Leni & John Sinclair Kick Out The Jams Motherfucker!

On October 30th and 31st of 1968, Detroit’s MC5 recorded what would become their debut album “Kick Out the Jams” at The Grande Ballroom. The live album would capture Rob Tyner, Wayne Kramer, Fred “Sonic” Smith, Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson and Mike Davis at their primal best, in front of a rabid hometown crowd at Russ Gibb’s San Francisco-style ballroom. Playing alongside the second wave of British invasion bands like Led Zeppelin, Cream and The Who, word spread that the Grande’s house band wouldn’t let anyone come to Detroit and show them up. For touring bands it was “Kick Out The Jams MOTHERFUCKER!” or get off the fucking stage. Friendly competition. Call it what you want to call it. The MC5 essentially created protopunk as they blended blues, garage and psychedelic, bearers of the rock and roll torch, with performances, a live presentation and attitude that made each show a one of a kind experience for concert goers. With “Kick Out The Jams” the band found themselves with a national voice and an image of themselves revolutionaries in post-riot Detroit as the 1960s seethed with racial, economic and military tensions.

Detroit writer, poet and activist John Sinclair would be at the center of it all, as he would meet the MC5 after being released from a 6-month sentence at the Detroit House of Correction for possession of marijuana. He became friends with the band and, a year later, their manager as they found themselves on a national scale through the late 60s psychedelic music scene. John would help provide the revolutionary rhetoric, while his wife at the time Leni Sinclair, would be the one behind the camera.  She captured not only the band, and the subsequent trials and tribulations of the White Panther Party, as well as John’s two landmark court cases, but iconic views into the civil rights movement, burgeoning national jazz scene and much more throughout the city of Detroit and national underground culture at large.

During the 2-1/2 years John infamously sat in prison for giving two joints to an undercover cop, Leni fought to bring attention to the case and harsh sentencing John had received. John Lennon and Yoko Ono took notice of John’s case and Lennon would write the jangly “John Sinclair” in an effort to help bring attention to the case nationally. It worked as John was released three days after The John Sinclair Freedom Rally, which featured performances Lennon and Ono alongside Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger, Allen Ginsberg and more.

On October 18th, 2016, The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame announced that the MC5 were among this year’s candidates for induction.  The entire story of The MC5, along with John and Leni Sinclair can’t be fully run down here, but we did catch up with them to talk about Leni’s iconic gate fold photo and John’s incendiary liner notes of “Kick Out The Jams.” Both the Kick Out The Jams Uncensored Gate Fold and John’s original typewritten Kick Out The Jams Liner Notes were recreated by the team at 1xRUN with the help of Signal Return, to create two unique limited editions with fine art archival pigment and letter press printing, done right here in Detroit, Michigan.

As we welcome in the Zenta New Year, you can read our full interview below and pick up both editions exclusively on 1xRUN. Now…Go Wild! The world is yours! Take it now, and be one with it! Kick out the jams, motherfucker! And stay alive with the MC5!

Photo by David Felton

Leni Sinclair, gagged and bound in protest of the denial of an appeal bond for the then incarcerated John Sinclair, at the Michigan Supreme Court with David Sinclair at the microphone, Lansing Michigan 1971. The case would make it’s way to the US Supreme Court and prove to be a landmark decision against unwarranted wiretapping. Photo by David Fenton.

1xRUN: John, let’s start with talking about these [original typewritten] liner notes for Kick Out The Jams, looks like they are dated December 13th.
John Sinclair: Ahh. 1968. See I have these dates in my life that reoccur like that. December 13th is one of them. November 1st is another one. But December 13th, 1968, three years later I got out of prison on that day.  Between these liner notes and three years I was inspired by the MC5 and then went to prison for 2 1/2 years. Then got out on December 13th, 1971. “Kick Out The Jams” was recorded on Halloween, 1968. The 30th and 31st of October.

1xRUN: Who’s idea was it to have this as the liner notes? Did you suggest it or did the band come to you?
John Sinclair: I was in charge.

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1xRUN: Yea? Was it a full fledged thing where you were their manager from day one? Or how did you get tied together with the MC5?
John Sinclair: They moved into our neighborhood. Around Wayne State. Second and Canfield. Wayne [Kramer] lived on Canfield. Mike Davis lived on Canfield.  There were three different places. So they were there, you know? They played, and I was a fan of theirs and then I became close friends with Rob Tyner. Very close friends.  We’d get high, and rant and rave. He was a brilliant character. He turned me onto these concepts of a rock ‘n roll band being more than just a way to make some records and buying your mom a new car. You could really do something to alter the course of events with this music and the careful presentation of it.

