John Sinclair, a counterculture activist whose nearly 10-year prison sentence for sharing joints with an undercover police officer was cut short after John Lennon and Yoko Ono sang about his plight at a protest rally, died on Tuesday in Detroit.
His publicist, Matt Lee, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was congestive heart failure.
As the leader of the White Panther Party in the late 1960s, Mr. Sinclair spoke of assembling a “guitar army” to wage “total assault” on racists, capitalism and the criminalization of marijuana.
“We are a whole new people with a whole new vision of the world,” he wrote in his book “Guitar Army” (1972), “a vision which is diametrically opposed to the blind greed and control which have driven our immediate predecessors in Euro-Amerika to try to gobble up the whole planet and turn it into one big supermarket.”He also managed the incendiary Detroit rock band the MC5.
Their lyrics — “I’m sick and tired of paying these dues/And I’m finally getting hip to the American ruse” — were a kind of ballad for the cause.
Persons:
John Sinclair, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Matt Lee, Sinclair, ”, Army ”, “, I’m
Organizations:
White Panther Party, Army
Locations:
Detroit