As I make a final push to finish up my rough draft this week, I will be posting some of my favorite interviews I’ve conducted for Blogcritics. org.

Though conducted in May of 2007, I still find a lot of the issues I talked about with John Sinclair relevant. As we sat down, I informed him that I too grew up in the thumb area of Michigan, like his grandfather, and we seemed to strike an instant connection. What evolved was more of a conversation than an interview. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed conducting it.

Come back every day this week for more interviews: Eric Himan, Hal Ketchum, 30 Seconds to Mars, and David Immergluck of the Counting Crows.

John Sinclair; author, poet, and activist, spent the sixties embracing the ideal of love and peace, and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. He was a jazz poet, founder of the Detroit Artists Workshop and manager of the MC5. With the release of the first MC5 album also came the declaration they had formed the White Panther Party, in support of the Black Panther Party and in opposition to the U.S. Government.

In 1970 he found himself sentenced to 9 and a half to ten years in prison for giving two joints to an undercover policewoman. While the movement he started, along with much of the rock world, protested for his freedom, Sinclair began compiling the columns he had written for the underground newspapers and writing the resulting book Guitar Army. He was given his freedom twenty-nine months later, three days after the expansive “John Sinclair Freedom Rally” at Crisler Arena in Ann Arbor, MI (Dec. 10, 1971). The book, which became known as a manual for revolution, was re-released May 1, 2007 by Process and includes previously unreleased photos as well as a CD of recordings of the MC5 and other Detroit area bands of the time.

John Sinclair sat down with me last week at a local restaurant near the record store he would later sign copies of Guitar Army and read from its pages. We found most things in life are circular — to move forward you have to look back. We talked about the ideals of the time, those he expressed back then, and how it all relates to the social and political state today. The conversation drifted from music, to baseball, to the effect of the media on the youth of today, and back again.

Is there a reason, other than the thirty-fifth anniversary, that you are re-releasing the book Guitar Army?

I got a publisher. (laughs) It’s been available for thirty five years but no one has had the good taste to want to put it out again. Finally they did and it coincided with the thirty five years. It rings a bell with journalism of today.

Major anniversaries?

Right. I’ve been active for these past thirty five years, but since I wasn’t in trouble, and I don’t call major press conferences they don’t know. They ask ‘Where you been?’ Well, I was in your town six months ago, but you didn’t pay any attention. Now I have a product and a publicist and it’s about the old days, so it’s safe to talk about.

Because enough time has passed?

If I brought this out now I couldn’t get a review. On the basis of the content I mean.

Do you think there is a significant relevance between what was going on then and what is happening now? I mean, we’re once again a country at war.

It’s an unbroken line. It just keeps getting worse from my perspective.

Do you mean from the political perspective?

Well everything, it’s the culture – the deteriorating, degenerate culture. I don’t mean that in any particular way. It’s the trading of intelligence for dollars. It’s all because there are a lot of greedy people who are making a lot of money off of this. They have no compunction to elevate or educate; they just want to take their money and throw them on the side. I hate that.

I live in Holland where we don’t have people sleeping out on the street. You know, it’s all what a society wants. It turns out this is what America wants. They wanted to discard all of their values to have a bigger car that takes $3.50 to the gallon for gas.

I’m pretty unremitting in my critique. (laughs) It doesn’t matter who the politicians are. They’ve proved that. They have a mechanism that works for the rich people, and they get richer and richer as statistics prove.

You look at big business with millions and millions…

I’m a big baseball fan. But why does Pudge Rodriguez have to get ten million dollars a year? Or others get fifteen million dollars each year. What are they going to do with that? How much money do they need? So if someone wants to take their family to the ballgame it costs $100, or more than that.

I was going to say, when was the last time you were to Tiger Stadium. It costs more than that to take a family of four to a pro ball game.

We use to go all the time and sit in the bleachers for three dollars. I don’t say that to dis these guys, but god damn. 50 cent is worth a hundred million dollars. What kind of world is that? I don’t live there mentally.

There’s one tier of extremely wealthy, but then there is also high unemployment.

