John Sinclair, Blues Poet, at 82

 

Acme Oyster House - Circa 1996

[APRIL 4, 2024] - White Panther Party Activist, jazz writer, MC5 band manager and poet John Sinclair, famously and unfairly imprisoned in 1969 for marijuana use, died Tuesday in Detroit. He was 82.

His cause, as potently sung in John Lennon’s It Aint Fair John Sinclair [in the stir for breathing air] became an important rally point in the fight to legalize pot.

His influence was also important in helping to create a politically radical school of high-powered rock n roll. That notwithstanding, he also diligently promoted a school of writing that could be called Blues Poetry, starting in the 1960s. 

In the '80s Sinclair moved to New Orleans, started doing a radio show, and started writing and performing poetry, mostly about blues. 

His masterwork Fattening Frogs for Snakes - Delta Sound Suite," took the lives of the 20th Century American blues artists and applied a precisely descriptive and musical poetical form to its representation. Sinclair’s writings include the  magically and sympathetically presented blues line in the service of lyric telling of the blues story. 

Among these poems is the tale of Roosevelt Sykes – a blues piano master explaining the blues artist’s odd distancing from the phenomenon of blues itself; the lonesome tale of Tommy Johnson's pine-alcohol-driven melancholy; Bubba White's encounter with a knife; and, a chilling portrayal of the final fatal poisoning of Robert Johnson.

Among those influencing Sinclair was Robert Palmer, NYTimes critic and author of Deep Blues. Palmer’s book brought Sinclair back to poetry writing in the 1980s, after tumultuous years in a counter culture  spotlight. He saw that the poetry of the bluesmen’s conversational speechd was just as vivid as their music. Fugs’ Ed Sanders, who advocated Investigative Poetry, was also a major influence on Sinclair’s approach to historically-aware poetry.

Most compelling in influence, however, was the blues line as magnified in the acme work of artists such as Robert Johnson, Chester Burnett, John Lee Hooker, and McKinley Morganfield. This, and the music of jazz masters like John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, Sinclair worked to capture in a prosaic verse.

Sinclair's blues poetics expanded on the work of Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka and others.

Sinclair recordings included Underground Issues, Full Moon Night [with this Blues Scholars], Full Circle [with this Blues Scholars, featuring Wayne Kramer], Steady Rollin Man [with his Boston Blues Scholars], and others. He travelled and performed regularly, and operated Big Chief productions, a theatrical concern.

Personally, I came to know of John Sinclair through college mates and blues buddies Harry Duncan and Paul DeMark. Sinclair heard of my book, ‘Sunnyland Blues’ through Harry, we shared correspondence and met.

He gained no mere notoriety in the '60s and '70s as the chairman of the White Panthers party and as manager of the MC5, followed by a famous interment in Michigan prison for pot possession. He travelled the world, and was consistently interviewed on these matters. But his first calling as a poet was what we discussed. I found him to be a truly endearing and incredibly insightful poet and friend. Ride on, John Sinclair, ride on. - By Jack Vaughan

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I spoke on a porch in Boston with John Sinclair with tape recorder rolling haphazardly one cool October eve in 1998. The next time he came to town (September 1999) we picked up the conversation, meeting in the backroom of a local pub. Most of that conversation follows .. 

Q:John, do you remember when you first started to hear blues music?

A: Well, I started listening to blues when I was a kid in the '50s. Blues and R&B on the stations I listened to were all the same thing. Jazz was different. I grew up listening to those records by Muddy Waters, Little Walter and Sonnyboy, Howlin Wolf. Out of Flint, Mich. in a little town north of Detroit, the vehiclecity. There was a guy named Ernie Durham, the Frantic One. Frantic Ernie D. He was my idol when I was 11-, 12-, 13-, 14-, years old.

