John
Lennon
On December 10, 1971, a John Sinclair Freedom Rally was held at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Sinclair was a Michigan pro-pot activist who was sentenced to 12 1/2 years for possession of a single marijuana joint. Yippie! Jerry Rubin organized the event, originally as part of a series of events up to the 1972 Republican convention.
On the bill were Michigan natives Stevie Wonder and Bob Seeger, Phil Ochs, Steve Miller, Commander Cody, poet Allen Ginsburg, Chicago Eight members David Dellinger, Renne Davis and Bobby Seale (ungagged), and, in his first American performance since the break up of the Beatles, John Lennon with Yoko Ono.
Stevie Wonder, aged 21, came on at 2:30 AM and said, "This is to any undercover agents in the crowd" and played "Somebody's Watching You." Later a FOIA investigation revealed FBI agents were taking down every word. Lennon came out, announced, "The Pope smokes dope" and performed his composition "The Ballad of John Sinclair" and three other original songs with Yoko. Two days later, an appellate court freed Sinclair on bail.
Afterwards, Phil Ochs was wiretapped and followed, and the INS initiated proceedings to deport Lennon because of old pot bust in England. The protracted fight soured him from performing for political causes [but he was planning to do so when he was shot dead in 1980].
(Source: Stand and Be Counted by David Crosby and David Bender)
Harvard psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon, the author of Marijuana Reconsidered, met Lennon when he testified as an expert witness at his Immigration and Naturalization Service hearings that Attorney General John Mitchell had engineered. Grinspoon, who tried marijuana deliberately after studying it for years, told Lennon that cannabis appeared to make it possible for him to "hear" his music for the first time. Grinspoon writes, "John was quick to reply that I had experienced only one facet of what marijuana could do for music, that he thought it could be very helpful for composing and making music as well as listening to it."
In his autobiography Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut, Paul Krassner recounts smoking with John and Yoko in 1972. Lennon discounted theories that Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison may have been political assassinations. "No, no," John said, "they were already headed in a self-destructive direction." A few months later, he reminded Krassner of the conversation and added, "Listen, if anything happens to Yoko and me, it was not an accident." But Lennon lives. At the February 10, 2006 Olympic opening ceremonies in Turin, Italy, Yoko introduced Peter Gabriel who sang "Imagine," a song that has become the world's peace anthem.
Copyright 2006
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