Hi, everybody, and welcome to the July edition of Free the Weed, my monthly column for the Marijuana Report. I’m in the process of establishing my personal institution, the John Sinclair Foundation, and I thought it might be good to explain what it’s all about.
Inspired by Allen Ginsberg, who formed and operated the Committee on Poetry to assist him in pursuing his mission, I’m forming the John Sinclair Foundation to support my artistic and cultural projects presently and in perpetuity, to make them available to the public and preserve them for posterity, and to ensure the preservation and proper presentation of my voluminous creative works in poetry, music, performance, journalism, editing, publishing, broadcasting, and record production, and my contributions as a cultural and political activist and organizer.
The John Sinclair Foundation will hold all copyrights to my creative productions of every sort and will share royalty and advance payments from licensing these copyrights equally with my family and designated heirs, with the foundation set to receive 50% of any and all revenues, the heirs sharing the other half.
The foundation shall conduct its operations with funds secured through royalties, advances, performance and personal appearance fees, record and book sales, commissions on artworks, donations, gifts, memberships, grants, and other public sources.
Expenditures will be made from the foundation’s accounts for expenses associated with ongoing and prospective projects undertaken by the foundation, including facility rentals; building operations and maintenance; establishment and maintenance of an artist in residence guest living space; staffing and associated costs; insurance; travel costs; grants, fees, and honoraria for contributing artists and consultants; and other costs of doing business.
The business of the foundation is directed by Executive Director Steven Pratt in Amsterdam, supported by a board of directors comprising Beyonce Sinclair, Adam Brook, and Jamie Lowell, and backed up by a steering committee of 15 people. The foundation will be assisted in its development and activities by an advisory board made up of persons sympathetic to the goals of the foundation who will agree to serve as consultants and advisors with respect to operations, fundraising, and project development.
Our immediate projects include the operation of our internet radio station, RadioFreeAmsterdam.org; the establishment of meeting space/gallery/performance/office spaces in Detroit and Amsterdam as a new project of the foundation; the consolidation of several existing websites under the umbrella of the John Sinclair Foundation; making a uniform digital edition of the poetry and prose of John Sinclair; and registering copyrights and publishing the creations in music and verse of John Sinclair as the property of the John Sinclair Foundation.
Our internet radio station is a grassroots broadcasting project founded in Amsterdam on January 1, 2005. The Radio Free Amsterdam program hosts are radio veterans who produce weekly blues, jazz, or free-form programs for college or community stations or expressly for Radio Free Amsterdam:
• John Sinclair produces our flagship program, The John Sinclair Radio Show, plus other series exclusively for Radio Free Amsterdam, which he founded with Larry Hayden and Hank Botwinik in 2005, and continues to serve as Program Director. He is a veteran of WNRZ-FM and WCBN-FM in Ann Arbor, WDET-FM in Detroit, and WWOZ-FM in New Orleans, where he was voted most popular deejay for the last five years of his residency there.
• Steve Pratt (Steve the Fly), deejay, drummer, record producer, writer, and scholar extraordinaire, spins his Fly By Night shows exclusively for Radio Free Amsterdam and serves as the executive director for the project.
• Bruce Pingree has hosted and produced The Blues Show on WUNH-FM in Durham, NH, since the early 1970s and now has more than 500 episodes archived at the John Sinclair Foundation site.
• Leslie Keros hosts and produces Chicago Bound and Jazz at Daybreak, all archived at the John Sinclair Foundation site.
• Bob Putignano mixed soul, jazz, funk, blues, blues-rock, and more with a steady dose of musician interviews and conversations with industry insiders for years on WFDU-FM in New York City and created his current program series for taintradio.org, now heard every Friday on Radio Free Amsterdam.
• George Klein hosted the long-running Groove Yard show on WEMU-FM in Ypsilanti, MI, in the 1990s.
• Lucille Mancini, a popular club deejay known in Italy as Lucille DJ, produces The Soul Lucille Show for Controradio-FM in Florence, Italy, and features a Radio Free Amsterdam guest spot from John Sinclair each week.
• Linda Lexy, producer of the Party Train show, is a veteran Detroit deejay on the radio and in the clubs and is also a principal of Funky D Records. She has received multiple Best Deejay in Detroit citations from the Detroit Music Awards.
• David Kunian is Jazz Lunatique in residence at WWOZ-FM in New Orleans and an award-winning broadcast program producer, a music journalist, and director of the Jazz Archive at the Louisiana State Museum.
• The late Tom Morgan, a veteran of WTJU-FM (Bartender’s Bop) in Charlottesville, Virginia, and WWOZ-FM (Jazz Roots, New Orleans Music Show) in New Orleans, contributed several program series to our broadcast schedule and continues to be featured every week even though he is no longer with us.
This cast of musical characters who contribute their programming to Radio Free Amsterdam can be heard every week in regular rotation and in reverse sequence in the continuous 24/7 stream on our website.
Radio Free Amsterdam issues a monthly Program Guide with short descriptions of each offering for the upcoming month. The guide is published on our website the first of each month.
An obsessive collector and compulsive documentarian from an early age, Sinclair has created an extensive collection of materials from all the stages of his productive life and preserved the manuscripts, documents, recordings, posters, and other evidence of his activities as a poet, activist, journalist, broadcaster, record producer, and community organizer since the early 1960s.
In 1978 Sinclair donated the archives amassed by him and his first wife, Leni Sinclair, to the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, and in 2000 made a second massive deposit of the materials remaining after a fire had destroyed his residence in New Orleans. This archive, titled “John and Leni Sinclair Papers,” can be accessed here.
Sinclair has also donated tape recordings and other archival materials relating to his activities in the Detroit jazz community—from the Detroit Artists Workshop to the Detroit Jazz Center—to the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, where these materials repose as the John Sinclair Detroit Jazz Collection and can be accessed at http://thewright.org/archives/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/John-Sinclair-Jazz-Audio-Collection.pdf.
The John Sinclair Foundation will be the repository for all extant archival materials held by John Sinclair, including his poetry and prose manuscripts, recordings, printed and recorded products, copyrighted materials, posters, flyers, promotional materials, and ephemera relating to his activities in Europe, America, and elsewhere from 2000 to the present.
The foundation will also maintain a complete collection of the printed and recorded work of John Sinclair and make this collection available online, including a uniform edition in digital form of all his published and heretofore unpublished books to be issued by the foundation. This archive will also contain all extant programming of Radio Free Amsterdam since its inception in 2004.
In future the John Sinclair Foundation will attempt to find a home for these 21st-century archives at an appropriate institution in the Netherlands.
—Detroit, June 14, 2022
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