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Transcript
Rob Johnson:
Welcome to Economics and Beyond. I’m Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
I’m delighted to be here today with a long-time mentor, a man I learned very, very much from over the course of my life and continue learning, as I’m sure I will today. This is John Sinclair from Detroit, Michigan, famous for the song John Sinclair by John Lennon, famous for the Free John Sinclair concert, famous for his social activism, famous as the manager and kind of visionary of the MC5, and many other things.
And I know there was another band called The Up that your brother managed, but you guys worked together on. But, John, we’ll cover a lot of things, but I want to welcome you and thank you for joining me, and it’s a treat for me to share with the young people in our network one of my greatest teachers. And you certainly are that.
So, we begin, as I said, the Institute for New Economic Thinking. We’re in that place where we’re looking at the economy, we’re looking at society. It’s supposed to be a tool, the market, the economy, to be a tool, but a lot of people are concerned about how it’s been functioning for many years and are acutely concerned right now. And I’ll turn to an essay that you wrote about the relationship between music and the pressures of money and finance in I believe it was 1970 or ‘71, in a book called Music and Politics that you co-edited with a man, was it Richard Levin?
And I think your chapter, the one that caught… This caught my eye when I was in high school. Motor City Music. And one of my favorite quotes came from LeRoi Jones, a man who later wrote an introduction to your book, Fattening Frogs for Snakes, which I had the pleasure of making a recording of the first part of that, the Delta Sound, with you for the Rooster Blues label. But I don’t want to go on. I want to get to LeRoi Jones, who became Amiri Baraka. He said, “This new music, it’s cooled off when it begins to reflect blank, any place, universal humbug. It is this fag or that kook, and not the fire, promise, and need for evolution into higher species. The artist’s resources must be of the strongest, purest possible caliber. They must be truest, straightest, and deepest. Where is the deepest feeling in our lives? There is the deepest and most meaningful art and life. Beware the golden touch. It will kill everything you used to love. You dig?”
That’s pretty strong stuff. High school kid, I had to fasten my seatbelt to read that paragraph. But tell me, John, you were very involved with the scene, founder of the White Panthers Party, Detroit Artists Workshop, working with many of the bands, MC5, The Stooges, and others. The Grande Ballroom. How do you see how economics affects or refracts what music could do to nourish society?
John Sinclair:
Well, you know, music made a big change in the ’60s, and then they bought it off. Since then, music hasn’t really, popular music hasn’t really advanced civilization in any way that I can see since about ‘74.
Rob Johnson:
Do you feel that it’s gotten… So there was a window of opening in the ’60s that then closed again?
John Sinclair:
‘72, really, to ‘69. Woodstock was the turning point because that’s when they realized what a market it was. How great a stooge the market for this music was. Before that they tried to pawn us off as being a little phenomenon that only weirdos liked this kind of music, and pretty soon there’s half a million people in the rain in a field, and they had to accept that this was a big thing. And then they decided, figured out how to buy it off, and we started this other great thing called underground radio, FM radio, in the late ’60s, and this played this new music once it started being recorded. We didn’t have a hit with our music until ‘67. So they started playing that around ‘63, ‘64. We didn’t have a hit until Jefferson Airplane, Somebody to Love in the spring of ‘67, and then Light My Fire by The Doors in July.
Rob Johnson:
I do remember you telling me that you grew up up near Saginaw, is that right?
John Sinclair:
I grew up in Davison, Michigan. I was born in Flint.
Rob Johnson:
Okay. And then you told me that, as is often the case, the strong stations at night, particularly when it’s cloudy, you can hear from other regions. So while there is Detroit music, I remember you telling me about hearing particularly Black rhythm and blues early on when you were curious and looking around the radio dial for things that came from elsewhere.
John Sinclair:
Yeah, there was a great station called WLAC in Nashville, Tennessee, and at night they played rhythm and blues. Each of the programs was sponsored by a mail order record shop. So you could order the records that you heard on these programs to be sent to you through the mail, which served the entire rural south, where people wanted to have records but they didn’t… You’d have to go to Jackson, Mississippi or either Memphis. You couldn’t find a record in between there, you know what I’m saying?
Rob Johnson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Sinclair:
So they had a mail order thing. And the station was power 50,000 watts. And they broadcast all over the… A lot of people I know listened to them on the east coast, in Ohio and Michigan, Illinois. You could get them in all those places. In the West it was Wolfman Jack coming over XERF in Mexico. He was the guy who had the huge spread of music. So we never heard of Wolfman Jack where I was.
Rob Johnson:
Yesterday I read a Master’s thesis by my former office partner and friend, Susan Dodes. Her husband, Jeff Jones, used to run the Dylan catalog at Sony, and now he runs the Beatles catalog. And Susan, at NYU, wrote one of the most beautiful Master’s thesis about the city of Liverpool and how the music got to there. And they called them the Cunard Yanks. They were people who worked on ships that went to New York and bought records and even bought jukeboxes and brought them back and held house parties in Liverpool, so that music, that spirituals, gospel, blues, rhythm and blues was, how do I say, touching on Liverpool because it was a global port and many of the merchants brought it over.
John Sinclair:
London also, you know. Mick Jagger and Brian Jones met on a tram or a bus and one of them was [inaudible 00:08:37]. Brian Jones was carrying a Chess ‘78. And that’s how you saw these records. Somebody brought you. That he had gotten from a sailor.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah. But particularly the powerful music that came from the African-American community fighting for its freedom, defying this… The great James Cone wrote in his book The Spirituals and the Blues, he said, “The spirituals you wrote about the afterlife because you were in chains. But the blues, that was different. You were allegedly free even though you weren’t free, so you had to defy the world in the here and now in a code.” As our artist Willie King, who I know you knew and liked, used to tell me, he said… He did this essay with me, audio essay, called The Boss Man and The Baby. He said, “When you’re playing in the juke joint, you’re not talking about the oppression of the boss man. You’re talking about the oppression of your romantic partner. And everybody that’s dancing in that club knows you’re talking about the boss man, but even the boss man’s thinking about whether he’s getting along with his wife or not, and he’s dancing too, but the joke was on him.”
I have to say, you and I worked on your movie, Twenty to Life, with Steve Gebhardt. We worked on Fattening Frogs for Snakes: Delta Sound record. But I don’t think I would have ever been in the place where I could have seen the energy and the import if I hadn’t been exposed to two things. The Rainbow Room, and this book called Guitar Army that, when I was 14 years old, I got a copy of, and the recommended readings at the back, I call that the counterculture curriculum of America. And there were things about Coltrane, there were things of spoken words, all the Flying Dutchman records, Robert Scheer, it was just stunning to me.
Through college and through graduate school, I kept going back to it and finding more and more and more. And you gave us that roadmap.
John Sinclair:
We called that the White Panther reading and listening list.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it was, how would I say, you had that little purple button with the white panther on it, music is revolution, and you gave us a taste of it with Sun Ra and Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders and John Coltrane, and I did see in your essay you were talking about, I think it was how beautiful and authentic the MC5 was, and you said it was natural. “The MC5 related so strongly at one time to the music of Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Trane, Pharoah Sanders, because they were to rock and roll what those brothers are to jazz music, the extension into the post-Western future.” But then you quote, saying that was LeRoi Jones’ term. The post-Western future.
I have to tell you a story. My landlord in the West Village at one point was Elliot Hoffman, who was a lawyer in music, and he represented Coltrane, Stan Getz, Eubie Blake, and Pete Townshend and The Who. And I used to go down and hear his war stories late in his life, and he said that Coltrane, on his last tour in Japan, Elliot and his wife, Nancy, went with them. And he said they played, I believe it was 16 events in 17 days, it was just before Coltrane was clearly diagnosed with the cancer of the liver. And he died the next year. But in this trip on Japan, Elliot told me the story about one night, Coltrane came up to him and said, “We cannot be abiding by the Western canon of music. We have to go, when I look at the Black Panthers, when I look at all of the oppression, we have to go to a new place.” And he’d been reaching out to Ravi Shankar and Indian music and Eastern tonality, as he called it.
John Sinclair:
He was very close in New York City with Yusef Lateef and Olatunji, and the three of them got together and they were going to open a joint together, but then Coltrane died.
Rob Johnson:
But what Elliot told me was at dinner in Japan, he said, “We have to get ready for our concert, and you and your wife, I love you, you’ll always be my lawyer and my companion, but you have to sit at a different table because we’re trying to transcend White culture. We can’t be, even unconsciously, deferential. Would you mind?” And he’d apologize before and after every meal that they would sit apart. It was only the meal that was just before the concert. But they were so energized. And when I look at that little quote, the extension into the post-Western present future, that’s where those guys were going, and that’s why it sounds like to me, from the turbulence and the dirt and the tension of Detroit, that’s where you envisioned in that essay, that’s where the MC5 was headed.
John Sinclair:
Oh, yeah. Well, they were our mentors. We followed them. They were trying to figure out a way to do what they felt within the context of the music hall environment that existed. We followed that approach.
Rob Johnson:
How did you come across the MC5? How did you meet them?
John Sinclair:
Well, I met them because they had moved into our neighborhood around Wayne State. Some were living over on Canfield between Second and Third. Some were living on Prentice and Third. Anyway, they were around the neighborhood. I was in the Detroit House of Corrections in 1966 for six months for marijuana possession. I was released on August fifth. The next day they had a big welcome home party for me called the Festival of People, and friends of mine came from all over. We were very close friends. And so then all the poets and musicians, for hours and hours, and this band that had moved into the neighborhood called the MC5, they wanted to play, too. And so they were there and I met them, and then they went on and I retired about one or two o’clock to be with my wife and catch up on my sex life, and the music kept on going, and about four o’clock the MC5 went on.
And they were so loud in this little bitty place that we had at [inaudible 00:16:09], that my wife Leni at the time got up and went downstairs and says, “Too loud. We can’t afford to be raided.” So we started off on kind of a bad foot, but then I went and saw them at the Michigan State Fair, that was ‘66. They played there, and Jerry Goodwin, do you remember him? [crosstalk 00:16:43] Keener? Great, good guy. He was a disc jockey. And in those days, the disc jockey hops would have bands as guests, but they would lip sync their record. Very rarely would you have a live performance by a local band unless it was in a teen club.
So I saw the MC5, they played live at the Michigan State, and they were just fucking killer. They were just unbelievably great. And so I became a huge fan, and I never missed a chance to hear them. And then a month later they opened the Grande Ballroom.
Rob Johnson:
When you say they opened, was that the beginning of the Grande Ballroom? That it was opened and they were one of the first acts there, if not the first? Wow.
John Sinclair:
They were the house band.
Rob Johnson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Sinclair:
They played at least once a week. They opened Friday and Saturday nights. They’d play there either the Friday or Saturday. If they had another gig they wouldn’t play there, they would play the other gig, but…
Rob Johnson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I remember people like The Who and Cream and other famous bands also played at the Grande Ballroom before too long.
John Sinclair:
That was starting the next year.
Rob Johnson:
The next year. I see. Was that in part because they were inspired by the MC5?
John Sinclair:
The first year it was all bands from Detroit and Michigan.
Rob Johnson:
Hmm. Hmm.
John Sinclair:
From October until September or August. August ‘67 the Grateful Dead came on their first tour.
Rob Johnson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Sinclair:
And they were the first ones to come to the Grande. And then Russ, I don’t know, somehow became friends with some English people, and so he brought all the English groups that were breaking in England who nobody had ever heard of here. So he could pay them 500 bucks or something, and an airline ticket. And they would come and play the Grande. I’m talking about the Small Faces and Jeff Beck Group, The Who. The Who didn’t have a hit record out when we had The Who. You know what I’m saying? He brought people who were musically advanced but nobody… They didn’t have hit records. It wasn’t based on hit records, let me put it bluntly. It was based on I heard this band was really good.
Rob Johnson:
And what was your experience with trying to take them out of Detroit? Like you said in this essay that I’ve been quoting, “They reflected, organically, Detroit.” But how were they received in San Francisco or Los Angeles or other places?
John Sinclair:
They hated us in San Francisco, the regular hippies, they hated them. But other people really liked them, so… And Bill Graham blackmailed us.
Rob Johnson:
Is that right?
John Sinclair:
Wouldn’t let us play the Fillmore. Even in the benefit. So we played in Golden Gate Park, and people went nuts out there. And they really loved us in Berkeley. They were crazy about us in Berkeley.
