Letter to Beth

Sometime during the summer of 1968 I took a day off from my factory job and drove to Ann Arbor to meet my college roommate, who lived in Gross Pointe, so we could hunt for an apartment for the coming school year.

 

We had lined up a rental agent to show us some apartments. Since Ann Arbor is an expensive college town we were prepared to pay as much as $150 a month for a one-bedroom, unfurnished.

She showed us a flat we fell in love with. The location was good, on a lovely stretch of Hill Street just west of Washtenaw in fraternity row. The apartment was upstairs, not particularly clean, with dark blue shag carpet and midnight blue walls—in short, perfect. The rent was $145. However, the agent was forthright enough to say that the rest of this very large house was occupied by some kind of commune and that their rock-and-roll band rehearsed in a converted garage right below the apartment. She added, hopefully, that the rehearsal room was lined with egg cartons for soundproofing.

 

We wanted the apartment a whole lot, but Bob and I were entering our junior year, and we both needed to get our grades up if we wanted into grad school. We passed, reluctantly.

 

As it turned out, the house was occupied by John Sinclair’s White Panther Party commune. The band was the protopunk MC5. During the coming year, Sinclair got sentenced to ten years in prison for possession of a couple of joints. (Not his first conviction, and, yes, of course the conviction was political.)

 

In 1971 John Lennon and Yoko Ono headlined a benefit concert at UM’s Crisler Arena to rally support for Sinclair’s release, which took place a few days later following court review of his case.

 

Anyway, instead of spending our junior year kicking out the jams, motherfuckers, we rented an apartment upstairs from The Beer Depot. We both turned 21 that year, and I didn’t have to go outside to buy booze. I’m not sure this represented a net gain with regard to academic endeavor, but the rent was only $125.

 

In Googling around for this blog entry I found the web site of Lawrence “Pun” Plamondon, the White Panthers’ Minister of Defense. Here is an excerpt from an autobiographical timeline on Plamondon’s site:

 

• 1969, indicted for bombing clandestine CIA office in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

• 1970, FBI fugitive. Traveled "underground" to Algeria seeking political asylum. Captured. 32 months in Federal prison.

• 1971, CIA bombing trial reveals illegal government wiretaps. Legal challenge goes to US Supreme Court.

• 1972, Supreme Court rules in my favor, released from prison. SUPREME COURT DECISION LEADS TO WATERGATE BREAK-IN AND NIXON'S DOWNFALL.

I can’t explain the cause and effect implied in that last item, nor does Pun’s web site, but I remember the bombing well. It woke me up. The supposed clandestine CIA office was in a little glass-front office building a block west and a block south of The Beer Depot. The bomb went off at about 3:00 a.m. Lots of shattered glass. There was also a State Farm office in there, so I assume the damage was well covered.

 

Plamondon had a difficult childhood. He was born in 1945 in the state mental hospital in Traverse City, Michigan, where his “mixed-blood Indian” father and mother were being treated for alcoholism and syphilis, respectively. In 1947 he was adopted, according to his site, “by [a] dysfunctional white, Catholic family.” Bad to worse, and only two years old.

 

Leigh and I now live part of the time near Traverse City. There is a nice shoe store downtown called Plamondon Shoes. The nineteenth-century state mental hospital complex is being renovated into office space, condos and retail. Our favorite TC restaurant, Trattoria Stella, is there.

 

Do I digress? No. This letter is about almost coming in contact with people I almost knew. Five years ago this spring Leigh and I went to New Orleans for a short vacation. Shortly after our return I read with regret an article about Sinclair who, it seems, had been living in New Orleans for years writing about and promoting music and running a blues and jazz show on the radio. Music was his first activity before he got into counterculture politics, and it is the vocation to which he returned after his jail term, teaching, writing, promoting, performing, recording. He continued to visit Michigan and sometimes appeared and performed with friends who have a band in Saugatuck. If I had known any of this I would probably have tried to look him up in New Orleans or to see him when he appeared in west Michigan.

 

West Michigan might have the highest concentration of Dutch people outside Holland and the Dutch West Indies. That probably has nothing to do with the fact that Sinclair moved to Amsterdam a few years ago.

 

Certainly he moved there because of Holland's open, laid-back culture and perhaps its liberal drug laws. There are townships in west Michigan that still do not have liberal alcohol laws, 74 years after the repeal of Prohibition. In fact, the reason for the extreme liberality of Netherlands society today may be that most Dutch Calvinists emigrated to west Michigan 100 to 150 years ago.

 

Sinclair is busy producing a radio show (or rather webcast) in Amsterdam. According to a press release on his web site dated 11 November 2006:

 

The John Sinclair Radio Show will feature Sinclair's signature mixture of music, poetry, interviews, cultural news, political commentary and “live” on-air performances by local and visiting artists.

 

The John Sinclair Radio Show will emanate from a kaleidoscopic series of intimate sites at cannabis coffeeshops and community arts venues in Amsterdam's world-famous Green Light District. The show will take place before a “live” audience in real time each Monday evening from 6:00 to 8:00 pm

 

The John Sinclair Radio Show will be broadcast Monday nights at 10:00 pm at www.johnsinclairradio.com.

 

So, at last, the point of this ramble. Beth, if in your wanderings about the Dutch metropolis you run across an old fart who looks like this…

 

 

…emceeing a show or performing spoken-word blues in one of those “coffee” shops or hanging out somewhere talking blues, jazz and liberation, introduce yourself, tell him where you were born and tell him your dad almost lived upstairs from him.