ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — Poet, music producer, and counterculture figure, released after a series of small pot busts and a lengthy prison sentence to a John Lennon song and a star-studded 1971 concert. John Sinclair, the inspirational man released from prison, has died. He was 82 years old.
Sinclair died Tuesday morning of congestive heart failure at Detroit Receiving Hospital, said his publicist Matt Lee.
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Sinclair was sentenced in 1969 to nine-and-a-half to 10 years in prison by Detroit Recorder’s Court Judge Robert Colombo for giving two joints to an undercover agent. He served 29 months in prison, but was released just days after John Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger and others performed in front of 15,000 people at the University of Michigan’s Chrysler Arena.
American poet John Sinclair has died at the age of 82. (Photo by David Fenton/Getty Images)
“They gave him a 2 out of 10/What else can Judge Columbo do?/We’ve got to let him go,” Lennon wrote in the song, written by the former Beatle. “John Sinclair,” which he immortalized.
John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono performed at the John Sinclair Freedom Rally held at the Ann Arbor Basketball Arena on December 10 and 11, 1971. They took to the stage just after 3 a.m., about eight hours after the event started.
Earlier that night, Mr Sinclair’s wife Leni had called her jailed husband, and the conversation between the couple and their four-year-old daughter Sunny was amplified to a crowd chanting “Free John!”
“I’m trying to go home. I want to be with you,” a sobbing Sinclair told the crowd Friday night.
And he came by Monday.
At the time of Sinclair’s arrest, possession of marijuana was a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. He was arrested in Detroit while living as a poet and activist and co-founder of the White Panther Party. He received the maximum sentence.
The day before the concert, the Michigan Legislature voted to reduce the penalty for possession of small amounts of marijuana to a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in prison.
Having already served two and a half years in prison, Sinclair was released three days after the concert.
“For me, it’s like coming to a completely different world than the one I left in 1969,” Sinclair wrote in his collection Guitar Army, published in the early 1970s.
Mr. Sinclair continued his marijuana advocacy efforts, helping introduce a $5 fine for marijuana possession in Ann Arbor and celebrating his home state’s legalization of recreational marijuana in 2018.
“I’m a trailblazer. I was the first in Michigan to say we should legalize marijuana, and they said I was completely crazy,” he told the Detroit Free Press in 2019. . This one. I spent nearly three years in prison because of marijuana. ”
Sinclair was born in Flint in 1941. His father worked at Buick for over 40 years, and his mother was a high school teacher who quit her job to raise John and his two brothers. Sinclair grew up in Davison, a town not far from Flint, and graduated from the University of Michigan-Flint in 1964 with a degree in English literature.
Over the next 60 years, Sinclair did just about everything, dabbling in performance art, journalism, cultural and political activism. And of course poetry.
In a 1965 poem, Sinclair wrote, “You have to live it, not just say it or act it out/That’s/All/That.”
When the White Panther Party disbanded in 1971, Sinclair embraced Marxism-Leninism and founded the Rainbow People’s Party, which promoted a revolutionary struggle that was “communal, classless, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-sexist.” He formed the party and served as its leader. ..A culture of liberation. ”
Sinclair proudly and actively fought for progressive policies as part of the burgeoning “New Left” movement.
“Back then, we thought of ourselves as revolutionaries. We wanted an equal distribution of wealth. We didn’t want the richest 1 percent running everything,” he said in 2013. Of course we lost.”
Sinclair often kept a foothold in the music world, at one time based in Detroit, known for Mitch Ryder and, perhaps most famously, “Kick Out the Jams” and as a hard rock pioneer of the punk movement. He managed the quintet MC5.
Sinclair described in “Guitar World” the “crazy guerilla war we were having with the MC5.”
Sinclair’s death comes just two months after the death of MC5 co-founder Wayne Kramer.
Sinclair also promoted concerts and festivals and helped found the Detroit Artists Workshop and the Detroit Jazz Center. He taught Blues history at Wayne State University. He hosts radio shows in Detroit, New Orleans, and Amsterdam. He wrote liner notes for albums by artists such as the Isley Brothers and Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes.
Sinclair never stopped promoting and participating in marijuana use.
He helped create Hash Bash, the annual cannabis festival at the University of Michigan, and served as the state coordinator for the Michigan chapter of NORML, the national organization for marijuana law reform.
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“The only issue I’ve continued to take seriously is marijuana, because it’s so important,” he told the Free Press. “There’s been a war going on for 80 years against people like you and me. They don’t need to mess with us to get high.”
Sinclair had two daughters during his marriage to Leni Sinclair. They divorced in 1988. In 1989, Sinclair married Patricia Brown.
