Vintage

Updated August 24, 2008

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ON THE ROAD WITH JOHN SINCLAIR

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Entry 15

Amsterdam
August 18, 2008

I’ve been trying to post a new entry and update my calendar here for the past month but I’ve been living in computer hell since I had some minor work done on my iBook in Detroit last month: I was blocked out of my own website and the Radio Free Amsterdam site as well; my Airport application that connects me to the Internet almost every day was only intermittently available; my CD and DVD drive won’t work; and my little computer keeps crashing over and over again with no apparent provocation, something that’s never happened with any of my several Macintosh computers since I first turned to Apple in 1988.

I’m writing from Amsterdam late Sunday night following my performance with Elliott Levin & Jair-Rohm Parker Wells at the 420 Café, where the Irish poet Philly Hayden joined our music-&-verse revue featuring Elliott on flute, tenor saxophone & poetry, Jair-Rohm on electric bass and Philly & myself on verse & voice. I was with Elliott & Jair-Rohm in London last week and joined them there for their concerts at CrossKings (June 10) and Klinkers in Maggie’s Inn (June 12). Jair-Rohm is also a Macintosh wizard and helped me conduct a series of diagnostic measures that suggested re-installing my Mac OS X operating system before going any further.

Elliott is over from Philadelphia to play a series of dates with Jair-Rohm and divers drummers in Stockholm, London, Berlin and elsewhere in Europe. We’ve been friends since I started playing in Philadelphia several years ago and met the saxophonist as a member of Calvin Weston’s startling ensemble called Big Tree. We’ve played together in any number of settings, from the Tritone and Johnny’s in Philly to CBGB’s, Bowery Poets Club, Jimmy’s Restaurant and other spots in Manhattan, and at Zebulon in Brooklyn with UB313, Elliott’s quartet with Marshall Allen. I love his playing and his quicksilver poetry and his old-school orientation in all matters of music & life, and it’s been wonderful hanging & playing together in London & Amsterdam.

Last week Elliott & Jair-Rohm were guests of mine & Dylan Harding at our lodgings in the new HeadPress Bunker on Cranbrook Park Road, London N22, near the Wood Green tube station. We enjoy our own rooms and use of the kitchen and sanitary facilities which we share with David Kerekes and the tiny HeadPress office operation soon to be installed on the ground floor. I’ll be spending the next few weeks there while my new book IT’S ALL GOOD: A JOHN SINCLAIR READER goes into production and comes out this fall as a HeadPress publication, joining the forthcoming issue #28 of HeadPress itself with my elongated report from Mardi Gras in New Orleans 2008.

So this trip is going well for me after a rocky start August 1st when I presented myself to Anthony Murrell and Henk Botwinik of Stichting Episodes at the former Oosterijland Prison in Hoorn to begin their art project titled 13 Isolations, wherein 13 artists of diverse backgrounds and geographical origins had agreed to enter individual prison cells in Hoorn to spend a period of 29 days in isolation, to be followed in September by a gallery exhibition of the art works created in their cells.

My role was to serve as an intermediary or interlocutor between the isolated artists at the prison and the outside world and to create a series of radio programs from interviews with the artists and other participants and reports on the progress of the project. There was talk of payment if grant funds were realized, but no funding was forthcoming and the organizers were having a very difficult time trying to pull off this complex project without the necessary cash in hand.

My own bottom line was that Episodes had pledged to put me up for the first three weeks of August at the lodgings in an old school building they had secured for the project’s organizers and volunteer staff. I would also be fed with the prisoners and enjoy the freedom to leave Hoorn and commute to Amsterdam by train when required. My basic needs would be taken care of as part of the project and I would have the opportunity to take part in another of Anthony Murrell’s unique and exciting art projects under the Episodes banner.

On the evening of my arrival in Amsterdam via London I found that I had suffered a small cut on the tip of the middle toe on my problematic left foot and it looked like infection was about to take hold. I checked the foot again on Friday evening after dinner and it had swelled up considerably, so I determined to leave Hoorn for the night and go back into Amsterdam to clean out the infected area and start a regimen of antibiotics three times a day with the medicine I had left over from the last time my foot was infected.

My pal Ted Jackson had generously taken me in at his pad in the Pijp on the Thursday night of my arrival in Amsterdam, and he would accept me as a guest for another night while I tried to deal with my injured foot. But when I went to return to Hoorn on Saturday afternoon Larry Hayden reported that the prison was under siege from the Hoorn fire department, the various materials meant to be provided to the incarcerated artists had not materialized, and there were other organizational problems of such serious import that it would not be wise for us to return to the project right now.

That night and the next two I spent sleeping on the floor at the apartment where Larry stays with Andy Adkins while Larry kept trying to arrange our delivery to Hoorn and my promised food and lodgings there. After a prolonged comedy of errors on Monday night that prevented us from getting to Hoorn after all, I threw in the mental towel and opted out of any further involvement in this abortive installation. My manager, Nick Smith, arranged for a hotel room for me in Amsterdam on Tuesday night and a flight to London for Wednesday evening so I could spend the next week in my new room at the HeadPress Bunker without additional expense before returning to Amsterdam for another week between August 13-20, where I am now, writing from my room at the Casa 400 Hotel near the Amstel Station.

That was it for 13 Isolations and me. This week I’ve been meeting with Rob Karnisky, who’s here from Florida State University to interview me for his forthcoming Ph.D. thesis on the White Panther Party, and working with Joeri Pfeiffer and Ravi and Daniel Dronkers on getting my iBook back in order. We’ve re-installed the OS X operating system and the repeated crashing has stopped except when the Airport connection is being used, so I’m on-line only via a DSL connection and my CD/DVD drive still isn’t accepting any discs. While Jair-Rohm is here tomorrow he’s promised to help me delve deeper into the pool of possible on-line solutions so I can return to London on Wednesday with these remaining problems solved.

I was writing up a report on July in Detroit and Maryland when my computer went bad and my access to this website was blocked, so I’ll attach that entry from July 20 here and finish up the month of July and attach that report to my next entry (#16) from London next week.

REPORT FROM DETROIT
July 20, 2008

There’s been a week in Detroit, a week at Common Ground on the Hill in Westminster, MD and now three weeks in Detroit in progress since I left London on July 1st, and I’ve been having a ball every step of the way so far. It’s always kicks to visit in the Motor City—my daughter Sunny and her daughter Beyonce are here, I’ve got hundreds of friends I love to see while I’m in town, and my daughter Celia is up from New Orleans until next Monday, so I’m in the midst of a whole lot of warmth and loving every minute of it.

My first week in Detroit for the 4th of July festivities was devoted to catching up with my aged body after flying from London to Genoa to London to Tokyo to London and on to Detroit in the second half of June. Beyonce’s 7th birthday on July 3rd was a perfect day and one of the happiest occasions of my long and fruitful life, featuring a party for B at the Butchers Inn and both of my daughters on hand to lead the celebration. I asked my granddaughter how her year in the 1st grade had gone for her and she said, “Grandpa, they named me Student of the Year.” She wasn’t bragging about it, but that was some good stuff to hear from the light of my life.

We chilled through the weekend at the bohemian colony on Service Street by the Eastern Market where I’m staying with my boy Holice P. Woods, enjoyed a terrific 4th of July party on the block that lasted through the 5th, and then my old comrade Pun Plamondon picked me up at 7:00 in the morning on the 6th of July in a rented mini-van to drive straight through to Westminster, MD to begin our week as faculty members at Common Ground on the Hill on the campus of McDaniel College.

For 14 years we have gathered as a multicultural community of musicians, artists, writers, lecturers, actors and dancers, sharing skills with students of all ages, and with one another.

In this way, we believe that we can improve ourselves, our communities and our world as we meet, share and celebrate our arts and cultures on "common ground."
 
Common Ground on the Hill was founded on the premise that there is a common human thread unifying all people expressed in our various artistic traditions. Our mission is to make this thread a path towards human understanding, tolerance, fulfillment, and enjoyment.

The embodiment of this path is a music and arts community, where master musicians, artists, craft people, and creative thinkers will provide a quality learning experience for an audience, which we will endeavor to increase in size, diversity, and influence. It is essential to the success of this mission that the artists, teachers, and students reflect local, national, and international communities.

It is our goal to provide the opportunity to teach and to study various musical instruments and art forms representing various ethnic and cultural traditions. To sponsor a series of musical and artistic events from cultural and ethnic groups who are marginalized in our society or who are in conflict with each other and listen to their voices, e.g. Indigenous People, African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, Euro-Americans, etc. To encourage and facilitate dialogue, by way of the arts among different cultural traditions, in order to discover that this artistic common ground unites us, and that, as a result, the world might become a more human place.

Traditions Weeks are held this year from July 6 -12 and July 13-19 at McDaniel College, offering an incredible range of classes and workshops led by master artists of many disciplines with concerts every evening featuring faculty and student performers at Theater on the Hill and the Carroll County Arts Center, as well as the annual Roots Music & Arts Festival on July 12 & 13 at the Carroll County Farm Museum that featured special guest artists Tom Paxton and the Fairfield Four.

The 2008 Catalog is online at www.commongroundonthehill.org or you can request a printed copy at 410-857-2771.

Pun was at Common Ground this year to conduct workshops in Native American story-telling and help direct the nightly In Search of Common Ground seminar. He also performed at the Roots Music & Art Festival and served as Master of Ceremonies on the big stage both days. My Common Ground assignments included a 9:00 am poetry class conducted with the New Mexico poet Lee Francis IV; a 1:00 pm New Orleans seminar conducted with Cary Wolfson and Henry Reif focusing on the history and culture of the Crescent City pre- and post-Katrina; and a 4:00 pm Radio Production Workshop conducted with Cary Wolfson and Mike Atherton where we taught a group of mostly high-school kids how to produce their own podcasts.

As always I had the pleasure of performing at the annual Blues Night concert on the big stage at the Theatre on the Hill, backed by guitarist Harry Orlove, Professor Louie on keys, saxophonist Jose “Dr. Loco” Cuellar and the Common Ground All-Star band. We hit together again at the Roots festival with the additional benefit of Tomas Montoya on second guitar and the great Wale Liniger on harmonica.

On Friday afternoon, in our final workshop meeting, Cary Wolfson & Mike Atherton & I made a one-hour radio program with the Radio Workshop participants which is now posted as John Sinclair Radio Show 210 at www.RadioFreeAmsterdam.com. The next day Mike & I made another program (#211) in the hospitality barn at the Farm Museum with some of the legions of great performers at the festival. Cary Wolfson came by, and there were conversations with Scott Ainsley and Bill Ellis, who both contributed “live” performances, and with Professor Louie, Dr. Loco and Mike Atherton himself, along with recorded music by Bo Diddley, T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, Scott Ainsley, and John Sinclair with Ed Moss & the Society Jazz Orchestra. 

Pun and I did some emcee duties at the festival on Sunday and then, as soon as Tom Paxton finished the last set in the pouring rain, we packed up the rent-o-van and hit the highway for Detroit, arriving in the middle of the night some 8 hours later. It was a real treat for me to spend this week with my old-time partner from the days of yore—Minister of Defense for the White Panther Party, international fugitive from the law on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, community organizer, professional rock & roll operative, former alcoholic now clean 26 years, Odawa activist & storyteller and author of the brilliant memoir Lost from the Odawa: The Story of the Journey Back, soon to be published in a British edition by HeadPress.

The drive home was great—Pun drove all the way, and we shared some powerful memories and fascinating conversations as we plowed through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio and the familiar stretch of I-75 north from Toledo to Detroit, pulling up to Hollywood’s pad by Eastern Market around 4:00 am to let me out and then Pun had to ride another two hours to get to his place near Kalamazoo. He was a big hit at Common Ground and I’m sure we’ll meet up there again—hopefully the very next year.

[to be continued]

 
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NOTE: Previous Entries are archived immediately below this post and Entries #1-9 below them under the title 2008 INSTANT ARCHIVE

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My Events Calendar is posted in the left-hand column of my Home Page

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Entry 14

London
July 1, 2008

I had planned to be in Detroit tonight dining in style with my daughters and granddaughter but I’m still in London as the result of a bonehead mistake made by entering the wrong London airport in my flight diary. So I went to Gatwick at 6:30 am at great expense to find that my flight to Detroit was leaving from Heathrow instead and I was destined to miss it.

I’ve been saved from total ignominy through the urgent administrations of Nick Smith & Dylan Harding here in London and Adam Brook in Detroit and I’ll be flying to Detroit this afternoon (god willing). My daughter Celia has come up from New Orleans to join me there in celebrating the glorious 7th birthday of my granddaughter Beyonce at the B-Day party to be hosted by my daughter Sunny and her mother, the great photographer Leni Sinclair.

I’ll be taken in again by my boy Holice P. Wood for the 4th of July week, then drive with Pun Plamondon to Westminster, MD for the first week of Common Ground on the Hill and the American Music Festival before going back to the Motor City for two more weeks. If I can find a good place to work while I’m there, in the absence of the late lamented Amsterdam Espresso coffeeshop at 2nd & Forest, maybe I can catch up on my correspondence after the past few weeks of hectic traveling and correct the galleys of my first HeadPress book, IT’S ALL GOOD: A John Sinclair Reader, that’s coming out in London this fall.

My little needs while moving along the intercontinental bardic path I’ve chosen are simple, but they start with having a place to work every day with a table & chair, an internet connection, plenty of coffee, and a place to smoke my joints & my cigarettes, whether it’s inside as in Amsterdam (although no cigarettes inside starting today) or, as in America, out in the alley or on the sidewalk in front as the case may be. I need my newspapers every day and a spot nearby to wash my clothes every week. I carry everything else I need for my work on my iBook, including about 10,000 music files.

Sunday morning I was in Tokyo with my host, Maki Fujimoto of the Tokyo Hipster Club (THC), in his black PT Cruiser convertible driving through the rain to Narita Airport to make my flight back to London after a whirlwind trip to Japan centered on my participation in an event at the Tokyo Hipster Club centered on 1968, the MC-5 and the revolutionary movement in America, where I was interviewed on stage by the Japanese journalist & musician Gaku Torii with brilliant spontaneous translations from American into Japanese by Yuske in front of a full house of receptive, curious and responsive music lovers, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who paid close attention to our conversation throughout the 2-hour presentation.

Before the show I sat at a table outside the Café Liberte upstairs with Maki, Yuske, Gaku, and my friend Yukiko Akigawa, who had engineered my first trip to Asia, to conduct an episode (#208) of my radio show in Tokyo, playing music by the Wild Magnolias with Japanese guitarist June Yamagishi, the Miles Davis electric ensemble, two selections by Gaku’s band Loaded from its new album Pull the Trigger, and my own performance of “Smells Like Sulfur Here” with Wayne Kramer & the Lexington Arts Ensemble “live” in Los Angeles last year, plus a passage about the U.S. elections from a conversation with Wayne Kramer I had recorded in the Arts Café at the City Inn in London the previous Sunday afternoon.

My high point in London before I left for Tokyo last Thursday was joining the combined musical forces of the MC5 and Primal Scream onstage at the Royal Festival Hall on the 24th of June and doing a recitation of my poem “Spiritual” in the middle of a raging performance of “Black to Comm” that closed out their show and the Meltdown Festival itself. Funkadelic saxophonist Greg Thomas was still in town from the George Clinton show the previous Saturday night and he brought his alto down to the MC5 gig and played with us too.

Hanging with Wayne, Michael Davis & Dennis Thompson before and after the show was a beautiful experience for me and I got a chance to introduce them to my managers, Nick Smith & Dylan Harding, which was a special kick. Meltdown producer Glenn Max was incredibly kind to us again and threw a great party at the venue after the show.

I’d write more now but I’ve got to pack up my things and get to sleep so I can make my make-up flight early this afternoon, but I’ll try to add some more things about Japan and London when I get to Detroit. Yesterday I got this message from Bintou Simpore at Radio Nova in Paris about our radio show that aired on Sunday:

NEO GEO
Présenté par Bintou SIMPORE

DIMANCHE 29 JUIN: LA DERNIERE

Pour clore la saison en beauté, Bintou invite le poète, militant politique et mélomane: John Sinclair.

Originaire de Détroit, manager de MC 5, créateur du White Panther Party à la fin des années 60, John Sinclair a ensuite longtemps vécu à la Nouvelle Orléans. Installé aujourd’hui à Amsterdam, il reste très attaché à la capitale du rythm and blues.
 
Désormais MC sur sa propre web radio John Sinclair joue sa sélection musicale sous les oreilles attentives de Bintou Simporé et Rémy Kolpa Kopoul.
 
http://www.johnsinclairradio.com/

Afro mix

Samy Ben Redjeb créateur du label Analog Africa nous présente sa dernière compilation de rare grooves afros du Bénin et du Togo: Africa Scream Contest

http://analogafrica.blogspot.com

The beautiful and brilliant Ms. Bintou was also noticed in last week’s on-line communiqué from New Orleans, the OffBeat Weekly Beat, under the heading

WHILE YOU'RE IN PARIS

Saturday at 6 p.m., there will be a seminar on "Carnaval de la Nouvelle-Orleans" at the Petite Salle, niveau-1 of the Pompidou Museum in Paris. Excerpts from the documentaries Original Funk, The Sound of New Orleans and Dedans le Sud de la Louisiane about the Cajun Mardi Gras will be part of the seminar, and filmmakers Bintou Simporé and JP Bruneau will be there. Live music will be provided by Jeffrey Boudreaux.

And in New York City, my man Steve Ben Israel launched his new one-man show, Nonviolent Executions, at THEATERLAB (137 W. 14th St. between 6th and 7th Aves) with four shows last weekend. Here’s the formal notice:

Nonviolent Executions, Steve Ben Israel’s one-man show, is his latest séance to contact the living. A series of short takes combining humor, poetry, stories of rare poignancy, and his virtuosic acting abilities, nonviolent executions is an evening of entertainment with extraordinary intelligence and heart.

Mr. Israel started working as a comedian almost 50 years ago, then joined The Living Theatre and for many years toured this country, Europe, North Africa and Brazil as a leading actor in that ground-breaking group. More recently, he has performed extensively on the downtown scene, in such venues as The Kitchen, The Performing Garage, and The Nuyorican Poets Café, and has appeared in movies by Bertolucci, been a featured artist on recordings by Frederic Rzewski and Anthony Braxton, and has been a guest commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered.

In nonviolent execution, Israel comes full circle, to inhabit the city of his waking dreams and nightmares and confront the beauty, the horror and the possibilities of “the island that creates the spice that gives much of the country its flavor.”

When he finds communality with an immigrant cab driver, a cashier at the phone company, or an old jazz hand, he touches something in us all. When he tells his audience that he doesn’t “like the way white people are portrayed in movies,” he is completely sincere. When he sings the cantonal “Ballad of Black, White, and Jew,” sadness and hope ride a North African musical motif from hidden grief to deliverance.

Steve Ben Israel would present an audience’s most generous face to itself. If he pierces the slick armor masquerading as sense in our time with jolts of love and compassion, it is only his compulsion and our deep pleasure to be so subjected.

Steve is a 2007 Obie Award winner and recently performed Frederick Rzewski’s Attica at Carnegie Hall.

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NOTE: Previous Entry #13 is archived immediately below this post and entries #1-12 below that under the title 2008 INSTANT ARCHIVE

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My Events Calendar is posted in the left-hand column of my Home Page

 

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Entry 13

Genoa
June 21, 2008

It’s a beautiful Saturday afternoon, the first day of summer, and the weather in Genoa has finally turned sunny, warm and bright just in time for me to fly back to cloudy London town after the week of rain and chill that greeted the poets and arts partisans gathered here for the 14th Festival Internazionale di Poesia di Genova.

Produced by the indefatigable Direttore Artistico Claudio Pozzani and realized through the carefully coordinated efforts of Circolo dei Viaggiatori nel Tempo, an incredible collective of verse-crazy volunteers, the Festival Internazionale di Poesia stretches out from its base in the fabulous Palazzo Ducale through a variety of Genovese cultural venues to offer over 80 free poetry events from 11-23 June, including La Grande Notte della Poesia on the 13th, a mammoth Bloomsday celebration all over town on June 16, two days of poetry presentations by and for deaf people, a reading in the piazza by a consort of imprisoned poets trucked in from various penal institutions in the region, and daily and nightly performances by great poets from all over the world.