So I met them after I did an earlier stint in the Detroit House of Corrections, I did six months and I got out on August 5th, then on August 6th they had a party for me. They called it the Festival of People. It was at the Detroit Artist’s Workshop on John Lodge and Warren. The Festival of People, August 6th, 1966, that’s when I met them. They had just moved into the neighborhood, and they had asked my wife who was in charge…

Leni Sinclair: We had activities all day, poetry, jazz and weird exhibitions. But later that night this band started playing real loud, a rock band, and I kind of…they wouldn’t tone down so I had to pull the plug on them.

That’s how we met the MC5. John and Rob Tyner got together for a confrontation to discuss the issue, and out of that they became fast friends. That’s how John got involved with the MC5, and that’s when I got involved in taking pictures of them, to help the cause.

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1xRUN: This stationary says Cambridge on it…
John Sinclair: Ahh, we were in Boston. We got blackballed from The Boston Tea Party. It was the Fillmore of Boston basically, run by a guy named Don Law. He was the Bill Graham of Boston. I remember we played with the Velvet Underground. It was a fucking mess.

Now this is funny. There were these guys called Up Against The Wall Motherfucker. They were anarchists. They were led by a guy name Ben Morea, who I remember 2-3 weeks before had this story written about him, about how now he was a big “artist.” It blew me away. What a creep. They lived on the lower east side. They were anarchists. They were thugs with art intentions. Nothing was ever radical enough. This guy Ben Morea had gotten busted for some misdemeanor in Boston, and they were making a big deal about it. One of his henchmen came to our show and wanted to know if I would let him get up and make this speech to ask for support for Ben Morea’s trial. I said sure. So we let him up onstage and then he spent of the bulk of his time onstage attacking the promoter of the show, and the venue, and rock ‘n roll in general. Just a broiling attack. It got us blacklisted, they would never have us back there.

Then we went to New York and the Motherfuckers were having free concerts at the Fillmore on Wednesdays. I said yeah, we wanna play on that kinda show.  So we played one of their free concerts. We had another free concert when we put out our album, the day after Christmas. It was a free concert at the Fillmore (East) to introduce our album. These guys came and attacked us. It was even worse than that. They got into a big brouhaha with Bill Graham about doing these free concerts, because they would try and wreck the place. They were just assholes. Thugs. So he wasn’t going to allow them to attend our free concert that was sponsored by Elektra Records. I said no, you have to let them in or we won’t go on. This is our concert, for our album. It’s the biggest day of our career, and we put that on the line to make sure these guys weren’t blacklisted by Bill Graham. Then they came in and attacked us.  At the end they rushed the stage with their little thugs and tried to wreck our equipment. They were sick motherfuckers. That kind of drove the MC5 out of the revolutionary ranks. The band didn’t want to be associated with people like that. We were supposed to be on the same side.

Anyway, Jesus. So there we were in Boston. You can tell from reading what my perspective on the whole thing was. It’s a pretty accurate piece of writing from my point of view. Now I date and time stamp everything so  I can remember. I try to write wherever I am.

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1xRUN: So you already signed to Elektra at this point, but the record hadn’t been released.
John Sinclair: Yea, we made the record [Kick Out The Jams] on October 31st. But we worked all the time. They were always working.

1xRUN: So were you the one negotiating the record contracts, taking them on the road?
John Sinclair: Sure. I was their manager.

1xRUN: Right, but did you have any type of experience with contracts or anything like that at the time?
John Sinclair: Well, I knew how to do shit. This band was fantastic. They were the fucking bomb. It was easy to represent them, because they could deliver even more than you could promise. They were so fantastic man. I saw them every time they played for about two years.

1xRUN: Let’s talk about the band’s signing with Elektra and releasing Kick Out the Jams.
John Sinclair: Do you know Danny Fields? They just released a movie about him this week called Danny Says. Danny Fields was a genius. He was my mentor in the music business. He was a weirdo. He had a job as a publicist for Elektra Records. He was the “house hippie.” Record companies would have a house hippie that knew about the new music. Everybody else was trying to ride with Paul Revere & The Raiders or The Monkees. So he was the house hippie for Elektra, and he suggested to Elektra Records management that if they took this cut off this new album by this new group called The Doors and they took this long piece called “Light My Fire” and they cut it down to three minutes it could be a hit single. And it was. It sold more records than all of Elektra’s other releases put together.

