By Jim Bloch
You had to be politically luminous to have John Lennon write a song about you.
Lennon, one half of the song-writing team of the most famous rock and roll band in history, penned the twangy, folky protest ballad “John Sinclair” in 1971, a little more than a year after the Beatles broke up. The occasion was the John Sinclair Freedom Rally, Dec. 10, 1971 at Crisler Arena in Ann Arbor.
Sinclair had been arrested for handing two joints to an undercover Detroit police officer and sentenced to a decade in prison. He had already served two-and-a-half years in the state penitentiary at Jackson.
“They gave him ten for two,” sang Lennon and Yoko Ono.
The speakers at the rally included anti-war activist Rennie Davis, Yippie founder Jerry Rubin, beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the Black Panther’s Bobby Seale and movie star lefty Jane Fonda. In addition to Lennon and Ono, saxophonist Archie Shepp, protest singer Phil Ochs, Bob Seger, Commander Cody and Stevie Wonder played music. Gary Grimshaw designed the poster for the event.
“We came here not only to help John and to spotlight what’s going on, but also to show and to say to all of you that apathy isn’t it — and that we can do something,” said Lennon at the concert. “So Flower Power didn’t work. So what? We start again. This song I wrote for John Sinclair. Okay. ‘John Sinclair.’ Nice and easy now,” Lennon told the band. “Sneaky. One-two, one-two-three-four.”
Sinclair died at April 2 at Detroit Receiving Hospital of congestive heart failure. He was 82. He had experienced a number of health challenges since 2017, including a heart attack in 2020.
It’s hard to imagine today how radical politics, music, poetry, civil rights, anti-war protests and art had fused into a mass movement in the 1960s and early 70s. The Movement, more heterogeneous than the moniker implies, did not attack single-issue injustices. It attacked the interlocked institutions of capitalism in America that wreaked genocide on Native Americans, oppressed Black people, exploited women, sent young people to die Viet Nam, poisoned the environment and sent people to jail for smoking marijuana.
Sinclair represented the interweaving of all of those strands of radical culture. He wrote poetry. He managed revolutionary rock bands, most famously the MC5, the band that lost the last of its guitarists, Wayne Kramer, to pancreatic cancer in Los Angeles, two months to the day before Sinclair died.
Sinclair co-founded the White Panther Party, which he envisioned as the white counterpart of the Black Panther Party. In his criticism, he championed the far-out jazz of Sun Ra, Contemporary Jazz Quintet and the Tribe. He celebrated the roots of rock and roll in African American blues music and hosted a blues show on WDET radio. He helped found Strata Records to record modern music in Detroit. He launched the alternative newspaper called the Ann Arbor Sun. And he championed the legalization of marijuana.
His ex-wife Leni captured key moments of the era, especially musicians, with her camera.
Sinclair lived in Amsterdam and New Orleans for a number of years, but when he was in Detroit, he seemed omnipresent. He would perform at the Concert of Colors. He would recite poetry at street festivals. He would write articles about music and politics and liberty. He hosted radio shows and concerts. He regularly attended the Hash Bash in Ann Arbor, the first of which was held five months after the Free John Sinclair Rally. Sinclair had been scheduled to speak at the 2024 edition on April 6.
“They gave him ten for two,” Lennon sang. “And what else can the judges do?”
Lennon and Ono’s protest song unfurled like a standard protest tune until its startling, drone-like, staccato, proto-punk refrain.
“They gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta,/Gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta set him free,” sang Lennon.
The lyric repetition hints at the power of sticking with it.
The concert attracted 15,000 people and lasted 14 hours. Three days later, the Michigan Supreme Court freed Sinclair and a few months later struck down the law used to incarcerate him.
“Can’t be singing louder than the guns while I’m gone/So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here,” sang Ochs in his song “When I’m Gone.”
Sinclair did it while he was here.
Jim Bloch is a freelance writer based in St. Clair, Michigan. Contact him at bloch.jim@gmail.com.