WBBC in Flint was a station that had a lot of different kinds of stuff on it. Ernie Durham was on there and he was definitely black. But he'd be followed by a hillbilly show. And both of them would be pre-empted for the Detroit Red Wings broadcast. 'Lawrence Delvecchiho crosses the blue line' I'm not a hockey fan at all but I can remember laying in bed at night and listening to that radio which was where I got my life from. I remember lying in bed at night when I was a kid listening to this shit and hoping it would be over before Ernie's time was up, so he could come back on after the game y'know ?

One time I was visiting my grandmother down outside of Detroit. In the summertime y'know you stay with your grandmother for a couple of weeks. I was watching the Ed McKensie Dance Party on the local station on a little 9-inch screen and I saw Andre Williams. And he came on and did Going Down to Tijuana, and he had on a turban. He had on a zebra-striped zoot suit. He was a tall man and the coat to his zoot suit of course went to his knees. And the trousers had the high rise and came up right in the sternum.

He was the wildest thing I'd ever seen in my life. And I'd been listening to his music but I didn't really have any idea what it looked like. Three weeks ago I had a chance to spend an entire evening hanging out with Andre Williams and I got to tell him what he had done to warp my life. Cause I was never the same after the day I saw him on there. And I said Man this is what this shit looks like. Goddamn I wanta be there.

Q: The guy who was different that I remember seeing on TV was Jackie Wilson.

A: Oh, yeah! I saw Jackie Wilson live, man, when Lonely Teardrops was out. Jackie Wilson was the most exciting act I have ever, ever seen in my life. I can see the show I saw in 1958 in my head just like I was there last night. He was the greatest entertainer I have ever known. He was the greatest from Detroit! Ernine D. would bring him down to Flint. He was playing the hell out of his records. So he'd make him come down and do a show at the Flint Armory or the Flint IMA Auditorium.

Q:I think I heard a tape of him performing--I think it was around here in New Bedford or Brockton, Mass-not long before he had his stroke on stage. It sounded like he was in top form even though it was just about over.*

A: He did? Wow. Well that's the ultimate show business story. Fabulous man. I can see some of the moves he had.

Q: He used to rip his shirt off. On Bandstand that was way out.

A: When I saw him he used to let them rip the shirt off. When you'd go to a Jackie Wilson show at the IMA Auditorium in Flint, Michigan in 1958 -- I was 16 -- first off, it would be like what they call now festival seating. Open floor.

And pressed to the stage 20 or 30 deep were the finest black women you ever could possibly imagine seeing in your life all dressed up in the most fantastic finery, beautifully made up hair, beautifully done, and they were just pressed in trying to get close to Jackie Wilson. Twenty deep across the hall probably 400, 500 women. Oooooh man, I'm 16-years-old watching this and my mind is aflame.

He had jackets I learned that were tear-away. And he went let them rip his clothes off, his jacket and shirt.

He'd be singing a ballad, like Too Be Loved, or something like that. He'd be on his knees on the lip of the stage, he'd be singing this song, and the beautiful process. And he'd be singing this song and these women would just be clawing at him, and tearing his clothes to shreds. And he wouldn't pay the slightest bit of attention to them.

Where I came from nothing like that could ever happen. It was just way beyond the cultural matrix I grew up in. Everything about this music really was just so far beyond that. It seemed to me so much more intelligent and colorful, and full of energy and thought and feelings.

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*From a bio of Jackie Wilson in which Anthony John Douglas writes of Jackie Wilson's death (alluded to in John Sinclair interview):

"In September, 1975 Jackie was on stage at the Cherry Hill Casino, New Jersey, performing "Lonely Teardrops" and was on his knees when he was stricken by a heart attack. Dick Clark who headed the Rock 'n' Roll Revue revival tour, recalls him crashing backward and striking his head."

Although he emerged from a full coma, he suffered brain damage and did not reportedly speak in his last nine [all hospitalized] years. He died in 1984.

These tributary remarks include material from my blog: MoonTravellerHerald.blogspot.com