JOHN SINCLAIR AND HIS BLUES SCHOLARS – FAT BOY

for Charles Moore

There is something
about the American
mind
set on de-
struction, re-
lent-
less, un-
penitent,
eager to bomb
There is the hatred
that fuels the A-
merican mind,
the shriveled-up
heart
the heartless
always ready
to kill
& maim
brutal
with the urge
to crush & destroy
This is where
they built Fat Man, Mr. U-
235
& they sent
Fat Man
& Little Boy
to Japan
to level Hiroshima
& Nagasaki
They love Fat Boy
they feed him the sweets
of their hearts
singing their filthy songs
into Fat Boy’s u-
ranium ears
& let the rest of us
eat the shit
of their hatred
of anything
or anyone
that is not them
Ah! Fat Boy
so round & ugly
so full of hate
stuffed
with the dead spirits
of the Americans
blinded
& lost
in the deserts of Iraq
 

—John Sinclair

Detroit
April 9/June 1, 1982
Flint, MI
April 4, 2003

John Sinclair And His International Blues Scholars – Let’s Go Get Em’ (Album)

“Even though he is an expatriate, John Sinclair should be declared a national treasure. He’s a poet, historian and musicologist who, instead of publishing his research and findings, declaims them in the oral tradition with music. His latest works revisits themes he has worked with before and also adds several new poems and interpretations to his work. Let’s Go Get ‘Em features odes to friends and loved ones, whether it is remembering an evening with a lover who whistles Charles Mingus’ “Moanin’” or professing thanks and love to another with a reference to the Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four.” There are also several political pieces here, including his reworking of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’ United Nations’ speech “Smells like Sulfur.” The music has a great groove that simmers and occasionally boils over, whether in the acid rock taste of “Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky” or the deep mellow spice of his dedication to Mardi Gras Indians, “We Love Big Chief.”
David Kunian

https://www.offbeat.com/music/john-sinclair-and-his-international-blues-scholars-lets-go-get-em-mo-sounds/

John Sinclair – We Love Big Chief
Pontiac’s Speech To The White Man

Amiri Baraka – John Sinclair: Fattening Frogs For Snakes

Introduction by Amiri Baraka

JOHN SINCLAIR: FATTENING FROGS FOR SNAKES

If you been in America and ain’t sleep then I don’t have to begin where I wdda begun if you was just another dumbass American, souped up on not and aint. But suppose you had some feeling for what Dis is we in and how it’s the opposite of Art, and how as an Ain’t one of it’s chief physical/psychological/philosophical, soc-ec-pol, functions is to kill or make impossible the existence of Art. Then you would dig from the top, how rare and necessary is the John Sinclair work. Especially, if you know that many people think JS is, no shit, WHYTE!!!

(A dude told me this getting on the Mother Ship. I told the motherfucker that if the MS was segregated they was gonna shoot that johnson down! But you know, a hard head make a soft philosophy.)

The last irrelevance is not irrelevant here in Jungle Land because Animals are running shit and most of the place not yet fit for human habitation. They got the music lovers separated. You dig? Why, cause if they start digging the music from the same point of incorruptible ecstasy, even as different HUMANS (that’s the word, but that’s like a post-animal phenomenon, and ain’t in the house yet, too tough) then the Caucasian Crib, and the Absolutely Real Devils who run it and the world, like that old playhouse the old folks useta sing about, is gonna, like they said, get pulled right down to the ground. And the proprietors and they henchpersons gonna die, go to jail or be put back in the 4th grade ( for a long time).

What it is, is that JS, from way back, has been in the real world. And for bunches of white guys, certainly those who qualify as Straight Up Americans, that’s a trip not usually bothered with. Cause they doesn’t have to take it. What with the wall of bullshit and white supremacy, the straight out class removal from MOST of the world, including them poverty struck “white people” (technically speaking) in Appalachia, you know, them HILLBILLIES, and of course, any remaining hard ass unopportunist workers and the fucking Commies.

I say this, because I cant lie and the deep fuckup in Dis is that the majority have been bought by naught. With some shit thin as skin and “for a few dollars More” to help Toiletpop Bill and the demons rule and ravage the rest of the world, including the USA.

JS has been a WHITE PANTHER (NOSHIT) doing time for the crime of thought. And resistance to the continuing slavery of US imperialism and its prophylactic, racism. J has always been on the firing line, on the front line of saying and doing. He is a brother, in the real sense, of the flesh and the spirit, and his words, his stance, his loves, his perception and rationalization of the world, will bring him close to anyone not in the straitjacket of random imbecility and opportunism ( the “most finished form” of which, sd Lenin, is National Chauvinism).

John has always, since I been knowin him, dug the music. From the way back to the way out. Not in the “Gee Whiz” fashion of well paid critics, who are all much whiter than John. Hell, there’s a buncha wooden negroes much whiter than John, if it gots to be about something as flimsy as color. (Damn, Stan, you look mighty pale around the lips! But thass what money dooos.)

Because finally, it has always been about feeling and understanding. About Perception, Rationale and the Use, we make of the world. As my wife, Amina, says, “Whose side you’re on.” John, for instance, is one of the only dudes who cd pass for American, who really understands and can actually poet wit them word music Gleemen. Who begins from ON and can get to DIGNITARIA and even check SERIOUS. (As the Fon say.)

This book is about the Blues. The Blues is everywhere in America (Negro say, “I even give myself the Blues”) IT has to be killed, locked up, lied about, impoverished, character assassinated and oppressed, but it still don’t go away, it even stand out in the street where any silly motherfucker cd see it if they looked or even if they cd just hear.

