Lennon in New York presented a rare opportunity that Rubin eagerly seized. He placed a shot-in-the-dark call to Apple Records and was as surprised as anyone when Yoko called him back. Rubin and Hoffman’s first encounter with John and Yoko fittingly took place beneath Washington Square’s landmark arch; Lennon wore American flag sneakers, Yoko was all in black. After excited introductions they left the park and spent several hours in Hoffman’s apartment. Rubin told John and Yoko that their bed-ins for peace were great, not unlike his own political stunts. John and Yoko said they considered Hoffman and Rubin to be artists; the radical leaders saw Lennon as a new kind of political activist.
Rubin asked early and often what exactly Lennon wanted to do. To be involved, Lennon told him. He wanted to put a band together, play music, and “give all the money back to the people”; to use his music and do his part for the Movement. He had said he intended to “compose songs for the revolution,” and hoped to take those songs on the road and maybe shake things up a little.
“I want to do something political, and radicalize people and all that jazz,” Lennon said. “This would be the best way . . . taking a really far-out show on the road, a mobile, political rock and roll show.”
If he’d been back in London Lennon would have had all the contacts he wanted, as he dipped a tentative toe in British revolutionary waters, but in America he required some introductions to find the right causes to rally. Rubin’s usefulness relied on whether the Yippie leader could serve as Lennon’s tour guide into Left politics, Yankee style. He had to bring something to the Bank Street party to stand out from the dreamers and schemers who sought Lennon’s friendship, confidence, and favors.
A specific issue piqued Lennon’s interest, the struggles of Rubin’s friend, Detroit activist John Sinclair, who was serving a harsh prison sentence: ten years for marijuana possession that instead seemed like punishment for his political views.
Either the sales pitch or the cause—ten years for two lousy joints!—clinched the deal. The immediacy of the effort appealed to Lennon—grab a guitar, fly to Michigan, and get involved, and for the crowd to do more than just scream in delight.
“We want the audience to participate fully, and not just admire God onstage,” Lennon told French TV reporter Jean-François Vallee, who spent a day filming a Bank Street bed-chat with John, Yoko, and Rubin in early December.11 Lennon described the vision he’d been forming of a politically charged concert, free of superstar trappings, with the people and performers united in spirit.
That seemed to have been the problem when the Beatles last tried to perform in front of a crowd—and who knew what might happen if all four took the stage together again. “I am still mainly a musician,” Lennon said, perhaps wistfully, as he prepared to begin a new chapter in his career. Partly, his goal was to be just another musician, one without the superstar trappings; at the same time, in his writing and performing he was seeking to shine as an artist in ways that might even surpass what he had accomplished as a member of a group, even if the group did happen to be the Beatles.
“As an individual I still have a lot of power, I can always get on the media . . . because of the Beatles,” Lennon said. “Our job now is to tell them there is still hope and we still have things to do and we must get out now and change their heads. We can change! It isn’t over just because flower power didn’t work. It’s only the beginning.”
Lennon thought he’d found exactly what he’d hoped for when he left Britain, a chance to serve the Movement with his guitar and presence.
• • •
Lennon may have been John Sinclair’s last hope for getting out of prison. Two years into his sentence and nothing had worked, not letter-writing campaigns to the Detroit News or Free Press, not even when Abbie Hoffman tried to take the stage at Woodstock and say a few words about Sinclair’s ordeal. (Abbie’s timing was off: he stepped onstage while the Who were doing their thing, and legend holds that guitarist Pete Townshend belted Hoffman with his Gibson and sent him off.)
Sinclair was an underground Detroit legend dating back to his Wayne State University days in the early 1960s. A man of eclectic tastes in addition to an affinity for weed, Sinclair composed poetry, advocated for political causes and community benefits, and promoted his beloved jazz. With his future wife, German-born Magdalene “Leni” Arndt, Sinclair transformed the 1964-launched Detroit Artists Workshop into the more political, civil rights–driven White Panther Party, a name taken in response to Black Panther Huey Newton’s call to arms to people of all colors. Although the name was potentially confusing (and later changed to the Rainbow People’s Party), the White Panthers sympathized with what they considered a natural ally in the wake of the 1967 riots that rocked the Motor City.