Oh yeah, and you have the underclass that they don’t even want to acknowledge until they turn out 20,000 of them in the superdome waiting for a bus. That was the first time they saw people like that on TV in a long, long time. Americans didn’t know they still existed. I don’t know; I hate this society. I’m sorry, let me stand right up.

It’s okay, if that’s how you feel. Do you think the things you wrote in Guitar Army are still relevant. Are there things people today can draw from to change the human condition?

I don’t know. That would be for them to say. I did my bit. I didn’t put the book out to influence people today.

Well, no. You put it out thirty-five years ago.

Back then I was trying to take over the world. Now, I’m just trying to get my words in print, because I am a writer.

Do you still look at your poetry and writing as a way to express political and social unrest?

I express whatever I think or feel at the moment. That’s what I like about writing. You can say whatever you want; and I do. If you read something I wrote it’s pretty much what I wanted to say.

You only write about what you care about?

I really do. That’s why I don’t make a very good living as a journalist. (laughs) I only write about music I like. I only write about books I like, anything like that. It has to give me satisfaction because they aren’t paying me enough, so you have to have your fun.

You say you only write about music you like. You went from being a rock ‘n’ roller to a blues and jazz guy.

Well I started in the blues then moved to rock, and now I’ve come back.

So you’ve come full-circle?

Yes, thank-you.

Do you think the decline in the music industry has anything to do with the content?

That’s part of it, I’m sure. But it’s also caught on what we were talking about before and the change of media. They’ll figure out a way to control the digital domain. But they’re mostly… To me 95% of the best records that have been turned out since they switched to digital media are the reissues, reissues of the old LPs with the outtakes. Like Chess records, when you look at the discography of Muddy Waters – great records – but they only put out half of them, or maybe less, on singles. That was all the market would bear. You could put out three Muddy Water singles a year, but you couldn’t put out four. So those other sides went without being issued and now they are putting them out with these reissues.

But as far as the new stuff, it’s hard for me to find a record I like.

They’re saying now, with iTunes and the like, artists are thinking more in terms of the single and not the album so-to-speak.

It’s gone back to what it was like when I was growing up. Songs came out as singles and it was very exciting. At first, the singles would come out – the 45s – and then an album would come out and it would be a collection of singles. It was like that until the 60s when bands started conceptualizing the album.

So that’s coming full-circle too?

Mostly they concentrate on the technological change because that was a challenge to control the stuff on the internet, which to me iTunes and that whole thing is the greatest thing to happen in my life time. I’ve been collecting music since I was ten years old, but now you can get all the tunes you want on your desktop and it has the name and the date, and it’s labeled with where it comes from. I use to spend countless hours writing all this down on cassette boxes. I have thousands of them.

So have you taken all your boxes of cassettes and digitalized them?

No, they’re all in my archive. Eventually, the University of Michigan will allot the funds to transfer it all to digital media then I’ll go back and put them on my iPod.

Early in Guitar Army you talk about the sense of restlessness you feel at that young age you were. Don’t you think that’s a pretty universal feeling across generations?

Young people don’t have the reflection today. We were trying to reflect in the music, through rock ‘n’ roll. That’s what rock ‘n’ roll is all about, intrinsically. In reality it’s about that coming out and the industry smothering it. It just hasn’t busted out in a long time. There isn’t a target. The charts, the radio, it use to be you put a record out and you try to get it on the radio. Now [with the decline of radio], everything is just so scattered.

The other side of this is you can do whatever you want. You don’t have to wait for some A&R guy to discover you. To go into the studio to record a record it use to be you had to wait to be signed by a record label through your work. Now anyone can make whatever record they want.

You just have to build a website, and a MySpace and you’re all set?

Yeah, you can do the promoting yourself, but you can also record it by yourself at home with your computer, or get some friends together and form a band.

If only you were twenty now with this technology.

Yeah, I always say if we had the internet in the sixties we would have taken over the world. They could do that now. I just saw the most encouraging story yesterday in the New York Times. The people in charge of coding the DVDs to keep you from copying them, their lawyers sent out a stern warning to these people about disseminating this information on the internet that it was not to be done. So they revolted and now this code is everywhere.

