Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - John Sinclair

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

This interview with John Sinclair was recorded a few months before he passed away on April 4, 2024.  John was an icon of the counterculture movement. In the late 1960s, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for marijuana possession, sparking protests and rallies like the John Sinclair Freedom Rally, which featured performances by John Lennon and Stevie Wonder, among others. After a high-profile legal battle that challenged and ultimately reformed harsh marijuana laws, Sinclair was released after two years in prison. Before and after his protested prison sentence, John was a renowned poet, writer, and political activist. He founded the White Panther Party in support of the Black Panthers, produced music festivals, managed the influential rock band MC5, and published and recorded prolifically, including John Sinclair: The Collected Poems and the music-in-verse collection Thelonious: a Book of Monk. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra ------ Lucy https://lucy.co/tetra ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra ------ House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra

Tetragrammaton. I'm surrounded by music at all times. Right now, I'm talking to you so I turned off my radio, but I got my own radio station. Great. Online. I got 12 disc jackies. I put up two hours of new music every day for 20 years. How do I find it online?

Radio Free Amsterdam dot O, RG. We started in 2004 in Amsterdam. Great. My 38 program was podcast. I've been a radio freak since I was a little kid. I'm now 81. Tell me your first memories of radio. What first got you? Well, I grew up on radio in the 40s, you see, before television. Was it even in the car then, or was it just the wooden box in the house? Well, I had a little one. My dad got me one for my son's birthday

and he made for my kid a radio. Then when I was 14, he bought me a 45 player you could plug into the back of the radio. I remember the first 45 I got was Hard Hearted Woman by Big Walter Horton on states 154. Amazing. I was a blues fanatic when I was about 11, 12 years old. I've been gone ever since. Was everyone else you knew in the neighborhood a blues fanatic?

No, nobody. How does that happen to you? Well, when I grew up, you listened to the radio. All of the programs, the quiz shows, the dramas, the stereos, the cowboy shows, Superman, all of that was on the radio. So you listen to the radio like you watch TV, you know? And then around 1950, they started moving everything to TV and they changed radio to

a format for music 24 hours a day. A lot of them closed at sundown. You imagine that radio station shutting down at sundown. Crazy. A lot of them did that. Big ones met at 24 hours. Well there was a handful of black radio stations, black oriented. The first one was in 1948 in Memphis, Tennessee, WDIA. Before that, it was all white oriented. So I discovered a black-oriented radio station in Flint, Michigan, my hometown. So I started listening to that and then I heard this incredible music, Ray Charles, the Clovers, the Drivers, Ruth Brown, you know, etc. That's just the Atlantic records. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha It was the most exciting shit I'd ever heard in my life. So I was in him every day for hours. I'd come home from school instead of playing outside.

I'd be listening to Ernie D because you didn't have a portable radio then. Yeah. Like you said. And then I discovered that night they had a guy on CQLW in Detroit and Iran knows he played rhythm and blues. And then after he went off, he could get WLAC of Nashville, Tennessee and jump and John R will be playing the blues,

rhythm and blues. How were you able to find the records? I can't imagine they were easy to find back then. WLAC, their concept, they were a country station. They had this great concept for rhythm and blues. They were sponsored by record shops, mail order record shops, Randy's Records in Gallatin and only Gallatin, Tennessee.

Ernie's Record, Mark 179 3rd Avenue, Nashville, Tennessee. It's in a waveform. They There's great things that have like the blue star blues special six records 12 big sides We're 279 plus packing mail in COD Send no money just your name and address and then ship them to your COD Or you can buy it. you listen to John R, if you liked one record on there, say Bobby Blubland had a new record on Duke

and you really liked it. You could just send them a postcard saying, number eight has played on today's date, and they would send you the Bobby Blubland single, COD. And then when I got old enough to hit-shake around, I would go to record shop to record shop and steal 45s. I stole thousands. Because I wanted them all, but I didn't have any money. When did you first have friends who liked music like you like music, like to play music together

and enjoy it together? like music like you like music, like to play music together and enjoy it together? Well, by the time I got in high school, of course, rhythm and boys had crossed over. I had the first Chuck Berry record on chess. I had the first little Richard records on special T, Fats Domino on Imperial, Bo Diddley on checker. Adam Olson's of the came out. Well, these crossed over and they're played on the radio for white people. the because it was so powerful. Tooty-Frooty by Little Richard. Incredible. It was like getting hit in the head with a hammer, you know? Yeah.

Was there any other music that spoke to you or was it all blues and R&B at that time? All blues and R&B. When I went to college, I got turned down to jazz by a guy. Anyway, yeah. No, tell me about that. Tell me about getting turned on to jazz and the experience of falling into it. Well, I went to this terrible Methodist college called Albion College in Albion, Michigan. And they had to live in the dormitory and they had a dormitory radio station, what they call closed channel. You could just hear it in the dorms. Oh closed circuit we called it. Oh circuit yeah that is. So they had this little radio station in our dorm and one day a guy I knew

was doing a radio show and he said he was tired of it and he wanted to quit and did I want to do it? I said yes I want to do it. So I had a Rhythm and Blues show from seven to eight in the morning one day I wake up in the morning and off to school by Chuck Berry. I was my team's son. So I did the show for a while and one day this is in the afternoon I knocked on the door and I answered the door and it was the campus beatnik was at my door. They only had one. He was wearing his sandals and his turtleneck shirt, you know. And he said, are you John Sinclair? I looked like a square, you know, I was trying to fit in to college.

Mentally, I was still in the same, but physically I was wearing the crewneck, you know. So he said, are you John St. Clair? And I said, yes, I am. He said, was that you on the radio this morning? I said, that was me. He says, where did you get those records? And I said, they're my records. And he said, wow. So we sat down and played records for about three hours. He said, wow. So we sat down and played records for about three hours. He was a rhythm and blues fanatic from Detroit. And after we played records, didn't even go to dinner. Ha ha ha ha.

Which I always say, if you know me, that's a big deal. Ha ha ha. I miss dinner. Ha ha ha. I don't miss too many dinners. Ha ha ha. So then at one point he looked at me and he said, are you up to jazz? I said, I don't think so. I don't think I ever heard of it.

So he grabbed me by the arm, literally grabbed me by the arm and dragged me up to his room on the second floor and he sat me down. And he played dig by Miles Davis with Jake McQueen and Tony Brown. So I started right at the top. Did you love it right from the start? By the time that record was over, I was done. Yeah. I've been there ever since.

That was 1960. Did you ever have another experience like that since that where something new hit you and took you over or since 1960 it's been jazz, R&B and blues? Well, I heard MC5. I thought they were fantastic back in the old days. I thought they were fantastic. They improvised. They closed every show with a free jazz number called Black to Con. Different every night. Made up the lyrics. So I really liked that, but it wasn't like a

life-changing experience. It was just, I became a big fan. And I went to every gig they played, and then I became their manager. Tell me about the scene in Detroit at that time. Who else was there besides the MC5? What were the type of places that they would play at? How many people would be there? Tell me everything. When I first heard the MC5, it was in 1966. In those days they had, when a band had a record out, they played DJ hops for a DJ on the radio and he would play the record and they would sync it live, you know, not only

on TV, but also if you want to dance with Jerry Rubin, then your band showed up but you didn't play a song, you just slipped on the stage. Pretty fucking primitive. Got to start somewhere, right? Yeah, you got to start somewhere. So then when I saw the MC5 the first time, there was a guy named Jerry Goodwin on WKNR. And he was a popular disc jockey and he let the bands play at the state fair.

And he had a constant stream of bands but they actually came out and played. Well in those days, a rock and roll band had to look like the Beatles. They had the same outfits, same haircuts. To get gigs you had to play the hits. So a band like the MC5 which was trying to develop its own music, but they all started out by playing the hits by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The MC5's first 45 was a song by them. So in October of 1966, a guy named Russ Gip opened a place called the Grandy Barroom. That's G-R-A-N-D-E, Grandy. It was an old-fashioned barroom from the 20s. He was inspired by the strip from San Francisco where he went to the Avalon and the Film War.

Then he came back to Detroit and he thought they should have a place like this and it should feature original music. That was the turning point here. When the Grand opened, in order to get a gig, you had to have your own tones. That was totally different from before when you couldn't get a gig with your own tunes. So this is a big breakthrough and a lot of bands developed as a result of having a place, you know, opportunity in art makes the world of difference. If they aren't allowing this, you don't really develop anything in that area. But if they do allow it, it opens it up and all kinds of shit happens, you know. So in this case, all these bands were competing to play at the Grandie Ballroom, which was the hippest venue from Owls and Mounds to Chicago.

So then you developed a whole generation of bands that played original music and had, they were trying to better themselves and they were developing as an art. I mean I couldn't have articulated that. I could because I was out of the art beatnik poetry tradition. But they didn't know nothing about art but they knew they wanted to have some original tunes and express themselves. And so you had a whole generation of some. The MCs by the Stooges came behind us out of Ann Arbor.

The Third Power, the Rationals, the SRC, I could go on and on. Were you guys all friends? Oh yeah, not everybody was friends. Yeah. It's a beautiful thing. Absolutely. What was Trans Love Energies? Well, that was a group we formed to create some sort of structure

to be useful to the hippie movement that was developing in Detroit. So we were a collective. I am going to live in a commune, but we had a collective of other communes and bands, light shows, underground newspapers. All the things that had a left-wing cultural tendency came under our purview. And what we do is help a band get some gigs. If a band developed and we thought they sounded good. We would tell Russ Gibb to hire him at the Grandi. We were advocates.

When Russ Gibb started them, the Grandi bottom is looking for a band to be like the house band. So they came to our place to hear the MC fight. That's where they practiced. That sounds great. And it sounds like it wasn't a commercial endeavor. It was, you wanted to spread music.

We were on acid. Money, we would have burned in a foreign furnace. We weren't afraid of the authorities. We weren't afraid of anything except God. And we weren't too sure about God. When did you first try acid? Well, I took peyute in October of 63. That was a life changing experience. I've never been the same since.

Describe how you're different after than before. Well, you know, if you're lucky, you learn that you're just a small piece of debris in the universe. Everything is much bigger than you or me. That we're just here. They call it ego loss. You don't care if you live or die. You're just here. Whatever happens, you're going to try and make the best of it and you're going to try and create stuff to make things better. The thing about as it is all of a sudden you see through all the illusions that they taught you that's what happens. The main thing and then you

develop according to your own personality some form of way to deal with shit afterwards you know but and there that really removes you from the constraints of daily life for most citizens you see. That's a beautiful thing. You have the freedom of mind in order to do things that haven't been done before because that's what you're trying to find. What hasn't been done before. Originality. That was the key concept to everything you did. So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy, using one of Squarespace's best-in-class templates. With the built-in style kit, you can change fonts, imagery, margins, and menus, so your design will be perfectly tailored to your needs.

