Interview with John Sinclair

Interview by Dean Kuipers

From the LA City Beat

The poet, activist, and counterculture impresario on weed,
Black Panthers, and the death throes of America the Beautiful

American culture has closed up around John Sinclair. There's
just not enough freedom in it any more -- not enough free
time, not enough outrage, not enough difference between one
place and the next, not enough high culture or genuine
bohemia, not enough Sun Ra or Dylan. Anyone who didn't live
through his era -- or, more particularly, through his life
-- might not know what he's talking about. Poet, founder of
a 1960s arts collective called the Detroit Artists Workshop,
and manager of the proto-punk rock band MC5, Sinclair
co-founded the White Panther Party in 1968 after one of his
heroes, Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton, said in an
interview that the best thing white people could do to
support their struggle was to start such a thing. So he did.
And paid the price, serving a couple years of a
nine-and-a-half-to ten-year prison term for marijuana
distribution after police started swarming the group.

He was released after John Lennon and others put on a
concert in his defense, but that probably wouldn't happen
today. The White Panther Party credo of "rock 'n' roll,
dope, and fucking in the streets" is completely impossible
in a world where only millionaires are considered real
artists and Americans happily embrace domestic wiretapping
and corporate spook culture. Well, hell, it was impossible
back then, too. But the difference is: Sinclair and a
million other beautiful dreamers believed it.CityBeat: Why did you move to Amsterdam in 2003?

John Sinclair: I just can't stand it here anymore. And plus,
the positive part: I love it there. It's a kind of place
where I want to live in my old age. No one's armed. They
have a social structure where they take care of people who
don't have any place to live, if you don't have any money.
If you get sick, you can get healed. And then, they don't
care if you get high. If you've got six euros, you can get a
gram of the best fuckin' weed you ever smoked in your life.

What changed here? It's not just the war on drugs, right?

No, but it's just the downward trend that that represents.
The venality, the hypocrisy. Everybody knows the war on
drugs is a shuck. But still and all, they're all profiting
from it. Musicians and those in the record business; they
know it's all horseshit, but they're all groveling to keep
milking it. And that this guy Bush could take the election,
and then they believe anything he says, and nobody says
nothing about it, so he's got us in perpetual war. Finally,
I concluded: there's nothing for me. I'm 64 years old. I
lived in New Orleans for 12 years, and I got evicted. I
thought: Jesus Christ, this is humiliating! And I thought:
If I'm going to starve, I could starve in Amsterdam just as
easily.

But America used to hold magic for you.

I loved it here. I never even went to Europe until 1998.
This used to be a great country, man! Until Ronald Reagan
and the CIA. It's turned into CIA country. It's a country
run by fuckin' narrow-minded little guys who all want to get
millions of dollars. It's all business. Corporations. And
they have no noblesse oblige. They have no taste. They have
no humanity. America is becoming a reflection of their
shitty reality.

When you helped create the Detroit Artists Workshop, was it
a political movement?

We weren't political at first. We hated politics. I mean,
political organizing -- getting people to go to meetings and
putting together programs -- when I got out of prison, I did
that. Before that, it was just ideas, and organizing
cultural activities. We didn't have no meetings. We had
dances! [long laugh] Because what was there to talk about?
We all felt the same. Everybody hated the war. Nobody went
in the army. Everybody hated the drug laws and smoked pot
and got high. Nobody wanted to oppress black people.

Why start the White Panther Party?

We were already there and we [the MC5] had a record
contract. We'd just recorded our first album. And then we
thought: We don't want to go out there and just be another
band. We want them to know what we feel and think, so we're
going to start this White Panther Party. We'll make an
impact then! Not such a great idea, in retrospect.

Why not?

Well, because we took it in the ass! For sticking our head
above the ground. But we had tremendous feeling for the
Black Panther Party. Because they were getting fucked. They
were getting gunned down, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and
all their leadership was in prison. They were the James
Browns of real life to us. We wanted to say: We're rock 'n'
roll with the Black Panthers! Come with us! Nice people! Not
like they say! Ha!

It was an anarchist movement, basically, but you did start a
program of building institutions

Yeah. When I came out of prison, I was more of a Maoist.
From '72 to '75, in Ann Arbor, we were engaged in
institution-building. We created what we called the Tribal
Council, and we organized all the longhairs and the
anarchists and all that. Nobody knows about this. The White
Panther Party was really based on the Yippies. And we really
wanted to merge with the Yippies. But even so, we gave
speeches and organized events, we had rock 'n' roll bands,
light shows, a newspaper, houses. We had housing. We had six
houses in Detroit in 1965, plus the Artists' Workshop. We
saw that we could provide places for people to be like we
wanted to be.

Did you coordinate with folks like SDS?

We hated SDS. I mean, not hated them, we admired them for
their nerve, but they weren't anything like us. They didn't
even listen to the Beatles. They listened to folk music.
They didn't even get high. And then they took all these
things out of our book and never gave us credit for 'em, and
just as well, because they fucked it all up. Communal
fucking. Taking drugs. They all did it in this kinda
ego-driven context that they were all in. I mean, there in
Ann Arbor, with Bill Ayers and Tom Hayden and them? They
never came to the free concerts. They never came to the MC5
dances or anything. We were having a ball. We flourished.

Why do you think the war on drugs is our archetypal battle
right now?

The template of the war on drugs is what rules our society
-- certainly it rules our foreign policy. What is Iraq but a
drug bust template? You go in, you kick the door down, you
grab the people, you throw 'em in jail, you take all their
shit. They resist, you drop bombs on 'em, you have
helicopters everywhere. This thing has worked so well for
'em against us, the pot-smokers. The only progressive thing
happening right now is the medical marijuana movement.

You said the other day that the war on drugs has already
been won.

Why not? The squares won the war on drugs. Okay, you won.
You don't need to spend any more of the taxpayers' money on
this. You've pulverized us. You're number one! We're
pitiful, we're drug users, maybe, but we ain't any threat to
you anymore. You've killed us. Withdraw the troops. Send out
some humanitarian aid. Restore our crops! Send in
Halliburton! Bring the troops home. Turn 'em loose on the
terrorists.

How does your poetry work in a political context?

When Allen Ginsberg died, I realized that he played this
incredible role of talking about shit from the context of
poetry, but he talked about real shit. What matters to me is
art and music. Because to me, and this is the biggest
ugliness of today, on top of all this other, is that there's
no art. Black Americans don't know who Miles Davis was, or
Muddy Waters, or Louis Armstrong. But when Ginsberg died, I
wrote a couple pieces that deal with some social issues. God
help me, what if they ever put me on TV doing this? I'll be
assassinated. Maybe that's too extreme. They don't have to
assassinate you now. You're out, anyway. Anybody like us --
intellectuals, music lovers, flesh lovers -- real people! --
they're after us.