One of our writer’s just wrote about the story last week.

Look at what Move On did. You see, part of getting a culture to not make things happen is making them believe it can’t happen. In the academic world, all the people who went to college since the Regan and CIA era started in 1980, or even before that, have been taught that history is dead. That there is a new world order and this is the way it’s going to be. Then they have this massive wiretapping and this kind of stuff, and you’re supposed to feel like you can’t do anything.

So a lot of people feel that way, but there’s still a lot of stuff going on but they don’t give it the same weight as they do the other stuff. I’ll give you an example. I use to go to this thing in Boston called MassCann. It’s sponsored by Massachusetts Normal Cann – Cann is short for cannabis. It’s a huge legalization rally. It was huge because the FM station endorsed it and it was their major promotion of the year, because all these guys could harken back to the day when you could say these things publicly. Well the EEA and the state police and all these people came to the station, because they were getting 80,000 kids at Boston. And they said, ‘We really wish that you wouldn’t do this.’ And they said, ‘Are you crazy? This is our most popular event. It’s working for us commercially.’

But when they would have it they would have the counter-rally down the street, the people who supported the laws against marijuana, and even though there were 80,000 people at the other [MassCann] event, the coverage would be fair and balanced. So they would show somebody here, and then they would have an equal amount of time from the counter rally and there were maybe 50 people there. It was totally bizarre. Wayne Krammer was talking to me the other day about going to this thing in Washington against the war, 300,000 people there. You don’t get any sense there is that kind of opposition.

You never got the sense that the Democrats could win a congressional election. Now that they have, you don’t get any sense of the tremendous change taking place, even in the last two years of the Bush administration. Nor did you get a full report on the impact of having all your branches of government lined up in a row and how ugly that is. The President, the Supreme Court, both the Senate and the House, there was no checks and balances. It was all the same party, which was all set in motion by a vote of the Supreme Court against the vote total — Don’t count the votes – against Al Gore. We’re not going to count the votes. So for six years they had this power, especially after the 2002 congressional election. We had four years of, I call it fascism. I read some books about history and they said when all the forces in the media are all lined up together, that’s what the definition of fascism is.

Anyway, you have this false veneer of news. It’s not really news; it’s propaganda. Roger Ailes was the guy who was Ronald Regan’s ad man. Roger Ailes is now the head of Fox News, the same guy who had the doves released when Ronald Regan was inaugurated; he’s the same guy who told the Iranians to hold the hostages until the inauguration ceremony. This is the guy who runs Fox News. And then you don’t have any continuity and you don’t have any history anymore. Now we’re reaping the effects of these kinds of policies. People don’t have idea what’s going on or what happened, not only in the past but not even now. My favorite is eighteen months after 9/11, 72% of Americans believed ?addam ?ussein was responsible for the attack. Three out of four Americans believed that. This guy was no where in the picture. They all watched it on television and this guy was nowhere in the picture. The guys who did this hated him. He wasn’t their boy at all.

Do you think the fear from 9/11 was a catalyst that caused people to allow new measures to restrict personal freedoms like the Patriot Act?

There’re all these conspiracy theories, you know. I don’t know enough about it, but you hear it’s the CIA. They’ve done all kinds of rotten things all over the world, they could have done this. I don’t know. Is it possible Al Queda or the guys in Al Queda were contracted by the CIA? I don’t know, or the Russians were in Afghanistan, and the Taliban, and the Islamic Freedom Fighters. Saddam Hussein was our ally for ten years against Iran. Even today you don’t see this. It isn’t part of the story.

So, what’s the story? We use to back this guy and then he didn’t agree with us so we took his country. We threw him out of office. We executed him. We put in some puppets. They aren’t working out, so we’ve precipitated a civil war. When I read the story, that’s what I see.

It’s all about how they spin the story. We got a little bit away from my original question – which was about the fear in this country and the limiting of our freedoms.

