It’s hard to believe that John Sinclair is 66 years old, in relatively good health and aging gracefully. He is thinner now and appears centered and mindful and exudes a sense of acceptance - amazing after all those years of notorious substance abuse and social protest. Nowadays his schedule is heavy on personal appearances yet less hurried-up and demanding than those heady times in the sixties. This gig is just one of several before he returns to his expatriated home in Amsterdam later this month. Before the show I approached John as he sat quietly, getting into the zone for his performance. He looked tired, reflecting back to me my own tired mind. He told me of his love for Amsterdam and its freedoms, “The police don’t carry guns and nobody cares if you get high.”
We both shared our worries about the deterioration of civil liberties and personal freedom in the United States and the false patriotism that erupted in the aftermath of 9-11 tragedy. Fear prevails over confidence and reason. Where are we headed?
Could there possibly be other enlightened societies out there like Amsterdam. In 1628 Rene Decartes described Amsterdam as if it were today:
What other place in the world could you choose where all of life’s comforts and all novelties that one could want could be so easy to obtain as here and we could enjoy such a feeling of freedom?
- From the film Twenty To Life: The Life and Times of John Sinclair
A packed hours greeted John enthusiastically, some brought CDs to sign, others with books of poetry. One of my good buddies brought a copy of first MC5 album. He asked John to sign the censored inner cover that left out John’s diatribe about revolution and F***** in the streets and he wrote,
Where’s the liner notes?
Local poet/playwright Marc Beaudin opened the show and later sat mesmerized by Sinclair’s majestic yet humble presence. It was a night when the aspects were right - Aries was rising. Mars ruled and good vibrations reigned over us all as we shared a communal appreciation of blues, jazz and poetry and their organic link to peace and love.
Muddy Waters was born on April 4th, 1913 in Rolling Fork Mississippi and John wished him a loving Birthday tribute with two extended pieces; Louisiana Blues and Country Boy (also dedicated to his long-time guitarist and collaborator Jeff Baby Grand).
John’s dramatic reading of Louisiana Blues had a tinge of irony and just a shade of irreverence that seemed as self-directed as it was targeted to the natural inclination of his hero. A brief excerpt will give you an idea of the truth that lay behind the words:
I’m going down to Louisiana
Baby, behind the sun
I’m Goin’ down Louisiana
Honey, behind the sun
Well, you know I found out
My troubles just begun
-Muddy Waters
This is Muddy Waters speaking:
It’s a con job
on people’s heads,
you know,
gettin’ the fools
And these mojo doctors
Was drivin’ big cars
owned big homes
Cuz the peoples were brainwashed.
My grandmother & father
their mother and father,
was so brainwashed
they thought people could
point their finger at you
& make frogs and snakes
jump out of you
or make you bark
like a dog.
John’s poem Country Boy reveals how McKinley Morganfield became Muddy Waters. It seems that McKinley was in late infancy when he took to crawling around and playing in the mud like most kids do. At an early age we all seem to have a natural affinity to all that is wet and dirty...we are truly anchored to mother earth. But to the dismay and amusement of his folks young McKinley took it a baby step further and began eating it...joyfully, like he couldn’t get enough of it. Ah, a fond childhood memory - a natural curiosity, eating the inedible. Muddy gained his name and a butt-spankin’ at the same time.
Hallelujah!
Happy Birthday Muddy
John proved to me more AND less than his legend promises. He is no longer that sassy panther that stalked the urban jungle of Detroit or the socialist one-for-all and all-for-one communal trans-love god, rockin’ with the 5 and soul struttin’ with Mitch Ryder’s Detroit. No, that was in another lifetime. Now John is the blues scholar, a spoken word genius chronicling an almost forgotten yet heroic history of American roots music and its street savvy and knowing creators.
They ain’t nobody’s fool and this ain’t homogenized dreck for the masses. Curious it is that blues fans nowadays are primarily white or in my case off-white.
John’s Cross Road Blues gives us the skinny on a dark legend, left home at 16 with an older woman, sold his soul to the devil, died of poisoning at the hands of a jealous husband. But Robert “Tommy” Johnson left enough clues to convince us all about his revisionist stature as a blues icon.
The King Biscuit Flour commercial was a hoot…delivered by KFFA announcer Sonny Payne:
Pass the biscuits,
Cause it’s King Biscuit Time!
Light as air! White as snow!
Yes folks that’s
King Biscuit Flour, the perfect flour
For all your baking needs.
Mmm, makes me wanna scarf down some of that southern cornbread goodness…but not too much, you KNOW what it can do to that sweet cantilevered booty of yours.
The final piece “my buddy” was excerpted out of John’s evolving masterpiece opus Fattening Frogs For Snakes. It was conceptualized as a text to be set to music and it has evolved for over twenty years through a painstaking Herculean process writing and performing. This is John’s tribute to his friend Henry Normile who was murdered in Detroit in 1979 outside of his jazz club, Cobb’s Corner. Years after his death, Normile came to John in a vision and inspired this poem in which perfectly gorgeous angels are administering to his every earthly need on a bed of clouds - cocaine, pussy, and lobster, in that order.
John’s “historical” poems are a form of alternate rebellion as he tells us about an almost forgotten history of black culture and music, the genius artistry of black musicians that was the co-opted, pre-empted and homogenized by white mainstream culture. This is a history that isn’t taught in classrooms, though it should be – for the sake of preserving an honorable heritage, a noble identity.
It ain’t fair, John Sinclair
In the stir for breathing air
Won’t you care for John Sinclair?
Let him be, set him free
Let him be like you and me
- John Lennon
And so it is…
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