Tag Archives for John Sinclair

HOW LOUD WERE THE MC5 REALLY? Wayne Kramer, John Sinclair, Ted Nugent and Leigh Stephens (Blue Cheer) weigh in (Arthur, 2004)

“FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDBACK”

The MC5 were unbelievably intense live. They were also very, very loud (but not as loud as Blue Cheer). Wayne Kramer, John Sinclair, Ted Nugent and Leigh Stephens of Blue Cheer offer testimony to Jay Babcock.

Originally published in Arthur No. 9 (March 2004)

“Loudness was a big part of the concept,” says MC5 manager/chief theorist John Sinclair. “Our concept, as I remember, was that if you gave yourself up to the music, then the loudness wouldn’t just go through your EARS, it would go through your entire body. And if you were to immerse yourself in the sound, it wouldn’t hurt you: it would just THRILL you…

“But you could never get loud enough with those damn sound systems! It was always tough for us. You didn’t use the amplification on the amps in those days: you just amplified the singer. You didn’t mic the drums, you didn’t mic the guitar cabinets. Club owners, show promoters, teen center directors? They HATED it. The authorities hated it. They couldn’t understand why it had to be so loud. They would pull the power, threaten not to pay.”

Eventually the MC5 gained a following that allowed them to play larger local venues where they could do their thing better. Louder.

“The MC5 was the first band in Detroit to get their hands on the new line of Vox amps from England, these Super-Beetle amplifiers,” remembers Wayne Kramer, one of the MC5’s two guitarists. “They were real 100-watts amplifiers: true power. They had these gigantic speaker cabinets with four twelve-inch speakers and two metal high-frequency horns in them. No one had ever heard anything this loud before. We ratcheted the level up, we raised the bar considerably. This was when the MC5 was leaving the scale of a club band, a teen dance band, a local community center gig band, and going up to the next level, where we were playing the Grande Ballroom. That was the first place we could play them loud enough to get enough to get a good tone and didn’t clear the room. So the next step was the Marshall amplifiers, and they were, I don’t know how you quantify it, but they were twice as loud. You had twice as much speaker all of a sudden, and an even more powerful amplifier, so you’re pushing twice as much air.”

“The technology for amplifiers was progressing faster than for the sound systems,” says Sinclair. “So you go from Super Beetles to Sunns to Marshalls. The guitars would get louder and louder, heh heh heh. The singer would always be struggling to be heard in that mess.”

“There was no such thing as monitors, so we never heard ourselves sing—ever,” says Kramer. “Venues didn’t provide PA’s in those days. And the PA system would lag so far behind the guitar amplification system that it was ridiculous. So, you had to carry your own PA.  We built three or four PA systems! We had some money coming in, and we’d meet a friend of a friend who was an electronics genius. And what he’d say is, ‘What you guys need is 12 of these XL-77 amplifiers’ and we’d give the guy a pile of money and he’d come back with this big monstrosity that would catch on fire. Oh well, that wouldn’t work. And then the next guy would come along and say, ‘No what you need is these new Crown amplifiers.’ Okay, let’s try those. 

What was the point of all this? Why the need to be so loud?

“I think it was just a thing of, I need MORE: the teenage fascination with power,” says Kramer. “This was a chance to make sure that everybody in the area had to listen to ME. It’s all about ME and MY guitar playing. I even had a guy who came down and hooked up some high-frequency industrial metal horns to go on top of my amp to make it even more brutally loud.”

“Ah, feedback,” says Sinclair. “I loved feedback. Ohhhh man, that was part of the MC5’s stock in trade. Feeeeedback. Yes! Loud! Penetrating! Well, you know, the social milieu then, everything was so numb. So you wanted to feel something. And the loudness was part of it. That would make you FEEL. I think I can characterize part of our outlook that way. Ha ha ha. We were trying to shake people up. The goal was to make them feel something, to make ‘em enter a new world. Ha! And drop some acid if possible. Heheh.” 

It was a point of pride for the MC5 that they were louder than every band local band they played with… Bob Seger, the Stooges, and, of course, Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes.

“We kicked their asses, hundreds of times,” says Sinclair, gleefully. “We did! We loved it. They would come up pale.”