Rob Johnson:
Well, I enjoyed so much your writing in this essay, the one I mentioned that I read in Motor City Music, how you contrasted the environments, the contexts in which the music was created. The difference between the relationship between what you might call concertgoers, band members, and law enforcement was very, very marked, and it reflected in the edginess of that Detroit music, and it was really quite… You really shared with us that music wasn’t just some concoction in a vacuum for a market, and the contrast between San Francisco and Detroit, the lifestyle… They’re within the same country, but they might have been on different planets.
John Sinclair:
But the impetus was the same. The hippies in San Francisco started playing this music because it reflected and expressed the way they felt and thought. There was no market for it. They played it because this was what they wanted to do. The Airplane. Big Brother and the Holding Company. Country Joe and the Fish. Quicksilver. All of these bands. None of them had a record contract. They weren’t out to make millions of dollars. They wanted to play in a dance hall where people that looked like them and got high like them could dance. And that’s what they did. And then it caught on because it was so popular, it was so much fun. Of course, the drugs helped, too, you know?
Rob Johnson:
I remember in this essay you threw a little elbow at the concert promoters, too, saying that they started putting people 15 dollars in a seat because they could pack more people in and make more money, but what were you doing not being able to dance? Why did they use the money capture of seated concerts rather than what you might call an open general admission ballroom?
John Sinclair:
Festival seating, they called it.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah.
John Sinclair:
No chairs.
Rob Johnson:
So when you look at now, I guess one of the reasons I reached out to you, John, is that I don’t know really anyone that’s not quite concerned if not distressed right now about the pandemic, about the social relations, about the climate challenges and dangers, about the risk of nuclear war that people like Daniel Ellsberg talk about as tension between the US and China and Russia heats up again. But I’ve often viewed music, because of my focus on the blues, as like this emission. It’s a smoke signal that emanates from the spirit of people as to what is going on. Do you see this as a time where musicians will be called to action again and step up and what you might call share with us that poetic truth that gives us some guidance? Or do you think that it’s been swamped by the commerce system? Is it able to provide that?
John Sinclair:
I think that they don’t know what it is. You have more artists like this… All this stuff is driven by the individual. In the 60s, the musical breakthrough was driven by individuals who were motivated by what was going on inside of them. Seekers of truth or readers or people who went to art galleries, they painted. People who knew who Miles Davis was.
Rob Johnson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Sinclair:
You know. They got people today, they call them hipsters, they don’t know who Miles Davis was. Miles Davis was like god of hipsters. It’s like you’re saying you were a Christian and not knowing who Jesus Christ was. You know?
Rob Johnson:
I’m proud to say I have a friend who really loves you and your work who called me last night from Detroit to tell me he’s reading Eric Nisenson’s book about the making of Kind of Blue. So there are some people still seeking out the beautiful insights that Miles Davis shared with us.
John Sinclair:
Who was the guy that wrote that book? It’s not Eric Nisenson. I know this guy, he’s from Cincinnati. He wrote the book on A Love Supreme, he wrote the history of Impulse Records.
Rob Johnson:
Is that Ashley Kahn? Yeah, I know him. I know him. Yeah.
John Sinclair:
I like him. I haven’t seen him in about five or six years, but quoted by Ashley in his book about A Love Supreme, when he explained that Impulse, when they devised the gatefold records as their signature, so we liked the gatefold records, and mostly because you could clean your joints on these gatefold records when you used to have seeds. They used to have seeds in your weed. You’d buy an ounce of weed and it’d be full of seeds. So you had to take your Impulse records and dump the weed up here and the seeds would all roll down.
Rob Johnson:
I want to bridge to something that’s a very important part of you, because we’ve been focusing on music, and we interacted a lot in that regard, but there’s another dimension of arts where you’ve had a very profound impact, and you just crossed it when talking about Coltrane, and that’s poetry. You were a friend of Allen Ginsberg, I know, he came to the Free John Sinclair concert, and you have written books. Yes. Songs of Praise about Coltrane. Thelonious: A Book of Monk. All kinds of… Well, Fattening Frogs for Snakes. All kinds of things where you’ve gone with the poetic. And I ordered a book that came in the mail today. It’s by a man named John Fox. It’s called Finding What You Didn’t Lose: Expressing Truth and Creativity Through Poem-Making. And I thought of you when I ordered that book last… I ordered it the other night after watching you on the David Marsh show, and it came tonight. I got it out of the mailbox half an hour before we started.