John do hear and see the Blues. The old blues, the recent blues, the new blues, the blues, Europe (a black dude said), get in him when he “got to buy the baby new shoes”. All kinda blues be in John, and that’s different. Tell me white cats aint got the blues. It’s a lie. They might say they depressed. Or a nigger took they job. Or the iceman they real father. Or they psychiatrist feeling on they leg. But it still be the U.S. no shit blues.

“Fattening Frogs For Snakes”, yeh, that’s what Americans do, except the ones that really is Snakes. This is the United SNAKES ain’t it? So from jump, John know, what the definition of hope to die (say when) American is. And he rejects it like the music do. The music reject it because American is a definition of what ain’t got no use for the blues or for those who make the blues. Even tho, right up in its fucking flag, is a blues, some stripes, like real niggers (every body who gonna live) got on they backs.

The book is not a Homage to the Blues, it is a long long long blues full of other blues and blues inside of them. John all the way inside, and he got the blues. And he live in New Orleans, and all them motherfuckers got the blues, even the police.

John is drawn to the blues because it is real life, and ain’t much of that you supposed to have and understand that’s what it is. You can pay 9 dollars and get real life, after standing in line, in technical color. But if you stand up in the flick and say this ain’t real life gimme my money back, you trying to make a blues and chances are you will get the flag treatment before you split, that is there will be some white and some red in your life and on your head, before the owners through with you.

John has taken the Blues, many Blues, many Blues singers, their words, their feeling, their lives, their conditions, the places and traces of where they was and is, the Delta, Chicago under the El, in the streets of any anonymous Black and Blue America, and transformed them into a poetry a narrative epoch of PLACE and REPOSSESSION. He has given us the humanity of person, speech, description, song, dance, style, stance. What is political in the work is that it is about reality which is political like a motherfucker.

But everything got to do with people is political. “Whose side yr own”, again the definition. Like, “Cross Road Blues”, for Harry Duncan., about

“Tommy Johnson,
Born in Crystal Springs,
Mississippi, in 1896
left home around 1912
with an older woman”.

Like that, the precision of research, but in the context of song. You get the facts and throughout, the same music that he talking about.

“& then returned south
to Crystal Springs
& his family
& the peoples
who used to know him”.

In the language and gentle rumble of the guitar itself, from the sound in John, laid there, by them, but brought back, the music and the facts, for further beginnings, somewhere in our mind. So it is mise en scene , like French dramatists say, the living drama of place and person, engaged in being them, then and back to now.

“His brother LeDell
asked him how
he had learned to play
so well
in such a short time….

“He said the reason
he knowed so much,
said he sold himself
to the Devil…
I asked him how?”

* * *

“You have your guitar
& be playing a piece,
sitting there by yourself.
You have to go by yourself
& be sitting there

playing a piece.
A big black man
will walk up there
& take your guitar,
& he’ll tune it….”

The book is a marvel, in that it is not only poem, but research, bibliography, discography, history, of the most copious yet careful and earnest kind. Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Robert Lockwood, Booker White, Jimmy Rogers, Roosevelt Sykes, Little Brother Montgomery, Sunnyland Slim, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howling Wolf, Robert Johnson, Charley Patton and many peeps you don’t even know, all be in here. Where to find their music. What their lives were like. And what is, after all, the Blues, when it move inside you forever.

This is a rare and very flne book. An incredible work of passion, perception and song. John Sinclair, has been on the circuit more than a minute, and he has created a great many things, powerful incisive poetry and stinging analysis as well, but this book is something, entirely, else, and for this, even if he were not a long time roadie & comrade of mine, he should be celebrated with the respect one reserves for the wise and the courageously sensitive.

— AMIRI BARAKA
8/98

http://www.fatteningfrogsforsnakes.com/introduction-by-amiri-baraka

FOUNDING FATHERS 01 – WINDS OF CHANGE

Dj Papa Saint Juan has created a 6-hour travelogue tied to Independence Day under the title Founding Fathers, with selections by Garland Jeffreys, Marvin Gaye, The Neville Brothers, Rod Stewart, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Richie Havens, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Buffalo Springfield, Bob Marley & The Wailers, Love, Sly & The Family Stone, The Doors, Jim Morrison, and Roy Harper. St. Juan quotes our Founding Fathers: “It does not take a majority to prevail… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.” (Samuel Adams); What do We mean by the Revolution?The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen Years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.” (John Adams); and “That government is best which governs least.” (Henry David Thoreau).

The John Sinclair Foundation Presents
WINDS OF CHANGE
FOUNDING FATHERS 01
DJ Papa Saint Juan, Los Angeles, June 20, 2020 [20429]

Theme Music: Winds Of Change ~
Garland Jeffreys: Wild In The Streets
Marvin Gaye: Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)
The Neville Brothers: My Blood
The Neville Brothers: Sister Rosa
Rod Stewart: Street Fighting Man
Crosby Stills Nash & Young: Ohio
Richie Havens: Freedom
Creedence Clearwater Revival: Fortunate Son
Buffalo Springfield: For What It’s Worth
Bob Marley & The Wailers: Burnin’ And Lootin’
Love: Maybe The People Would Be The Times
Sly & The Family Stone: Stand!
The Doors: Peace Frog
Jim Morrison: An Hour For Magic
Roy Harper: Come The Revolution

A JOINT PRODUCTION
Hosted by DJ Papa Saint Juan for Radio Free Amsterdam
Produced & recorded by DJ Papa Saint Juan in Los Angeles
Post-production, editing & annotation by John Sinclair
Executive Producer: Steve Pratt

© 2020 John Feins. Used with permission.