“As far as street fuck you-ness goes, they definitely had us,” admits Nugent. “There was an energy to the 5 that was nothing short of mesmerizing. It was their uninhibitedness and the fact that they focused on the sheer unadulterated middle finger quality of all their music. Where the Amboy Dukes, we wanted to make rhythm and blues songs. Really emulated the Young Rascals and Stax and Volt and Motown and James Brown and Sam & Dave and Wilson Pickett. So we were playing those kind of things. Even though the MC5 came from the same genre, really, cuz they would play It’s A Man’s World by James Brown and they’d play Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag and those kind of songs, but they’d already figured out how to just do it unlike the original black artists. They just did it like white idiots. So they were whiter than we were.”

“We’d got even louder because we started using two amplifiers on each instrument, and that was the point where it was too much,” says Kramer. “But that was the point where I knew… Well, let me tell you how I knew. Blue Cheer had come to Detroit to play at the Grande Ballroom. And they used two hundred-watt Marshalls on their guitar, two hundred-watt Marshalls on their bass. It was TOO loud. I was out in the audience, and the place was kinda empty. It was kinda exacerbated by the fact that they weren’t very good. They really just droned on. There was no dynamic to it, it just droned, but it droned at a level that was like a 747 in your face.”

“The MC5 didn’t reach the levels of volume we did,” recalls Leigh Stephens of Blue Cheer. “I really don’t know in decibels how loud we were, [but] we were louder than anyone we ever played with, not that that is necessarily a good thing. We were going for… Just the overwhelming pushing of air. If the speakers blew your hair around, it was loud enough. Hey we were kids, we thought that was cool.”

“Blue Cheer were incredibly loud,” says Sinclair, “louder than we were, but not as…gratifying. They weren’t as interesting musically, I didn’t think. But, loudness was a huge part of their aesthetic. It was pretty much what they had to offer. Ha! Nice people, though.”

“Just because something is loud doesn’t mean that it’s powerful,” says Kramer. “Intensity doesn’t come from volume. Intensity comes from focus, from the application of dynamic. So I knew when I heard Blue Cheer have two 100-hundred watt Marshalls that it was too loud. And we had two guitar players in our band, so we [had to have been] twice as loud as they were. I remember when we played in Boston once, this was at the point where we were into our two 100-watt Marshalls-each and I had people that I knew coming around who really wanted to listen to the band but they had to go stand outdoors! That’s too loud. We went through a phase when we were too loud. Too fuckin’ loud. Cleared the room. Caused people pain.”

Sinclair: “If you stood there and tried to listened to it with your ears, it would hurt. It would be ‘too loud.’ I lost some top end standing there in front of the MC5 there for a couple of years every night. But I still hear pretty good, for an old person. 

“I don’t want to hear nothing that loud now, though! Ha ha ha. Not anymore.”

##

Exit interview with JOHN SINCLAIR (2003), introduction by Byron Coley

Originally published in Arthur No. 6 [Sept 2003], available from the Arthur Store….

“Everything is worse than ever”
A conversation with righteous MC5 manager/poet/scholar/activator and great American JOHN SINCLAIR, who is leaving the country

Introduction by Byron Coley

John Sinclair casts a huge shadow across the American underground. The force of his personality and energy of his vision kept the midwest alive for several years. His writings, howlings and example ignited fires in the brains of kids everywhere, and his return to live performance in the last few years has been a cause for elation.

Sinclair was born in Flint, Michigan in 1941. His father worked building Buicks. John would have followed his footsteps had he not been driven mad by hearing R&B. The music—so alive, foreign, transformational—clicked a switch and he was never the same. In high school John became a party DJ and record nut. After graduation, he found affinity with words, especially those of Charles Olson and the beats. He dropped out of college after two years, getting heavily into jazz, writing poetry and doing drugs. Newly illuminated, Sinclair finished his BA, and began graduate studies.

John’s high profile drew lotsa heat. He was busted for pot in 1964, again in 1965. Shifting his wheels out of the academic rut, along with his partner Leni, John founded the Artists Workshop—a collective involved in publishing, presenting readings, film showings and concerts. He also wrote about high energy music for Downbeat and elsewhere. After Cecil Taylor played him the Beatles’ Revolver LP, Sinclair made the pivotal decision to get back into rock music.

Busted again in 1967, John began a long legal odyssey. At this time, the Artists Workshop transmuted into Trans-Love Energies, and he began working with a young band called the MC5. By filling their brains with righteous dope, free-jazz and politics, a quintet that might have been remembered as the American Troggs was transformed into the pinnacle of free-rock perfection. In 1968, the tribe moved to Ann Arbor and the White Panther Party was founded. The Panthers’ stated goal (revolution via rock and roll, dope and fucking in the streets) seems a bit naive now, but at the time it sounded perfect.