But this notion of awakening what you might call the poetic dimension, people can learn a lot from you. There’s audio things… But when you were talking about Coltrane just now, it brought into my mind, I think it’s on Songs of Praise, I Talk With Spirits, which was a poem which really got to the essence of him, like when I read the liner notes to A Love Supreme about his reverence for the transformations of his own life and… But tell me a little bit, how did you become inspired to be a poet?
John Sinclair:
Oh, I don’t know. I was in college and they turned me on to Howl by Allen Ginsberg, and Pictures of the Gone World by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In the little Pocket Poets edition. It was in 1959, in the fall, when I started college.
Rob Johnson:
Wow.
John Sinclair:
And they just fit in, and really, I read On the Road by Jack Kerouac when it was released. I turned 16 the next month after it was released.
Rob Johnson:
Yes.
John Sinclair:
And it was a bestselling book. I didn’t really read his poetry. I’ve never really been a huge fan of his poetry, but his prose I’m a fucking maniac about. And then he led me down, and I read Howl, and then that was it. Before that you didn’t want to have anything to do with poetry.
Rob Johnson:
On your show, you have a program on Radio Free Amsterdam online, do you do poetry sessions as well as musical sessions, or has that primarily been devoted to music?
John Sinclair:
Well, it’s primarily devoted to music. I play poetry and other… I got 12 disc jockeys. I put up two hours of original programming every day. I’m in my 16th year.
Rob Johnson:
Wow. So you’ve got stamina.
John Sinclair:
I put it on the 24/7 stream, and I learn music that I want to hear. There’s no bad music. There’s no commercials. There’s no news. There’s no spots. Just disc jockeys telling you what they play. And then there’s some poetry and there’s some conversation. I got a couple shows that are done by weirdos and they put a lot of weird shit on it, you know? But I think that’s good. How else is somebody going to hear some weird shit? It’s not going to be on TV. It’s not even going to be on YouTube.
Rob Johnson:
Nice. Nice. And you’re… In your own inspiration, who are the poets that move you? I know we talked just momentarily about Allen Ginsberg, but who’s your pantheon of poets that young people who are watching this might be turned on.
John Sinclair:
Oh, I’d say Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who just died at the age of 101, Ferlinghetti. My personal mentor, Charles Olson.
Rob Johnson:
Oh, wow, yeah.
John Sinclair:
Robert Creeley. Robert Creeley. Amiri Baraka. Those were my main people. And then after that Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Phil Whalen. All the San Francisco poets.
Rob Johnson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Sinclair:
Gregory Corso and John Wieners and Humphrey and those guys.
Rob Johnson:
I grew up as the son of a sailor on Lake St. Clair and around the Great Lakes and ended up traveling all over the world, so Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner got under my skin, too. And that’s a long one, and that one has, that portends or foreshadows a lot of problems between the relationship of humans to environment, because the killing the albatross and destroying the wind in the southern seas, and the ancient mariner wearing that burden is not too far from some of the concerns people have today in the realm of climate. But in the musical realm, that book Songs of Praise was reverent. It was poetic but reverent about Coltrane.
John Sinclair:
He was God to me when I was a kid.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Well, I have, I treasure in my office at home, I have two pictures. One is with you, and it’s… One of them is you and John Coltrane in Detroit that your former partner Leni took, and another is Coltrane onstage with Thelonious Monk at Cobo Hall in 1966, I guess a snowstorm. And Leni took that one, too.
John Sinclair:
It was on the same night.
Rob Johnson:
Is that right? Wow.
John Sinclair:
Yeah, Coltrane came here for a concert and Monk’s group was on the bill, and they had a terrible snowstorm on the east coast, and the planes couldn’t fly out. Trane had taken the train from Philadelphia, and his wife and his band. And Monk had got to Detroit somehow without his band.
Rob Johnson:
Hmm.
John Sinclair:
Wait, it’s the other way around. Monk had his band, and Coltrane had to use Monk’s rhythm section.
Rob Johnson:
Wow. Wow.
John Sinclair:
Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison missed the train because of the snow. Yeah, so they played together. I saw that. I was there, and we had just published the first issue of our paper called Guerrilla, me and a guy called Allen Van Newkirk made that.