1xRUN: Yea, now that you mention it, I don’t remember seeing many older Elektra records aside from The Doors.
John Sinclair:  Judy Collins. Tom Paxton. Stuff like that. Hokey. They did have The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, then the guy who produced them also produced The Doors. Paul Rothschild.

1xRUN:  So Danny was the one who got you in the door with Elektra.
John Sinclair: Yea, he was the one who signed us. He also had a show on an underground radio station on Fridays called WFMU in East Orange, New Jersey. They were the original free form radio station. My friends Bob Rudnick and Dennis Frawley wrote the rock ’n roll column for The East Village Other. Their column (and their radio show) was called Kokaine Karma. It was the first major free form radio show. They’d play Howlin’ Wolf, The Doors, John Coltrane. That would be a set.

Anyway, they were on WFMU, and they were our entry into New York City because they loved what we were doing. I used to send them my press releases. I used to write these incendiary press releases about the adventures of the MC5 dealing with the police and the authorities to play gigs. These were published in The Fifth Estate. The Fifth Estate and The East Village Other were two of the original five underground papers. If you were an underground paper and you were in the underground press syndicate, which was managed by Bob Rudnick, any other paper could print anything from any other paper without permission, just by being a member of the syndicate. So they used to print my press releases when they were trying to write their column late at night, when their deadline was in the morning so they’d take my shit and put it in their column. That was how we entered the consciousness of people in New York in the music scene. Through their column, talking about these crazy motherfuckers from Detroit.

So I went to New York with our single “Looking At You,” that we put out on A Square records, to try to get a record deal, and I met Rudnick and Frawley and I went on their radio program and they played our record in New York. It was a big deal. It was a really big deal at the time. Then when they had a shift change I met Danny Fields, because he had the next show. He liked the record. Then they told him about our crazy behavior. He was intrigued. So I encouraged him to come and see the band in situ. If he wanted to see where this was going to go he had to see that. So he came to see the band, and I set up a concert with The (MC)5, The Stooges and our other band The Up. He wigged over The Stooges. So after the concert he called the president of Elektra and said “I want to sign these two bands. The MC5 and their baby brother band The Psychedelic Stooges.” We readily agreed. The whole trip was so fantastic. It’s unimaginable in today’s world. There isn’t anything like this.

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1xRUN: So Leni, what kind of photography were you doing prior to this?
Leni Sinclair: I started taking photographs before I left Germany. I got my camera in East Germany before I escaped. I spent one year in West Germany and came to Detroit. Early on I really didn’t take photographs for any reason except to take snapshots to send back home to my family. But then when I met John Sinclair, and I got involved in the Detroit Artist’s Workshop, I was the chick with a camera, so it fell upon me to document our interesting activities.

That’s when I started taking pictures of jazz musicians in concert and poets, and the beatniks around Wayne State. I went to Wayne State before I met John, and I got active in our student politics and some movements, like the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, and I got some beautiful photographs of that era of student activism. My political activism pictures will be in an exhibition next year. That’ll be interesting.

Then I took pictures for the Detroit Artist’s Workshop because we always needed photos to put on a magazine cover, or we published books of poetry. Around the same time was when the Fifth Estate started. John started writing for them, and I started supplying photographs of jazz musicians that played around Detroit.

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1xRUN: This image that was on the inside cover, do you remember when and where that image was taken?
Leni Sinclair: I don’t know the exact day, but it was in 1968 when we were trying to get a good publicity picture for the MC5 to use to get more paying gigs and get them more known, more famous. They were very cooperative. They would do anything I asked them to do to take the picture. Including going nearly naked.

The photo itself was taken at our house on Hill Street in Ann Arbor, and it was the MC5 and Trans-Love Commune. There was a bunch of people living in it all together. All the people in the MC5, and the people who worked with them, which was John, and me, and some other people that did the light show, and they did the publicity, and they did the fliers, and they did the clothing. It was the whole commune of people all working together. That was in Ann Arbor.

1xRUN: How soon in relation to the 1967 Detroit riots was that? When you guys moved to Ann Arbor.
Leni Sinclair: The riots had nothing to do with us moving to Ann Arbor. We stayed in Detroit after the so-called riots, and people prefer to refer to it now as “The Rebellion.” There’s a controversy about what to call it, but I call it “The Rebellion.” That happened in 1967, but we stayed in Detroit another year in 1968, right after Dr. Martin Luther King got assassinated. We had to move practically overnight. There was an incident where somebody fire bombed our house, and put the whole basement — which was our living quarters, and kitchen, and dining room, and record listening room — put it under three feet of a black sooty water. We couldn’t live there. We had to kind of flee overnight, and we had a place in Ann Arbor that we rented. That’s how that happened. That’s where we all started actively promoting the MC5. Including taking as many pictures as I could.

1xRUN: So, for this image, was it fairly natural, or did you stage them?
Leni Sinclair: No. Well, they staged themselves. It was always a co-production between me and John telling them what to do and me doing the fine tuning. I was never really professional. I was just lucky to get one shot that was, and now it’s considered iconic.  The anecdote about it is that, I don’t know who, Wayne [Kramer] or somebody, spread the rumor that those White Panther buttons were stuck in their skin. Based on what people knew about Iggy mutilating himself with glass pieces and stuff, they thought it was for real. Oh no. I think we just used a little piece of masking tape. I’m spilling the beans here. They were not that brave or crazy.

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1xRUN: So they were still refining their look at that point? What was their demeanor like at that point? Did they think that it could blow up at all?
Leni Sinclair: Yes, they knew it would blow up. They had that ambition. There was nothing stopping them. They were into whatever would help make the band more exciting. Especially the outfits. They kinda got the idea from watching people like James Brown. They knew they wanted the audience to feel excited and to come back, so they never wore the same things twice. We did a new light show every weekend. There was always something new to keep the fans coming back. All week long they would practice in the garage and write songs, and come up with new stuff to put in and some were new gimmicks too.

1xRUN: What do you mean “new gimmicks?”
Leni Sinclair: Yeah. For instance, one gig they had playing in a Catholic high school, and the contract called for no lewd movements on stage. Well, they played the whole first set sitting in chairs on the stage. One place they played, maybe it was the same place where they not supposed to say the forbidden words “Kick out the jams, motherfucker!” So they changed it. They said, “Kick out the jams, mother superior!”

Sometimes they wouldn’t say it at all, because the police were surrounding the stage ready to jump on them if they uttered the forbidden, obscene word. But they didn’t say it. Then the whole audience would yell, “Motherfucker!” because how are they going to arrest two thousand teenagers and prove they said it. It was always an exciting thing. There was harassment too. The police were always there waiting to arrest them. They hated them.

1xRUN: John, would you have been there during this photo shoot?
John Sinclair: Probably. I can’t say that I remember. But we lived in Ann Arbor at this time. We moved to Ann Arbor in March of 1968. So I would hazard to guess that I was in Ann Arbor. It was after November 1st. It was after the White Panther Party had been created, obviously, because they’re wearing the buttons. So that dates that around November. This is when we were putting the package together for our debut album on Elektra Records. Our first release was a live recording at the Grande Ballroom. The whole thing was pretty revolutionary in all these different dimensions, except for the cover which they rejected — our (Gary) Grimshaw cover.

1xRUN: What was the original cover?
John Sinclair:  It was a picture of an American flag burning at the bottom with a marijuana leaf. They finally put it out in 199something on the official Elektra/Rhino Records re-issue.

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Kick Out The Jams Original Artwork created by Gary Grimshaw

1xRUN: Is this it?
John Sinclair: (Laughing) Yep. That was the album cover that we submitted. Ohh man.

1xRUN: Leni, let’s talk about the inside gate fold image we have for this edition, do you want to talk about how this is a slightly different photo than the original album?
Leni Sinclair: Yes. I don’t mind telling that story, because if people heard this story maybe they can help me unravel the mystery about that. The original album cover had a photograph of the MC5 that I don’t have the negatives for any longer. So I could not recreate the exact photo. I took many photographs at that same session, and all of them got lost except three negatives. One of them was good enough to be a replacement for the one that was gone.

Years after me and John broke up, and the MC5 broke up, years later I tried to find that negative. I couldn’t find it anywhere in my collection. It was not in my MC5 file. So I contacted Elektra Records to see if I had given them the original negative to work from to do the album cover. Somebody there came back and told me, “Well, we looked, but the whole MC5 file is missing. Somebody must have stolen it, or it got thrown away. Would you like to help us recreate it and send us some more photographs?” I don’t know what I said, but I got a lawyer to try to get some royalties for that picture. I never got a royalty from Elektra Records, what is it now forty years. They claim they have the copyright, I don’t think so. I don’t think I ever signed away my copyright, but hey, that’s the way it goes. I never found the negative, and if they had it it got stolen or lost. Maybe by coming out with this story, maybe somebody knows something about my missing negative.

1xRUN: Let’s talk about the lead-up to the album and the aftermath.
John Sinclair: They censored it. We left the label because of it.