By upping his political content, Sinclair got deeper into shit. After producing the first Detroit Rock & Roll Revival in 1969, he got 10 years for having given a nark two joints. Sinclair continued to write from prison (mostly politically charged music criticism). This work was collected into the essential Guitar Army. [Guitar Army was reissued by Process Media in 2007: http://processmediainc.com] The MC5 couldn’t handle his imprisonment, however, and left Trans Love (at the behest of future Springsteen slave, Jon Landau). Fortunately, others took up his cause. There were numerous benefits, culminating in a massive Detroit rally, featuring John & Yoko, Archie Shepp, Stevie Wonder, Phil Ochs, Bob Seger, the Up and Ed Sanders. In 1971 the case was tossed out.

Sinclair continued to mix politics and music, although the Panthers were folded into the Rainbow People’s Party (a less obstinately provocative organization). A full time political activist, Sinclair lobbied for marijuana reform, involved himself in community work and put together the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festivals. Sinclair also had a book of poetry published in 1988, at which time he returned to the live stage. But by 1991, local politics had bogged him down and he headed south to New Orleans.

Sinclair continued to do radio shows, edit magazines, write about music, and do wild-ass performances of investigative jazz poetry. He formed a band called the Blues Scholars, and recorded explosively syncopated albums of music and words. He also rekindled his friendship with former MC5 guitarist, Wayne Kramer, which resulted in excellent new work, fantastic archival releases and the promise of much more of both. His latest book is a blues suite Fattening Frogs for Snakes and many future projects beckon.

Hearing through the underground grapevine that Sinclair was preparing to exit America, Arthur arranged a phoner with the great man. The following Q & A was conducted by Jay Babcock in July [2003].

ARTHUR: So you’re leaving America.

JOHN SINCLAIR: Yes, God willing.

ARTHUR: And you’re going to…?

SINCLAIR: Amsterdam. I have a patron there and they said if I came over they would take care of me until they could get me set up and then I could call for my wife. That’s an offer I’ve been waiting for all my life. Now I’m old and I can really use it. [laughs] I wanna get the hell out of here. [laughs]

ARTHUR: You’ve been traveling around the last couple of months, so you’ve been getting a good look at the mood of the country. And you can remember when the resistance to the Viet Nam war was starting. Is the current situation—the state of the country now—worse than it was back then?

SINCLAIR: Oh yeah. The people are so much dumber now. They’re just…painfully dumb. They love this guy Bush, they love all this stuff that’s going on, and they’re gonna return him to office in a big way, and it’s gonna get worse and worse. That’s what I see. And except for the occasional glimmer of light like that new issue of Arthur, [laughs] it’s hard to even find people who have any inkling of what they’re doing.

ARTHUR: How did Americans get so dumb?

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Byron Coley and Thurston Moore’s “Bull Tongue” column from Arthur No. 29 (May 08)

BULL TONGUE by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore
from Arthur Magazine No. 29/May 2008, available from The Arthur Store

Great new LP by Portland’s Jackie O Motherfucker may be our fave of theirs since Flat Fixed. Spaced out jabber and float with casual/urgent female vocals that almost sounds like certain moments of Fuzzhead at their most blues-wailin’est, interspersed with Velvetsy volk moves, and overlaid with swabs of smoke & jibber. The slab is called Valley of Fire (Textile) and it’s a monster. Also out from Jackie O is a sprawling 2 LP set, America Mystica (Dirter Productions), which was recorded in various caverns by the touring version of the band between ’03 and ’05. Not quite as precise as Fire, but its muse is savagely crunchy in spots and never so formal as to appear in a bowtie. It’s an open-ended weasel-breeze you’ll happily sniff in the dark. Is that a hint of Genevieve’s crack?

This young noise dude from Minneapolis named Oskar Brummel who records and performs under the name COOKIE has released his first entry into the new new American underground noise forest and it is frothingly balls-deep: good n’ harsh. It’s a cassette titled Ambien Baby and it flows with both a FTW sexual undertow and a strange-feeling/shit-coming rejoice. There should also be rejoicing over the fact that Times New Viking seem to have made their transition to Matador with their instincts intact. Their new LP, Rip It Off, is as grumbly and fucked sounding as any blast of gas they emanated previously. Nice thick vinyl, too. I guess you need it heavy when the needle’s buried this far into the red. Smooth!