“The hippies and the black people had the same enemy: the Detroit Police Department,” Sinclair says. “Another common bond was we smoked weed and so did most of them. Certainly the ones we came in contact with, artists and poets.”
Whether hippie or Panther, Sinclair said they shared common bonds as easily distinguishable minorities in a country divided by a so-called generation gap.
“They had a sign: long hair,” Sinclair says. “If you had long hair, smoked dope, liked rock and roll, didn’t have a job, and liked to fuck, you were a hippie. Hippies were great; best thing to ever happen to this country.”
Sinclair’s casual demeanor, that of the frequently if not perpetually stoned, could be deceptive; he was passionate and focused on the issues he championed. From a core of community-based idealism, his grassroots efforts tackled causes large and small but always local, unlike the higher-profile activists who basked in the national spotlight. While sympathetic, Sinclair pointed out that Detroit had its own problems.
“We were totally outside the established realm of politics, of which the left wing was the SDS and the mobilization of all the antiwar stuff,” Sinclair says. “We were always in support of that, but we were coming from a different cultural perspective.”
The local attention—good and bad—was just as intense as the national scrutiny faced by Rubin and Hoffman. Sinclair’s passions for pot and politics made him a target for campus police who considered longhairs enemies of the state.
“I was busted twice before,” Sinclair recalls. “Once for selling a ten-dollar ‘matchbox’ to an undercover police officer; the second time an undercover policeman induced me to drive him to someone’s house where I got him a ten-dollar bag.”
The second arrest in 1965 ended with Sinclair spending six months in the Detroit House of Corrections. What should have been a cautionary tale—quit giving pot to relative strangers—didn’t take hold. Back on the streets, Sinclair continued his laid-back approach to freely sharing the weed.
“We were hippies, you know, we weren’t criminals,” he says. “We didn’t consider ourselves engaged in criminal behavior. Everything we did was open, free to the public, that’s what we were about.”
Everyone was welcome at the Detroit Artists Workshop, including two newcomers in late 1966: a man with long hair and a beret called “Louie,” and a woman introduced as “Pat” who wore hippie clothes, smoked pot, and helped with the typing.12 Pat played up to the men and Louie tried to score pot from whomever he could. Louie and Pat—in reality Vahan Kapagian and Jane Mumford of the Detroit Police Department—were comfortable with the hippies, and one memorable day Pat asked a question often heard at the workshop.
“She asked me if I had a joint,” Sinclair says. “I rolled a joint, we had a smoke. She asked if she could take it with her. I said, ‘Here, let me give you another one,’ so I gave her a second one.”
The word “entrapment” probably didn’t slow down the two officers who, a month later, stormed the workshop with some of their friends and a fistful of warrants. Sinclair was arrested along with fifty-five others in what the papers called a “campus dope raid.” The charges dragged through two years’ worth of app
eals, and in 1969 Sinclair began a ten-year prison sentence for a pair of joints.
For two years his friends and supporters had tried everything they could think of—appeals to sympathetic lawmakers, letters and advertisements in newspapers—but Sinclair remained stuck in prison. Hope came in two forms. The first was a political gambit played in July 1971 by President Richard Nixon when he lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. The impact went well beyond the election of the president; candidates at all levels of government would now need to sell their platforms to a generation that they had barely acknowledged before, let alone understood. Of particular interest to the college crowd, the politicians would quickly learn, were laws criminalizing marijuana use. Legislators across the country weighed whether it might be time to reduce simple possession from a felony to a misdemeanor.
Sinclair’s supporters hoped this might be the chance they’d been waiting for to get Sinclair’s story back in the public spotlight, told on front pages and evening newscasts. Sometimes it took sensational efforts, something as loud as a Yippie stunt, but backed up by mainstream credibility. A concert to rally the pro-pot, antiwar crowd could be the perfect combustion of audience and cause—if the right acts could be found. They needed a big star to draw the right amount of attention.