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1xRUN: You left the label or they kicked you off?
John Sinclair: No, we quit.

1xRUN: Really.
John Sinclair: Yea, the guy lied to me. Jac Holzman who was the president of Elektra Records was a liberal. A New York liberal. We sold 90,000 copies. They must have printed around 100. That was a big press run for an album in those days. Nowadays you wouldn’t get to make another one. But, by then we were already recording our second album in Los Angeles. So I had to go to New York from Los Angeles to meet these guys.

We took the band to San Francisco at our own expense. The company didn’t pay for it, so I booked some gigs out there. We took the band out there, and went to the distributor to get a box of records and take them to the radio station, and they didn’t have any. I said, “you don’t have any? The record’s on the charts. It was zooming.” They said the record company had recalled them. I said what are you talking about? I’m out here with the band, what do you mean they recalled them?

So then I had to go back to New York and fight it out with these assholes. The sick part was that Jac Holzman pretty much insisted that we used the “Motherfucker!” version of “Kick Out the Jams.” But we cut a different version for the single that said, “Brothers & Sisters!” at the end. It was kind of subversive. They would buy the single, and then if they get the album they get the real version. Even to me, I thought it was too far out there to sell it on the market like that. But he thought, “oh no. this is good.” I said, well they aren’t going to like this. This is a New York liberal. He said, “If there’s a problem with this, our legal department will fight this.” I said alright then. So we put it out with the liner notes: Kick Out The Jams Motherfucker! Then they pulled it off the market, stripped the liner notes off and put the master for the single on instead of the album cut.

1xRUN: Did it keep selling after that?
John Sinclair: Not so much. It was a bad experience from the beginning, because then we were in Rolling Stone, and it turned out to be the first review by this college student by the name of Lester Bangs. He was a college student out in California at the time and he panned the record. He said it was a joke. He just said disparaging things. The critical momentum was completely killed. Rolling Stone was supposed to give away the album along with their American Revolution Issue in April of 1969, in which this review appeared, so they couldn’t give away this record. It was panned by their writer. So all of these things happened. (Editor’s Note: The MC5 also took out a full page ad — which included Elektra’s logo — after Hudson’s refused to sell the record.)

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Leni Sinclair: The aftermath. It was just really based on one incident in Dearborn, I believe, where some teenagers went into the record store and bought a copy of the record. When they brought it home their parents were incensed because it was so full of obscenities. So they complained, to who I don’t know, the police or something. The record company got cold feet, and they just pulled out instead of getting a lawyer and defending the band and this is freedom of speech like they would now. The record company thought, “We can’t handle this band. They’re too much.” When they signed MC5 they thought all that radical talk and all that … they thought that was a gimmick. Then when they find out they are real revolutionaries they’re just, “Oh no. Can’t handle these people. They’re out of control.”

1xRUN: Who’s idea was it to put The White Panther (Party) buttons on? Or was that just implied it would be in there at this point?
Leni Sinclair: That’s an interesting question. It could easily have been my idea, but I don’t remember. I can’t claim for sure.  You’d have to ask John or the remaining members of the band. That was in 1968 though. Then in 1969 we took some more pictures. We did another thing like that. Just lined them up against the wall in the dining room. For that session, they had some long guns, and some rifles that my brother-in-law Dave Sinclair procured for the photo sessions. Not that they ever used them, but they sure looked like interesting props. It was expressing the idea of the guitar army. That’s what it was supposed to symbolize.

I’m not quite comfortable with my images of the MC5 with guns, because now you don’t want to advertise guns because of all the gun violence. But that’s a historical document. I just want to set the record straight that they were not so militaristic as they look. We just wanted to have a nice photo. But who knows, without that militant image, and without them starting the White Panther Party, they would probably just be another forgotten garage band. It’s that political aspect of them that keeps them interesting over the decades. I can’t wait until the MC5 “Kick Out the Jams” gets published in China. Those people will go nuts.

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1xRUN: What was the official connection to The Black Panther Party?
John Sinclair: We worshiped them. We thought they were the greatest. We loved The Black Panther Party. I remember Bobby Seale or Huey P. Newton responded to an interviewer saying, “if you really support this, we don’t need you coming to the ghetto, really the problem that we have is with white people. So why don’t you organize these white people to get off our motherfucking ass? They’re your people. Why don’t you talk to them? They won’t listen to us.”