Rob Johnson:
And that poetry that I got a recorded… I got two discs from you at one point while we were working on your film, Twenty to Life. One was called Fly Right, and the other was The Book of Monk Volume One.
John Sinclair:
Fly Right never came out.
Rob Johnson:
I’m sorry, say again?
John Sinclair:
Fly Right never came out.
Rob Johnson:
Is that right? Oh, okay.
John Sinclair:
It was my first recording project that I did with Ed Moss out of Cincinnati, piano player. Gebhardt produced it. We couldn’t get the OK of the Monk estate to use his songs. And I cut that album again with a piano player .
Rob Johnson:
Ah. Let me ask you how you see the politics of today. Do you see the tumult of the last year, are you hopeful? Are you terrified? Where are you seeing where we’re…
John Sinclair:
I’ve been terrified all my life, and it’s even worse today.
Rob Johnson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Sinclair:
If we wouldn’t have elected Joe Biden president, I’d really be flipped out. I don’t know how we lived through the four years of that asshole, but we did it. We made it.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah, many people are disturbed.
John Sinclair:
I have hope that this guy will be able to put in the stuff that Trump took out. If we get back to zero of Obama that will be a good thing.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah.
John Sinclair:
But Obama, I was still thrilled to have a Black president, but he was very conservative.
Rob Johnson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Sinclair:
You’d almost have to call him a conservative Democrat.
Rob Johnson:
Well, at one time in your life, I read an essay yesterday in preparing for this again, you were at Jackson State Prison, and I believe Jerry Rubin and John and Yoko and Archie Shepp and Stevie Wonder and all kinds of people came, and you talked in this interview that I read, I think it was an Ann Arbor newspaper, about how you had gotten to using your call to your wife, your weekly call, and you got to speak for the Free John Sinclair concert, and then you were terrified that they would come down on you for having done that. But how did it feel to have all of these people and all of these artists come to your side? To come to your assistance and work, what you might call create a kind of meta-pressure and activism which involved changing the rules about penalties for the use of marijuana, and you got out of prison I think three days after that concert.
Rob Johnson:
But did that… I remember you once told me that you thought that the changes in the legislature predated the concert. But nonetheless, you could see people rising to your side. Can we imagine now a public rising to address some of these major concerns in a way that we might call is an energy other than money that starts to push things in a healthier direction?
John Sinclair:
Well, you got the Black Lives Matter that’s trying to deal with the police slaughter of innocent citizens. But Black Lives Matter is like a kindergarten version of the Black Panther Party. So it’s really a regression from our day. I’m glad to see them doing something. It’s so hard to get them to do anything for longer than a TV program. They had their great thing called Occupy. And I got excited about that, and I took part in some of them. I was in New York, London, I did things with Occupy Detroit. But then after six months they completely disappeared. Completely.
Rob Johnson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Sinclair:
And that’s what I’m wondering what’s going to happen. When they started marching in the streets after they killed the Black people, I thought, well, this is something that’s interesting for a few days, but they’re still doing it. So I’m… You got to keep doing it. It’s a lifetime issue. You’re talking about your life and the quality of your life and what they’re going to make available to other citizens. It’s as serious as shit that there is. What are they going to do next? What are they going to let us do? What are we going to come up with as an idea of what we should do? These are the things that we have to have our mind open to, I believe.
Rob Johnson:
I know you have children. It’s daunting being a parent now.
John Sinclair:
My daughter Sunny turns 54 today.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah, but handing them all off in the world of climate change and domestic turmoil doesn’t feel good. We got to keep, the older generation has to keep fighting for this.
John Sinclair:
Because of things like this and the internet. But really they just use it for trivia for the most part. And then the problem with the TV is that they have you surrounded with that little square TV set, now you got one that you carry around in your hand. It’s with you at all times. So it’s hard to escape. They got them locked in to this fucking world of commerce and consumption and doing what they say when they say it. You got to break through that. If you don’t it’s just going to get worse. I can’t see, it’s got to… You got to break… I don’t have the least bit of optimism.
Rob Johnson:
Well, both, how would I say, both you and I, I was more a child, but we lived in that cauldron called Detroit. And I often tell people that I felt like, as a young person, I watched the United States divorce Detroit, that after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act there wasn’t going to be assistance to a Black governed or Black majority city in the north because southern Democrats were terrified. And there was all the turmoil related to the transformation of the auto industry and the segregation and everything else, not to mention the Vietnam War, obviously the Port Huron Statement came from the neighborhood not far away.