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app helps you run your business from anywhere. Track inventory and connect with customers while you're on the go. Whether you're just starting out or already managing a successful brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create and customize a beautiful website. Visit squarespace.com slash Tetra and get started today. When did you first get into marijuana? You're heavily associated with marijuana. 62. 62. Yeah, in January. Was that life-changing as well?

Well, it was more subtle. I was a severe beer drinker as a teenager. And then I got into pills. And so one day a guy says to me, what are you taking them pills for? Try this. And he hands me a joint. And so I thought it was superior as far as the way of getting the night. You get high in a whole different way.

And it was very cool. So I stuck with that. No, they don't talk about that too much about the greatness of getting high. Let's talk about it. Tell me. I mean, but it isn't part of the rhetoric. This huge industry they're creating now to sell you marijuana, marijuana products. They don't say nothing about getting high. I mean, it's kind of a known subtext. You know what I'm saying? But you're saying the primary function of it is not what's being talked about.

Right. Exactly. It's just now the commodification. That's all. It's totally opposite to what they want today. You see, they don't want you to be high. they want today you see they don't want you to be high. I've always continued that was their beef with no one. It made you not want to go to work. These are people that mean work means everything. Then you get your products. If you don't go to work you don't have to get the products you see. If you don't go to work, you don't have to get the products, you see. It's a revolutionary thing in the context of capitalist society. To me.

Yeah. How has marijuana changed over the course of your life? The substance? Well, it's still the same. You still get high or you don't get high, you know, it's either good or... They got 10 million brands now, but that's all just part of trying to interface with the commercial culture. I don't pay any attention to brands. You know, they give me about 50 different brands every month. And here in Michigan, we legalized medical marijuana in 2008, you can have a caregiver. So since 2008, I've had a caregiver,

haven't paid a dime for weed in the last 15 years. Congratulations. What more can you ask for? As a party head. When did you first get into politics? I always had left-wing tendencies, even when I was a teenager. I idolized Fidel Castro, for example.

But I didn't know nothing about politics at that time. I just say that, I was always attracted to anything different from the mainstream, I was always attracted. But I didn't really get involved in doing things until I was persecuted by the police for marijuana use. And then I fought back. Eventually I overturned the marijuana laws, but I had to do two and a half years in prison

before that happened. There's a story about Dynamite and the CIA. Can you tell me that story? Well, first of all, in the fall of 1968, somebody planted some dynamite at a little office building and I remember to draw attention to the fact that it was a local recruiting center for the CIA, for the U of M students. Totally illegal, totally outside of everything

that was supposed to be happening. So some people, friends of mine, decided to blow this place up to draw attention to it. They didn't blow it up. They put a couple sticks of dynamite in the front door. Nobody was in the middle of the night. We called it armed propaganda in those days. So I was charged with two other guys

with conspiracy to blow up the CIA building. Although I wasn't really involved, but I can say since he just died, that Pum Pumond and blew the motherfucker up. He did it. He told me when he got back that night, I could never admit that when he's dead now. He was very proud of it and I was very proud of him. And I wished I had been part of this conspiracy, but I wasn't,

but I was proud to be included. And so I was already in prison when they brought these charges. I was in prison for giving away two joints of marijuana to a police woman. I think I was included in this to keep me from being able to get, they wouldn't give me a bond from the field bond, like I was a murderer.

An appeal bond is the basic amenity of our culture. Two joints of marijuana, there's no danger to letting this guy out. But they wouldn't let me out and I did two and a half years before they gave me an appeal bond. I got an appeal bond because John Lennon came to Ann Arbor and played a concert for me and Stevie Wonder and Bill Oakes, and all Bobby Seale and all these people came to Ann Arbor to demand my freedom and then three days later I got out. It must have seemed like a dream. I mean, what's your first memory of the Beatles? Well, I don't know.

I was a jazz lover. Still. I got to grab corn ball. I liked the Beatles when I got the sergeant pepper. So much I determined to revolve or I kind of like that. But by the time judge of pepper came out, that was the shit. Every American with any degree of intelligence on the copy of that. And are you experienced by Jimmy Andre? that and Are You Experienced by Jimi Hendrix. We had a commune in Ann Arbor over a period of several years.

Many, many people came in and ordered this. When we broke up, the record collection was mine. We were even trying what was left. After all, these hippies had been in and out. So there was 18 copies of our new experience. I'll never forget that. Amazing.

That was the Bible. How did you meet Jerry Rubin? And how did you meet Abbie Hoffman? Well, I mean, it was all one big thing, you know. Everybody was in it together and there wasn't that many of us. Small community, you'd say? Yeah. Yeah.

On the national scale, very small, a couple of thousand people, right? 200 people, New York, San Francisco. They had the big population. That would only be a few hundred each. It was very small. There wasn't a market for our music. Our music was not... Yes.

They didn't have no hits until 67. The jibbers in the airplane yet with somebody to love. So that was when that started. How do you think the different branches or the different genres of music relate to each other? Do you think they have carried different energy? No, it's the people. It's not the format.

I don't know. I mean, like a blues was the flatted fifth and the flatted seventh. Those are emotional triggers. So if you play the format, you get the emotionalism, you know what I'm saying? Yes. I don't know. I don't ever think of these things. I just accept it.

Cool. It's either good or bad. You can either listen to it or you can't. It's like, wait, if you get higher, you don't, you see. I remember in the back of the guitar army book, there were like lists of the canon of books and list of the canon of recordings What chapter reading and listening was? Yeah, I

Love that Influenced by that. I told me absolutely People somebody I had a guy tell me went down and read every book amazing. I did of course, but I mean Yeah, it was amazing. It was small, you know, it was small. When the Beatles played Detroit, they drew 16,000 people. Britney Spears can draw 15,000 people by raising her arm up, you know?

