AADL Talks To: Hiawatha Bailey, Founder of the Punk Band Cult Heroes, Former Community Activist, and Member of the White Panther Party

Thu, 12/05/2024 - 1:42pm

When: November 18, 2024

Hiawatha Bailey lived in one of the legendary Hill Street houses at 1510 and 1520 Hill Street where he was a member of the Trans-Love Commune, the White Panther Party, and later the Rainbow People’s Party. In this episode, Hiawatha traces his political awakening and community activism in Ann Arbor’s countercultural heyday during the late 1960s and shares stories of living and working in the commune, including the day he hung up on Yoko Ono and got a follow-up call from John Lennon. He also takes us through his musical journey as a roadie for the local rock band The Up and Detroit's Destroy All Monsters to founding his own punk band, Cult Heroes.

Transcript

• [00:00:09] AMY CANTU: [MUSIC] Hi. This is Amy, and in this episode, AADL talks to Hiawatha Bailey. Hiawatha grew up in the Ann Arbor area and lived in the legendary Hill Street houses where he became a member of the Trans-Love Energy Commune, later the White Panther Party, then the Rainbow People's Party. In the 1970s and '80s, he was a roadie for the Detroit band Destroy All Monsters and formed his own punk band, Cult Heroes. In this episode, Hiawatha talks about his political awakening and local activism during Ann Arbor's counter-cultural heyday in the 1960s. He also shares stories of living and working at the Hill Street Commune and his life-long love affair with music. Well, thanks so much, Hiawatha, for agreeing to chat with me today.
• [00:00:58] HIAWATHA BAILEY: No problem.
• [00:01:01] AMY CANTU: I understand you came from Georgia to Hamtramck and you also went to Catholic school, and then you moved to Belleville. You've had a wide variety of environments and influences growing up. Can you talk about how they influenced you as a kid and then a teen?
• [00:01:17] HIAWATHA BAILEY: Sure. I was born at home in Columbus, Georgia along with my sister Gwendolyn. My dad didn't want to raise a family down south across the Mason-Dixon line with all the racism that was going on down there. I actually turned 1-year-old when we moved to Hamtramck. I went to Friendship Nursery School, Kosciuszko Elementary School, My name is Hiawatha. What school did you go to? I go to Kosciuszko. Where do you live at? Hamtramck. Then from Hamtramck, my dad got a job working at Chevrolet here in [INAUDIBLE]. We moved from Hamtramck to the east side of Detroit. Back then, Detroit was the community that where we lived in Detroit was Bewick and Mack Ave. It was like a diversified community. The Chaldeans next door, Catholic families, Baptist people. You could get your butt whipped at the neighbor's house on one corner and all the way down the street until you got home for whatever you did. Point being, people were taking care of their kids in the neighborhood. Then prior to the Detroit Riot, some time prior to that, my dad decided, I was starting to get a little rambunctious. He told me on his way to work, he goes, I'm going to give you three choices and you decide by the time I get home: Either up north, where my uncle was the head of the juvenile branch of the police department, he, later on, became Major Joe Louis Stevenson, or military school, or the country. I fretted and fretted and I thought, Oh my goodness, I don't want to go to Saginaw. Definitely don't want to go to military school. I choose the country, that sounds like fun. White-washing picket fences, Tom Sawyer, thinking about all the garbage. Nobody told me no street lights, mosquitoes the size of dive bombers, snakes. But I did choose the country and we wound up getting a piece of property out in Belleville, Sumpter township. My aunt lived down the road from us near my grandfather's house, my aunt, mother and our house across the street from the Fiirst Missionary Baptist Church, where I became president of the junior choir.
• [00:04:33] AMY CANTU: So music at an early age?
• [00:04:36] HIAWATHA BAILEY: Well, yeah. Actually back then, it wasn't that my voice was all that. It was that we lived across the road from the church and my mom had the key to the church. Choir rehearsals were on Thursday. And being a member of the junior choir, I got the key and I got to open the door to the church. I thought it was because of my voicw, but no. But that started the thing.
• [00:05:07] AMY CANTU: Now you... Did you come in to Ann Arbor and did you hang out here much at that time?
