Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Interview with John Sinclair

2008; Michigan State University; Volume: 1; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jsr.2008.0003

1930-1197

Ann Larabee, Mathew J. Bartkowiak,

Music History and Culture

Interview with John Sinclair Ann Larabee and Mathew Bartkowiak In 1967, John Sinclair's TransLove Energies sponsored the Belle Isle "Love-in," a gathering of hippies that turned into a violent clash among the participants, biker gang members, and the Detroit police. Nearly 40 years later, on a peaceful, sunny afternoon, we sat down with John Sinclair on Belle Isle to discuss the state of radicalism, music, and the legacy of the New Left. A leading figure in groups such as the White Panther Party and manager of the MC5, Sinclair now hosts The John Sinclair Radio Show, a program recorded and podcast from Amsterdam, as well as recording poetry and touring. AL: You've been part of numerous radical organizations and collectives, such as the Detroit Artist's Workshop, Trans-Love Energy, the White Panther Party, and Rainbow Energies. Looking back over a lifetime of radical activities, what was their purpose and meaning? JS: Well, the purpose for each was different. The purpose of the Artist's Workshop was to find a place where we could practice, do our art, poetry, music, painting, photography, just with people in the neighborhood around Wayne State. They were more or less on the cutting edge of things culturally, politically, artistically, so we banded together and rented a house, held an exposition every Sunday afternoon about this time with poetry and music, jazz mostly, and we paid for this with dues from our members, about $3 a month. At that time you could get the whole house, two floors and everything, for $65 a month, so it didn't take too much to keep it going. The electric bill was $20 a month, the phone bill was $25; it was the early sixties, a different world. [End Page 129] So out of that, we were kinda committed to the beatnik-hip thing at the time, and then people started taking psychedelic drugs, peyote, mescaline, LSD, and that's when we started reaching these messianic visions. It was important to share this with others. The Artist's Workshop, the whole beatnik thing, we just kinda wrote off the vast majority of Americans, people who were really dedicated to the status quo, and so, if you didn't want to be part of that, you could operate outside of it, and not really pay it any attention. But the drug issue, that really drew the attention of the authorities, 'cause we all smoked marijuana, and that was really outré, you were outside the mainstream, way outside. Marijuana at that time was classified as a narcotic, and it was the same in the eyes of the police as heroin, or any other sort of serious drug. So the police came after us, but we still weren't worried too much about them. We were more worried about turning people on—the Timothy Leary dictum, "tune in, turn on, drop out." We were trying to offer that alternative to people who were otherwise coming out of college and about to join the corporate workforce. So we felt this was a good way of trying to turn that possibility into a scene, coming up with other possibilities for things you could do that didn't involve being part of the system. So I got into the concept of alternative institutions at this time, and that's really what we were all about for a very long time. Putting on our own events We had a rock 'n' roll band, a couple of rock 'n' roll bands. We had concerts; we had our own sound system. And we got our own printing press; we had an underground newspaper. We took over these houses in our neighborhood at $50 apiece and rented them to co-operative housing projects. Again, it was important to have a place where you could be yourself and do things that you wanted to do without being penalized. So you did them all in this compound; it was a lot easier: you didn't have a landlord or a landlady who would smell some marijuana burning and call the police, see a seed on your dresser or something. That's why we called [it] "the...