John Sinclair acknowledged that the song John Lennon wrote about him and which bore his name was not the former Beatle’s finest piece of work — but he credited it with helping to get him out of jail.
Sinclair became a countercultural cause célèbre after he had been imprisoned for giving a marijuana joint to an undercover female police officer, and the lyrics of Lennon’s 1971 song calling for his release were little more than a series of simplistic slogans.
“It ain’t fair, John Sinclair/ In the stir for breathin’ air”, the song protested. “Free John now, if we can/ From the clutches of the man/ Let him be, lift the lid/ Bring him to his wife and kids.”
Lennon unveiled the song on December 10, 1971, when he joined 15,000 supporters at the John Sinclair Freedom Rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Sinclair addressed the audience from prison over a phone line hooked up to a PA system. “Say something to me,” he asked the crowd which he could not see. “Free John!” they bellowed back as one.
Stevie Wonder sang, Allen Ginsberg and Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, spoke, and the aroma of marijuana hung heavy in the air. “People were smoking joints openly and passing them around,” Keith Stroup, founder of the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, recalled. “Several people had quantities of marijuana sitting open on their laps, rolling joint after joint, to make sure everyone who attended could get high for the occasion.”
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The event was due to end at midnight but was still going at 3am when, accompanied by Yoko Ono, Lennon appeared onstage wearing a “Free John Sinclair” T-shirt for what was his first live appearance in America since the Beatles’ final tour five years earlier.
“We came here not only to help John and to spotlight what’s going on but also to say to you all that apathy isn’t it and that we can do something,” Lennon told the crowd before he and Yoko sang the song he had written especially for the rally.
The song may have been sloganistic but it was highly effective. The Michigan Supreme Court immediately announced that it was reviewing the case and Sinclair was released on bail.
“Not John’s best song but I have to thank him for getting me out of prison,” Sinclair said half a century later. “I was there for two-and-a-half years and then he came to Ann Arbor and three days later I was released.”
At a news conference Sinclair celebrated his newfound freedom by puffing on a joint, and hailed “a great victory”. He offered his thanks to Lennon, whom he phoned at the Record Plant in Manhattan, where the star was recording the song for his next album, Some Time in New York City.
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By the time the record was released, the court had overturned Sinclair’s conviction, ruling that he had been entrapped by Detroit police and that the harshness of the sentence constituted “cruel and unusual punishment”.
Lennon, who at the time was deep into his Che Guevara period, had been moved to take up Sinclair’s case by his militant political stance, which had led him to found the White Panther Party.
Named in solidarity with the Black Panther Party, Sinclair wrote in the group’s ten-point manifesto that they were promoting a “total assault on the culture by any means necessary, including rock’n’roll, dope, and f***ing in the streets”.
After his drug conviction had been quashed, Sinclair was charged with other White Panther Party members with conspiring in 1968 to bomb a CIA office in Ann Arbor, but the case was thrown out.
Disillusioned by his failure to bring down what his manifesto had called “the vicious pig power structure” of American society, he later moved to Amsterdam, where he wrote poetry, recorded albums that mixed the spoken word with jazz, and penned newspaper columns advocating the legalisation of marijuana.
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He claimed to have smoked pot every day of his life since 1962, including the two years he spent in prison. “When you’re high you do all kinds of interesting shit,” he said. “High up in the air, you look down on things and you see it better.”
By 2019 he was back in America, although he did not appreciate the gentrification his home town had undergone. “This used to be a dope area, now it’s all white people with big cars,” he complained. “I preferred it when the whores and the dope fiends were here. They had more character.”
Compensation came when Michigan legalised the sale of marijuana for recreational use. Sinclair, now confined to a wheelchair, was at the head of the queue when a dispensary in Ann Arbor, which had received the first retail licence, opened for business. He emerged triumphant, displaying for the news cameras a cache of pre-rolled joints with names such as Gorilla Glue No 9 and Forbidden Jelly, for which he had paid $160.
“Things have come full circle, haven’t they, John?” someone told him. Flashing back to his bust of exactly 50 years earlier, he replied, “It would be more full [sic] if they came and gave me back the weed they took.”
Sinclair is survived by his second wife, Patricia Brown, whom he married in 1989, and by his daughters Sunny and Celia Sinclair, from his first marriage to Leni Sinclair (née Arndt), which ended in divorce.
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John Alexander Sinclair was born in 1941 in Flint, Michigan, the son of Elsie (née Newberry), a teacher, and John Sinclair, who worked for Buick Motors.
After graduating in American literature in 1964 from the University of Michigan, he enrolled for a master’s degree at Wayne State University in Detroit, but was expelled for smoking dope.
Making the Motor City his base, he became music editor for Detroit’s underground newspaper, Fifth Estate, which continues publishing to this day, wrote poetry, organised jazz concerts and started an artists’ workshop.
In 1967 he became the manager of the proto-punk band MC5 led by Wayne Kramer (obituary, February 24, 2024) and two years later launched the White Panther Party, for whom MC5 — whom he described as a “raggedy horde of holy barbarians” — became the house band.
When he was imprisoned in 1969, it was his third bust for possession of marijuana in three years and his ten-year sentence — the severity of which seemed to be as much for his militant politics as his smoking habits — prompted immediate protests, with the Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman invading the stage at the 1969 Woodstock Festival to highlight Sinclair’s plight during the Who’s performance before he was booted off by Pete Townshend.
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After his release, Sinclair published Guitar Army, a “manual for revolt” which he had written in prison. “We are a whole new people with a whole new vision of the world, a vision which is diametrically opposed to the blind greed and control which have driven our immediate predecessors to try to gobble up the whole planet and turn it into one big supermarket,” he wrote. It was a vision from which he never wavered, his determination to fight against “The Man” undimmed to the very end.
John Sinclair, writer and counterculture activist, was born on October 2, 1941. He died of congestive heart failure on April 2, 2024, aged 80