Crackly, yet filled with anticipation, John Sinclair's voice came through the telephone like a needle hitting a vinyl record.
The alienated poet's past is well-documented. He was the former leader of the radical White Panther Party, manager of the politically charged rock group from Detroit — MC5 — and an activist sentenced to 10 years in jail for passing a small amount of marijuana to an undercover agent in 1969. He was released, however, after John Lennon and Yoko Ono's 1972 benefit concert in Ann Arbor.
But now that the 64-year-old political voice from Flint is free — relatively speaking — what is he up to these days and what is he upset about?
"I don't like it here (in the U.S.)," Sinclair said from San Francisco.
"You have this Nazis-style regime that is taking over our country, and it's not the same country that it used to be. It's a different place now. They have no respect for what the Constitution is; it has no effect. It's just being run for rich people."
With all his projects and titles, Sinclair only considers himself to be one thing.
"I'm a poet, so I write poems. If people hear them and enjoy them then that's all the better, but basically it's a form of self expression."
The self-proclaimed "Hardest Working Poet in Show Business" will be sharing a little bit of himself tonight in Lansing at the Creole Gallery, 1218 Turner St. Alongside his Motor City Blues Scholars, led by R.J. Spangler, Sinclair will hit the local stage with edgy verses in his throat.
"When I play with guys that know how to play blues, you don't have to talk a lot about it. But you say slow blues and they play just what I need. And I say shuffle medium and they give me a nice little groove," Sinclair said.
Sinclair no longer plays the saxophone — like he did on the side of the stage and with MC5 — but he still feels comfortable with a toe-tapping band that knows the blues vocabulary.
"Everybody knows the language, see? And I got my ideas what musical settings should be for what verses," Sinclair said.
Blues and jazz musicians like John Coltrane, Muddy Waters, Miles Davis, Howlin' Wolf and Magic Slim & the Teardrops are still the jiving cats that Sinclair gets down to. He sees little hope for good music in the mainstream in the United States these days.
"I think that is contradiction in terms, isn't it? Kind of like Dutch cuisine or military intelligence. They haven't had any good music in the mainstream for probably like 25 or 30 years for me," Sinclair said.
The radical-thinking poet does see hope in the ability for up-and-coming musicians to produce their own records with the advances in technology.
Despite all of Sinclair's disgust with the U.S., he shows signs of patriotism but sees himself becoming more and more estranged from society.
"I'm a citizen. They can't take that away from me, but I've been alienated all of my life. You know what I mean? Consciously, since about 1960. I'm even more alienated now because you see I don't care who wins 'American Idol,'" Sinclair said.
In 1991, Sinclair moved to New Orleans and worked as a radio host, wrote for music publications and performed, but in 2003 he found himself unable to pay rent. Instead of living on the streets in New Orleans, he decided he would rather starve in Amsterdam. So Sinclair packed up his belongings and headed overseas but is grateful for his time in New Orleans.
He recently went back to the Big Easy to celebrate Mardi Gras. With little rebuilding after the flood, he returned a disappointed man. He found that the blacks were not being welcomed back into the neighborhoods their families had inhabited for five or six generations — and the hospitals weren't open.
"Really, it's just the ugliest thing I've ever seen in my life what they are doing in New Orleans right now," Sinclair said.
One reason Sinclair chose a life of poverty in Amsterdam is because of the lax drug laws across the ocean.
"Legalizing drugs is the answer to so many problems in the U.S. today, but it's also a huge industry — the war on drugs — it's a billion, billion, billion dollar industry, so it's going to be hard to legalize drugs here."
Besides touring the U.S. with his Motor City Blues Scholars, Sinclair discussed a movie about his life entitled "Twenty to Life," which is in the works and a book that comes out in Italy in September.