Among the bards featured at the 2008 Festival were Lars Gustafsson (Sweden), Mahmud Darwish (Palestine), Antonio Carvajal (Spain), Arjen Leka (Albania), Dato Magradze (Georgia), Danielka Crasnaru (Romania), Tatiana Daniliyants (Russia), Natalia Molebtsi (South Africa), Michel Deguy and Antoine Simon (France), Bas Boettcher (Germany), Shaiija Patel (Kenya), John Foxx (UK) and David Thomas, Suji Kwong Kim and myself representing the USA. There is quite rightly a plethora of Italian poets and musicians in the picture, including Elisabetta Pozzi, Davide Rondoni, Davide Serini, Roberto Mussapi, Roberto Piumini, Paolo Ruffilli, Guido Oldani, and the rapper Militant A.

My performance was Thursday night on the big stage at the Palazzo Ducale with northern Italian bluesmen Fabio Ragghianti & Andrea Giannoni backing me up on guitar & harmonica in a short program of blues verse from The Delta Sound. My friends Guiseppe Pipitone of Milano and Marta Matteini of Massa had labored hard to produce Italian translations of the poems that were to be projected onto a screen behind us for the benefit of the audience, but some sort of mechanical malfunction prevented the translations from being seen. Our reception was warm and enthusiastic in any case, and it was a beautiful evening for your correspondent from beginning to end.

We were preceded by poet Suji Kwang Kim and David Thomas of Pere Ubu and followed by a collaborative ensemble called Poesie Fuoribordo that presented the poetry of Francesca Valente & Marisa Portello with Veronica Vismera, voice; Giuliano Palmieri, computer music; and a killer jazz trio of Francesco Aroni Vigone, alto sax; Piero Ferrari, bass; and Claudio Saveriano on drums that I’d love to work with the next time I go to Genoa.

My special assignment at the Genoa Poetry Festival was to produce a series of internet radio programs from Festival venues under the title Radio Free Genoa Poetry. With the crucial production assistance of Paolo Podesta and Cristina Poletti and translation help from the young Max Hernandez, my engineer Andrea Orlando and I set up Monday evening on the Piazza delle Erbe in front of the Café Letterario to stage the first episode of Radio Free Genoa, broadcasting my demented mix of music and commentary to a “live” audience of diners and drinkers on the piazza, including a contingent of young people who’d been stranded when the Poetibus failed to make its evening run of the Festival sites and left them at the Piazza delle Erbe with us.

On Tuesday night our “live” broadcast on the piazza got rained out, so I set up inside the café and made the second episode of Radio Free Genoa in celebration of that night’s Poesia en Bottaglia award ceremony organized by Claudio Pozzani & Patrizia Baldizzone to honor the 88-year-old Italian poet & screenwriter Tonino Guerra with the gift of 48 bottles of fine Grigolino wine that’s quite accurately described as “poetry in a bottle.” Episode 2 also featured a conversation with Claudio about the history and development of the Festival and its 2008 manifestation.

Wednesday evening we were back outside the Café Letterario delle Erbe for episode 3 before an ample audience attracted by the promise of Aperitivi Poetici, or Drinks with the Poet, scheduled for me by the Festival organizers for 7:00 pm. Rather than simply present a reading of my works, we staged a “live” radio show that featured recordings of my poems set to music and played by the Motor City Blues Scholars in April and by guitarist Gilles Riberolles and myself at the Starski & Sons Studio in Paris earlier this month.

After the Aperitivi Poetici Marta Matteini took me over to La Passeggiata Caffe near the birthplace of Christopher Columbus for a screening of the Steve Gebhardt film TWENTY TO LIFE and the greatest question-and-answer session with an audience that I’ve ever experienced—not about the events portrayed in the movie but about the issues of revolutionary culture, political resistance and individual freedom raised by the film. We conversed in Italian and American for almost two hours before the evening came to an end around 1:00 am.

Thursday afternoon before my concert Paolo Podesta walked me over to the waterfront to make a promotional appearance on Babboleo Radio 103, www.amobabboleo.it. Then it was back to the grand Palazzo Ducale where I conducted episode 4 of Radio Free Genoa from my table at the Café Mentelocale, playing some hip music, talking about the Festival and conversing with the American poet Suji Kwang Kim. The Café Mentelocale—I call it the Mental Location, on the web at www.mentelocale.it—was my workspot for most of the week, providing free WiFi, plenty of espressos and permission to smoke cigarettes at the same time, and it was kicks to make my last two radio shows from my customary table—almost like being home in Amsterdam.

I say “almost” because not only is marijuana smoking not allowed in the Cafe, but it was even more difficult than usual to find any marijuana to smoke in Italy at all. A young man I met mashed a couple of little blocks of low-grade hashish on me to take the edge off my nervous system, and Christina came up with enough weed for the obligatory pre-show tokes before my show on Thursday night, but otherwise the screen was completely blank. I’m beginning to think of Italy as the only place in the western world where they’re winning the War on Drugs, and that is really sick.

I stationed myself at the Mental Location all afternoon and evening on Friday to make the final episode of Radio Free Genoa with a couple of good conversations featuring the venerable French poet Antoine Simon and the young German innovator Bas Boettcher plus the customary program of musical treats. I finished mastering the program just in time to get back to my room in the commodious B&B at Salita di S. Gerolamo 4 where I stayed all week, pack my suitcase, and hit the sack before checking out in the morning and catching my flight back to London from Christopher Columbus Airport.

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My week in Paris June 4-9 was filled with activity, excitement and good clean fun, as partially reported in Entry 12 (below). The highest points were my collaborations with the French guitarist Gilles Riberolles at our Filmer de Musique 2 concert at Point Ephemere on Friday night and in the recording studio at Starski & Sons on Sunday afternoon, where we cut a series of my poems set to Gilles’ very imaginative improvised accompaniments. Some of these numbers can be heard on the John Sinclair Radio Show #206 and Radio Free Genoa #3 when they’re posted at www.RadioFreeAmsterdam.com.

Another high point was the screening of the film MC5 * A True Testimonial at Filmer de Musique 2 on Saturday afternoon. Marc Zermati had arranged for the officially unreleased film to be shown at last year’s festival and everyone wanted to show it again, so there it was in all its glory and it was kicks to watch it with the audience of hip young Parisiens at Point Ephemere.

Saturday night Marc and I enjoyed a fine dinner at the home of Philippe Manoeuvre, editor of Rock & Folk magazine, and spent the evening listening to some excellent music with Philippe and his ménage. On Sunday we were in the recording studio with Gilles, and on Monday afternoon the whole bunch of us got together at Marc’s place—laughingly dubbed the SkyDog Tower—to hear some tunes, have some laughs, and eventually to conduct an episode (#206) of my radio show featuring conversations with and among Zermati, Philippe LeBras of SkyRanch Records, Gilles Riberolles and their friend Olivier, organizer of the Filmer de Musique. Here’s the notes & playlist for the program:

The John Sinclair Foundation Presents
John Sinclair Radio Show 206
SkyDog Tower, Paris
Monday, June 9, 2008 @ 6:30-7:30 pm [20-0826]
Special Guests: Gilles Riberolles, Marc Zermati, Olivier, Philippe LeBras

I spent June 4-9 in Paris as a guest of the Filmer de Musique 2 film festival at a funky arts center called Point Ephemere under the careful sponsorship of my friend Marc Zermati, long-time French cultural warrior and proprietor of SkyDog Records. He arranged my Friday evening concert at Point Ephemere with an exceptional guitarist named Gilles Riberolles and, two days later, a recording session with Gilles in a proper studio near the Arc de Triomphe known as Starski & Sons. On Monday afternoon before leaving for Charles deGaulle Airport Marc had Gilles, Olivier from Filmer de Musique, and our dear friend Philippe LeBras of SkyRanch Records over to his place in the 10th Arondissment to hang out together, get high and listen to some music. I took advantage of the occasion and set out my little digital recorder to capture our conversation for my radio show, featuring music from Nawfel produced by P. LeBras, selections from a rare Don Covay album reissued by SkyRanch in the early 1990s, and several tracks from Gilles & myself recorded at Starski & Sons Studio the day before. The closing cut, Nawfel’s “Too Mancini,” goes out to my friend Soul Lucille in Firenze.

Playlist 206

[01] Opening Music: MC5: Looking at You
[02] John Sinclair ID, Intro Comments, Opening Tokes & Conversation with Philippe LeBras
[03] Nawfel: E. Warriors
[04] Nawfel: Sexydelic (I Want Some More)
[05] John Sinclair & Gilles Riberolles: Scuze Me While I Kiss the Sky
[06] John Sinclair Comments & Conversation with Philippe LeBras, Gilles Riberolles & Marc Zermati
[07] John Sinclair & Gilles Riberolles: steps
[08] Don Covay: Standing in the Grits Line
[09] Don Covay: Ain't Nothing a Young Girl Can Do
[10] Don Covay: What's in the Headlines
[11] John Sinclair Comments, Conversation with Marc, Philippe, Gilles & Olivier, Closing Comments & Outro
[12] Nawfel: The Trip, Act III: Visions of Suzy Creamcheese playing tenor   
[13] John Sinclair & Gilles Riberolles: that old man
[14] Closing Music: Nawfel: Too Mancini

Hosted by John Sinclair for Radio Free Amsterdam
Produced, recorded, edited & assembled by John Sinclair
Posted by Larry Hayden
Executive Producer: Larry Hayden
Special thanks to Mark, Philippe, Gilles & Olivier in Paris

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We finished the show and it was time to go, so the fellas drove me to Charles DeGaulle Airport for my flight to London and I was back in residence at the HeadPress Bunker that night. On Tuesday afternoon a little film crew came over to cut me doing some on-camera scenes and off-camera voice-overs for a strange movie I’ll have to tell you more about later when it’s finished. I had two blessed days off to try to catch up on some of my backlogged correspondence and then on Friday a radio producer for Guardian Media named Simon came by to make an interview with me for a program he’s putting together about the momentous year of 1968.

