The Story Behind the Song John Lennon Wrote to Help Free Imprisoned Politicial Activist and Ex-MC5 Manager, “John Sinclair”

In 1969, Detroit poet and activist John Sinclair was arrested for distributing marijuana and sentenced to 10 years in prison. In support of Sinclair’s cause, John Lennon wrote a song in his name and performed it during a rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which helped lead to the release of the artist and activist, who had already served 29 months.

“They wanted a song about John Sinclair, so I wrote it,” said Lennon. “That’s the craftsman part of me. If somebody asks me for something, I can do it. I can write anything musically. You name it.”

Three days after Lennon and Yoko Ono performed “John Sinclair” during the John Sinclair Freedom Rally at Crisler Arena in Ann Arbor, Michigan on December 10, 1971, he was released from prison. The Sinclair rally also featured performances and speeches by poets Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders, and countercultural figures Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, and Abbie Hoffman, along with Lennon and Ono, Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger, Phil Ochs, and David Peel.

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“I first heard it in prison when one of my lawyers came and played it for me,” recalled Sinclair in 2010. “I couldn’t believe he would come and play it for my concert. My first wife and I went to New York to say ‘Thank you.’ I got out on the 13th.”

“John Sinclair” was later featured on Lennon’s 1972 album, Some Time in New York City, and the 2006 film The U.S. Versus John Lennon.

“It was the culmination of two and a half years of agitating and organizing to get me out,” Sinclair on Lennon’s impact on his release. “I just lucked into Lennon hearing about it and wanting to help. That meant a lot to me.”

Regardless of his brushes with the law, from 1966 through 1969, Sinclair managed the Detroit-bred proto-punks MC5, co-founded the anti-racist collective White Panther Party in 1968, wrote about music, and taught jazz at Wayne State University.

When Sinclair moved to New Orleans in the early ’90s, he worked as a radio DJ and released jazz and spoken-word albums from Thelonious Volume 1: A Book of Monk in 1996 through collaborative pieces, including working with MC5’s Wayne Kramer, through his final three albums, Beatnik Youth Ambient, and Beatnik Youth, produced by Youth, and Mobile Homeland.

Sinclair continued fighting for the legalization of marijuana in Michigan throughout most of his life, until it was legalized in 2018, and died in Detroit on April 2, 2024, at age 82.

Photo: John Sinclair hangs out at Dominick’s Restaurant, 44th Annual Hash Bash at the University of Michigan, America, April 4, 2015, by Zuma/Shutterstock