• [00:05:14] HIAWATHA BAILEY: Back then. No, not yet. That was still like an elementary school. But slowly but surely, the 60s, the draft. I joined Washtenaw Community College during its first year as an attempt to avoid the draft, I wanted the student deferment and the 2-S to avoid getting... I didn't know anything about Vietnam. When I was in high school, a couple of friends dropped out and joined the military and wound up coming back in boxes. I thought, This war, man, I don't know anything about that. Earlier on, I thought about joining the Air Force. That was before the war, and that put a whole different palette on things. I would up going to Washtenaw, had a 2-S student deferment. I had a four-hour oil painting course taught by Yanka McClatchy. One of my fellow students was Steve Correll from The Rationals. He would come into that place like the lead singer -- or, guitar player -- for The Rationals. I thought This guy seems really cool. I started going to check those guys out, slowly but surely. That introduced me to the alternative underground culture in Ann Arbor, Sunday concerts, and the White Panther Party was then called Trans-Love Energy, and the MC5 and The Up and I was like, Wow man, this is a lot cooler than Vietnam, if you ask me.
• [00:07:15] AMY CANTU: What age were you when you met John Sinclair and when you moved into the commune over there on Hill Street? How old were you?
• [00:07:26] HIAWATHA BAILEY: Well, when I was at Washtenaw I was 18, of course, just graduated. I would've been, I'm not got the numbers, but I probably would have been really 20, 21 something like that. Before moving in, I ran into a bunch of... We used to go to the Sunday concerts, and listen to the bands play. The friends of mine at this house over on Felch Street, we found out later that Diana Oughton and some of the people from the [INAUDIBLE] of the Weathermen who were living there at that time. But then friends, brothers, and sisters, there moved in and took over the house. I started hanging out with those guys. We heard about the White Panthers who were the Rainbow People-- wait, wait a minute. Trans-Love Energies back then, from the town. Then there was this guy named Panther White, and he was going around town putting up his fliers saying Panther White is running. He was running for city council and I was thinking Panther White. I was thinking it had something to do with Ku Klux Klan or something weird. Part of that whole development back then was smoking pot and dropping my first hit of LSD. We were all running around in the Arboretum and being little stoned hippies, and we kept seeing his fliers all over town saying, Panther White is running. We thought it had something to do with like some racist group. But it turned out he was self-appointed minister of Zenta in the White Panther -- or what was then Trans-Love Energy. He would announce the MC5 before they played. "This is Panther White, you're about the a cultural experience, blah, blah, blah." Well, we finally found out it was really cool and I used to sneak over to the houses and hide in the backyard, trying to figure out exactly what those guys are up to. There would be all of the girls that were groupies for the MC5. Had a sewing room off the back porch, and they would be making all of the pants, outfits for dates. I went back to Sunnygoode Street, which is the commune we lived at 1513 South University. I said, Hey, these guys are pretty cool. You guys got to check it out. Well, the Ann Arbor Riot happened a little while after that, and that was after the Detroit Riot. We all decided we were going to go down to South University to take over the street. Well, the Ann Arbor Police and Doug Harvey -- Sheriff Harvey -- of the Washtenaw County Police had a whole different plan for us. Well, we wound up getting beat back from South University. We took over the streets for three days. Every night after, we got done with what we call the riot, we would clean up the street, clean up after ourselves, pick off everything and go home. Well, people were driving in from the suburbs. On the third day, the city council had enough of that, they called the National Guard, and the National Guard were policing South University. I thought, Well, this is pretty weird. Well, a little while after that -- John had been arrested prior to that before the party moved to Ann Arbor -- and Dave Sinclair, his brother, came over to our commune and said, "You guys are pretty cool, but don't you realize that there's something going on? Something happening in the streets. In order for us to get John out of jail, we have to build a strong local base. I know that you know everybody in town. You're well-connected with the underground movement here. Why don't you think about politics and getting involved on a political level, instead of just walking around smoking dope and tripping out. You guys got to think about the political relevancy of what you're doing, of our culture." We talk about it. Next thing I knew, me and my whole house moved into the White Panther house. There was like 12 of us and we moved in on the third floor. We call it the White Panther Psychedelic Barrack. We proceeded to start working to get John out of jail -- that's the marijuana laws being cruel and unjust.
