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John Sinclair, Former MC5 Manager and Counterculture Activist, Dies at 82
John Sinclair, the counterculture activist and former MC5 manager who helped define that proto-punk ensemble’s radical politics, has died. He was 82.
John Sinclair, the counterculture activist and former MC5 manager who helped define that proto-punk ensemble’s radical politics, died on Tuesday at 82. Long before social media’s instant impact, Sinclair helped spawn the pointedly politicized alternative newspaper movement as a fast fount of information about the “underground,” as the counterculture was termed at the time, with Detroit publications such as Fifth Estate (which still exists), the Ann Arbor Sun, the Detroit Artists Workshop Press and its offshoot Work Magazine. In 1966, the Motor City rock band got a regular gig at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom where they met Sinclair – a radical political writer and White Panther Party leader nicknamed the “King of the Hippies” – and by the next year made him the group’s manager.
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