On Saturday 14 June I had the pleasure of meeting with a young man named Sam who’s in charge of producing my book IT’S ALL GOOD: A John Sinclair Reader to be published by HeadPress this fall. He brought me a beautiful set of galleys to annotate and emend and then, when the corrections are properly entered, the book will go to the printer. Hallelujah!

Sunday it was back to the airport to fly to Genoa for the poetry festival. I returned to London the following Saturday 21 June and was whisked down to the Royal Festival Hall in the Southbank Centre alongside the River Thames to enjoy the thrilling Meltdown Festival appearance of George Clinton & Parliament/Funkadelic and exchange a few pleasantries with George & the cats after the show courtesy of the very tasteful Festival producer Glenn Max. I’ll see Glenn again tonight when I join DKT/MC5 and Primal Scream for their Meltdown extravaganza at Festival Hall.

I spent Sunday evening enjoying a long dinner with Wayne Kramer & Dylan Harding in the Arts Café of Wayne’s hotel, the City Inn, and made an interview with Wayne for a forthcoming issue of Headpress that’ll be devoted to the music & life of Sun Ra. I’ll tell you more about it later after I’ve transcribed our conversation. Now it’s time to head down to the hall for tonight’s show.

Before I go I’ve got a couple of things to share with you: The first is a new poem by my friend Ted Jackson sent from Amsterdam:

The second is a terrific statement by the very recently departed George Carlin, whose presence and fiercely resistant point of view we are going to miss something terrible from now on.

GEORGE CARLIN SAID:

"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying—lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want: they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.

"But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers—people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club."

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NOTE: Previous Entry #12 is archived immediately below this post and entries #1-11 below that under the title 2008 INSTANT ARCHIVE

My Events Calendar is posted in the left-hand column of my Home Page
 

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Entry 12

Paris
June 6, 2008

It’s Friday night in Paris and I’m writing from a funky arts complex called Point Ephemere in the 10th Arrondissement where Filmer de Musique 2 is being staged this weekend. I’m with my friend Marc Zermati of SkyDog Records who has arranged a performance for me here tonight with the guitarist Gilles and an appearance tomorrow afternoon at a filmic event celebrating the MC-5.

I came to Paris on the train from Amsterdam two days ago and have done two short stints at NOVA Radio, the popular free-form station founded 27 years ago by my old friend, the recently departed Jean-Francois Bizot. When I got off the train Wednesday evening Marc drove me past my hotel at 4 rue Petit in the 19th Arrt. long enough to throw my bags in the room and then whisked us off to NOVA for an interview with a deejay named Melanie, who thrilled me beyond measure when she beamed out three of my own recordings over the Parisien airways.

Thursday came with no specific duties but we came over to Point Ephemere to finalize the details of my appearances at Filmer de Musique 2 and hang out for a while in the café drinking espressos and trying to get on-line. Today we were back at NOVA Radio to cut an interview with a happily renewed acquaintance, Ms. Bintou Simpore, for her 3rd World music program on Sundays. Bintou even let me spin half an hour of music from New Orleans, a 3rd World location if there ever was one.

The last time I saw Bintou was in the mid-‘90s when she came to New Orleans with Bizot at Mardi Gras time to make a film about Funk for French television. They had the good taste to engage my wife Penny and me as location and talent consultants and we had a ball helping them get to the right places at the right time to hook up with the right people during the Mardi Gras festivities.

My own highlight was getting to interview George Clinton for the film concerning his conception of Funk and where it came from. In response, George said he heard this song on the radio one day called “Get Out of My Life Woman” and that was it! Sung by Lee Dorsey and written & produced by Allen Toussaint, the 45 featured the funky approach of a teen-aged Leo Nocentelli who would later emerge as guitarist of The Meters.

A sight I’ll never forget was the gigantic, unmistakably Gallic, impeccably blazered form of Jean-Francois Bizot striding up Jackson Avenue near the corner of Dryades in the 3rd Ward, looking like General deGaulle on his way to inspect his troops as the Zulu Parade began to roll down from Claiborne Avenue on Mardi Gras morning. What a terrific character!

On Saturday night after the screening we’ll have dinner with Philippe Manoeuver, editor of the venerable Rock & Folk magazine in Paris and a recent visitor to Amsterdam, where we conducted an interview for the magazine’s special 1968 issue that’s just been issued. If I can get the piece translated from the French so I’ll know what I said, I’ll print it here for you later.

On Sunday night we’ll dine with another Philippe, M. LeBras, chief of SkyRanch Records in Paris and another recent visitor to our Radio Free Amsterdam haunts in Amsterdam. Philippe is the producer of an outstanding young French guitarist named Nawfel and is about to release the kid’s new album, The War of Sound, for which I’d been commissioned to write the liner notes:

NAWFEL: THE WAR OF SOUND

Nawfel—this kid is unbelievable. Well, he’s not so much of a kid anymore: Now, at 22, he’s a full-grown young man and a master guitarist of the highest order. Born in 1985 to emigrant Tunisian parents in Soissons, France, the kid emerged very early on as a juvenile guitar prodigy who had soaked up popular and creative music of every persuasion and fused it into a sound and conception of his own.

The kid has listened to and fully absorbed into his playing an incredible range of music, listing influences from John Coltrane, Freddie Hubbard and Herbie Hancock to Brother Jack McDuff, Richard “Groove” Holmes and Jimmy McGriff, from Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Minnie Ripperton to the Stylistics, Curtis Mayfield and Earth Wind & Fire.

Then there’s Deodato, George Duke and Boz Scaggs, Prince, Sade and Steely Dan, MC5, the Stooges, the Dead Kennedys and the New York Dolls. The Ramones. Motley Crue. Black Flag. Van Halen and Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and Metallica. And the list adds Manu Dibango, Toots & the Maytals, Ruben Blades, Willie Colon, Al Green, Donny Hathaway and Bobby Womack.

The kid doesn’t even mention guitar players! It’s clear that he’s dug them all, assimilated every possible lesson to be learned from the innovators and the virtuosos, and invented himself as a heroic guitarist of epic dimension. In his young maturity he’s also developed as a composer and mastered all the instruments he needs to make his music come true in the studio with a minimum of assistance.

The guitarist’s panoramic musical vision and masterful delivery power this set of original compositions—plus a spectacular 13-minute outing on Al Kooper’s “I Can’t Keep from Crying Sometimes”—from the opening notes of Nawfel’s “The Land of the Surfer Dolls” to the closing moments of “Oh Boy!” His conception fuses every sort of guitar heroicism with a sleek, soulful rhythmic thrust that provides a fresh and compelling context for Nawfel’s extended solo excursions.

Nawfel’s slashing guitar leads are right out in front, where they belong, and Toma Milteau is always right there behind him on the drums, but the kid fills in the open spaces with his own rhythm guitar, bass, percussions, Fender Rhodes piano, Hammond B-3 organ, clavinet, Prophet V, Mellotron, Minimoog, Wurlitzer electric piano, drums, Linn drums programming & sampled vocals.

Nawfel made his first recording in Los Angeles in 1999 as a 14-year-old electric guitar phenomenon supported by an all-star cast of musicians led by producer Barry Goldberg, Ivan Neville on keys and vocals, Reggie McBride on bass, and the great Jim Keltner at the drums. With their backing the kid attacks tunes by Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, the Kinsey Brothers, Aretha Franklin, Booker T. Jones and Los Lobos, pinning them down and turning them around with his soulful guitar pyrotechnics and sly, funky rhythmic drive.

Eight years later it’s apparent that the kid has been building a following for himself behind the excitement generated by the impact of his initial release, writing his own music and assembling a sympathetic crew of supporting musicians to aid him in accomplishing his musical goals. Here they include his lyric writer (two songs only), Jesse Chaton, on keyboards & vocals, Loic Gayot on electric tenor sax, Moussa N’Diaye at the congas, Mom on rhythm guitar and Antoine Arroyo on various basses.

Together they perform Nawfel’s songs to perfection, creating with him a throbbing wall of electronic sound—The War of Sound!—that surrounds the listener and never falters, from the surfers-on-acid workout called “Land of the Surfer Dolls” through the boldly anthemic “E. Warriors,” the three wildly psychedelic sections of “The Trip,” the reverential “To Arthur Lee,” the parodic, tongue-in-cheek “Too Mancini,” the brilliantly buoyant “Song for Kelly G,” the romping, stomping, “Oh Boy!” and the quietly reflective bonus cut at the very end—everything works like a charm. And the poppy vocal numbers “Sound in the City” and “Sexydelic” put the frosting and a cherry on top of this tasty musical cake.

Hats off to the young guitar god and his fearless champion, co-producer Philippe Le Bras, for their musicality, persistence and unflagging rhythmic intelligence. You can take my word for it: This is a hell of a record!

—John Sinclair
Amsterdam
December 16, 2007

© 2007 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.

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Another recent Parisien visitor to our haunts in Amsterdam is the writer and raconteur Phil Demetrion, an old old friend whom I've just met this year. Perhaps this post from his blog at http://parisposts.blogspot.com/ will explain:

BY PHIL DEMETRION

I headed uptown for a rendezvous at the 420 Café with an iconic figure from the 1960s.

John Sinclair is a veteran activist & poet. Back in the day he managed the Detroit-based punk pioneers MC5 ("Kick out the Jams, Motherfuckers!") & led the revolutionary White Panther Party.

"I Talk with the Spirits"
by John Sinclair

. . . I asked him, "Do you think
about Earth life?" He said,
"Not much." I said,

"Do you consider
that you might prefer
living on Earth
as opposed to your life
in the afterlife?" & he said,
"No,

I wouldn't prefer
living on Earth." So I said,
"Really? Not with all
the acceptance, the
recognition, the fame?"
His reply was, "I prefer

the Spirit
life
to the way
life
is
on Earth"

—Detroit
August 1982

John is perhaps most famous for the Draconian prison sentence he was given in 1969: 10 years in prison for giving two marijuana joints to an undercover narc. Is there any question why a youth counterculture emerged in the '60s & '70s? John Lennon was among the many notable left-wingers who came to Sinclair's aid via a benefit concert & rally in late 1971. Within three days of the rally, John Sinclair was sprung from prison. The Michigan Supreme Court ruled the State's marijuana statutes unconstitutional.