It has taken a little while to actually read the bastards, but now that it’s done, there can be little doubt that Process Books has blasted out three of the best music-related tomes to have been peeped by our tired eyes. First up is the new edition of John Sinclair’s Guitar Army. This is one of the great American underground revolutionary texts—ecstatic, naïve, visionary and powerful. It’s a little funny to glom a few of the embedded old (old) school opinions about what is happening, but it’s still a wonderful read, and a doorway into eternal truths, if you can stay open to its music. The new layout is pretty good. We miss a few visual aspects of the old one (like, where’s the Frantic John flyer?), but the new pics more than make up for it, and the bonus CD—music, interviews, rants, poetry—is fantastic. As is Paul Drummond’s Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson. We’ve read endlessly about Roky over the last 30 years, but this book is jammed (JAMMED) with new facts, reproductions of fliers, posters, photos and ephemera we never even imagined, and Drummond really covers the subject the way he deserves to be covered. It’s really an overwhelming effort. The same is true of Robert Scotto’s Moondog: The Viking of 6th Avenue. The writing can be a little sere, but the story is juicy enough to mitigate this dryness. We finally get to read the story of how the collaboration album with Julie Andrews came to be. There are meetings with Arturo Toscanini and Edgar Varese. It’s quite a tale, and Scotto has done his homework. The only frustrating note is that there really isn’t a comprehensive straight discography. If there’s a second edition, it would be a welcome addition. Also, while the CD tracks are bitchen—especially the early recordings by (one presumes) Steve Reich—some notation there would be cool, too. Other’n those quibbles, we couldn’t be more celebratory ‘bout popping our corks. Buh!

We reported a while back how the horn has become a significant sound source in basement noise life with the weirdo bleat/junk processing of John Olson’s reed kill with Wolf Eyes, Dead Machines etc., and certainly Slithers, and to a mighty free jazz extent the always amazing Paul Flaherty. Furthering all this way hep ghost-trance-sense improv is Dan Dlugosielski’s new(ish) project Uneven Universe. Dan oversees the EXBX Tapes label and has recorded great gunks of noise-jam as Haunted Castle, plus he’s spooged out a few Uneven Universe documents. The one we keep going back to is The Rattling Caverns, on sweet Ohio label Catholic Tapes. It will make you wanna huff smoke-think and drink brews and maybe get some arm-around. If you’re lucky.

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Jan 15-Feb 25, NYC: Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal #10 at White Columns

ep_journal7

(above: cover of sold-out Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal No. 7)

From White Columns:

ECSTATIC PEACE POETRY JOURNAL – ISSUE #10
Edited By Thurston Moore with Byron Coley and Eva Prinz

White Columns is proud to present Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal, Issue #10: an exhibition, publication, and a series of readings and performances.

Artist, musician, poet and publisher Thurston Moore began editing and producing Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal in 2001 as a forum to publish poetry by individuals who intersected the worlds of poetry, music and art. A dynamic range of writings, with various pages of visual work by Gerard Malanga, Richard Meltzer, Chan Marshall, Dennis Cooper, Kathleen Hanna, John Sinclair, Richard Hell, Jutta Koether, Gus van Sant, Rick Moody, Kim Gordon, Anne Waldman, Bill Berkson, Anselm Berrigan, Gary Panter and many others were published in eight issues in as many years.

Moore was inspired to publish Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal after years of appreciation, study and relentless archiving of post-war poetry publishing focusing on the activity of the “mimeo revolution” of the ’60s and ’70s. The stapled mimeo poetry journals produced from the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Peace Eye Bookstore in New York City, and Asphodel Bookstore in Cleveland, Ohio, as well as a myriad of other subterranean centers of shared post-beat writing, rage, meditation and experimentation continues to inform the publication of Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal.

Issue #10 of Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal will be published and presented at White Columns as an expanded event/exhibition. A stapled issue will be created during the show. Pages from each of the ten journals will be exhibited as enlarged wall pieces, including the heretofore unpublished issue #9, [in keeping with the journals every-third-issue a theme issue, i.e., #3 was themed “cunnilingus,” #6 was “punk,”—with #9’s theme “pot”]. The main gallery space will feature a selection of historical poetry publications from the last fifty years culled from Moore’s own library, including original editions of Amphora, Change, Coldspring Journal, Copkiller, Fervent Valley, Free Poems Amongst Friends, Gaslight Poetry Review, Kauri, Klactovedesteen, LA-BAS, Outburst, Stance, Sum, The Willie, Trobar, Yowl and more.

Working as co-editor on many aspects of Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal, including this exhibition is writer Byron Coley, formidable musicologist, essayist, poet and producer of music and literary arcana, ephemera and beyond. Select pieces from Moore and Coley’s catalogue will be reprinted in limited states for this exhibition. Eva Prinz, editor, co-publisher of Ecstatic Peace Library and curator of Radical Living Papers: Free Press 1965-75 (2007) brings additional organizational and creative force to Issue #10 as a gallery event.

