It’s been said that a 90s conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, but sometimes experience makes people more radical. Poet John Sinclair had been writing and riffing his personalized brand of blue-eyed soul around the Detroit area for several years when in 1966 he made the mistake of trying to give two joints to an undercover policewoman.
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“I challenged the constitutionality of the marijuana laws,” he says. “That’s really when I crossed the line into political activism. Before that I was just kind of organizing in the cultural community, putting on concerts, poetry readings, art exhibits. I was involved in a club called the Artists’ Workshop in Detroit. That was mostly jazz–Charles Moore, Stanley Cowell, a lot of guys who never left Detroit were part of that–and pretty forward-looking jazz at that.”
As soon as he was released from prison in December 1971, Sinclair set out to make his dream of cultural revolution come alive. But by the mid-70s, he says, “when we finally drove Nixon out of office and finally ended the war, all the things that were compelling young people toward different choices were removed. People just weren’t interested. I was committed to [activism] because I thought we could change things, and then you look around and find that people are more interested in seeking some kind of accommodations with the way things are, and making a life for themselves in a fairly traditional manner. I said, well, if this isn’t what they want to do I’ll just go back to what I was doin’ before.”