It ain't fair, John Sinclair
In the stir for breathing air
Won't you care for John Sinclair?
In the stir for breathing air
Let him be, set him free
Let him be like you and me

—"John Sinclair"
by John Lennon
from Some Time in New York City

John & I enjoyed a world class hang at the 420 that afternoon. He's an interesting cat, to say the least. Easy to speak with. These days Sinclair divides his time between the 'Dam & the U.S., does fascinating roots music radio webcasts from various coffeeshops, goes on speaking tours, even has a band. We gabbed about everything under the sun. Music. Bob Dylan as Satellite DJ. Our childhoods. Our health (like the geezer fucks that we are). We discovered that we'd seen Chuck Berry on the same Alan Freed rock 'n roll package tour in our youth. I caught the show in Hartford in January, 1958; John saw it a few months later in Flint, Michigan. Small planet.

I told John that earlier this year I'd written about that show on this page. Now my friend César has picked it up & published it in Spanish in the current issue of his Barcelona-based magazine Popular 1.

I'll be writing a piece on John for Pop 1 later this year. For now, though, I just wanted to meet the guy & tell him how much I dug his webcasts. I wasn't disappointed.

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Monday night I fly back from Paris to London to take up my residency at the HeadPress Bunker with Nick Smith & Dylan Harding for a few days before flying down to Genoa, Italy on June 15th to spend a week as a guest of the Genova International Poetry Festival. Genoa is the loveliest city I’ve ever visited and I’m looking forward to my return with great anticipation.

My last stay in London was dedicated to doing a lot of planning work with Nick & Dylan, happily interrupted by Sunday brunch with the Dopefiend and some of his crew at the PingPong dim sum restaurant next to the Royal Festival Hall, where I’ll be seeing the MC-5 on June 24th. I went back to Amsterdam May 28-June 4 and stayed at the Hotel Utopia on the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal above the Utopia coffeeshop—not a bad location for your correspondent.

Speaking of the coffeeshops in Amsterdam, here are a couple of Dutch news squibs from recent weeks:

POT PLANTATIONS

Police in The Hague raided 316 marijuana plantations last year with a total of 83,000 plants and a street value of €11,000,000. In addition, 199 people were arrested in connection with the plantations and €150,000 was clawed back from benefit claimants who were working in them.

—DutchNews.nl
April 22, 2008

MARIJUANA IS MAJOR DUTCH CASH CROP

Coffee shops where small amounts of cannabis can be bought contribute some €400m to the treasury a year, according to estimates by TV programme Reporter. The country’s 700 coffee shops are responsible for selling some 265,000 kilograms of soft drugs a year, mostly Dutch-grown marijuana, Reporter says. This means turnover in the sector is around €2,000,000,000 a year. The programme also estimates some 5,500 plantations were destroyed by police last year. Between 20% and 40% of local production is sold in the Netherlands, the rest is exported abroad.

—DutchNews.nl
May 5, 2008

My week in Amsterdam was brightened even further by a visit from my dear friend Soul Lucille of the Firenze station CONTRA RADIO, who has agreed to let us carry her Sunday afternoon soul music program on Radio Free Amsterdam. I’ve known Soul Lucille and the members of her band Near the Jail since my first trip to Florence in 2003, and we’ve visited together in Rotterdam, Rome, and when I’m in Firenze ever since.

Soul Lucille got a big taste of Radio Free Amsterdam when she was in town, accompanying me to several of our John Sinclair Radio Show episodes conducted at the Dolphins & Eat at Jo’s and sitting patiently by while Larry Hayden and I recorded the many voice segments (they call them “pills” in Italy) to be inserted into the music tracks for my weekly podcasts from the 420 Café Café (New Orleans Show), the Dolphins (Blue Dolphins) and the Hempshopper (Jazz from the Hempshopper), and then waiting some more while I produced the final versions of a whole bunch of these shows at my table at the 420 Cafe.

On the last day of May—my brother David’s 63rd birthday!—we were guests of the H3R3TIC Film Festival at Overtoom 301, where about 6 people attended a free showing of TWENTY TO LIFE but we had a great time conversing with them after the screening and hanging around the long-established ex-squat arts center all day and made a radio show (#205) with the organizers and one of the visiting film-makers during the afternoon.

Sunday, Monday and Tuesday I worked very hard too complete enough of my three weekly radio shows to keep up the schedule until the beginning of August when I’ll be back in Amsterdam after a month in the USA. Soul Lucille had to return home on Tuesday evening, not such a happy moment, and then I was gone the next day on the train to Paris. Au revoir, mes amis!

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NOTE: Previous entries #11 & #10 are archived immediately below this post and entries #1-9 below them under the title 2008 INSTANT ARCHIVE

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My Events Calendar is posted in the left-hand column of my Home Page

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Entry 11

London
May 24, 2008

I’ve been to London and back to Amsterdam since my last entry and now I’m back in London again for a second week in residency at the HeadPress Bunker with my new managers, Nick Smith and Dylan Harding, sorting out the present, the immediate future and the long range with respect to my late-blooming career as an author, performing artist and itinerant bard.

HeadPress is an avant publishing operation under the direction of editor David Kerekes and publisher Nick Smith that issues an elaborate periodical called Headpress (#28 coming up this summer) and so far has published an improbable 50 books of varying weirdness under the Headpress imprint.

Early this year I was engaged as Senior Editor of HeadPress and signed as an author with the promise of a permanent home for my works in poetry & prose, starting with the release this fall of IT’S ALL GOOD: A JOHN SINCLAIR READER, a collection of 22 poems & 22 essays celebrating my 44 years as a poet & writer in 2008. We are also planning a series of little HIP POCKET books containing a CD of the texts for each book performed by the poet with various musical ensembles.

It’s been easier to get some of my works in verse recorded with musical accompaniment and into print, however briefly, than to get my prose works published. It took 35 years to get someone to reprint GUITAR ARMY last year, for example, and the forerunner of IT’S ALL GOOD was first published by the Italian publishers Stampa Alternativa in Italian translation with facing pages in American under the title VA TUTTO BENE.

My prose writing over the past 44 years has included cultural and political essays, record and book reviews for underground papers and obscure music magazines, newspaper columns for ephemeral alternative publications, liner notes about obscure artists for tiny independent record companies, travelogues and commentaries of many sorts, and feature stories and artist interviews for a variety of newspapers, music magazines and specialist journals.

For several years I’ve been collecting these voluminous writings into a series of anthologies and trying to figure out how to get someone to bring them out. At the same time I’ve been attempting to solve the problem of getting my works in verse and my CDs that have gone out of print back into circulation, and to force into print the several books of verse which have still never seen the light of day.

I’m no big fan of Charles Bukowski, but I’ve always loved the way he found a publisher in his later years who pledged to get all his work into print and offered financial support so the author could concentrate on his writing instead of having to continue to hustle for a living. My friend and mentor Edward Sanders enjoys this sort of relationship with his publisher today and knows that his several volumes of the History of America in verse will, upon completion, meet the public in a timely way.

My prayer is that HeadPress will fill this role for me from now on in my life as a poet & writer, and that Nick and Dylan’s interest in managing my artistic and business affairs will blossom into an effective working relationship that will take the burden of planning and managing my work life off my aching back and allow me focus on the work itself into the future. That’s why I’m here in London right now hoping for the best—and what have I got to lose?

Going back and forth from Amsterdam to London is something like going from Detroit to Chicago and back: It’s an hour in the air by easyJet, and now I’ve finally figured out how to bypass the nightmare at the airport by taking the Dutch InterCity train from Amsterdam to Brussels and switching to the EuroStar train from Brussels to London. The round trip this time cost 147.50 Euros and takes 4 hours each way on the very comfortable trains. I’ve already got my train ticket for Amsterdam to Paris on June 4 and plan to return from Paris to London by EuroStar as well, so I won’t have to fly again until I leave for Genoa on June 15 for the International Poetry Festival.

During my time in Amsterdam this spring I’ve been kept pretty busy with my Radio Free Amsterdam duties since our executive producer, Dr. Larry Hayden, has moved our programming activities up several notches since the first of the year. My weekly podcast, the John Sinclair Radio Show, is at episode #203, and Larry is posting one of my programs each day right now until my backlog of programs from New Orleans, Detroit and Amsterdam is fully caught up to date and we can go back to posting a new program each Monday.

I’m also producing and hosting three additional one-hour programs on location each week now being podcast at www.RadioFreeAmsterdam.com: Blue Dolphins—Blues from The Dolphins Coffeeshop (Tuesdays), the 420 New Orleans Show from the 420 Café (Wednesdays), and Jazz from the Hempshopper (Fridays). We’re also posting weekly episodes of Tom Morgan’s Jazz Roots, a series of original programs From the Radio Free Amsterdam Vaults and past episodes from the John Sinclair Show Archives on Thursdays.

Yesterday Larry Hayden introduced our new weekend line-up (to be podcast every Friday) featuring Cary Wolfson’s Blues from the Red Rooster Lounge, Tom Morgan’s New Orleans Music Show from WWOZ, the Black Star Sound reggae show from the nightclubs of Amsterdam, Jazz from the Hempshopper with John Sinclair, and the Vintage Radio Vault, our salute to great radio producers, programmers and personalities of the past and the present, including Frantic Ernie Durham, Famous Coachman, the Duke of Tchoupitoulas and the award-winning New Orleans radio documentarian David Kunian.

These program series are also integrated into the Radio Free Amsterdam “live” broadcast stream that flows from the upper right-hand corner of our home page 24 hours a day—just like a real radio station!—with a lineup of music & arts programs produced by independent broadcasters all over America and Western Europe and beamed out with great regularity on our live broadcast stream.

Soon we will upgrade the Radio Free Amsterdam portal at our website with introductory material outlining our internet radio project and profiling each of the programs in our lineup. All of our podcasts are now being archived on the www.RadioFreeAmsterdam.com website, thanks to Larry, Joeri and Henk Botwinik, and the reorganization now underway will result in effective access to the program archives and information about each of the archived shows.