The Who, when they played here, they drew 2,000. They wouldn't go out of their house today for 2,000 people. And Detroit's a big town. It's not like it's a small town. It tells you how small the whole- Detroit's as big then as it is now. Wow.

Detroit's one of the top 10 cities in the country, yes? Yeah. It tells you how small the whole world of music was at that time. Right. And it was totally outside the mainstream. If you read the daily papers from the period when our music was in its ascendancy, when the grandee opened, when the MC5 and the studios emerged, you won't find nothing about that.

Totally outside. Yeah. Completely underground. It was a completely underground. No, that was the thermo use. The thing was when everybody started taking acid and playing rock and roll, instead of just smoking weed and playing jazz, it became a massive phenomenon. It grew exponentially day by day. It got bigger and bigger. It was a massive phenomenon. It grew exponentially, day by day. It got bigger and bigger.

It was a beautiful thing. Do you think the drugs played a role in the expansion of the music? Oh yeah, absolutely, acid. Ha ha ha ha. So these people are all taking acid. The Grateful Dead, the big brother in the opening company, you know, country John the fish.

They were folk music players. They started taking acid and they plugged in, they listened to the Beatles and they wanted to do something like that. So they did, but the acid was a catalyst. Yeah. No question. As a jazz fan, did you ever find yourself being attracted to heroin? Because heroin's always been the drug.

No, no, no, no. That's always the one associated with jazz though, as you know. Well, the guy who turned me on to weed schooled me on heroin. In Flint, they didn't have any heroin, they used peregrine. So he took me by a guy's house that was a peregrin addict and had me watch him shoot up. That was enough for me.

I didn't ever want no parts of that. I never even heard of that. I never heard of that word. You said peregrin. Yeah. Well, it was some kind of thing in a bottle and you cooked it up and you shot it and then you get big abscesses. Your hand, this guy's hands were like footballs. Oh man. the And it was always a bad thing. It was never a case of they shot some dope and went on and created musical history. They never put it that way. Yeah.

They shoot some dope and then they go to the penitentiary. Yeah. Yeah. What do you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young? Well, it depends on what you mean by young. Everything I believe now I learned on peyote. I've stuck with everything I learned on peyote

since 63. 60 years I've been the same way. Amazing. My beliefs are consistent. Your taste in reading the same? Would you read the same kind of books today that you would have read then? I read anything today.

I'm semi crippled. My legs are fucked up. So I don't really go anywhere except to the doctor if I have a pain in the gig. So I just sit and read, and run my radio station. And write something with someone. My radio station takes up quite a bit of time

because I prepare 60 to 62 programs every week to sleep. Wow. It's amazing that from your youngest age of childhood, music on the radio is what carried you and it continues to carry you. It's like it's- The religion. Yeah, it was such a beautiful thing when I was a kid, I'd never gotten away from

it, you know? Yeah. It brought me life. There wasn't a hip person in my old town. If you went to Flint, 10 miles away, you'd meet some hip people. Not that many. When I was in college at the point, there was maybe 20 of us that were there. When you went to the University of Michigan in those days, there were maybe 20 people out of 40,000 students. Wow. Most of them were squares. They made fun of us. They pointed at you. They pointed at the

woman for not having no preserves on, you know. Nobody had long hair, everybody shaved. You know, every day now I read the papers every day. I've been doing that since I was seven. And every day you see these people that are running things now, and they all got beards, or they're black, or they're female. This is totally different from the way I came up when it was all white men. So it's all good, you know, it's we're in a transition period, I think. Is Michael Moore also from Flint?

From Davis and he went to the same school I did. My mom was his eighth grade English teacher. Incredible. Have you ever got to meet him? Oh yeah, I know Mike. Good people. Have you ever got to meet him? Oh yeah, I know Mike. Good people. It has been cherished in tribal wisdom traditions for thousands of years. Indigenous people the world over have used this plant-based compound in spiritual, healing and ceremonial rites and rituals for centuries.

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Nicotine is an addictive chemical. I read somewhere that the MC5 ended the show with a mock assassination. Is that true? Yeah. The first time the cream came to America in October of 67, we opened for them at the Grandy. They humiliated us. They made us set up our equipment around the drums of Ginger Baker. We thought they were the most awful, lamest motherfuckers in all of history. So they came back in June and I begged West Kim to let us open for them again.

So we got the gig. We spent two months rehearsing, trying to get ready to blow them away. We wanted to destroy the cream. We wanted to make it so they'd never come back to Detroit ever again. And it was going to end with an assassination. But by the time that point came in the show, it was 105 degrees in the grand. It was packed to the walls for the cream, they were huge.

And we just went out and played the best set you could possibly imagine a band to play. And by the time we did Black to Calm, it was just in total pandemonium, which was just totally nuts, the best possible way. And then the assassination was supposed to come on, but it was still an anti climactic, nobody even, we had it all planned out. Our roadie was going to raise the stage with a flag and

assassinate the lead singer. Amazing. We figured out how could you go on after that? Fuck you, cream. Come on after this now, you motherfucker. Make a set up around your drums, kiss my ass. There were a few more off-putting and ugly persons than English roadies, if you'll remember. Yeah. They were horrible people. What was the White Panther Party? White Panther Party was strands of energies morphing into an overtly political movement based on the Black Panther Party and meant to support the Black Panther Party who were our heroes. We love the Black Panther Party, it was a vanguard of the revolution in the whole world, not just the US, because they were a

