ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — John Sinclair, a poet, music producer and counterculture figure whose lengthy prison sentence after a series of small-time pot busts inspired a John Lennon song and a star-studded 1971 concert to free him, has died. He was 82.<\/p>\n
Sinclair died Tuesday morning at Detroit Receiving Hospital of congestive heart failure following an illness, his publicist Matt Lee said.<\/p>\n
Sinclair drew a 9 1\/2-to-10-year prison sentence in 1969 from Detroit Recorder’s Court Judge Robert Colombo for giving two joints to undercover officers. He served 29 months but was released a few days after Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger and others performed in front of 15,000 attendees at the University of Michigan’s Crisler Arena.<\/p>\n
“They gave him 10 for two\/What else can Judge Colombo do\/We gotta set him free,” Lennon sang in “John Sinclair,” a song the ex-Beatle wrote that immortalized its subject.<\/p>\n
Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, performed at the Dec. 10-11, 1971, “John Sinclair Freedom Rally,” held at the basketball arena in Ann Arbor. They took the stage after 3 a.m., about eight hours after the event got underway.<\/p>\n
Earlier in the night, Sinclair’s wife, Leni, had called her imprisoned husband, and the conversation between the couple and their 4-year-old daughter, Sunny, was amplified for the crowd, who chanted “Free John!”<\/p>\n
“I’m trying to get home. I want to be with you,” a sobbing Sinclair told the crowd that night, a Friday.<\/p>\n
And he was by Monday.<\/p>\n
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 who co-founded the White Panther Party. He received the maximum sentence.<\/p>\n
The day before the concert, the Michigan Legislature voted to reduce to a misdemeanor the penalty for possession of small amounts of marijuana, punishable by up to a year in prison.<\/p>\n
Because he already had served 2 1\/2 years, Sinclair was released from prison three days after the concert.<\/p>\n
“For me, it’s like coming into a whole different world from the one I left in 1969,” Sinclair wrote in “Guitar Army,” a collection of his writings that was published in the early 1970s.<\/p>\n
Sinclair continued his advocacy for marijuana, helping to usher in Ann Arbor’s token $5 fine for pot possession and celebrating when his home state legalized recreational cannabis in 2018.<\/p>\n
“I’m the pioneer. I was the first one in Michigan who said marijuana should be legal, and they said I was totally nuts,” he told the Detroit Free Press in 2019. “I’m proud to have played a part in this. I spent nearly three years in prison because of marijuana.”<\/p>\n
Sinclair was born in Flint in 1941. His father worked for Buick for over four decades and his mother was a high school teacher who gave up her job to raise John and his two siblings. 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.<\/p>\n
Over the next six-plus decades, Sinclair did a bit of everything — dabbling in performance art, journalism, cultural and political activism. And, of course, poetry.<\/p>\n
“You got to\/live it not just\/say it or\/play it that’s what this is\/all\/about,” Sinclair wrote in a 1965 poem.<\/p>\n
Upon the dissolution of the White Panther Party in 1971, Sinclair formed and chaired the Rainbow People’s Party, which embraced Marxism-Leninism and promoted the revolutionary struggle for a “communal, classless, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-sexist … culture of liberation.”<\/p>\n
Sinclair proudly and aggressively fought for progressive policies as part of the burgeoning “New Left” movement.<\/p>\n
“In those times, we considered ourselves revolutionaries,” he said in 2013. “We wanted equal distribution of wealth. We didn’t want 1 percent of the rich running everything. Of course, we lost.”<\/p>\n
Sinclair often kept a toehold in the world of music, managing for a time Mitch Ryder and perhaps most notably MC5, a Detroit-based quintet known for “Kick Out the Jams” and as a hard-rocking forerunner to the punk movement.<\/p>\n
In “Guitar World,” Sinclair described “the crazed guerilla warfare we were waging with the MC5.”<\/p>\n
Sinclair's death came only two months after MC5 co-founder Wayne Kramer's passing.<\/p>\n
Sinclair also promoted concerts and festivals and helped to establish the Detroit Artists Workshop and Detroit Jazz Center. He taught blues history at Wayne State University; hosted radio programs in Detroit, New Orleans and Amsterdam; and wrote liner notes for albums by artists including The Isley Brothers and Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes.<\/p>\n
Sinclair never stopped promoting — and partaking in — the use of marijuana.<\/p>\n
He helped create Hash Bash, a yearly pot celebration at the University of Michigan, and served as state coordinator of the Michigan chapter of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.<\/p>\n
“The only issue I’ve really kept active on is marijuana, because it’s so important,” he told the Free Press. “It’s been a continuous war for 80 years on people like you and me. They’ve got no business messing with us for getting high.”<\/p>\n
Sinclair had two daughters from his marriage to Leni Sinclair. They divorced in 1988. In 1989, Sinclair married Patricia Brown.<\/p>\n
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