• [00:12:49] AMY CANTU: You wouldn't have called yourself a political activist prior to that point? It was Dave Sinclair that really sparked that interest. Is that what I'm hearing?
• [00:12:59] HIAWATHA BAILEY: Totally, Dave... Back then, we were just off tripping and having fun, and look, like anything to avoid the war. The factory... I was also working at Ford Motor Company at the time, the Rawsonville plant. Nobody told me about all that stuff when I was growing up. But when I got hanging out in Ann Arbor, it was, like, music and incense and marijuana. No underwear. But what they said was true. I started realizing a political aspect of our lifestyle. The fact that John had been arrested for 9.5 years for possession of few joints of marijuana, we knew that wasn't right. We started working. And Trans-Love Energy, instead of being a commune of musicians, artists and groupies, went out to California to the Peace and Freedom Conference that the Black Panther Party put on and came back politicized and decided to become the White Panther Party, a fraternal organization based on the tenets of the Black Panther party. We established a 10-point program that emulated their 10-point program, but dealt with our own community needs like free food, free shelter, free clothing. One of our statements was free everything, free everyone, which was in our idealistic -- we were kids, in our idealistic manner. We thought we could really do that. We got pretty close, actually. Started at the People's Food Co-op, and for $7, you could get the equivalent of 30 bucks worth the grocery. But we had to load our equipment trucks, drive it to the farmer's market in Detroit after collecting money from the various communes in town. Like I said, for about 10 or 15 bucks we could get almost 50 bucks worth the grocery, bring them back to the house and bag them up and people that had given us initial money to go shop or come and pick up their groceries. That was one of the things we did. We started Children's Community Center, the CCC, where instead of putting our kids in daycare, members of the house would take turns doing kid duty, and we would babysit for various commune kids. There'd be sometimes, like, you know up to 10 kids that you had to take care of. Never forget tripping on acid once. Kids loved me because I'd hang out with them to play with them and stuff. Their parents would pick them up when it was time. On this one day I said, Kids, it's time to get dressed, your parents are coming to get you. They made pickets signs, circled me with these picket signs they had made. They were staging their own revolution. They were not going with their parents. "We won't get dressed, we're not going home. This is the revolution!" Come and get your rugrat, please. But we were doing things like that to help ourselves. We had needs that weren't being met by the [INAUDIBLE]. So we formed committees and organized ourselves to deal with our own needs. That was the politicization of Trans-Love Energy into the White Panther Party.
• [00:16:57] AMY CANTU: So what else did you do in the house? You mentioned babysitting duties, you mentioned that people would sew. What was it like in the house? What was the atmosphere like? We've interviewed a bunch of other folks, Pun Plamondon, Genie, Gary Grimshaw, Leni Sinclair. Can you talk a little bit about your relationship with some of them and some of the other things that happened in the house?
• [00:17:20] HIAWATHA BAILEY: We loved them. The Central Committee was responsible for just perusing the [INAUDIBLE] and looking at things that needed to be done and making plans to have those things done. And we in the general cadre, as we were referred to, would implement essential committee directives out in the town. We had the Sun newspaper. We had, like I said, the Children's Community Center, the food coop. There were a lot of things that we were doing. Plus, we lived in three houses, and there was like three houses worth of us and that took a lot of organizing, too. Sometimes I think back and try and figure out how we did it, but one of the things -- I loved office duty, where the front office... There were always people coming and going. So as officer of the day, you would sit at the front desk, people would either call or come in and you'd ask them what they needed and direct them. If they came to hang out with the band, direct them to the rehearsal space, if they needed to meet with the chief of staff, who was Dave Sinclair, you'd address them there, or Genie Plamondon who was minister of defense. We were well organized, actually. All of that was organizing to get the word out, to spread the word, and neutralize the negativity in town about the White Panther Party. Because there were a lot of college students that had dropped out of college and started [INAUDIBLE] and those people we were getting going. They were always a little standoffish with us. It took a while for them to understand that we were all fighting the same fight just from different angles. Part of that was allowing them to come to the house and see how we lived and what we were doing. Those Weather people were weird. They were always talking about blowing stuff up.