On the street level, we made a pair of programs in Amsterdam before I left for my first trip to London: Episode #201 at Eat at Jo’s on Sunday 11 May, featuring a “live” presentation in the café by Mark Ritsema & myself, augmented by several selections from the rough mixes of my new production, THE DETROIT ALBUM, recorded with the Motor City Blues Scholars in Detroit and Oak Park last month. The next evening we sat out on the sidewalk in front of the Hempshopper and got Sidney & Joeri to join us for episode #202 with most of the rest of the music from THE DETROIT ALBUM embellishing our conversations.

On the 13th I flew over to London via easyJet and stayed at the HeadPress Bunker near Turnpike Lane until Saturday the 17th, enjoying a series of informal meetings with Nick & Dylan, visiting David Kerekes and the indomitable Ms. Emma at the HeadPress offices in Dalston, and recording the 100th episode of the Longcat Weekly Podcast with host, pianist and singer Robbie Knight at his home studio near Turnpike Lane (now posted at www.RadioFreeAmsterdam.com).

Then it was back to Stansted Airport and the easyJet over to Amsterdam to claim my splendid little room at the Hotel de France on the Oudezijds Kolk that had been arranged by my management to lodge me for the next five days before I was to return to London. The high point of this short sojourn was the appearance in Amsterdam of the great Harmonica Shah and his Detroit Blues Band at the Bimhaus on Sunday afternoon, with Harry Oman on guitar and my pals Chris Rumel and R.J. Spangler in the rhythm section.

Shah is just about my favorite contemporary blues man and one of the finest composers of modern-day blues songs to be found anywhere. You can hear them on his CDs Motor City Mojo, Tell It to Your Landlord, and the latest release, Listen At Me Good, and now that he’s traveling out from Detroit a little bit maybe he will come to your town. Go see him!

Shah played to about half a house at the Sunday afternoon blues concert but gained the full appreciation of everyone in the audience with a 90-minute set of originals and Shah’s distinctive interpretations of blues classics by Little Walter, Rice Miller, Jimmy Rogers and Slim Harpo. After the show Larry and I lounged with the band in the adjoining café to have a few smokes and talk with Shah about Detroit past and present. Then we took the fellas by Eat at Jo’s for dinner and on to The Dolphins and the 420 Café for more tokes and Motor City conviviality.

My boy Octavio Carrasco showed up in town the next day with his companion Faye, the sister of our friend Willie from Common Ground, where O and I will meet up again in July, and the three of us spent some good hours together at the 420 Café over the next couple of days. Larry Hayden and I buckled down and recorded the necessary material for 18 new radio shows for Radio Free Amsterdam: Jazz from the Hempshopper #5-10, Blue Dolphins #15-20 and the 420 New Orleans Show #15-20 before I left for London on the train Thursday afternoon.

Now it’s Saturday evening and I’m comfortably ensconced in my spacious quarters at the HeadPress Bunker with my own desk and chair and I’ll be working here and conferring with Dylan & Nick until I take the train back to Amsterdam on the 28th for my last visit there until August. I’ll be going from there to Paris June 4-9 under the auspices of Marc Zermati, back to London until June 15, off to the Genoa International Poetry Festival June 15-21, back in London to meet the MC5 June 23-24 and then to Tokyo June 26-29 for my first visit to Japan before flying back to London and on to Detroit by the first of July.

In closing, my pal Michael Simmons sent me the following clipping from the New York Times of May 18, 2008 with a pair of pretty okay poems from the pen of my favorite presidential candidate writing as a young man some 27 years ago:

THE POETRY OF BARACK OBAMA

Following are two poems by Barack Obama that were published in the Spring 1981 issue of Feast, a 51-page student literary journal that described itself as "a semi-annual journal of short poetry and fiction collected from the Occidental College community.” The journal is no longer published, according to a college spokesman.

POP

Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken
In, sprinkled with ashes
Pop switches channels, takes another
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks
What to do with me, a green young man
Who fails to consider the
Flim and flam of the world, since
Things have been easy for me;
I stare hard at his face, a stare
That deflects off his brow;
I’m sure he’s unaware of his
Dark, watery eyes, that
Glance in different directions,
And his slow, unwelcome twitches,
Fail to pass.
I listen, nod,
Listen, open, till I cling to his pale,
Beige T-shirt, yelling,
Yelling in his ears, that hang
With heavy lobes, but he’s still telling
His joke, so I ask why
He’s so unhappy, to which he replies...
But I don’t care anymore, cause
He took too damn long, and from
Under my seat, I pull out the
Mirror I’ve been saving; I’m laughing,
Laughing loud, the blood rushing from his face
To mine, as he grows small,
A spot in my brain, something
That may be squeezed out, like a
Watermelon seed between
Two fingers.
Pop takes another shot, neat,
Points out the same amber
Stain on his shorts that I’ve got on mine, and
Makes me smell his smell, coming
From me; he switches channels, recites an old poem
He wrote before his mother died,
Stands, shouts, and asks
For a hug, as I shrink, my
Arms barely reaching around
His thick, oily neck, and his broad back; ’cause
I see my face, framed within
Pop’s black-framed glasses
And know he’s laughing too.

UNDERGROUND

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.

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NOTE: Previous entries #10 & #9 are archived immediately below this post and entries #1-8 below them under 2008 INSTANT ARCHIVE

My Events Calendar is posted in the left-hand column of my Home Page

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Entry 10

Amsterdam
May 11, 2008

It’s always rewarding to get back to Amsterdam after a trip to the United States, and particularly so after 5 weeks in Detroit, which is almost the exact opposite sort of place from Amsterdam. For my own particularly modest needs, it’s a big relief to be able to come to the 420 Café or the Dolphins and open up my computer and get right on line while I have an espresso, smoke a cigarette, and pick up a couple of grams of White Widow across the counter, roll ’em up and smoke ’em right there without having to go out in the alley like you do in the States.

I don’t care what they say—after a lifetime of living as a criminal in the USA, it’s no little thing to have the yoke of oppression lifted off your back and live your life out in the open without fear at last. I like it!

My last week in Detroit included a side trip to New York City for Dana Beal’s Drug Peace March on Saturday the 3rd, leaving Friday night and returning early Sunday afternoon to spend the day with my granddaughter Beyonce and my daughter Sunny on her 41st birthday, featuring brunch at the Union Street and a cruise around Belle Isle with a few stops for B to run wild. In New York I spent two nights as the guest of Dimitri and Roman in Brooklyn and had the pleasure of seeing Dr. Dorothy Goodman on Saturday night. Her friends will be happy to know that she’s looking good and feeling fine and spending a lot of time at her place in Susquehanna PA.

Most of the rest of my time in Detroit was spent with Mike Boulan and Hollywood at the No Cover studio in Oak Park. On May 1st we recorded Johnny Evans and James O’Donnell putting the horns on several selections and did some quick rough mixes, and on Friday Hollywood and I spent a couple more hours mixing with Mike Boulan before Holice drove me to the airport for my quick trip to New York City. We were back in the studio again on Monday and spent the afternoon and evening making the rest of the rough mixes while I had charge of Beyonce and she had a ball playing with Hollywood’s dog Bro and with Mike’s companion, Ms. Beth, and their cats.

I flew out of Detroit Metro at 3:50 pm Tuesday 6 May for Frankfurt, Germany, laid over 3 hours at 6:00 in the morning and then flew to Amsterdam at 9:00 am on the 7th, arriving to the most beautiful day of the year to date and spending the afternoon and evening making the rounds to check in with my peeps. Larry Hayden and Andy Adkins took me in for the first night and Joeri for the second before HeadPress booked me into the Hotel Centruum near the top of the Warmoestraat for the weekend.

From this point on I’ll be dividing my time between Amsterdam and London, staying with my new managers Nick Smith and Dylan Harding at the HeadPress Bunker in the North End and preparing the proofs for the printing if my next book, IT’S ALL GOOD: A JOHN SINCLAIR READER, with an introduction by Mark Ritsema. Mark and I are playing a concert this afternoon at Eat at Jo’s in the Melkweg, Larry and I are trying to make a radio show at the Flex club Monday night when Michael Franti is there, and then Tuesday I’ll fly over to London, returning on Sunday the 18th to hook up with Harmonica Shah, Chris Rumel & R.J. Spangler from Detroit at their Sunday afternoon blues concert at the Bimhaus.

I’ll be in Amsterdam May 18-22, London May 22-28, Amsterdam May 28-June 2, then in Paris for a few days before going back to London to prepare for my week at the Genoa International Poetry Festival June 15-21 and a trip to Tokyo June 26-29 before heading back to the States for Beyonce’s 7th birthday on July 3rd and a week in residence at Common Ground on the Hill in Westminster MD July 6-13. In parting, here’s a brand new poem that I finished in Detroit at Hollywood’s pad just in time to record it for THE DETROIT ALBUM. It’s from always know: a book of monk.

