Kickin' Out the Jams: A Review of John Sinclair's Guitar Army

[laststeamtrain]

Kickin' Out the Jams: A Review of John Sinclair's Guitar Army (Feral House 2007
by Ron Jacobs; April 30, 2007

It's hard for some of us who were around to remember and even more difficult for those who weren't to believe, but youth culture was once considered to be a revolutionary phenomenon. Of course, we didn't call it youth culture (that was a media catch phrase), but looking back, that's what it was. Indeed, that's part of the reason why it didn't last like we wanted it to. We couldn't figure out how to maintain it once we got older. So, capitalism took over and turned the whole thing into a commodity. Some groups and individuals that were politically inclined understood the revolutionary nature of a culture that opposed imperial war and racism and, more importantly, that challenged these phenomenon with their bodies and minds in the streets. Their attempts to organize this varied from the somewhat fumbling attempts of the Weatherman to the humor inflected approach of the Yippies. Then there were the White Panthers.

The brainchild of John and Leni Sinclair and a dozen or so other residents of Ann Arbor, the White Panthers were a counterculture revolutionary kernel that understood that in order to change the system one needed to not only change the economics and distribution of power, one also had to change the culture. John Sinclair ended up in prison not long after the White Panthers were formed. He was sentenced to ten years for giving two joints of marijuana to a woman who was a undercover narcotics officer. The White Panthers (and their successor the Rainbow People's Party) worked in alliance with the Yippies and the Weather Underground and represented the aspirations of thousands of youth across North America during their brief existence. They put on rock concerts and festivals, managed the rock group MC5, operated food cooperatives and a newspaper, and yet their greatest lasting achievement is probably the book penned by John Sinclair himself--Guitar Army.



A collection of writings on rock and roll, youth culture of the 1960s and 1970s, the formation of the White Panthers and a myriad of other rants and reviews, Guitar Army is being re-released by Feral House Publishing of Los Angeles. This book is a freakin' manifesto of the times. Naturally, some of it is dated in terms of context and the language overblown at times, but the discussions of the potential of culture to change people's thinking and the corporate world's understanding of that still ring true. Any modern rock or hiphop artist who really believes in the power of music to change the world should read this book. And, even more importantly, they should heed this book! So should those who listen and dance.

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http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=105&ItemID=12704
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Wayne Kramer (MC5) quoted in Ammiel Alcalay's essay Republics of Poetry:

We had been championing Detroit music for years. “High Energy” is how we described it at the time - no
holds barred, pedal to the metal. Combining the R&B we heard on WJLB and WCHB, the blues of
Howlin’Wolf and John Lee, the new sounds coming in from the Rolling Stones and The Who and the
Yardbirds, and the powerful force of the avant-garde “free-jazz movement,” we toiled away in small clubs
all over the Midwest. Night after night, we worked at perfecting our sound and our stage show. The music
was in our blood, and it dripped everywhere. It was very messy. We rehearsed in a storefront studio in the
Cass corridor (we called it the Warren/Forest then). It’s on the corner where East Warren Avenue meets
the John C. Lodge Expressway in the “inner city” of Detroit. The district was close to Wayne State
University and was a little rundown. There were cheap rents and a general feeling of “live and let live.”
North of this, on the corner, was a series of two-story commercial structures with storefronts below and
what used to be a dentist’s office above. The reefer smoke billowed out of these buildings. The storefronts
housed the Detroit office of the Committee To End the War in Vietnam, the Fifth Estate (the underground
newspaper), the Artists Workshop and, later, the MC5’s rehearsal space. The upstairs became the band’s
communal home. From there I watched the city of Detroit go to war in the riots of the long hot summer of
1967. I watched tanks and armored personnel carriers from my bedroom window. Tanks rolling across
Warren Avenue. I was arrested by the Army just up the street for being a suspected sniper - I had a
telescope in my window... That corner in Detroit was, for me at least, the center of the known universe.
Late nights were spent tripping on acid, smoking the best Mexican herb to be found, listening to Sun Ra,
John Coltrane and Albert Ayler, and plotting the future. Our political idols were the Black Panther Party
and crazed poets like Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson and Ed Sanders.

Entire essay available as pdf here:
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/olson/blog/republics_of_poetry.pdf

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. I used to work with...

Craig Blazier. One of The Rainbow Family. Kinda famous in his day.

[laststeamtrain]

2. I see his name comes up on Google connected to Rush...

I don't know much about Rush. Probably my loss.

Circa 1980, when rock became a TV show, I started to lose interest.

It was odd to me when FM rock stations became reactionary rather than radical.

Everything good seems to turn into crap.

Here's to the hope that things are changing...I'm up for it.

:hi: