Hi everybody and highest greetings from the northeast sector of Detroit where I’m recovering from foot surgery with my daughters and granddaughter waiting on me hand and foot to keep me from going stir crazy while I sit here and heal. While in Detroit for the past two months I’ve been delighted to read page after page of coverage in the daily papers of the proliferation of medical marijuana outlets in the city and several serious think pieces about the burgeoning of the cannabis industry and the imminence of legalization for recreational use as well. My position is clear: For those like myself who spent 40 or 50 years copping in…
sun ra
Free The Weed 55 by John Sinclair
Highest greetings from the northeast side of Detroit, where I’m visiting with my daughter Sunny and granddaughter Beyonce and waiting right now to schedule a required foot operation that promises to restore much of my personal mobility that’s been shackled for most of the present year by a diabetic wound on my left foot that has refused to heal. My several doctors say that portions of infected bones in my foot—sadly including my small toe—must be removed so that the flesh may heal, and then I’ll be off my feet for another month of recovery time. I’ve had to cancel all my potential performance work and my entire trip to Chicago,…
Free The Weed 54 by John Sinclair
I’ve been talking in this space all year about my forthcoming book from the MMM Publishing Company called IT’S ALL GOOD—A John Sinclair Reader, and our hope was to have it available for the Cannabis Cup in Clio. But that proved impossible, and now it’ll hit the streets right around the first of September. I’ve been running excerpts from the book to try to pique your interest in what’s coming, and here’s an excerpt from the lead number in the book: On The Road…. Although this writer has followed faithfully the bardic path for fifty years, I waited a long time to hit the road as a poet. There were so…
John Sinclair – It’s All Good: A John Sinclair Reader
It's All Good: A John Sinclair Reader Writer/Poet John Sinclair takes readers on a journey through time through music lyrics, poetry and stories from songwriters themselves. It's All Good features stories of tragedy and triumph, musical and poetic inspiration that takes readers on a trip through the Wonder Years. John Sinclair has been many things to many people—founder of the Detroit Artists Workshop and the White Panther Party, manager of the storied MC-5, producer of the legendary Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festivals and of records by artists from Deacon John to Sun Ra, political prisoner and implacable opponent of the marijuana laws since 1965, popular radio broadcaster at WDET and…
Free The Weed 46 by John Sinclair
Highest holiday greetings from Amsterdam and Happy New Year to everybody. I’m writing from my favorite spot, the 420 Café, where I landed a month ago from New Orleans to find that the 27th Annual High Times Cannabis Cup has been seriously disrupted by the local authorities who claimed that the Cup’s organizers had failed to obtain the proper permits for its five-day exposition of cannabis and weed-related products and shut down the affair. It’s no secret that the Netherlands and its business partners in America and the European Union have been increasingly unhappy with the relatively wide-open public availability, vendition and smoking of weed in Amsterdam and in towns and…
Sun Ra Memories by John Sinclair
My first real exposure to the music and legend of Sun Ra came in the fall of 1964, when drummer Roger Blank passed through Detroit with a jazz trio I can't remember the name of. We put him up for a few days in our stronghold at the Detroit Artists Workshop Cooperative Housing Project, and I watched Roger open his suitcase and pull out what were obviously his most prized possessions: two weird LPs on the El Saturn label with garish outer space art on the covers and names like Supersonic Jazz and Jazz in Silhouette. I had read about the avant-garde Chicago pianist and bandleader in downbeat and other jazz…
The Sun Ra Arkestra and John Sinclair – Barbican, London by Michael Horovitz, 4 June 2014
Detroit jazz poet John Sinclair, counterpointed by inventive British post-bop quartet The Founder Effect, whom he’d only just met, filled the first half hour of this marathon gig with echoes and premonitions of the Arkestra and of its visionary originator-captain Sun Ra, who died in 1993. Sinclair’s finale ‘Another Order of Being’ drew extensively on Ra’s pronouncements, notably that ‘A band can demonstrate unity among men more than anything else in the world’, and that ‘In some far place, many light years in space, where human feet have never trod! where human eyes have never seen! I’ll build a better kind of world’. Then on ambled a dozen amiable all-black Arkestrans,…
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