black organization that was not racist. They dealt with you like human beings instead of like some white devils, you know. They were real Marxists, Leninists. So we aspire to this, so we followed them. We read their paper every week. And one time in 68, in the fall of 68, Uncle Mond and one of our people was in jail on Traverse City, Michigan for a marijuana thing. He read an interview with Huey P. Newton, I think it was in The Guardian, and they asked him what white people should do that wanted to support the Black Panther Party, and they said, well,

we can't really join our organization because we got this covered. You got to form a white fanatic party and do something with these white people. They're the problem. And so Portland read this and he thought, yeah, that should be us. So when he got home, it took a couple of months to convince me because I didn't, I hated politics except for Malcolm X and Fidel Castro. Anything other than them, I didn't. I mean, I support the black liberation struggle and Martin Luther King and all of that. But I mean, I didn't believe in any of that. I believed in Malcolm X. I thought he was the greatest American of all time. And U.M.B. Newton was right behind him after he got killed. That's what I thought. Did you ever get to see Malcolm X live?

Three times. Wow, tell me about that. I'm extremely excited. Of course, there were Muslim events. So as a white person, you had to sit in a segregated area, you see. I'll never forget that part of it. And there weren't very many of us there either.

Because see, most white people hated black people at the time. The number ones that didn't hate could be summarized in the membership of SDS. They were racist Americans, but they were trying to be better. But those around acid, we had driven racism in our lives. That was important. Did you guys actually know the Black Panthers and were friends with them? We idolized and worshiped them. I see. But from a distance, because they were based on the West Coast?

Well, yeah, pretty much. We became close with the Panthers in Detroit, but they were not a very effective chapter. I was in jail with a couple of those guys, so that's how we became tight. I read that the White Panther Party became the Rainbow People Party. Oh, right, right, right. Well, to be connected with the Black Panther Party, the first thing you had to do was accept our struggle. And you had to arm yourself, and you had to learn how to shoot.

We were hippies, you know? We tried doing this, we adopted this, but it wasn't a posture that went very far with hippies. They didn't wanted no trouble. They wanted to get high and fuck and hear some good music and not go in the war. If you wanted to say four things about hippies, there they are in a nutshell. So the farther we went, of course I was in prison, so part of it was trying to get me out of prison, and our other people were under attack for the CIA conspiracy and what have

you. So we thought, this really isn't doing us a world of good to be grandishing a bunch of guns, and plus if they came after us they would annihilate us. There's nothing the 20 of us could do with guns against the fucking system, you know? So we thought it would be best to change our focus from this self-defense, Black Panther Party thing to something that reflected what we thought and believed and were fighting for, which was a world of rainbowism, which need I explain all different kinds of people getting together without changing their colors or their cultures, you know.

And again, I wasn't there to convince them that I wanted to call it the Woodstock People's Party because everybody knew what Woodstock stood for. That was the turning point in our culture really. I read somewhere that the white Panther Party was never bothered by the authorities, but once the rainbow people came, that was dangerous to the powers that be because it promoted unity

instead of pitting people against each other. I don't know if that's true. They didn't like either one. They just didn't like us. We didn't fit. And we were leading their people astray, their young people. So they hated us the worst. Not so much we were defying them and their old culture,

but they were leading their young people, their sons and daughters, away from the straight and narrow. Soon their daughter didn't have a brazier on and she was fucking everything in sight. We didn't like that. Do you remember what the original Ten Point program was? Pretty much, I couldn't recite it, but we adapted it from the Black Panther part, throwing

in our own little changes, like Rock and Roll Dope and Fucking in the Streets. That was our slogan. It later became bolderized to sex, drugs and Rock and Roll, but when it started, it was Rock and Roll Dope and Fucking in the Streets. Catchy. Rick, I know you like that one. Did the MC5 all live together? Did you guys live like in a big house?

Was there a commune? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was our concept. You'd be involved 24 hours a day with each other. You would never have to wonder about where somebody was coming from. You knew. You knew who everybody was, what they were doing. And also of course, the economic factor.

If you had eight people that rented a house, it was cut to bill and eight parts. You know, you could do it. You can live and do your things, which were without reward. Rock and roll was without reward at that time. Understood. There was no way you were going to get any money for this because it was outside the mainstream. It's not what they were looking for.

In fact, they were bewildered and befuddled by this. Was your guys commune the only one like that in the Ann Arbor area, or were there other groups of young people living together like-minded? Other groups, yeah. Everyone had its own distinct identity, depending on who the people were. But basically, as an economic unit, it was unbeatable for a hippie to live in a commune. And then we took it to another level when we got more political and we revolutionized the commune way of life

so that everyone was equal, so that everyone shared in cooking, cleaning and childcare. This was mandated by the central committee. You had a schedule for every member, hours that you had to spend on the front desk, answering the phone, taking care of kids, cooking certain days a week, you know. It was very sophisticated when you think about it. When you look at that period, the main thing you think of is the oppression of the women. What do you think of the movement? That's what the women all say, how oppressed they were.

Well, I happen to think that the bosses, they could have done whatever they wanted. But in our group, the women were encouraged to take leadership roles. My wife and I, before any of this, we had to Detroit out his workshop. We published little mimeograph books and I typed the stencils, she ran the machine. So that was a reversal at the basic level. That was what we were looking for. We used to make our beliefs into reality. The commune was a basic manifestation of our beliefs.