Reading and performance schedule:

Friday January 15th:
6-8pm. Opening performance: Northampton Wools (Thurston Moore, Chris Corsano, Bill Nace)

Saturday January 23rd
7-9pm. Reading: John Giorno, Byron Coley. Performance: Thurston Moore

Friday February 5th
7-9pm. Reading: Edmund Berrigan, Anselm Berrigan. Performance: Thurston Moore

Friday February 19th
7-9pm. Reading: Richard Hell, Dorothea Lasky. Music: Thurston Moore + guest

Thursday February 25th
7-9pm. Reading: Thurston Moore and Anne Waldman accompanied by musicians Ambrose Bye and Devin Waldman

All performances and readings are free, admission on a first-come basis.

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CALVIN JOHNSON (K Records, Beat Happening) on the importance of ALL-AGES gigs, and the secret history of age segregation in rock n roll

calvinscooter

photo: Danielle St. Laurent

“What’s Wrong With Having Fun?”

A History of All Ages: A conversation with Calvin Johnson

by Jay Babcock

Calvin Johnson is the founder of Olympia-based K Records. He was in Beat Happening, Halo Benders and Dub Narcotic Sound System, and recently toured the USA in tandem with Ian Svenonius. His influence on underground American music in the last 25 years is enormous; read more about him at wikipedia.

I spoke with Calvin by telephone in early 2007, following on an interview I did with former MC5 manager/poet/historian John Sinclair, published in Arthur No. 24, in which we tried to figure out how rock n roll music went from being an all-ages thing to what, all too often, it is today: age-segregated. Calvin had some ideas about that…

Arthur: Where did you see your first shows?

Calvin Johnson: I was going to some stadium shows. When I was 12 I saw Paul McCartney & Wings. That was in the Kingdome, which is like 75,000 people. I was like, This is different than the Casbah Club in Liverpool. This isn’t the same. I kind of view that as more… Having read this biography of the Beatles and their whole world in Liverpool just seemed really exciting. Very little of that excitement existed in the stadium. And I’m like, Hmm. Something went wrong here. Just shortly after that is when I started reading about punk rock and I recognized that as being within the spirit of that local scene that the Beatles came out of.

It was about two or three years later that I went to my first punk rock show which was… A band from Seattle called The Enemy played here in Olympia. Then I started attending shows in Seattle. There was an all-ages club called The Bird that was in an old warehouse, then it moved into an Oddfellows hall. They had shows twice a month at this Oddfellows hall. That was really exciting.

Arthur: How did age segregation in rock ‘n’ roll music performances start, do you think?

My knowledge is second or third-hand on these things, but in reading rock n roll histories or biographies, it seems like some of those people, like Little Richard, was playing in nightclubs and juke joints that were serving alcohol and they were mostly oriented towards adults, meaning people in their 20s and 30s.

So live music was divided in a demographic way: there were these teen-oriented events and then there were adult-oriented events, and rock n roll was viewed at first as teen-oriented music. It seemed to have been normally in these environments that are dance-oriented—the armory, the school cafeteria, gymnasium, the local union hall—might be rented for these teen events.

When people like Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis became rock stars, and they were playing at those kinds of shows where there’s 10 or 15 acts on the bill and they each do their one or two songs that are well-known, kids were still trying to dance in the aisle. [in faux announcer voice] “Can’t stop the kids from dancing! They’re dancing in the aisles! Crazy! Bedlam has broken out!”

You look at films like Charlie Is My Darling—the Rolling Stones on tour in Ireland in ‘65—and you see it’s sort of a transition to this more concert-type situation, where it’s not necessarily a dance, kids are still dancing, and the set-up seems so nascent, they don’t have huge P.A.s or amps, they just have their regular amps and drums, little vocal public address system, and it’s …very quaint.

But it seems as though in the Northwest here, there was a circuit more or less of all-ages teen dances, which were held at various either hall-type situations or clubs that catered to teenagers and…

Arthur: How is that different from a sock-hop?

A sock-hop is more like high school dance where people are just dancing in their stockinged feet. It seems like the demographic is what divided things rather than a legal situation. The demographic was, ‘only kids would want to go to that show.’

Arthur: ‘Who else would want to?’