#58

“nutty”

for david & hali & brad hales

at 3:00 o’clock in the morning
on mardi gras night
in detroit
some nutty motherfucker
           
in room 412
of the forest arms apartments
at 2nd & forest
set his room on fire

& burned himself up
& all the worldly possessions
of his fellow tenants
who would now have to start their lives all over

while he would go on to his grave
& take their building
down with him, this commodious home
to countless 1000s of students

& artists & bohemians
on their way into
or out of the motor city
since the building was erected

in 1904, generation
after generation of young detroiters
filled every apartment
with energy & life & art

like the 100 current residents
who were turned out by the fire
& the poet himself
as a young man

fresh out of flint, michigan
in the spring of 1964
rented the basement apartment,
#b-2, on the other side

of the forest arms
from where the amsterdam espresso
& people’s record shop would be
some 40 years later

& where I met my first wife
when she lived next door
in the building
on the corner of prentis—this place

where i learned how to write
& lived with allen van newkirk,
poet & prophet
of paleo-cybernetics

& then with charles moore,
cornetist & philosopher
who taught me how to live
the way i have lived

for all the years since,
exactly as I wanted to
& in exact conformance
with the system of beliefs

that came into being
in that basement apartment
at the forest arms, & continues
into the present moment—this life

which began for me
when I met lyman woodard
in the student union
at flint junior college in 1961—this life

of the mind & spirit
rooted in humanism
& love of art, & manifested
in creative production

& social engagement, like trane said
to be a force for good
& make an impact
upon the world at large
           
with no promise of recompense
or material reward
beyond the joy of creation
& the thrills of human connection,

the deep friendships formed
with fellow seekers
of many persuasions
who follow the same path,

sharing our visions
& our love for each other,
our humble possessions
& our commitment to personal freedom

& social liberation, living & working
outside
the clenched domain
of the white people, & open

to experience
without prejudice, & to people
of every sort of origin
who have transcended the circumstances

into which we were born
& transformed ourselves
in accordance with our beliefs
to live the life we love

& make a world
for ourselves
that can hold & carry us
through the certain ugliness ahead—

after the forest arms has burnt up
& amsterdam espresso has been ruined
& all of brad hales’ 1000s of lps destroyed
& the building abandoned

& all the things we used to love
about our country
disfigured by greed
& turned against us—this life

we have made
out of love & resistance,
this life which exists
in our hearts & minds

wherever we may be, this life
which is shared
with our brothers & sisters
wherever we may find them,

this life we carry with us
wherever we go—ahhh, this
is the life, dear friends,
this is the life for me

And finally, my dear friend and comrade Steve Ben Israel is celebrating his 70th birthday this month and I’d like to offer his great little poem to you:

                            how hip
 
                    how hip I thought it was
                    in nineteen fifty seven
                    playing with Levosier Lemar
                    and the Birdlanders
                    levosier Lemar on piano
                    levosier lamar jr.on alto
                    sister larraine lemar on guitar
                    and cousin teddy on base
                    steve ben israel on drums
                    playing jazz dance parties
                    at black baptists churches
                    all over brooklyn
                    during the break those different
                    tasting egg salad sandwiches
                    and the potato salad with the
                    sweet and red hot hot peppers
                    look out look in
                    the last dance
                    was always that slow foxy trot
                    of "the very thought you"
                    how hip that really was
 
                                    —steve ben israel

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Entry 9

May 1, 2008
Detroit

April 27: It’s a beautiful Sunday afternoon in the Eastern Market sector of the Motor City, I’ve got a rare day off and I’d like to get this entry made before my work schedule kicks back in tomorrow. I’ve been working like a horse since I got to Detroit at the first of the month and I’ve got another week to go before I fly out to New York City next weekend for Dana Beal’s Million Marijuana March on Saturday, then back to Detroit on Sunday to celebrate my daughter Sunny’s 41st birthday with her and Beyonce, and then back to Amsterdam on Tuesday the 6th of May.

April in Detroit has presented a challenge even for the Hardest Working Poet in Show Business, but I’m going to get a hell of an album out of it and I get to see my daughter & granddaughter almost every day. The other great thing is seeing and hanging out with so many old friends made during my 25 years as a Detroiter and 50 years in Michigan.

The weekend following the Hash Bash festivities got off to a terrific start when Ben Edmonds and Maribel took me to lunch at Union Street and we spent a couple of hours having our laughs together over some tasty provisions. Ben is the writer who dubbed me with my favorite title in a story he wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle several years ago, knowing how much his paraphrase of the James Brown sobriquet would knock me out, and I’ve been using it proudly ever since.

Friday afternoon Hollywood and I motored out to Dearborn to the campus of Henry Ford Community College and joined Jo Ann Korczynska for her “Highway 61” blues show on WHFR-FM to promote the 420 Party at the Jazz Loft on 4/20 and help the station with its annual fund drive. Jo Ann has been playing the blues on WHFR on Friday afternoon from 2-6 pm for 15 years and has seen the blues offerings at the station expand to six weekly programs now.

On Saturday evening Adam Brook and I were in the northeast sector for a duet show with Jeff “Baby” Grand on guitar at a new coffeehouse at 12 Mile & Hoover called the Beat Café, a brave undertaking for Mike, the proprietor, and his wife who want to provide a locus for creativity and youthful fellowship in the suburban wilds of Warren. Larry Larson opened the show and Jeff and I played some blues for an attentive audience that happily included my daughter Sunny and my granddaughter Beyonce.

Sunday night Hollywood and I were in the northwest sector by 8 Mile & Myers for Mark Pasman’s “Motor City Blues Project” on WCSX-FM, where the Pazman has been playing blues records at this commercial rock station on Sunday nights for the past 20 years and is still going strong. Mark is really a guitar player and bandleader who assembles his Super Session band from the vast ranks of first-rate Detroit players—cats like Chris Codish, Paul Randolph, Skeeto Valdez, James McCarty, Lorenzo Brown and a host of others—and plays dates all around the Detroit area.

After the radio show we head for the far east side and stop in at R.J. Spangler’s Sunday night set at Your Place Lounge on E. Warren east of Cadieux. The next night we’re at the Jazz Loft in Greektown for the Milton Show, the Monday night jazz session headed by Milton Hale on drums and his brother Phil on keys. I started writing a poem there one night last year called “bags’ groove” and dedicated it to Phil & Milton, so tonight I want to read it for them in preparation for recording it with them next week for THE DETROIT ALBUM. It turned into an elongated roll call of great Detroit jazz players since World War II. Here’s the text:
 
#64

“bags’ groove”

for philip & milton hale

the sound of detroit
ever pulsates, from the streets
of the motor city
after the 2nd world war

when the arsenal
of democracy
carved out the freeways
& built up the suburbs

& started moving
all the white people
& the tax base
out—

but the cars
kept rolling
off the assembly lines
& the peoples

all had jobs
& paychecks
& cars
& homes of their own for a while

& the schools
taught music & art
to the children
of the working class

& the pulsation
of the music
grew ever stronger
& more powerful

& the city grew huge
with the artistry
& brilliance
of its great musicians—

teddy wilson,
j.c. heard,
lucky thompson,
yusef lateef,

milt jackson,
hank jones,
thad jones,
elvin jones,

wardell gray,
billy mitchell,
tommy flanagan,
donald byrd,

paul chambers,
doug watkins,
curtis fuller,
pepper adams,

louis hayes,
roy brooks,
alice mcleod,
kenny ‘pancho’ hagood,

barry harris,
ali muhammad,
sir roland hanna,
sonny redd,

art mardigan,
frank isola,
frank morelli,
frank rosolino,

bernard mckinney,
ray mckinney,
earl mckinnney,
harold mckinney,

terry pollard,
dorothy ashby,
jimmy wilkins,
miller brisker,

lamonte hamilton,
claire rocquemore,
moon mullins,
in & out of the penitentiary,

willie wells,
melvin mccray,
boo boo turner,
willie metcalf,

& in the modern era:
sam sanders,
kenny cox,
wendell harrison,

marcus belgrave,
donald walden,
george bohannon,
bert myrick,

teddy harris,
charles boles,
bess bonnier,
larry nozero,

kirk lightsey,
cecil mcbee,
freddie waits,
leon henderson,

bud spangler,
roderick hicks,
george davidson,
ralphe armstrong,

charles moore,
danny spencer,
phil ranelin,
ralph ‘buzzy’ jones,

lyman woodard,
ron english,
larry smith,
leonard king,

allen barnes,
robert lowe,
norma jean bell,
regina carter,

marion hayden,
eileen orr,
gaye lynn mckinney,
jeribu shahid,

reginald fields,
rodney whitaker,
tani tabbal,
faruq z. bey,

geri allen,
kenny garrett,
james carter,
james ‘blood’ ulmer—

working their motor city magic
on the ineluctable,
on the irreducible,
on the irrefutable,

on the eternal,
non-stop,
24-hour-a-day groove
laid down by bags

& the men & women
who came after him
out of northwestern high school
& cass tech

& northern high
& miller
& wayne state university
& all over the city,

reaching out from detroit
to the ends of the earth—
this is the music
that made the motor city great

 
April 29: I had Tuesday and Wednesday off and spent my time trying to complete the last poem for THE DETROIT ALBUM, a paean to the Forest Arms Apartments set to the Thelonious Monk number called “Nutty.” Thursday night April 17th we were back at the Jazz Loft to begin our recording project in front of a small audience of friends, with Mike Boulan of No Cover Records at the controls and Holice P. Wood assisting. The on-stage sound setup wasn’t what it should’ve been and it was hard to hear one another properly, but I stuck to numbers we’ve done before and got good takes of “Walking on a Tightrope” and “Hold Your Horn High,” both featuring Jeff “Baby” Grand on guitar with Phil Hale on keyboards, Martin “Tino” Gross on drums and Showtime Johnny Evans on tenor saxophone. At the end of the session I got the band to let me cut demo versions of “bags’ groove” and “nutty” so I could hear what they sounded like before recording them the next week.

Friday the 18th took Adam Brook and me to Toledo for a reading at the Culture Clash record shop in the afternoon and a show at Wesley’s Bar & Grill with a fine young blues guitarist called Dooley Wilson that evening. On Saturday we were in Pontiac for the EarthFest 420 Festival where I got to play another show with Glowb and hang out with my old pal Muruga and the cats from the Macpodz. Sunny and B were in the house and B did a wicked little dance at the side of the stage during my show.

Sunday was 4/20 in Detroit and time for Holice P. Wood’s 4th Annual 420 Party at the Jazz Loft, where I served as guest of honor and house MC and sat in with Glowb opening the evening and then with Chris Codish, Paul Randolph, Skeeto Valdez and Bobby East—the Holice P. Woods All Stars—to close out the night with a version of “It’s All Good” over the All Stars’ arrangement of Lyman Woodard’s classic “Don’t Stop the Groove.” The 420 Party was preceded by an afternoon performance with Jeff Grand on guitar at the Scarab Club for M.L. Liebler’s poetry series that also featured a reading by the great Diane Wakoski.

On Monday the 21st we went back over to the Jazz Loft where Mike Boulan’s remote recording equipment was still set up from the night before and cut tracks all day with three different ensembles. The first one had the legendary Detroit guitarist Johnnie Bassett with Phil Hale on keys and R.J. Spangler on drums, and we made keeper takes of a slow blues for “all alone” and the Monk ballad called “Light Blue” with a lovely guitar solo by Johnnie at the end.