• [00:19:44] AMY CANTU: Did you hang out with them? Did they come over there and hang out with you all?
• [00:19:50] HIAWATHA BAILEY: Actually, yes and the Yippies. Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and Jane Fonda, Timothy Leary. And on the music, there were a lot of blues and jazz musicians that were familiar with John and hangin out with John at the Artist's Workshop when it was in Detroit. They would come and stay at the houses with us. Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Dr. John, Jefferson Airplane. The list goes on and on.
• [00:20:30] AMY CANTU: I know that with the John Sinclair Freedom Rally, I know that you were on the receiving end of a phone call from Yoko Ono. Can you tell us about that?
• [00:20:44] HIAWATHA BAILEY: When we started putting together the lineup for the Free John Now rally, Crisler Arena, Peter Andrews worked for Daystar and was really instrumental in hooking us up with the University Activities Committee. We made this plan for the Free John Now Rally, and we were going to bring everybody together, all of us in support of John, and hold this event at Crisler Arena, which had just gotten built, and this is one of the first events that actually occurred there. A lot of people were coming to the house. It was actually -- I remember I was sitting here one day and this guy comes to the door and he knocked and I go, Can I help you? He goes, You know, you -- something about free drugs, free sex, free John. Well, bring me the Hemlock like they did Socrates, he says. I go running up the stairs. I go, Dave, there's this wackadoodle on the porch. He's talking about Hemlock and Socrates! But you know, because the word had gotten out about -- we had put the word out about the freedom rally -- we were getting all of this energy input. People who are supportive or not. Not that that guy was, but sitting there, I had office duty, we're sitting there smoking joints. I'm answering the phone. The phone rings. I answered, "Headquarters, National headquarters. How may I help you?" "This is Yoko Ono. I would like to speak to Dave Sinclair." I thought it was just some other jerk. "Yeah, well..." I don't know what I said, but I hung up, lit another joint. We were passing the joint around and Gary goes, Who was that? I don't know, some asshole. The phone rings back and I said "Hello." "Hi, this is John Lennon and I'd like to speak to Dave Sinclair." I wasn't even that hip to the Beatles back then because I was doing the psychedelic rock and stuff, but I knew who the Beatles were. But somehow I knew that was John Lennon. I go running upstairs, I go "Dave, I think John Lennon's on the phone!" That was John calling to volunteer he and Yoko's help and at the Freedom Rally to get John out.
• [00:23:28] AMY CANTU: That's great you didn't hang up that second time. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:23:33] HIAWATHA BAILEY: Then the night of the Freedom Rally, there was so much going on and I was always tripping my butt off, tripping my brain, and I decided to go out and sit in the stadium off through the tunnel the football players go in. I just needed a break. So I go out there and I'm sitting and I'm thinking, Boy, we really did it. I don't know if it's going to work, but it should... All of a sudden, the wind blows up, picks up a bunch of litter, blows it around, and it stops right next to me. And I thought, OK, I'm going back in now. I get up, start walking through the tunnel, I'm about to go in and this limo pulls up. It was John and Yoko. The fervor of people. There was like hundreds of people hounding him and John asked me to help get him out of the limo, get him into the dressing room, pull the door shut. People are pushing like Beatles albums and trying to get signatures and are trying to get autographs and stuff and I'm like, Holy Christ, this is really happening. I get the door shut. John goes, Hey, mate you look like -- I can't do an English accent -- but he goes, You look like somebody I can trust. Here, use some of this while I teach Yoko the chords to the song. He hands me this vile of coke. I'm like, Wow. So I actually honked with John Lennon while he taught Yoko the chords to that stupid song that she performed. [SINGING, LAUGHTER]
• [00:25:26] AMY CANTU: Wow. I'm curious about your relationship with music, I know that Sinclair was really very much into blues and jazz. Were you interested in blues and jazz? Or, talk about your influences.