Ground level. If you lived in a commune, you were on the right path. Ha ha ha ha. First off. Did you learn about it from anyone or did you guys just make it up? Well, you read on the road, you know, everything comes from on the road, bro. Jack Kerouac, the greatest American, one of the greatest of the 20th century,

Allen Ginsburg, Charlie Parker, Jeff Pultrain. They were the pinnacles. So their ideas influenced and eliminated our lives not just their art but their ideas I think we got we don't care what the idea of you want to smoke some weed you just couldn't find any white people didn't have no only jazz musicians and poets. Regular white people never even heard of it. It was a narcotic to them. It was dope. LMNT. Element. Element electrolytes.

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If that was the case where everything in the underground was hard to come by, being where you guys were, how would you get information from what was going on in New York or what was going on in San Francisco? We had this thing called the underground press. They've completely wiped, you know, they've wiped out everything about our period. They've wiped out hippies,

they've wiped out the underground press. The Black Panther Party is a cartoon movie about Africa. They wiped it all out because they don't ever want it to happen again, so they don't teach you about it. It's like when I was growing up they didn't say anything about the labor movement. I grew up in Flint, Michigan where they started the labor, where they had the sit-ins against the Buick, you know, Chevrolet. They didn't ever tell you anything, I didn't know anything as a youth about the union. My dad worked for Buick in the office, so he wasn't a union man.

So that's what they did with us. They wiped us out. You know, one of my great influences is a guy named Rock Scully. He was the manager of the Grateful Dead. And I got to know the Grateful Dead from going out there, and then they came from Detroit in 67. We don't know it every day for a week. That's what influenced me to become manager of the MCBuy,

because I saw that Rock Scully and Danny Rifkin, the manager of the Great Podiatr, they were more far out than me. They were total dope queens and yet they were managing this band. They were on Warner Brothers. They were doing a national tour. You know what the MC5 needed was somebody to take care of their business for him and I knew how to take care of business. And so I just kind of, I was most into their management. But, Rock Scully. And then in later years, I got to know him again.

And one day we were hanging out there, and I don't know how we got him talking about this, but he was saying, they wanted to make a movie about the dead story. You know, and then he said, but they gave us a treatment, but they took all the drugs out to the drug. As you was covered by some roadies smoking a big doobie. And that was it.

Missed the whole point. Jerry Garcia wouldn't make a move without tomorrow. I don't know if you ever read Rock Scully's book. It's a great book. Living with the Dead. No, I'll read it. Well, you'll love it. But it starts out as, you know, you set the tone with the first chapter. He starts out by describing a trip to Germany and he described how his job as a manager, his first job was to make sure everybody had their dope.

Dangerous job. That is a true story here. Wow. Well, the underground press had millions of readers. There was an underground paper in every city of any magnitude whatsoever. There was at least 50 of them, maybe 100. So I was involved in this from the beginning, you know. My pal Bob Rudnick was the coordinator of the underground press center before Tom Fursad. Then Tom F Persad built it into a huge mountain by Villa

and then became wealthy by smuggling tons of pot and starting high times. High times, it all goes right out of the Underground Press Center because of that, you know. But everything went from 100 papers covering everything in these different communities to one magazine covering marijuana. That's how that shrunk, you know. They said there was five million readers of the Underground Press. They had the Underground Press Syndicate, which Redneck was a poor native of. And the idea of the Underground Fest,

and because if you joined, you could print material from any other paper without getting permission or paying for it. Of course, the Underground Fest, we didn't get paid. If you worked on the staff with notes of paper, maybe you got $25 a week. If you wrote, I never got a penny for all the millions of words I wrote.

But that wasn't, it wasn't about the money. No, and it was all the information was passed between all of these little independent papers all over the country. With your own words, from your own eyewitness accounts. Wow. Totally outside of the news. Amazing. Totally. Amazing.

Amazing. And then if you look back at them, it had a tremendous influence on the daily paper. Our little paper in Detroit, design influenced the daily papers to an incredible degree. You can look at them before and after and see the effect we had on them. Because we made the papers in the works of art.

San Francisco Oracle was the pinnacle of this. But every paper had its own artist, its own logo, and its own typefaces. And it all dealt with the shift that was going on in the community underground. Would you say it was like the internet before the internet in a way? Well, it was much more pointed. The internet's wide open. Anything can happen on the internet. I mean, it isn't limited to underground issues.

The underground press we dealt with, the war, women's rights, gay rights, capitalism strikes, anything against the government, you know? Anything that you see any parallels today in the way people feel towards the government versus the 60s? Yeah, yeah, the Republicans hate the government. Was that always the case? Republicans were the government. Was that always the case? Republicans were the government.

So what changed? They did. They became more venal, more greedy. And they've got to the point where ideology doesn't mean anything. Winning means everything. Getting their way means everything. This is the most incredible change to me in my lifetime. The Republican party is against the FBI.

And they used to be the FBI you're saying. They were the FBI. There was a Republican party to CIA, the FBI, they were one group. Could you imagine the Republican party being against the FBI? So do you feel like the sides switched? What happened?

Well, they started losing. We started having more. It's like it's all played out in the papers every day, you know. Our ideas started to overpower their ideas. And so now they're using their power to overpower our ideas. But you know, it's a culture war. It's like they say. Why was the first MC5 album a live album?

Well, we were a live group. I wanted to make the point that this is what they did. See, the MC5 was the most exciting live band of all time, in my opinion. I never seen nothing or heard of nothing like that. When they got done with it, the place was destroyed. And they worked hard to develop. Rob Tanner was a genius and he was a performing genius and he had a genius understanding of the stage and everything about performing. So that by the time it was over, the audience was destroyed.

They were laying on the ground with their heads spinning, you know. I wanted to get them across. We had a live album coming out on electric, and I wanted to be a live album. Nobody ever did that. I was gonna say, I'd never heard a debut live album before, so it really felt revolutionary. Unlike today where it's all about doing what everybody else does.