But that cauldron called Detroit was almost like a canary in the coal mine for the things that are stressing globalized America in many, many places now. And we each endured a great deal of pain and what we call diseases of despair among many people whose lives were crushed. And, yeah. And so I guess when I listen to you saying perhaps you’re not optimistic, we lived in a very unresponsive to our distress world for quite some time, and you were at the vanguard of that. I was trying to figure out… I remember when I first went into a economics class, I wasn’t trying to be a smart aleck, I thought at the time I was going to be a boat designer. And the guy started talking about equilibrium. And I put my hand up and I said, “Isn’t that like assuming a happy ending?” I had no basis from being in Detroit for thinking that things went to an equilibrium.
John Sinclair:
True that.
Rob Johnson:
So is there any music, film, or poetry on the horizon, meaning recently created, that you find inspiring that you’d point people toward?
John Sinclair:
I listen to a lot of… Like I said, I got 12 disc jockeys. They’re like the guy that does the blues show on Sunday nights on the college station for the last 30 years. I got him. Cary Wolfson. I’ve got Bruce Pingree of New Hampshire. He’s been doing this 35, 40 years.
Rob Johnson:
Wow. Wow.
John Sinclair:
Disc jockeys like Leslie Keros out of Chicago.
Rob Johnson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Does Steve Cushing still do Blues Before Sunrise? That…
John Sinclair:
She’s on the same station with him.
Rob Johnson:
I see. I see.
John Sinclair:
For over six hours. Five hours.
Rob Johnson:
Nice. So you’re keeping the flame alive for all of us that can find our way to get a taste, huh?
John Sinclair:
They all keep up with all the stuff that comes out. So I hear a lot of recent releases, and I like them. There’s a lot of it I like. There’s no Muddy Waters or John Coltrane, but there’s interesting music.
Rob Johnson:
Well, my understanding, from my recollection, is that you and Bob Dylan were born in the same year, and you’re both approaching a major birthday that we can celebrate, I believe in your case in October. Bob Dylan is the 24th of this month.
John Sinclair:
He is, yeah. Oh, this month?
Rob Johnson:
Yeah, he’s 24th of May. But I remember being at some of your birthday parties and seeing all kinds of people like Don Was and Bettye LaVette and everybody celebrating that vitality that you bring in that intersection between arts, meaning poetry and music, and politics, and the inspiration. And I’m sure this year it’s going to be an excellent party again.
John Sinclair:
I’ll be 80.
Rob Johnson:
Do you get back to New Orleans at all?
John Sinclair:
Well, I haven’t since the pandemic, you know.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah, I remember you used to run a beautiful radio show at WWOZ, and you were, when I’d come down there around the time we were making Fattening Frogs for Snakes together, and New Orleans was a stirred up place.
John Sinclair:
I don’t know if I told you, but they’re bringing out a box set of four vinyl albums.
Rob Johnson:
Oh, is that right?
John Sinclair:
So I’m really… This is the culmination of my life’s work.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. So I think you should… I’m going to challenge you to write an introduction to that, and I’ll call it letters to a young activist and artist. Like Rumi’s Letters to a Young Poet. And keep giving us instruction, John. Keep giving us the… Give us, yes, the insight, but the example. Your unrelenting vitality. Here, almost 80 years old. We all have to have some of that.
John Sinclair:
I don’t quit. But when I talk to young people I have one preachment, and that is to say you have to take the vow of poverty to be an artist in today’s world.
Rob Johnson:
Hmm.
John Sinclair:
You could get paid. But that’s not going to be a… That’s not really a possibility. You’re not going to get paid, so you got to do this out of the power of what’s going on inside of you.
Rob Johnson:
Yes.
John Sinclair:
And since you aren’t going to get paid, you can do or say whatever you want to.
Rob Johnson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Sinclair:
You don’t have to consider the marketplace. And this is what gives you artistic freedom. But you just have to figure out what you want to do, you got to figure out how to do it, and then you got to go ahead and do it [inaudible 00:45:30].