We thought if somebody could do this, we could. That’s what we were trying to do. We were trying to turn these kids on with some other kind of reality. We thought if you took rock ’n roll and put it behind The Black Panther Party they’d have a better chance of survival. That’s what we were trying to do. We also accepted some political leadership from them and tried to do what they told us to do. They said that we had to have political education classes with the Detroit chapter of the party. We had to arm ourselves. Hippies with guns. Not a really popular concept. We tried.

1xRUN: What was The Black Panther Party’s presence like in Detroit during that time?
John Sinclair: Detroit wasn’t one of their strongholds. They had a chapter here. But Detroit was really led by The League of Revolutionary Black Workers under the direction of Kenneth B. Cockerel, John Watson, and General G. Baker Jr., guys like that. They were in the automobile plants organizing black workers to make a revolution. They were the farthest out there guys in America. They were actually workers. Black Panther Party was a party for the lumpen proletariat. That would be workers without jobs. Hippies. That’s why we could plow in their wake, because that’s what hippies were. Lumpen proletariat. That’s people without jobs that didn’t want any jobs.

1xRUN: When did you find out when the government had started surveilling you?
John Sinclair: We forced them to surveil us. When we created The White Panther Party that was throwing down the gauntlet to the government saying right out what we were doing. What we wanted to do. What we meant to do.  There was a companion statement to these liner notes called The White Panther statement. November 1st, (1968) that was when we announced that we were going to be the White Panther Party. It was all just to…say to the government, “Fuck you. Stop us if you can.” So they did. Goddammit they did.

1xRUN: So you said Rob Tyner was pushing you, at that time were you already political when you met Rob or was did he kind of push you?
John Sinclair:  I needed no pushing.  I wasn’t a political. I was a subscriber to [Antonin] Artaud’s motto that politics is pig shit. I hated politics. Anything to do with politics. I loved Cuba. I loved Malcolm X. Everything else…I wasn’t always political except for being oppositional.  I guess that’s why I was in jail.

1xRUN: You were in jail prior to meeting the MC5, what was that for?
John Sinclair: I happen to have written about this in my recent column for Michigan Medical Marijuana report. You can get the whole story there. It got me thinking about how vile the police are and how the laws will always perpetuate the police involvement in this shit. I wrote a pretty well presented exposé of what happened to me with the police and marijuana.

1xRUN: Talking about the previous arrest or the one that you were in jail for two years?
John Sinclair: There was one before that even. They started arresting me in 1964.

1xRUN: All for marijuana? Or paraphernalia…
John Sinclair: Yea, marijuana. I was a graduate student at Wayne State and a jazz lover. I had been frequenting jazz clubs here in Detroit from before I even lived here, when I lived in Flint. So I knew a lot of guys in the jazz clubs. So I had the weed on the Wayne State campus. If I can put it in so many words. I forgot about this until a couple of years ago when I read an interview with Charles Moore. They were asking him about how all these people came around the Artists Workshop, and he said, “…plus John had the weed bag.” I  said, “ah geez. I forgot about that…” So everybody had to come to our house to get some weed. That’s how we did it.

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Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Leni & John Sinclair Photo by Robert Agriopoulos.

1xRUN:  Do you see any parallels [from then to today]? Was there any type of continuation from those ethos that you see now?
John Sinclair: No. Weed. Until now. I was just thinking about that when I got up this morning. Weed is going to be just like rock ’n roll in about three years. They just bought off rock ’n roll. They made you a millionaire or they wouldn’t give you a contract. They completely bifurcated the reality of the business.  If you wanted to get rich you could make untold millions, you just couldn’t write any music that was interesting. That was out. It had to stay the same. You couldn’t have any growth.

1xRUN: But now you don’t really have any record industry strength.
John Sinclair: They fucked themselves. I dunno. I’m just observing. I know I was there when it happened. Up until Woodstock they thought hippies were just a fad. This rock ’n roll with the long hair and the guitars, they’ll get tired of that. Next thing they know there’s half a million people out in the mud to see acts that they had never heard of before. Jimi Hendrix. Jefferson Airplane. Tim Buckley. Arlo Guthrie. People whose records were hardly played on FM radio stations. They said, goddamn, this is a gold mine.  It took them a couple years to get their hands on them, but pretty soon Columbia, Capitol, MCA, they had it all. So what rock ’n roll in this period was didn’t exist anymore. It was an artistic experience to go to the same place with people who felt like you did, were on the same drugs.

1xRUN: They’ve still got that. The scale is a little bigger now.
John Sinclair: It’s dwarfed. These were little microdots in the universe of popular culture now. You’re talking about some little joint with somebody banging on the walls. It’s kinda boring now, because they’ve done it 8 million times. At they time they hadn’t did it before. That was kind of exciting.