“We were always reaching for more,” Sinclair says. “This time we hit the jackpot.”
• • •
Concert promoter Peter Andrews didn’t believe it was really happening until John Lennon answered the phone. Andrews and Leni Sinclair had flown to New York equipped with little more than a Jerry Rubin–provided phone number and some downtown addresses.
Andrews was well experienced in booking concerts in Ann Arbor, everything from local acts to Jefferson Airplane. He’d been approached about the intimidating task of filling the fifteen-thousand-seat Crisler Arena on behalf of a jailed poet.
“Sinclair wanted a big event,” Andrews says. “He’s in jail telling folks, ‘I need something big here.’”
What they had wasn’t enough. Andrews says the original plans for the Ann Arbor show included local musicians and a host of speakers, which might fill three thousand seats at best and leave a sad, empty-looking arena. Besides, wasn’t John Sinclair old news?
“I looked at what they had and said, ‘You have a real bomb on your hands,’” Andrews recalls. “He’d been in prison two years, and people have short memories.”
Andrews considered the idea without much enthusiasm, until Leni Sinclair relayed an intriguing offer: John Lennon and Yoko Ono as headliners.
No way, thought Andrews. “It was too far out,” he says. “The idea of him performing was pretty outrageous.”
But it was real, and soon it was happening. Andrews and Leni shook their heads at their good fortune and set about closing the deal. While Andrews headed for Bank Street to confirm Lennon’s interest in the concert, Leni took a cab to Jerry Rubin’s Prince Street apartment to discuss adding another top-shelf artist to the line-up. Braced against the December chill she rang the bell. Hearing no response, Leni waited on the stoop for him to return.
“Before long, a man came up and rang the same doorbell,” Leni says. He, too, was there to see Rubin, and they had a brief conversation. Leni told the kindred spirit of her husband’s plight and how Rubin and John Lennon planned to help. Another man soon approached who had a key to the building, and they went inside to wait for Rubin.
“I sat in a chair and these two gentlemen started a conversation,” Leni says. “I’m listening out of one ear, and it dawns on me that it was Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs. Jerry Rubin was trying to get Bob Dylan to play this concert with John Lennon.”
A true radical dating back to when she fled Germany and dove headlong into Detroit’s underground scene, Leni felt somewhat out of her league when she realized the company she was in.
“I never saw them again, and he didn’t do the concert,” Leni says. I don’t hold that against him—you don’t need Bob Dylan if you’ve got John Lennon.” And though Dylan didn’t end up on the bill for the Michigan concert, Phil Ochs did.
The trip from Detroit was an unqualified if unbelievable success: one of the world’s most sought-after performers was set to champion the Sinclair cause. Andrews had a signed contract that paid Lennon $500 for his performance, a fee immediately signed back over to the John Sinclair Freedom Fund.13 The fee-turned-donation was a paltry sum, of course, and Lennon was well aware that the many groups and activists who sought him out did so in part from financial need.
“I always take care of the underground,” Lennon had said a few months earlier. He also had his own vision of what charity or benefits could accomplish. “If they get in trouble I lend them money or invest in them or whatever. I get asked every two days for at least five thousand pounds, and I usually give it to them.”14 Lennon had in mind a foundation built on “a dollar a head” concert receipts that could benefit those who came calling.
Of equal value was Lennon the performer, and the musical stamp of incalculable worth he could put on a given cause. With Sinclair in mind, Lennon previewed a song he’d started writing for the occasion, a bluesy number strummed on a steel guitar.
“I assured him it was very good,” Andrews says. “And that John Sinclair would indeed love it.”