Then the regular Blues Scholars drifted in—Tino, Showtime, Chris Rumel on bass and Phil Hale on keys—and we cut good tracks on “april in paris” and “The Street Beat” plus the Monk compositions “Let’s Call This” and  “Monk’s Dream,” Johnny Evans’ tune for “suburban eyes” and Phil’s tune for “i’ll follow you.” Then we set up for Milton and Phil Hale’s trio with Ibraheem on bass and made the “live” master take of “bags’ groove” during the Monday night Milton Show at the Jazz Loft where I had started to compose the poem one Monday night last summer.

We had planned to come back to the Loft with the band on Tuesday but we got so much work done on Monday that we didn’t need the extra day, so Hollywood and I went out to Mike Boulan’s studio in Oak Park to listen to what we’d done so far and took home rough mixes from the last Thursday night’s recording at the Jazz Loft. Everything still sounded as good as it had while we were cutting it, and we were ready to try to get the last four tunes in the band session scheduled for Wednesday afternoon with Lyman Woodard on Hammond B-3, Tino, Showtime, Chris Rumel, and the horn section with James O’Donnell on trumpet, Rick Steiger on baritone sax and John “T-Bone” Paxton on trombone—all 3 members of the Blues Scholars since our initial engagements in 1983-84.

On our way back from the studio to my gig at the Magic Stick we stopped across Woodward Avenue at the Union Street restaurant where I met Sunny and B, Adam Brook, and three new friends from Ann Arbor we'd met at the Hash Bash: Alma, Tommy and Lester, for a sumptuous dinner before the show. Adam and I took the Ann Arbor people backstage with us and had a few mutual smokes while awaiting the time Jeff Grand and I would take the stage to close out the celebration of the release of M.L. Liebler’s new book of poems from Wayne State University Press. We had originally meant to play this show with the full band and record it for the DETROIT ALBUM project, but we’d gotten so much done on Thursday and Monday that we didn’t need to record and I gave the rest of the band the night off.

Wednesday we were back in Oak Park with Mike Boulan at No Cover Studio to try to get the tracks for the last four cuts on the album completed. Lyman Woodard drove down from Owosso, MI to play the Hammond B-3 organ and lead the ensemble, with Jeff Grand, Chris Rumel, Tino and Showtime on hand. The horn section started drifting in while we were cutting the tracks for “The Screamers” and my newest poem, “nutty,” and we lined them up to complete the master for “Screamers.” Then Woodard put his foot pedal bass under the Monk theme called “Nutty” and James O’Donnell put his trumpet up in front with Showtime’s tenor sax.

Lyman Woodard is my oldest friend since we met in the Student Union at Flint Junior College in the fall of 1961. I had just turned 20 and Woodard would be 20 the following March. When we first met I was making up a semester at FJC after transferring from Albion College at the end of my sophomore year and working at Hatfield’s Record Shop in downtown Flint. Woodard had returned from his studies at the Advanced School of Contemporary Music in Toronto where he had studied piano and organ with Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown and their staff. He was living on his parents’ estate in Owosso and playing his first Hammond B-3 organ with the Oscar Bishop Trio at the El Toro Lounge on Flint’s east side, where “Green Onions” was the crowd’s favorite tune each night.

For THE DETROIT ALBUM I had wanted Lyman to lead the horns and rhythm section through a recreation of his classic ballad “Djarum” from his 1979 album Don’t Stop the Groove, recorded ‘live” at Cobb’s Corner at Cass & Willis in Detroit the night before the proprietor—our close friend, business partner in Corridor Productions, and beloved comrade Henry Normile—was brutally murdered in his apartment on Willis next door to the club. Lyman completed the recording project and released the album on Corridor Records in Henry’s honor. Woodard’s composition “Djarum” had been dedicated to Henry in the first place, and I wanted to set my poem for Henry, “my buddy,” to Lyman’s composition and record it anew 29 years later.

But Woodard wasn’t prepared to reopen that particular box and had pretty much spent his energy for the session on the numbers we had cut, so he said goodbye to the assembled cast of characters and the horn section didn’t last much longer. Mike and Hollywood and I agreed to try again to complete the two remaining tracks for the album on the following Monday, and to schedule a whole day on May 1st to record the horn section’s parts for their selections. When we got back from the studio I got a call from Lyman suggesting that I simply set the poem to the 1979 recording of “Djarum” and use it with his blessing. I thought that was a fantastic idea and decided to add Henry’s stage announcements from the album at the beginning and end of the piece so the song and the poem would be framed by his voice.

We would complete that part of the project the next Monday afternoon, but now we had everything tracked except for the final selection on the album, a paean to the late Detroit singer Dave Wilborn called “That’s All.” I took Thursday off to go to the ball game at Tiger Stadium with Kevin Sharpe and discuss his film project about Detroit rock & roll in 1968 that I’m about to sign on to. On Friday Hollywood and I went back out to No Cover, listened to all the completed selections with Mike Boulan and took home a disc with everything but “My Buddy” and “That’s All” in rough-mix form.

I had Saturday the 26th off and signed up for “baby-sitting” duty with my granddaughter while her mother went to work. Adam Brook snagged us a pair of tickets to the ball park and Beyonce and I spent a perfectly delightful afternoon and evening enjoying the Tigers victory, dining with Don Bailey at Butchers Inn after the game, and hanging out at Holicepad until Sunny got home from work. Then I had Sunday off as well and used it wisely to do as little as possible. Don Bailey hosted a little backyard party in the evening at his mansion on Boston Blvd. and a great time was had by all.

April 30: I started writing this entry Sunday afternoon before Don’s party but now it’s early Wednesday morning the 30th and I’m trying to finish so I can go to sleep. On Monday the 28th Hollywood and I went back to No Cover to meet Johnnie Bassett, Duncan McNaughton and Tino Gross to make the last number. First we laid my voice over “Djarum” and made the master from Lyman’s 1979 recording, then I asked Johnnie to take the guitar solo that comes after the words “Clarence / ‘Gatemouth’ / Brown” in my poem named “let’s call this” and he filled the assignment perfectly.

Duncan McNaughton was filling in for Phil Hale on the Hammond B-3 and he and Tino and Johnnie came up with a funky groove that we could dedicate to Dave Wilborn. Then Thornetta Davis graced us with her presence and her soulful vocal on the jeff Grand composition that goes with my poem for my late tenor saxophonist Big Red called “Hold your Horn High,” and Jeff came in to lay the last piece of the puzzle into place with a killer guitar solo on the opening choruses of the song.

We spent another four hours in the studio listening to the four newly-completed selections and copying them to a disc so I could take them all home. Hollywood and I stayed up all night listening to the numbers over and over again on the big sound system so we could be ready for the horn section overdub session and the mixing and editing to follow. I got up early Tuesday afternoon and caught two buses over to the WSU campus to make an interview with Rob St. Mary of WDET radio at the Cass Café for a program marking the 40th anniversary of the recording of the MC-5’s first album “live” at the Grande Ballroom.

Yesterday I did my first day of filming with Kevin Sharpe and Alex Greene for their 1968 music project, which celebrates the recording of the MC-5 album and the Detroit rock & roll music of the time by recruiting modern-day Detroit bands to record their versions of songs by the MC-5, Stooges, SRC, Savage Grace, Frost, the Rationals, Bob Seger and other artists who emerged during that fruitful period in the Motor City. I’m interested to see how the project works out and have pledged my support for their efforts, so I’ll report more as it happens.

I went from their studio in Clinton Township to my daughter’s place by 7 Mile & Mound Rd. for a special dinner and living-room stage show cooked up by Sunny and Beyonce, then came back to the Holicepad and reviewed the rough mixes from our recording sessions again to prepare for the horn section overdubs at No Cover this afternoon. Maribel stopped by and I had the extreme pleasure of playing the cuts for her.

And that’s my month to date. I’ve been here in Detroit since March 31st and I’ll leave next Tuesday for Amsterdam after spending the weekend in New York City and returning to celebrate Sunny’s 41st birthday in Detroit Sunday evening. Goodnight, everybody….

 
My Coming Events Calendar may now be found by scrolling down the left-hand column of my home page.

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INSTANT 2008 ARCHIVE

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Happy New Year! Thanks to Joeri Pfeiffer and Joe Spencer at the John Sinclair Foundation, my website is becoming more & more functional, and I’m going to switch my Travelogue postings (which were absent all Fall, in case you didn’t notice) from TravelPod.com to this space that we’re in right now. So let’s call this the first post of 2008 and go on from there.

Entry 1

Saturday, January 5, 2008

The Dolphins, Amsterdam


I had a terrific holiday season (except for throwing out my back waiting in line at Gatwick Airport in London) with a minimum of commitments and lots of time to read, write, keep up with my mail and make new radio programs for Radio Free Amsterdam.

Now that our stream is streaming at www.RadioFreeAmsterdam.com we’re rounding up more programming from my friends in radio and creating new shows to add to the flow of episodes from the RFA archives. For my part I’ve been making plenty of John Sinclair Radio Shows and have started three new series:

• Blue Dolphins (Blues from the Dolphins), every Tuesday at 11:00 pm
• New Orleans Music Show from the 420 Café, every Wednesday at 4:20 pm
• Jazz from the Hempshopper, every Friday evening at 8:00 pm
• Plus the John Sinclair Radio Show, aired every Monday night at 10:20 pm

We’re doing a lot of work on the Radio Free Amsterdam and www.johnsinclair.us websites, and this will be the spot to go to for news and updates.

************

KEY LINKS

The John Sinclair Radio Show is podcast and now archived at www.RadioFreeAmsterdam.com

My Travelogue is at www.TravelPod.com/members/johnsinclair

The website for my movie is www.twentytolifefilm.com

A friend maintains a myspace site for me at www.myspace.com/johnsinclairradio

• John Sinclair Bio
• Fattening Frogs For Snakes
• Ten For Two - The John Sinclair Freedom Rally
• US vs John Lennon

Thanks for listening. You can write me at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

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Entry 2

Thursday, January 10 > Saturday, January 12, 2008

The Dolphins > 420 Cafe, Amsterdam

I’ve had a busy first 10 days of the new year producing three new series of weekly radio shows for the Radio Free Amsterdam website and broadcast stream: 10