Yeah. It’s difficult to say, because I’m just piecing this all together, I didn’t live through it, but it appears that it had this vibe that as the audience for rock n roll starts to age into the ‘60s, and people were in their 20s and still interested in rock n roll, the focus changed. I blame the Beatles for that, because they created the atmosphere for where every rock band was suddenly Beethoven, and was creating “Great Works.” So it was more like when you go to the concert symphony orchestra and everyone is paying attention in this way and dancing is almost like an insult. It’s not that the Beatles had that attitude, but I think that the way that their music developed, people started to view music that way, and then these more serious prog rock bands came along and people suddenly forgot all about having fun. What’s wrong with having fun?

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GUITAR ARMY by John Sinclair — BACK IN PRINT!

GUITAR ARMY
Rock and Revolution with MC5 and the White Panther Party
By John Sinclair
With introduction by Michael Simmons

35th ANNIVERSARY EDITION
* First time in print since 1972
* 40 additional photographs
* Includes 18-track CD with rare recordings

“Guitar Army was our manual for revolt. It’s a rainbow-colored Howl, still resonating today with the singular value of idealism.”
—Michael Simmons

Guitar Army is the incendiary book that proclaimed “Rock and Roll is a Weapon of Cultural Revolution” for young, revved-up readers in 1972. Author John Sinclair spearheaded the leftist revolutionary vanguard White Panther Party and managed the Detroit rock band MC5, leading them from the ferment of the Detroit riots to the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, where the band played minutes before police clubbed antiwar demonstrators.

In October of 1970, the FBI referred to the White Panthers as “potentially the largest and most dangerous of revolutionary organizations in the United States.” However, just three years earlier, the group’s leaders hosted a “Love-In” on Detroit’s Belle Isle, presided over by Sinclair, whom the Detroit News proclaimed “High Priest of the Detroit hippies.” In 1970 he was arrested and sentenced to 9 ½ to 10 years for giving an undercover officer two marijuana joints. Sinclair then became the most celebrated political prisoner of the original war on drugs. After 18 months in prison, John Lennon, Allen Ginsberg, Stevie Wonder, Phil Ochs, and others demanded his freedom with a televised benefit concert attended by 15,000 people. Three days later, Sinclair was released.

Guitar Army chronicles these years of revolution through Sinclair’s “street writings” and prison writings, with over 80 photographs, illustrations, concert flyers and comics from the period. This 35th anniversary edition of Guitar Army includes two dozen previously unpublished period photographs, recent writings from John Sinclair, and an introduction from Michael Simmons that leads the reader through the revolutionary times to Sinclair’s life today. Author John Sinclair is the still-charging embodiment of a dazzlingly optimistic time in which change felt necessary and possible.

A bonus CD contains rare recordings of MC5 and other Detroit-area revolutionary bands, Allen Ginsberg, Black Panther Bobby Seale on the White Panthers, and original White Panther Party meetings.

6 x 9 in, 360 pages, CD attached, ISBN 978-1-934170-007, $22.95
Pub date: May 2007

JOHN SINCLAIR HITS LOS ANGELES….

THURSDAY, APRIL 26 – DETROIT POETS SOUND OFF! – ART SHARE LA. 801 EAST 4th PLACE – LA, CA 90013 – 213-687-4278

John Sinclair will reunite with brother Motor City poetry-&-music bards M.L. Liebler and Ron Allen for an evening of high-energy music & verse at Artshare Theater in downtown LA at 8:00 pm Thursday, April 26. Sinclair’s Detroit Artists Workshop put poetry on the map in the Motor City in the 1960s. Poet-playwright Ron Allen was a founder of Horizons in Poetry, the collective that revived public poetry in Detroit in the 1970s & 80s. M.L. Liebler, leader of the Magic Poetry Band, has been a major force in the Detroit poetry movement for the 1990s and 2000s. This will be a very special reunion for all three participants and a real treat for modern poetry lovers who like some music with their verse—a rare opportunity to witness the Detroit Sound at its finest.

FRIDAY, APRIL 27 – BEYOND BAROQUE – AN HISTORIC EVENING! – THE GUITAR ARMY RE-LAUNCH PARTY, PANEL, PERFORMANCE

BEYOND BAROQUE – 681 Venice Blvd. Venice, CA 90291 – 310-822-3006 – 7:30 PM
JOHN SINCLAIR and FRIENDS – GUITAR ARMY, with ADAM PARFREY, WAYNE KRAMER, DR. CHARLES MOORE, M. L. LIEBLER, PUN PLAMONDON, MICHAEL SIMMONS, a PANEL and PERFORMANCE

Also present for a panel rap will be WAYNE KRAMER (renowned solo artist & MC5 guitarist), PUN PLAMONDON (author & White Panther vet), M. L. LIEBLER (Detroit poet & poetry organizer), DR. CHARLES MOORE (divine musician), and MICHAEL SIMMONS (hyphenated revolutionary & introduction specialist).