The Stooges - Photo by Leni Sinclair

1xRUN: Somebody had to have done it before.
John Sinclair: The Stooges? There was nobody that had done anything like them. It was like nothing else that was going on. I was there.

1xRUN:  Yea, but they’re influenced by something. They’re not just the starting point.
John Sinclair: Yea, but they made it up. They’re artists. These people today aren’t artists. They fucking slaves to fashion. They’re trying to get rich. They’re entrepreneurs with instruments if you ask me.

1xRUN: You don’t think The Stooges had some influences of somebody who had done something similar before?
John Sinclair: No. Name one.

1xRUN: They aren’t pulling that shit out of thin air.
John Sinclair: Iggy made it up. It was his concept. There was never anybody like them. They made it up. Rob Tyner and Wayne Kramer, they’d sit around and figure out how can we do something to express how we feel about this shit? They made it up out of their insides and their brains. That’s why it was so interesting. The MC5 didn’t know what it was going to be like by the end of the night. When they started out they didn’t know what it was going to be like, so the audience really didn’t know what it was going to be like. Every night it was different. They had some of the same tunes, they had a repertoire, but it would be different every night.

1xRUN: So when you saw them early on, were they were still doing covers?
John Sinclair: The thing about The MC5 early on was that they didn’t write their own songs, but at the end of every show they did this freak out improvisation called “Black To Comm” and anything could happen. It was open ended. It started with a riff. Then it would just depend how high they were, how high the audience was. A lot of times the whole band would be on acid and have a transformative experience on stage. It was very incredible. You came to a show to see a band, all of the sudden you go out into this religious musical experience with other people. It was transformative. You left that being a different person. That was the greatness of the time. So that was always different.

So then they developed a following, and that was an important part of it, “Black To Comm” it was mind-boggling. You would have to go to the next MC5 gig to see what it was going to be like. Maybe you missed last week and everyone said, Jesus Christ you missed it, they did this, they did that. It got to where if you were a fan you didn’t want to miss no shows. Each one was going to be a hell of an experience. I haven’t seen that happen in a long time. That was exciting. Then you know, they just loved to play music. My mission as their manager was to make it so they just had to play and rehearse. Write songs, and not have to worry about anything else. Rent would get paid. They would have a ride. They’d have some weed. You know?

1xRUN: What was the first MC5 show that you saw? When did you begin managing them?
John Sinclair: I saw them at the Michigan State Fairgrounds, Labor Day, State Fair. It was Labor Day weekend of 1966. I got out of prison on August 5th, and it would have been around a month later. I met them, but I didn’t hear them play at the (Detroit) Artist’s Workshop that night. I had already gone to bed. So I didn’t really hear ’em, but I got to know them. I met Rob Tyner and Frank Bach. By that time the Grande hadn’t opened yet, but I wrote a column for the Fifth Estate newspaper called The Coat Puller. I was the arts columnist. Avant-garde arts columnist.

The first gig that I ever went on with The MC5 was at The Plymouth Teen Center in Plymouth, Michigan. We were in a Battle of the Bands with The Unrelated Segment. They had a 45 on the radio, and they kicked the MC5’s ass. They were so un-together. That’s what I remember. I was in rock ’n roll, but it was in the ‘50s. Then I was in jazz. But I liked Tyner, and I liked their music. So, if you wanted to hear them play you had to go where they were playing. Michigan State Fair. You know? Plymouth Teen Center. They would arrive about a half hour after the gig was supposed to start. Then they would have all the roadie guys bring in all the wires and everything in boxes. It would take them about an hour to set up. I hated watching all that shit. It would hurt my eyes. I said, don’t they know this is a gig? Then they would turn everything on 10 and play as loud as they could.

1xRUN: That’s one way to do it. Did you come in as someone who was reining them in and getting them into shows?
John Sinclair: That’s your job as the management. Get them to the gig, make sure the equipment works. Guitar strings. Drum sticks. Something to wear. Watching this as a friend of the band, and an interested spectator, that’s when I began to realize that things that I knew how to do — I was an organizer of hippies, artists, beatniks, weirdos. You know? We could get some weirdos to put on a show.  Put on an announcement.