Rob Johnson:
A few years back, around I think it was 2012, I gave a speech to a group of people who were activists because I had worked in the US Senate and I’d been in the music business. It was a group called Rock the Vote. A lady named Erin Potts organized it at the time. She now lives in New Orleans but was in the Bay Area at that time. And after I gave my talk they had a kind of buffet, and a number of the artists came up to me. Some of them were famous names, and they said, “Well, we can’t take on all those kinds of issues in motivating our audience to come out for politics, because…” Like the one that was mentioned twice to me was net neutrality. “Verizon sponsors my tour. I can’t possibly take on that issue.” And you could feel the kind of things that you taught me when I read this music and politics, all those constraints were right there. They were right there.
John Sinclair:
It’s all right up in your face at all times. You can make a record that sounds like what you want it to sound like, or you can try and make one that sounds like what you think somebody’s going to buy. Those are the two.
Rob Johnson:
That’s a different mission structure.
John Sinclair:
That they were going to buy it, it might be worthwhile to sacrifice your artistic integrity. But you’re never sure what they’re going to buy. And basically they’re going to buy something that the record company pays somebody 250,000 dollars to promote to the radio stations.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Well, I have to say, and you know this from our past conversations, I took great pleasure in trying to help that Aretha Franklin film, Amazing Grace, reach an audience, because that’s when she went back to her roots and broke away from what I’ll call the commodity game and really put some art out there for us. And what a spectacular talent she was. I had somebody once ask me…
John Sinclair:
I was riding down the Lodge freeway or one of these freeways, 75, they named it Aretha Franklin. I forget which one, but it had a sign saying Aretha Franklin. It was named for her. You know, how they used to do for the guys from the war? For the war heroes, and now they had Aretha Franklin.
Rob Johnson:
Oh, they named one after her. Oh. Oh, that’s outstanding. Nice. Well, that just… How would I say? She was such a beacon. Such a beacon. And I actually, I was mentioning to you earlier, I read this beautiful Master’s thesis about Liverpool, and there was a Rodgers and Hammerstein song called You’ll Never Walk Alone that became the anthem of the people at sports games in Liverpool. And when I came back home I went to search, because Frank Sinatra, what was it, Gerry and the Pacemakers, I think, did the version that was played at the football stadium. But Sinatra did one, Elvis did one, everything else. And then I came across, in that Amazing Grace session, Aretha Franklin did a version of You’ll Never Walk Alone. And geez, oh, did she take it to another place. And I was reminded once when somebody asked me, I was on a stage, about the film. And they asked me was I particularly religious. And I said, “Well, not… My mother was a Scottish Presbyterian, but I think my dad was kind of an atheist, and…”
Rob Johnson:
But I said, “But there was this notion of music in my house that felt like something called the holy spirit.” And the person in the audience said, “Well, what do you mean?” I said, “I mean James Brown’s feet, Bob Dylan’s lyrics, Jimmy Hendrix’s guitar, Aretha’s voice, and the social conscience in the compositions of Marvin Gaye. Those all feel like the holy spirit to me.”
John Sinclair:
Amen.
Rob Johnson:
That was all around us there in Detroit and beyond. But I think, John, once again, how would I say? I wanted to get together with you because I think you have so much to share. I want to turn all my 15,000 young scholars initiative on to the insights and the works that you’ve provided us. But I also want to thank you for the way you’ve been a teacher to me throughout my life and how grateful I am for all that you’ve imparted so that when you say you tell the young people, “What are you going to be? Where are you going to go? You got to pick,” like you were talking about the artists and stuff, you’re an echo that’s in my mind every day of my life from the example you set. So thank you for your guidance.
John Sinclair:
Well, I appreciate it. And I appreciate you having to help me with my foundation. I’m sitting on my foundation, hoping that it will help my works live on.
Rob Johnson:
They will. I’m sure of that.
John Sinclair:
All my writings, my records, all my recordings, I’m giving it all to the foundation.
Rob Johnson:
Well, thanks for being here today. I’ll maybe, around the time of your birthday, I’ll come back and we’ll do another episode right on the cusp of that party, we’ll do a little virtual celebration. And I’ll try to get on a place and get to Detroit for the party myself.
John Sinclair:
Well, that’d be good. I’d love to see you.
Rob Johnson:
Me too. Thanks.
John Sinclair:
Thanks, Rob.
Rob Johnson:
And check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at ineteconomics.org.
