“They wanted to put me away,” Sinclair says, “and so they did.” Following the sentencing, a request for an appeal bond was denied, and the 27-year-old cultural activist went directly to a maximum-security prison. They fixed on me because I was the most outspoken, and also because somehow I was successful in bringing young people around to my way of thinking.”Įven those who weren’t quite as certain of Sinclair’s blamelessness agreed that ten years in prison for possession of two joints was an unusually severe sentence, and probably politically motivated. “They didn’t like what we were doing, establishing an alternative community, defying their authority, smoking grass. “The powers-that-be in Michigan had it in for me,” says Sinclair, who now lives in Amsterdam.
The spectacle narrated articles yoko ono trial#
More than two years earlier he had received a nine-and-a-half to ten-year sentence for the possession of 11.50 grains of marijuana – two joints’ worth – following a trial marked by numerous irregularities. John Sinclair – poet, pothead, cultural revolutionary, and Chairman of the Rainbow People’s Party of Ann Arbor, Michigan – was at that time confined to the state prison in Jackson. I’d like to come there and perform it.’” They Gave Him Ten for Two “Lennon said, ‘I heard about the benefit that you blokes are putting on, and I wrote a little ditty about John Sinclair and his plight. “Dave and John talked for quite some time,” Bailey recalls. But I knew right away that it really was John Lennon.” He put the call through. “I was more into the Stooges and the MC5, more radical rock ’n’ roll. “I wasn’t even that familiar with the Beatles then,” says Bailey, now lead singer for the Cult Heroes, an Ann Arbor-based punk rock band. This time the voice on the other end said, “Hello, can I speak to David Sinclair, Chief of Staff of the Rainbow People’s Party. We all got a good laugh out of it.” A few minutes later the phone rang again. “I said something like, ‘Yeah, this is Timothy Leary,’ and hung up. I pick it up and I hear this voice, ‘Hello, this is Yoko Ono.’”īailey, of course, didn’t believe it for a second.
Some friends were there, and we were sitting around, tripping on acid, probably, and the phone rings. “I was doing office duty,” he recalls, “which entailed sitting at the front desk and answering the phone. Bailey was 23 and working at the communal headquarters of the Rainbow People’s Party in the ramshackle old mansion at 1520 Hill Street in Ann Arbor. But to Hiawatha Bailey, the events of that winter afternoon in 1971 are as clear as if they had happened yesterday. The passage of nearly four decades can dim even the keenest of memories. John Lennon and Yoko Ono, playing at the 1971 John Sinclair Freedom Rally at Crisler Arena.
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