1xRUN: What kinds of shows?
John Sinclair:  Poetry. Jazz. A certain time at a certain place.  With flier. That’s all show business is really. We were doing these shows at the Artist’s Workshop every Sunday afternoon. I know how to do this. Not that it was any great skill. But I knew how to do it amongst the people that we knew. Others didn’t. That’s it. So I realized that I demystified this by being there and watching these fucking disasters happen. Logistical disasters I call them. I realized this was something that I could do that would be helpful. That would make me stop feeling so helpless while I was watching. Make me have to cover my eyes to the greatest band I’ve ever heard. Why can’t they just get up there and have the stage set and ready for them? The come out. They look good. They all hit at the same time. You know? Maybe write some material of their own?

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1xRUN: They would do occasional covers too right? Would they do one long set or two sets?
John Sinclair: They started out playing all covers. They would do three sets. That was what they required. It was the job.

1xRUN: As the headliner they would do three sets?
John Sinclair: We didn’t have headliners yet. What places like The Grande established was a new paradigm. At The Grande you had a headliner, you had the second act and then you had the opening act. Three. Each did one set. That was a radical departure from working in a club. You might have two bands, each would play two sets. Neither would be the headliner. This is all too podunk of a level to think about who would be the headliner.

At The Grande they stratified this. I thought it was a good thing, because it created a standard for bands to aspire to. To be the headliner you had to have your own material. You had to have an approach. You had to be memorable. You had to come on. I remember we did this project with the musicians union to bring the rock ’n roll bands into the union. It didn’t fit their template. Union band is a template. There’s a leader, he gets double. Then there’s the sidemen and they get a certain amount, and they pay taxes on it.

In rock ’n roll there is a band. They all lived in the same space. They had one vehicle to get to the gig. So I remember having to battle with somebody to get the union to understand it. We wanted to be part of this, but we couldn’t bring somebody that wasn’t us. We could only bring ourselves. This is what we are, we’re a band. I remember they got called in a disciplinary thing, The MC5 did, they said Sinclair talk for us, you’re our manager. They said he’s not a member. They didn’t even understand any of that at the time, a manager, or a band. They understood an individual musician employing other musicians.

1xRUN: More of a bandleader.
John Sinclair: A bandleader they said. We said we don’t have a leader. We’re a band. He’s the lead guitar player, but that’s as far as we go in that direction. Tyler was the singer, and he was the leader in reality. But it was part of a democracy concept of a band. You were in this together. If there was any money you split it up equally. We established the opening act scale of $50. As the headliners, the MC5 got $125. Anyways, part of this union thing, I remember we had Gary Grimshaw do a membership card for the bands. If you ever got one of those they’d kill you. It looked like a union card.

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1xRUN: Let’s talk about The Grande Ballroom, how many people could The Grande hold?
John Sinclair: If you packed it in with a shoehorn you could fit 2,000. And Russ would. But generally it’d be between 600 and 800 people. You had The Who and it would be packed wall to wall. Cream it would be packed wall to wall.

1xRUN: How much were tickets for that type of show?
John Sinclair: $2.50? They made tons of money. Russ Gibb made it hand over fist. From 1966-1968, after we got our record contract, for two years we played for $125 a night. Crowds went up from 100 to 800. For the first year, The Grande Ballroom didn’t bring in outside recording acts. It was all Detroit or Michigan based recording acts.

1xRUN: The owner Russ, he went to San Francisco theaters and thought I’m going to bring this back?
John Sinclair: Russ Gibb. Yea, he went to San Francisco in the summer ’66. The Fillmore and The Avalon. This group called The Family Dog, was at least half Detroiters who had relocated to San Francisco, including the big poster artist (Stanley) Mouse. He’s from Detroit. James Gurley from Big Brother & The Holding Company was from Detroit.  Alan Stone, one of the first underground DJs on commercial KMPX in San Francisco, was from Detroit. So these people from Detroit, and these people from Texas, like Chet Helms, Janis Joplin and Gilbert Shelton. This weird melange of Detroiters and Texans came together in the Bay Area and created all the hip shit. It was crazy. It was all an exhilarating artistic experience.

Leni Sinclair was recently named the 2016 Kresge Eminent Artist in Detroit, which will allow Leni a chance to catalog over 10,000 of the photos she taken throughout her life. Find out more about John Sinclair’s latest projects via his Radio Free Amsterdam here.

-1xRUN

John and Leni Sinclair were each interviewed at the 1xRUN Studios in Detroit, Michigan by 1xRUN Editor-In-Chief Pietro Truba. He has previously interviewed Ricky Powell, Doze Green, Fred Armisen, Janette Beckman and Shepard Fairey among others for 1xRUN. Follow him @pietrotruba

Photos by Leni Sinclair unless otherwise noted.

Special thank you to Tim Mulheron, Ben Blackwell of Third Man Records and Brad Hales of People’s Records.