Only doing it better and having a bigger promotion budget. Did you meet Danny Fields? Do you remember any of the people from Electra? Danny Fields, sure. He's one of my best friends. Oh, great. How did you come to meet him? Well, Bob Rudnick and Dennis Farrelly have a column in the East Village,

other newspapers, the weaning underground paper in the country, you could say. It was called Cocaine Karma. Back before anybody ever heard of cocaine, it's in the 60s. They got a radio show called Cocaine Karma on a radio station called WFMU in East Orange, New Jersey on the campus of Upsalaw College. Some freaks at this college took over the college

radio station. They were the first street form station. Well because the underground for us we got to know each other and then the MC5, what I did with the MC5 as their manager was I created this unending stream of propaganda about how great they were, about how great the shows were, about the weird text on us by the police. I was a columnist for the Fifth Estate, but I wrote these things about the MC5 and each village, they loved what I wrote. And of course, being in New York City and being dope beans themselves, having a hard time with deadlines. They would come up upon the deadline of an issue they'd have. They wouldn't have anything of their own, so they would

take something of mine and put it in the East Village. Well, that was as good as the God in the Underground Press, you know. I also was in the San Francisco Oracle, that was as good as the God in the underground press, you know, that I also was in the San Francisco Oracle, which was the greatest paper of all time. So I was kind of proud of that. But I got to be friends with Drednekin probably through underground press. On the MC5, we made our first single, Looking at You, back with Borderline on the A Square record. So I bought it in Ann Arbor. Of course, we had 500 copies.

Russ Gibb, who earned us $500 for this session, the 500 copies. We had 500 records, but you couldn't really sell them. So we used them as promos. So running a program, they loved our record. I don't know if you ever heard looking at you on MCP. Absolutely. Yeah, it's a pretty far old record. They hadn't been on any record like that with feedback and shit, you know. Well, they liked our record, so they played it. So when I go to New York,

they had me come on the radio station and talk about the MC5 and play the record. Well, the show before them was by Danny Fields. Danny Fields and Marni Govralli would bullshit, have to change over. So that's how I got to know Danny Fields. And he liked the MC5. Then he went to Detroit to see the MC5. Then they brought him to Detroit to see the MC5 and we had the Stooges opening for us. So he signed us and he signed the Stooges on the same night. Wow. They called New York and said,

I want to get the MC5, I want to give them $25,000 and we can get this other band, there's two of us, we can get them for five. And so they signed both of us. So then Danny Fields was a staff member at Electra. He was the guy who told them that like my player would be a hit single if they charted it off the album. That was the turning point in Electra Records. Wow. That was when they made some money.

They were making a little money off of Judy Collins, but not very much. They were a folk music label, and then they had it sing along in 67 because of Danny Fields. So he was revered, and they took his advice until he got to MC5 and the Stooges and David Peele, he signed them. Not something to be especially proud of. Did you ever meet Jack Holtzman? Sure. He was the president of the record label.

I was the manager of this new signed band. He was a lying rotten motherfucker, if I may say so. Jack, fuck you. Jack was the one who tried me on to put a motherfucker on the album and then took the album off the market when they got the reaction that I told them they were going to get, you see. Said they aren't going to like this. He said, oh bullshit, we got to do this. It's important. It was so important that when

the stores refused to stock the records, he pulled it off the air. It was at 90 with a bullet, our opening album. You know, the record business, our old first week was 90 with a bullet. So we were barreling up the fucking charts. We pulled it off the market, censored it. Well, the censoring killed the MC fight because all of a sudden you were a bunch of punks. You weren't the authority fighters you were projecting yourself to be. You were being punked by the record company. Then they fired me. So, well, first I got

them over to Atlantic and Jerry Wexler signed them and I became friends with Jerry Wexler, one of my lifetime heroists. Great. Amazing. I had all of the Atlantic records when I was a kid. There were no better records. I'm playing them today and played them on my record show last week. Welcome to the house of macadamias. Macadamias are a delicious superfood, sustainably sourced directly from farmers.

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We were talking about how could we sell the MC5 and he had the goofy idea of signing John Lando to produce them. And that was what ruined the MC5. Bruce Springsteen, John Lando, that John Lando? No, he had before Bruce Springsteen. We were in Stepping Stone and he tried to make the MC5 sound like Bruce Springsteen, which is really a bad idea. I don't know if you know their second album, the on stage album sounded like the first album and the one in the middle sounded like the monkeys, one John Landau produced.

He told the bass player he couldn't play. For example, he made the drummer go straight ahead, where he was actually an Elvin Jones influenced rock and roll drummer. John Lando told me I had to stick to Booker T and the M.G.'s El Jack. So anyway, terrible thing. After that they fired me. So. When did you see the crossover from the short hairs to the hippie culture take over in the mainstream? Woodstock was a turning point because before that, you see, we started out small and then

they tried to keep us small. Mainstream capitalized on the fact that we were underground. It's a tiny phenomenon, it's gonna go away. All this long-haired shit is bullshit. You know, pretty soon everybody's gonna be back to suits and ties. And they were wrong.

And what just came, and all of a sudden there's half a million people in the rain. Just see Jimi Hendrix and Joan Baez. That was totally outside the rhetoric of what was supposed to be happening. So this was all of a sudden they realized 500,000 people would go and sit there in the rain in a farm in outstate New York. It must really be huge. That was 69 by 72, they had taken it all over and they had ruined everything. The underground ABC network put out eight underground stations under their ages.