Andrews, stunned at the prospect of a John Lennon concert, humbly asked Lennon to say a few words into a tape recorder, an oral testament to confirm the contents of the hastily drawn-up contract.15 Lennon’s message was brief, to the point, even semiapologetic in some ways:
This is John and I’m with Yoko here. I just want to say we’re coming along to the John Sinclair bust fund or rally or whatever it is to say hello. I won’t be bringing a band or nothing like that because I’m only here as a tourist, but I’ll probably fetch me guitar and we have a song that we wrote for John. That’s that. We’ll be there Friday . . . hello and goodbye and hope that’s fine.
• • •
Naturally, John Lennon and Yoko Ono were treated like royalty when they arrived in Michigan on Friday, December 10. Andrews booked—ironically—the presidential suite of Ann Arbor’s Campus Inn, where he brought the couple after picking them up at the airport.
Selling tickets with Lennon’s name on the bill was hardly a concern—the three-dollar entry fee was remarkably low even by 1971 standards—and the show sold out within a few hours. Andrews said that the modest price was at Sinclair’s insistence, a “for the people” philosophy he later regretted.
“We had a breakeven budget and nobody got paid,” Andrews says. “I wanted to charge twenty bucks, gross $300,000, and we’d sell out in the same amount of time. You don’t get too many opportunities to present John Lennon.”
As in New York, Lennon hoped to downplay his fame, to be one of the street people in the college town’s hip stores and bustling downtown. Lennon spent part of the afternoon wandering through the shops, including some time with star-struck musicians in the Herb David Guitar Studio at the corner of Liberty and Fourth Street. There was no fanfare, owner David told the Ann Arbor Chronicle; Lennon simply walked in, so unassuming that at first he wasn’t recognized by some of the people in the store.16
The owner knew perfectly well who was standing in his shop. “Hi John,” David said before introducing himself.
“I’m not John. I’m his cousin,” Lennon grinned in response.
“Hello cousin,” David smiled back, and invited Lennon to relax and sit in a simple wooden chair. Lennon spent more than an hour in the store, at one point playing guitar to the delight of stunned customers. (The chair remained in place four decades later. A cardboard sign read, John Lennon sat here in 1971, a museum-worthy piece revered like presidential memorabilia.)
By evening Lennon was backstage at Crisler, where he patiently showed guitar chords to his improvised band. Satisfied that his support group understood the songs as well as could be reas
onably expected, Lennon waited to close the show.
It was a long wait. The program began shortly after seven p.m. with the poet Allen Ginsberg, whose ballad of Sinclair had been given to Lennon as background information on the cause. It seemed a joint was lit each time John Sinclair’s name was invoked, as smoke clouds formed in the arena that lingered through the long night. The next seven hours featured musical performances by local favorite Bob Seger, Teegarden and Van Winkle, Phil Ochs, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen (“Hot Rod Lincoln”), the Up, and jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp. While instruments and amplifiers were rotated between acts, the audience heard revolutionary rhetoric from Rennie Davis, Bobby Seale, Jerry Rubin, and others who had come to Ann Arbor to free an imprisoned pothead; each of the speakers also brought his own take on the Movement’s priorities.
Davis gave an impassioned speech that put our government’s hypocrisy in perspective: since Sinclair began his sentence two years earlier, American forces—under Nixon’s orders—had dropped bombs on Southeast Asia at the rate of “two and a half Hiroshima’s a week”—at the same time as the administration tried to convince America that the war was winding down.17
Black Panther cofounder Seale let loose a free-verse, poetic rant on the “historical pollution” of war, hunger, murder, injustice—a rhythmic chant that long predated the cadence of rap: “The only solution to pollution is a people’s humane revolution!”
Rubin was typically excited, and made sweeping pronouncements on the state of the hippie union. “To all the people who say the Movement, the revolution is over, they ought to see what’s going on right here,” Rubin observed. “It doesn’t look over to me.”
Perhaps the most intriguing of Rubin’s statements—at least for certain members of the audience—were speculations on what might take place the following year at the 1972 Republican Convention, which at the time was scheduled to be held in California.
The Walrus and the Elephants Page 2