• [00:25:47] HIAWATHA BAILEY: Well, when I joined the party, I was also the roadie for The Up. When the MC5 signed, the central committee had a meeting with them, and I was there. They tried to talk to the band and the band had got assigned to elect Electric Records. The central committee was trying to talk to them into being more supportive and helping us get the word out about John who was their manager and got them their contract in the first place. But a couple of the members, like Wayne in particular, didn't want to have anything to do with it. "The reason why we had to change record labels was because of our affiliation with the politics of the party." And then, you know... So they turned their back on John, as we thought, but I was working with The Up. When the MC5 got signed, they just left and The Up became the musical organ for the White Panther Party. Wherever bands played at, we would go, Genie P., our Minister of Communications would speak about John's cause, and then the band would play. We would circulate petitions to inform people about John's situation and to get signatures on the petitions, hemp petitions, help in marijuana prohibition. I was working with The Up at that time, I was always involved in music. Like I said, we had Archie Shepp and Ornette Coleman, and all these people would come and stay like two or three days at the house while they were playing in Detroit or wherever they were playing at. Music was always there, and I worked with The Up all the time I was here, and we did our touring and stuff. At the Freedom Rally, actually, we got a phone call from John, and the State of Michigan had put a referendum on the ballot. That was weird, too, I forgot about that. The state house was having debates on the marijuana law, it being a cruel and unjust punishment. We figured, hey, those guys, if they just smoked a joint, they would realize nobody should be in jail for 9.5 to ten years of smoking a joint. We had a White Panther chapter at Wayne State, got a bunch of envelopes, and we did this printout that had an R Crumb diagram of how to smoke a joint, the roll of the joint, how to smoke it, and then we had the Columbian redbud. We rolled up two joints and put it in all of these envelopes, and with that cartoon, and sent it to the House of Representatives with this little letter that says they have blocked this man of our chairman up for 9.5 to ten years, or so. You're home by yourself or sitting in your office, or the kids are at school. No, here, you don't have to go underground or become a criminal in order to access it. Here, all you gotta do is light this up, take a toke off of it, and see if you feel you need to be locked up for 9.5 to 10 years.
• [00:29:40] AMY CANTU: Did it work?
• [00:29:41] HIAWATHA BAILEY: Well, a lot of people turned in the joint, but a lot of them didn't, and a referendum was actually put on the ballot, and the people of the state of Michigan voted and overturned the marijuana law as being a cruel and unjust punishment. In Ann Arbor, we had established the five-dollar pot fine too as part of our work. The precursor to change in the pot laws was established in Ann Arbor with a five-dollar ordinance for marijuana.
• [00:30:17] AMY CANTU: That's certainly come a long way since then, hasn't it?
• [00:30:21] HIAWATHA BAILEY: It sure has. I walked through my town and it's like being in a different country.
• [00:30:28] AMY CANTU: Now, you were quoted as saying that working with the White Panthers was a precursor of the do-it-yourself ethic of Punk Rock. Can you talk a little bit more about that because you eventually moved in that direction as well?
• [00:30:42] HIAWATHA BAILEY: What I meant -- I don't know exactly what I meant -- but I think what I meant was: Nobody was taking care of our kids, nobody was giving us affordable food, nobody was dealing with our political needs. We were dealing with our own stuff. We had issues, nobody was dealing with them, and we had to figure out ways to deal with our own problems on our own. That ethic is the same in punk rock. I would go around when I was spared at the band in 1978. We had eight songs, and I thought, Well, in order to make it, you got to play New York. But with our eight songs, me and my drummer got in a Ford Elite, drove to New York, and booked our first show in New York at CBGB's with eight songs. Prior to that, I had opened up for Ron Ashtenon's band -- from the Stooges -- Destroy All Monsters, and we played the Hamburg Pub, that was our first show. I'll neveI forget: We pull in, and the marquee said, "Performing tonight, Destroy All Monsters and the Occult Heroes," I said, "Take the OC off there. It's Cult Heroes." We go on, we play our eight tunes. So Ron goes... That was our first show. I said, Hey, Ronnie, because I respect the dude so much, I said, What do you think of my band? He goes, Well, I actually, we're impressed. But he goes, I expected you guys to suck, but you didn't. What are you going to do for your next set? And I went, What? He said, Yeah, you got to play two sets, you're opening up for us. We only got one set. You got to play... I go, Ron, we only know eight songs. He goes, Well, you got to do something. So I wrote the set list backwards. So we went on and what was our last tune, because by the time we made it through the set on the first set, we were hitting on all cylinders. So second set, we started with what was the last tune, or we were hitting on all cylinders when we started the second set. Then after that, it was off to the races. The next show, or not the next show, but that was when I decided we had to go to New York. You got to play New York if you're in a punk rock band. Went in, met with Hilly Krystal. He taught me how to defend myself while we were playing a cassette of our music. He goes, "Oh, you're here from Detroit. You guys from Detroit think you're pretty cool. This is New York and blah, blah, blah." Stage manager kept going, Hilly, they want to know about a gig. They came in a book gig. He goes, "No, I'm trying to teach them that New York's rougher than Detroit." He goes, "Come on, rough me like you're going to mug me on the subway." He sees me rise and he does this judo move and flips me around and stuff and he goes, "See, Detroit ain't that tough." And he looks at Jeff, his manager. "Book 'em this weekend." So we got a weekend gig at CBGBs 1981, '78, back around in there, and that started us on the way.
