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John Sinclair, Former MC5 Manager and Activist, Dies at 82
John Sinclair, the former manager of rock band MC5 and a radical Detroit activist, died at age 82 on Tuesday (April 2).
A poet, writer, author, critic, scholar, activist, recording artist and performer, he was beloved as a raconteur and an iconoclastic personality, and best known as the original manager of rock band MC5 and a marijuana proponent who was championed by John Lennon. He wrote about jazz for Down Beat magazine, read at the Berkeley Poetry Conference during July of 1965 and co-founded the Ann Arbor Sun, another underground newspaper, in the spring of 1967 with his first wife, photographer Leni Sinclair, and psychedelic poster artist Gary Grimshaw. “He was the Nelson Mandela of pot, he really was,” says Martin “Tino” Gross, a longtime friend and musical collaborator in Detroit who produced Sinclair’s last two albums — Mobile Homeland and Still Kickin’ — for his laebl Funky D Records.
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