him.
  • [00:58:03.03] Now, I remember Grimshaw-- during the years I worked with him, which was about 10 years-- never saying anything except, when do you need it? Man, oh man. When you look at the work he did, and the quality of the work-- but just the mechanical part of it-- somebody that would do that much work in support of a cause for nothing. And the other person is Emory Douglas, the artist for the Black Panther Party, who I've met in recently years, really a great guy.
  • [00:58:37.75] But they were committed to this idea. And they would do all the work that was required of them. If you said to Grimshaw, we're going to have a rally tomorrow, and we got to put out something to show people what it's going to be. Bam, when do you need it? Well, 6:00 AM. And it would be there at 6:00 AM. You know, if you had to take it to the printer, and tell the printer-- you know, when he used do his posters.
  • [00:59:03.50] To me, this was the ultimate measure of the artistry of Grimshaw because you couldn't afford four color printing, per se, like they do now in the twinkling of an eye. If you wanted four colors, you had to make the basic design, and then you had to make three transparent [? drawings, ?] three transparencies. And then when you put them together and you get the printer to manipulate the percentage of the ink that goes through this.
  • [00:59:33.68] He was just a genius. I could never have done nothing like that. I just had to write a sentence. And then it would come back, and he'd say, [INAUDIBLE] oh, man, they printed this yellow in 30% instead of 25%.
  • [00:59:52.63] But Grimshaw was selfless. For an artist, he was the antithesis of the diva-istic, ego-driven artist. He was without ego. See, one of the things in our organization that was so important was that we were all veteran LSD seekers. We had all gone through personal transformations with the universe to try to destroy our egos and try to be better people, and not self-centered and greedy and manipulative, and all that. John Coltrane was my god. And his idea was, I want to be a force for good.
  • [01:00:43.51] So you could tell, a guy like Grimshaw, he had took a lot of acid because you can't get to that point, I don't think, just by being an American. I mean, because being American, you have all this stuff bred into you from the jump.
  • [01:01:04.05] Anyway, Grimshaw, he was a selfless artist. His work was of unprecedented quality. Like I say, we had other people that were the same kind of. They weren't Grimshaw in terms of their commitment, but Mike Brady, he was the main protege. No, I wouldn't say protege, but I mean, he wasn't a party member. But he would do all of the stuff. If you needed a poster, he would have it, if you needed something for the paper.
  • [01:01:37.41] See, that stuff was so important because we couldn't buy any of this. I mean, the other thing you have to remember about this stuff is that it was all done in utter poverty. We were always operating on a negative capacity. There was always so much we were behind, and my brother had to go out and figure out how to keep going.
  • [01:01:58.48] And I was the idea man, so I was always throwing out the grandiose ideas. And I was full of messianic zeal. And I could talk. And I would browbeat these people.
  • [01:02:10.41] And when I look at it in retrospect, you really have to characterize it like that. I would just browbeat these poor people through the force of my personality and the depth of my belief and the zeal. We got to do this, this has got to be done, we've got to do this. Well, everybody would say, OK. And then we'd all be committed. And then we might have to die, but we were going to make it happen somehow.
  • [01:02:39.84] What a period. My life is so much easier now. My life is so much better, personally. But man, what a great period because our whole thing really developed along the line starting in '65, taking acid together, groups of people, 10 people, 12 people, once a week just gravitate to Friday night and go to the Grande and drop some. Tino's step-brother, Neil, would be there with a new batch of acid from San Francisco. And he'd pass out his samples. And then about an hour later, when the band goes on stage, everybody's starting to peak.
  • [01:03:22.19] And that was just a big factor in all this because everybody was part of this alternative reality together. It wasn't like you had to convince people of the need to do these things as a general philosophical premise. If you needed to do something tactically, maybe you had to do some talking. But everybody knew what the big picture was. You were trying to save the world from themselves, basically, if you want to put it in so many words.
  • [01:03:54.29] These people were bent on making this stuff be much more complex and harmful and idiotic than it had to be. And there had to be a way to pull their [? code ?] to this and say, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Hey, you don't have to do all that. Have a joint, relax. We're having a dance over here. Come on over, take your clothes off, you know.
  • [01:04:15.50] [MUSIC PLAYING]
  • [01:04:21.92] AMY: To learn more about John Sinclair, go to freeingjohnsinclair.org.
  • [01:04:29.28] ANDREW: AADL talks to John Sinclair has been a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.