It’s the fear of ‘the bomb’. That’s why were dropping all these bombs on Afghanistan. What happened was a terrible thing, but what are we getting from this. Do they feel better that we’re dropping all these bombs on people who didn’t do it, or these people in Iraq that didn’t do anything to us.

That’s what I hate. You don’t hear anybody say we should get out of the war because it’s ugly and it’s immoral and it’s awful. [They're not saying] we aren’t gangsters; we aren’t thugs. Nobody says that. They say we aren’t winning so we better cut our losses. What are we going to win? What were we going to win in the first place? The right for Haliburton to get these big contracts? We sell them the bombers, the bombs, and the fuel. They drop the bombs, and then we sell them new ones. It’s a pretty good deal for these companies. These are the people who have also controlled our foreign policy since World War II. And the whole oil thing is so everyone can have their big cars.

So we can pay $3.00 a gallon for gas?

$3.00 would be a cheap gallon. I paid $3.48.

Up in Michigan? Is it that much?

Yeah, up in Michigan. It’s working for somebody, but it’s not working for me.

I guess what it comes down to is I feel the same way now as I did back then about all this stuff. Back then I was young and we’d take LSD and we thought ‘people just don’t know.’ And I thought we’d turn them on to these ideas. We could have a different kind of world where people loved each other and got along. Things could be solved by cooperation — Pretty good ideas. I’m still behind them.

They are good ideas still today.

The part I don’t relate to is we got so pissed off, and then we got reactionary. Some relied on violence and it wasn’t really a solution it was just reactionary. We just got so angry. I mean, hippies with guns is not really a good idea, as it turns it out.

And again – you’re getting the same arguments today with violence and hip-hop music and how it’s translating.

Oh yeah. The movies, I don’t know. They got this whole culture of ugliness. There’s this Korean kid who shot these people [Virginia Tech Shootings] and he’s made a movie of himself. Except the people he shot won’t be able to get up and collect their paychecks.

And all the pontification, they all were asking ‘how did this kid go wrong?’ He watched the wrong movies.

But don’t you think part of it is when the media puts it in terms of records – largest mass killing to date – and glorifies the act?

That’s the way they compete with the violent movies is by having violent crime. I don’t watch TV. But if you do watch an evening of TV, as I have done on occasion in my life, you see more violence and ugliness concentrated into four or five hours than I’ve seen in my whole life of sixty-five years. You can’t show tender love scenes of people having sexual congress, that would be wrong and that would be immoral, but to blow your face off – that’s entertainment.

It’s disturbing. Isn’t it?

You can only do this kind of stuff for so long and then you start paying for it. And we’re paying for a lot of this stuff now, but they still don’t get it. They don’t understand why the Arabs and Muslims upset. ‘Why are they so upset with us? We’re nice people.’ The CIA has been working for us since they threw over Mossadegh in 1954. If we don’t give them the history, they can’t understand why what’s happening is happening.

Look at Europe, they remember Hitler because they had him right there – in their face. There were some people who really liked him. He represented their views on jews and other people, but they remember what happened. So they look at this; they see what it is. There is no love for America, no love at all. Plus there is no respect. They all think we’re idiots.

Maybe that’s a good reason for your book to be coming back out. Maybe the youth will read it and be inspired to change things?

It was definitely written for kids, that’s the other thing. It was a book that was put together for people who didn’t read. It wasn’t written as a book, you know. It’s a collection of columns for the underground papers.

One of the things I like about it is it shows the progression. And the thing I like about coming out and doing these interviews is I get a chance to say what really happened. There’s this whole mythology about what really happened, and in particular my role in it. They say ‘Well, how did you get the MC5 to support your political agenda.’ I say we both stumbled into it. We had no agenda beyond rock ‘n’ roll, dope, and fuckin’ in the streets. It’s a paean to the slogan. And then it goes through the MC5 playing the shows and the people liking it, but the police didn’t. So then it progresses and you tend to see how it happened.

And all the small steps that happened along the way?

Right, and you get my final conclusion on how it all worked.