John Sinclair, Detroit poet, cannabis activist and counterculture icon, dead at 82

Gleefully proclaiming the joys of rock ‘n’ roll, drugs and sex in the streets, John Sinclair reigned as a nationally celebrated troubadour of youth rebellion during the psychedelic era, playing a lead role in making Detroit and Ann Arbor counterculture hot spots with the MC5 band, the White Panther Party, cutting-edge concerts and flamboyant rhetoric.

Sinclair, who lived in Detroit, died Tuesday after years of declining health. He had been hospitalized at DMC Detroit Receiving Hospital for two weeks before his death at 7:58 a.m., his longtime publicist told the Detroit Free Press. He was 82.

Sinclair’s utopian dream of a post-industrial society based on leisure and marijuana never went beyond a small group of collaborators. But during the 1960s and early 70s, he made headlines as a cultural whirlwind and bold provocateur, infuriating the establishment while attempting to organize a “guitar army” of young revolutionaries to mount a “total assault” on the “death culture” of America.

“The pig-death machine is anti-life by definition,” Sinclair wrote in 1969. “Our culture is a revolutionary culture, a revolutionary force on the planet, the seed of the new order that will come to flower with the disintegration and collapse of the obsolete social and economic forms which presently infest the earth.”

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