• [00:34:11] AMY CANTU: Wow. So how many songs have you written altogether?
• [00:34:14] HIAWATHA BAILEY: God. The songbook is voluminous. I mean, that was, like I said, in 1978, and other than covers of the songs that people need to be reminded of -- you know, like MC5 covers and Stooges covers -- all our stuff was original.
• [00:34:35] AMY CANTU: So a lot. Did you hang onto your political views? I know that at one time you called yourself a Marxist-Leninst dialectical materialist. Did that change?
• [00:34:47] HIAWATHA BAILEY: Yeah, no.
• [00:34:47] AMY CANTU: You're still that?
• [00:34:48] HIAWATHA BAILEY: Yes, in a manner of speaking, yeah, because. I don't know, like, Marxism with all the weird stuff going on with China and Trump and all that garbage now. But the Red Book was our Bible, Chairman Mao's Red Book, the little red book. We needed a foundation from somewhere, and the White Panther Party, Rainbow People's Party, emulated a lot of the teachings of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, that was where that dialectical materialism came, that was where that came from. I was always telling people... Everybody is always approaching me about the White Panther Party and me being the only Black member of that. And it's not about the color, it's about the politics. It's not about my race, it's about the ethics of our political ideology. We tried to transition -- well, we did transition -- to the Rainbow People's Party, and our newspaper, the Sun transitioned into Sun/Dance because -- and the rainbow -- because it represented the unification of all colors.
• [00:36:20] HIAWATHA BAILEY: We got Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and those people from the Yippies to come because they were the Youth International Party. And that's what we wanted to do, initially, was unite all youth together to fight for our aligned cause. Jerry was like egocentric, Abby was cool, but Jerry didn't want to have anything to do with our radicalism. He was more of an anarchist than a revolutionary. He thought that uniting the Youth International with Yippies could bring too much radicalism in politics, and they were going around throwing bombs at things and doing dumb stuff with no plan. We had the Legal Self-defense Fund and people got arrested at our events. We had money collected that could help bail them out of jail. Jerry was just going around in an anarchistic fashion and training people to do things but it was all like guerrilla theater, acting out, and if something were to happen, those guys would just be gone. Then the referendum, I talked about that, brought a lot of changes. Eventually got John out of jail. Once John got out -- he had gone through so much, I understand it -- but he just didn't want to have anything to do with politics, the way we had stuff organized. He started managing a bunch of bands like Mitch Ryder and some of the other jazz bands that he used to work with when he was at the Artist's Workshop. Sat us all down and said, Well, you guys, I decided I'm going to dissolve the party. We all look at each other and go, What? We're ready to keep going. What do you mean? He goes, he looks at me and goes, Well, we got 10 for 2 -- John Lennon and Yoko Ono had a film company called Joko Film. They filmed the Freedom Rally. You should check that out sometime. And I'm in, you know, on stage hauling equipment and setting up bands. Afterwards, when John was being released, I took his daughter, Sunny, and handed her to him as the news cameras were flashing. And John hands me his wedding ring and goes, "Those mother fuckers even took my wedding ring." I took the property band off the wedding ring and slipped it back on his finger. He grabs his daughter and Leni, his wife, they embrace. Somebody goes, Hey, John. Now that you changed the pot laws in the states, what's next.? Somebody said "Smoke Dope!" We all turn and look in the direction of the voice and [INAUDIBLE] and the credits for the movie roll. That's when John said, Well, you made it into the movies now, Hi. What's next. Dissolving the party? I'm like, Well, what was next was lining up, going back to the community. Had no options for economics other than going back with slinging pot and LSD and wound up getting busted and sent to Lexington Federal Correctional Institute. Same place that Billie Holiday and Gene Krupa were locked up in the '50s and '40s under the NARA Act and Narcotics Addiction Rehabilitation Act. That was actually where I decided to form the band, or become a musician.
• [00:40:41] AMY CANTU: Yeah, I know you met Michael Davis and Wayne Kramer there.
• [00:40:46] HIAWATHA BAILEY: Sure did. Me and Mike were in this one, it was like being locked up on the Diag. The great buildings that were built during the reformation in the 50s. A beautiful facility. We had golf courses, horseback riding, our own theater. I became the editor of the newspaper. Michael had his own art studio where he would be down the hall from you painting and I'd be across the way, publishing Flack, the publication. Just bidding our time. But the Parole Board, you get to go before the Parole Board, and one would have to declare themselves. Under the NARA Act, the Narcotics Addiction and Rehabilitation Act, the statute of limitations of my charges were less if I declared myself an addict. I would do less time. I said, I'm not addicted. I know what I'm doing, and I'm not under the ravages of the drug. I'm a dialectical materialist Marxist... Ran my rant. So Mike we got out earlier than I did -- and Wayne -- because they declared themselves addicts.
• [00:42:22] AMY CANTU: Do you think that if John hadn't changed directions, if the party had continued to pursue all of the social and community activism that they had been doing, that you would have maybe stayed out of the FCI in Lexington, that you would have maybe not sold drugs?
• [00:42:45] HIAWATHA BAILEY: Well, I can't blame them for that, but, once the party dissolved, you know... I mean, when we were in the White Panther Party, there was all of us. We had three houses and we had an organization and I'd find a solution. I was like, Oh, boy, now I got all this attention. I mean, Nixon had a directive. He said to J Edgar Hoover, who was probably changing the stockings at the time, and said, I want something done about those people up there in Ann Arbor at 1510, 1520 and 1522 Hill. That was the directive from the Oval Office, from the White House to J Edgar Hoover. So, I mean...
• [00:43:33] AMY CANTU: So they were watching.
• [00:43:34] HIAWATHA BAILEY: Oh, big time. Freedom of Information Act deleted. Yeah, they were watching us big time. I mean, we were using the law to change the law and they did not like that. Then riding on out of this... The creative life of a musician in comparison to a revolutionary life -- they're both the same. Using what you have to get what you want or what you need.
• [00:44:01] HIAWATHA BAILEY: And you were asking about the changes in Ann Arbor in the last 60 years. I was in town a couple of nights ago, and it's like the plague of the university: It can't spread out anymore because the footprint is so large. Now it's "up" everywhere there used to be a commune. They just tore down Braun Court. Braun Court was one of the last holdouts. It's a town that's changing. You know, a bunch of the artists are moving to Ypsilanti, which is where I live now. Cause you can't afford it, the per capita in Ann Arbor is not designed for it. But Ypsi's not that far away.
• [00:44:50] AMY CANTU: Well, what are you most proud of over the course of your career?
• [00:44:55] HIAWATHA BAILEY: That I kept the faith. That time, changes, haven't changed me. I can't change time. "Strange fascination fascinating me." I'm just going through the changes, and I'm proud to be... me.
• [00:45:17] AMY CANTU: Oh, that's great. Thank you so much, Hiawatha.
• [00:45:20] HIAWATHA BAILEY: God bless you, Amy.
• [00:45:21] AMY CANTU: Bye-bye.
• [00:45:21] HIAWATHA BAILEY: Bye-bye.
• [00:45:22] AMY CANTU: AADL Talks To is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.