Saturday, APRIL 28 – WAYNE KRAMER with special guest JOHN SINCLAIR
HOTEL CAFE – 1623 1/2 N. Cahuenga Blvd. LA 90028 – 10 to 11 PM – http://www.hotelcafe.com
Avant-Rock legend Wayne Kramer headlines and will be joined by special guest John Sinclair, along with Doug Lunn (bass), Dr. Charles Moore (trumpet), Ralph “Buzzy” Jones (saxophone), Phil Ranelin (trombone), and others.

4) Sunday, APRIL 29 – LA Times Book Festival of Books – GUITAR ARMY Book Signing with John Sinclair
1 pm – UCLA – http://www.latimes.com/extras/festivalofbooks/

5) TUESDAY, MAY 1 – MAYDAY! (of course!) – Official Release party for Guitar Army – Appearance & signing with John Sinclair at…
La Luz de Jesus – 7 pm – 4633 Hollywood Blvd – Los Angeles, CA 90027 – (323) 666-7667 – www.laluzdejesus.com

See here for full schedule: www.guitararmy.org

JOHN SINCLAIR (MC5, etc) on ALL-AGES SHOWS (Arthur, 2006)

originally published in Arthur No. 24 (Oct 02006)

Let the Kids In Too: A History of All-Ages, Part One
by Jay Babcock

After this spring’s ArthurBall, someone posted to our website saying, “Hey, how was Growing? I really wanted to see them, but I’m only 17.” Now, if anyone needs to see Growing—a drone duo who are making a very challenging, contemplative sound right now, not unlike the first Fripp & Eno album—it’s a 17-year-old: talk about raw material for a formative experience. And yet, he—or she—was denied, because ArthurBall was an 18 & over event. Which meant that I was partly to blame.

That wasn’t a happy thing to realize. I’d been 17 once. I still haven’t recovered from my own formative experience back in 1988 when I saw the Mirage/Huevos-era Meat Puppets at Variety Arts Center in L.A. I was a teenaged square amidst 1500 freaks of the universe at a cheap, all-ages gig headlined by true goners: enduring the Kirkwood brothers’ 20-minute encore cover of the Beatles’ “She’s So Heavy” left a much deeper, richer impression on my tender, gradually opening mind than seeing U2 and the Pretenders at the Coliseum a couple months before. That was a painfully loud, stage-managed spectacle, a queasy mix of overwhelming power, machine precision and mass audience; the pajama-clad Meat Puppets, on the other hand, were… well, they were fun. They operated on a scale that was recognizably human. They seemed genuinely off-the-cuff, in-the-moment, willing to misfire. Their single stage prop, a pair of Playboy bunny ears spontaneously draped on a microphone, resonated with me in some deep, pleasantly weirdifying way. That Meat Puppets show pointed to a way out: a different way of leading one’s life—of embracing your idiosyncrasies and weird visions and interests rather than suppressing them. It was like some beautiful rite of passage, an initiation into art and imagination and other people—a sideways welcoming into a more creative, fertile, vibrant, rich way of being. Years later, I’d find out that, of course, I wasn’t the only one who’d undergone such an experience: almost everyone I know who is involved with music as a performer or enthusiast or whatever can point to some bizarro show that changed their life when they were a teenager, that lit up new paths.

I wonder if that kind of experience is readily available anymore to those who want it. I mean, the Mars Volta are amazing, but you have to pay $65 to see them open for the Red Hot Chili Peppers at a basketball arena. Growing are cool, but Arthur Ball is 18 & up. And so on. The sad truth is that although exciting music is regularly performed all over L.A.—at backyard barbecues and loft district rent parties, dive bars and supper clubs, nightclubs and art galleries, high school football games and homecoming dances, city parks and Sunday morning church services, street corners and subways, outdoor amphitheaters and baseball stadiums—maybe the only time when a good number of people of all ages can gather together to witness quality music, at an affordable price, with a good sound system, is when an artist plays an in-store set at Amoeba Music on Sunset Boulevard. Kudos to Amoeba for providing this basic public service to arts-starved Angeleno teenagers, of course—it’s more than the public schools and mainstream broadcast media do—but surely it’s not a positive indicator of a culture’s health when the best venue for all-ages music is a record store. ‘Dancing in the aisles’ should mean something more than grooving politely in the Used Funk/Soul section as cash registers ring in the distance.

