Apologies for no post coming into Monday. Honestly, I was kinda empty, and in cases like this, it’s best to respect the dry well and let it refill.

Then, today, John Sinclair died. :::cracks knuckles::: Ok, then.

If you don’t know who he was, no worries. He was strictly a local celebrity who briefly went national, if you’re the sort of obsessive music fan who reads the liner notes. He’s most often described as the manager of the MC5, a local activist in the hot heart of the ’60s, an unapologetic stoner who co-founded the White Panther Party and lured John and Yoko to Ann Arbor for a benefit after he was sent to prison for giving two joints to an undercover cop. You might remember the White Panthers from one point in their multi-point manifesto: Total assault on the culture by any means necessary, including rock ’n’ roll, dope and fucking in the streets.

I can’t recommend my friend Bill McGraw’s obit in the Freep highly enough; he really captured the guy, including his rock-solid, lifelong sense of humor and absurdity. The White Panthers weren’t Maoist scolds, or even 100 percent serious, and damn, I’d have liked to party with those guys.

I only met Sinclair once, although you could often spot him at this or that event around town. He’d been in declining health for some time, getting around with a walker or in a wheelchair, but his mouth was always in good shape. After marijuana was fully legalized in Michigan, a local attorney held a news conference in his conference room, and Sinclair was a guest. There wasn’t much news coming out of the event, something about a lawsuit, but at one point Sinclair went off on a recent story in one of the papers, that had showcased police concern for what might happen to their drug-sniffing dogs in this new era. “They’re boo-hooing about their dogs!” Sinclair raged. “Their fucking dogs!” The TV reporters despaired of a spicy clip they couldn’t use, but I laughed. And I quoted him accurately in my story.

He wasn’t all about weed, as this passage from Bill’s obit notes:

In 1972, after having been freed from prison for his marijuana conviction, Sinclair found himself in more serious difficulty. A federal grand jury indicted him and two other White Panthers, Plamondon and Jack Forrest, for conspiring to dynamite a clandestine CIA recruiting office on Main Street in Ann Arbor in 1968. The FBI maintained Plamondon planted the bomb.

After U.S. District Judge Damon Keith in Detroit ruled against the government for tapping Plamondon’s phone without a warrant, the three hippies squared off against the Nixon Justice Department in a landmark wiretapping case before the high court in Washington. Sinclair and friends won, in a unanimous decision that scuttled Nixon’s national legal strategy against numerous other radicals. It was a major defeat for the self-proclaimed law-and-order president.

“When that case came down, every pending Black Panther, Weatherman, antiwar conspiracy case in the country had to be dismissed,” said Hugh (Buck) Davis, a Detroit lawyer who worked on the Sinclair appeals as a recent law school graduate, with nationally known legal heavyweights William Kuntsler and Leonard Weinglass, fresh from defending the Chicago 7. “They were all based on illegal wiretaps.”

Good for him.

John Sinclair got high every day, and moved to Amsterdam for a while to make it easier, but he came back. Detroit is a pretty lawless town, and getting marijuana isn’t exactly difficult, even when it was a crime. Or, as he put it:

Detroit, Sinclair said, “was the place where you could hear jazz all night long and cop weed or pills whenever you wanted to.”

So farewell, John. As a final note, here’s a piece of research Bill passed along to me when he was composing his pre-written obit. Note the police description of a jam session: “…a party at which the participants entertain themselves with bongo music and marijuana.”