And they were huge. So they wiped out the smaller stations that had developed this concept. And then they developed what has ruined the record company ever since is the consultants. You know, when you were coming up with music, the people in the music business loved music. Well, there were the human, you know, Binsky's and the guys like that who were creepos, you know, but they were cigar-chomping businessmen, you know. But most on the ground level,

it was all music lovers. The Disjaki's were music lovers. The people that worked for the record companies, the promotion men, they were music lovers. They knew the difference between one song and another, one band and another. This is a big difference, as you can imagine, because they love music, and that's why they're in it. And after Woodstock, they were in it because they thought 500,000 people in the rain,

we can get reaching their pockets and get $10 a piece. That's five million. So that's what they did. And then they got where they could just buy off the music. If you went wrong with the program, they give you a million dollars. If you didn't, they wouldn't give you a record contract. That started in 72. It's just gotten worse every year for 50 years now. So you have what you have today, which is total alguenos. That's why I do my radio show, my recitation. I want to create a reminder, you know, an artifact of this period, the way it used to be when you listen to the radio. I was on WWLZ in New Orleans for 12 years. For 12 years in my house, the radio station never went off off and you never changed stations because they played all the good stuff.

Well, that's what I'm trying to do with my, I'm trying to preserve a little bit of that for the future, you know? It sounds like a dream. I can't wait to listen. Oh yeah. Put on the 24 seven stream and it's like listening to a radio station. What's your take on free speech? What was it like living in Amsterdam? You lived there for a while, right?

Well, I spent 15 years going there for half the year. Yeah. I loved it there. I'm trying to change it now, they say. I don't like the red lights. I don't like the lights. I don't like the lights. I don't like the lights.

I don't like the lights. I don't like the lights. I don't like the lights. I don't like the lights. I don't like the lights. I don't like the lights. I don't like the lights. I don't like the lights. I for half of the year. Yeah. I loved it there. Trying to change it now, they say. I don't like the Red Light District and the pot smoking anymore.

They got a government that wants to be like the US. They have 20 million tourists, but they want to get rid of 10 million of them. You know, they're just totally nuts. The white people. But this place has been like that for 500 years. That's the part I like to butt in. Life is different.

Nobody's armed. You know, the first time I went there, about the third day I realized that my shoulders were starting to settle down because I wasn't terrified of getting shot like I am here, you know? Yeah. Nobody's armed.

You could go in a place and buy some weed and sit and smoke it with your friends without having to buy a drink. That was a beautiful thing. It just brought everything to the forefront that you think is important about life. And you're never bothered by the police. In 15 years, I never had a conversation with the police officer. So that was my idea of civilization. I'd be there now except I'm crippled.

So I was going to go there in 2020 and I got to the airport and I didn't feel so good. So I went home and the next day I had a heart attack. So I'm going to think long and hard about going back again. You seem very strong. I am, except for my legs and not working. Tell me about being wiretapped by the government. Oh, it was just a way of life. You knew they were doing it all the time.

Well, you know, that was our case against the CIA bombing. And in our case, they, under discovery, they wanted to know if any information on the defendants was obtained by wiretaps. And they said yes, but we can't tell you who it was because it was a case of national security. Well, it turned out to be a tap on the Black Panther part. Pumped them on and distributed 900 copies of the Black Panther paper in Ann Arbor every week.

So he was on the phone, told them they were taping him. So the government says we can't tell you anything about this because it's national security. Then it turned out that William Rehnquist who worked for John N. Mitchell and Nixon, the so-called Justice Department, so reviled by the Republicans today. But Rehnquist had developed this concept of warrantless National Security wiretap. They didn't need a warrant ever with National Security. So we challenged this and our judge, Judge Damon Keefe, from the Eastern District of Michigan Court in Detroit,

federal court, agreed with us that this was wrong, that there was no such thing in America as a warrantless wiretip. They had to abide by the constitution to get a warrant. So they appealed the judges ruling the government. Very, very extraordinary action to take, but they appealed it. And we went up to the Supreme Court

and we won eight to nothing in the Supreme Court. Wow. The ninth vote was Judge Wenquist who had been appointed to the Supreme Court. He had to recuse himself because he had developed this unconstitutional policy. Amazing. Yeah. They talk about the Supreme Court today,

but they may William Wink was chief justice. He was on the biggest crooks of all time. He was Nixon's hatchet man. You've had the most incredible life. I mean, you've really experienced a lot of crazy stuff. As you know, that's the way we do this. Absolutely. You're one of the few examples of the good things that come of this. If you'll allow me to say so.

I appreciate it. Thank you. What wisdom can you share from your life's experience? That would be helpful for me to say so. I appreciate it. Thank you. What wisdom can you share from your life's experience that would be helpful for me to hear? You're almost Bob Dylan. You just do what you want to do. You don't do anything you don't want to do. You do exactly what you want to do. I admire Bob Dylan more than anybody in public life because he's made a, he's my age, he's 82 years old. He just does what he wants, he's still out there trying because that's what he wants to do. He don't want to sit home and roll around in his barrels of money.

He doesn't care about the money. He's got enough money where he doesn't ever have to worry about a penny ever again. So, I asked what important to me, whether he got money or not, it doesn't matter. You got to do what you want to do. You go into the arts like I did, you got to understand, as I did from Jack Kerouac, that you weren't going to get paid, that it was going to be a struggle that the police were going to be after you. All of these things were clear, but I still, I wanted to do this shit and I did it. So you've got what you signed up for. Amen.

Amen. I never expected to make 65. So I never thought I'd be able to retire like I have. You know? Thank you.