We lose something as a society when we don’t allow our youth to experience music—by which I mean real, living, breathing music, as opposed to commerce-driven pop—in a decent, accessible, affordable, relatively intimate setting where music is given the opportunity to be truly experienced as music. Something has gone wrong here. But what has happened, exactly, to get us to this point? And is it just Los Angeles, or is it nationwide? What can we do about it? What did they do in the past?

I decided it was time to call John Sinclair.

During the 1960s, John Sinclair founded the Detroit Artists Workshop, managed the MC5, headed the anarchist White Panther Party and got thrown in jail for 10 years for giving two joints to an undercover cop. He was freed after serving two years due to the intervention of John Lennon, who wrote a song for him and appeared at a 15,000-plus arena rally to bring attention to Sinclair’s case (check out the “The US vs John Lennon” documentary for more details). He is a renowned poet, scholar, deejay and journalist, and at 64, still a towering presence. We talked about all-ages shows outside a brandname coffeeshop in Culver City over half-finished crossword puzzles.

John Sinclair: Here’s a point I want to make about this right off: This whole ‘age’ thing is a function of the whole white American culture—it isn’t a universal thing. When I was coming up, you had no congress with anyone more than two years older or two years younger than you, unless they were your brother and sister. You had no congress with adults, with anybody but your own age peers. Everything you did was around that; we were alienated from all the others.

Now, I grew up listening to blues and R&B on the radio in the Fifties. I’m not into country music. I avoided it like the plague. I came from a farming community, and I didn’t want no part of that! Once I heard black music on the radio, I wanted to be where those people were. They were having a lot more fun than anybody I knew, and then when I started going to their dances. It was a beautiful thing. They had big shows in Flint, Michigan. Rhythm and blues shows. I saw everyone that came to Flint between 1955 and 1960. I went to these rhythm and blues shows and there’d be 3,000 black people and 20 white kids who were music freaks and liked to dance. The thing that hit me the hardest about these shows was that there were people of all ages there: little kids, grandmas, and most of the crowd was young adults who were older than us. The teenagers like us were only a stratum. There were people in their 60s, people in their 40s, the finest women you’d ever seen in their 20s just dressed to the nines, red dresses and shit. Knock your eyes out. And there’d be little kids running around and it was no big deal. And the people who wanted to have a drink, they had a flask in their pockets. If they wanted to smoke a joint, they had a joint. It was just like going to a different planet. It was so much hipper. And they were also so accepting. It wasn’t like you would be nervous about being there. They’d let you have your fun, you’d dance with the black girls. It was just like being in heaven for me, man. Because where I lived, I hated everything.

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A POEM FOR BIG RED by John Sinclair

Poet-author-scholar-human John Sinclair wrote “this little ode in memory of my pal Big Red, who passed away in Lansing MI around Christmas time”…

hold your horn high
for ron redman gulyas

early sunday afternoon
taking coffee at the dolphins
& the spring training reports
from the detroit news on-line,

all of a sudden
i’m at the batting cage
in royal oak 20 years ago
with big red,

a great big motherfucker in his late 20s
who weighed about 390
& played the tenor saxophone
with the sound of yore

like coleman hawkins
& ben webster were whispering
in his ear
while he fingered his horn,

big red
was a great big crazy motherfucker
who could tell you
the high school & college stats

for all the players
coming up on the tigers in the spring,
& he still played baseball himself,
semi-pro for a lansing team,

not the popular lansing lug-nuts
but some obscure outfit
that would pay him a few bucks
to suit up & power a couple of balls

out of the park,
& he claimed to be a gypsy
or either related to the little giant
of jazz, don redman

& he played
anything he wanted
on the tenor saxophone,
incomplete skills but

plenty of feeling, a
round,
warm sound
that was always good to hear,

big red,
my man,
he backed me up so many times
& played in my band (even though

johnny evans couldn’t stand
the way he played
the other tenor sax),
a great big crazy motherfucker

who drank more beer
than anyone you seen, & his weight
would go up & down
from 390 to 210

& then back up again,
& in the early ’90s
he fled the united states
& roosted in budapest

for a few years
& had a ball playing his horn
calling himself “ron goulash”
like the hungarian stew

& why he ever came back
will never be known
but he passed in east lansing
just before christmas?

big red,
hold your horn high,
let us hear your raspy breath,
my brother, just one more time

–the dolphins,
amsterdam
march 19, 2006