On The Road

On The Road #1

A Column by John Sinclair

(Detroit, August 7, 2004)—I waited a long time to hit the road as a poet. Although this writer has faithfully followed the bardic path for more than 40 years, there were so many other things to do along the way, and I did them.

As a cultural activist I directed the Detroit Artists Workshop, the Allied Artists Association, Jazz Research Institute and Detroit Jazz Center. I managed the MC-5, Mitch Ryder & Detroit and other bands. I produced dance concerts at the Grande Ballroom, free concerts in the parks, the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festivals, and countless left-wing benefits, community cultural events, jazz concerts and poetry readings.

I’ve booked bands, bought talent and done publicity for nightclubs, bars and concert halls, developed programs, written grants and raised funds for jazz artists and community arts organizations, and produced records by artists from the MC-5, Little Sonny and Deacon John to Sun Ra, Victoria Spivey and Roosevelt Sykes. I’ve been a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, a professor of Blues History at Wayne State University, director of the City Arts Gallery for the City of Detroit, a community radio programmer and producer of WWOZ’s live broadcast from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

As a professional journalist I’ve written columns, features and reviews about jazz and blues, rock & roll and poetry for publications of all sorts, from obscure local papers to downbeat and Playboy magazine. I’ve published poetry books and journals, edited underground newspapers, arts quarterlies and blues magazines, and written liner notes for albums by artists from Louis Armstrong, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes to Johnny Adams, the Wild Magnolias and the Re-Birth Brass Band.

As a political activist I fought the marijuana laws through Detroit LEMAR, the Amorphia organization and a five-year struggle in the courts of Michigan that cost me 2-1/2 years in prison before I won my case and got the old laws thrown out. I was the chairman of the White Panther Party and its successor, the Rainbow Peoples Party, battling Richard M. Nixon and his goons from the beginning of his administration to the bitter end. It was my court case challenging Nixon’s “national security” wiretap program that produced the historic Supreme Court decision in U.S. vs. U.S. District Court that warrantless wiretaps would no longer be allowed.

There’s much too much more to mention, but let it suffice to say that I’ve enjoyed a full and productive life in the arts and community affairs for more than four decades … and helped raise four terrific daughters in the process. But I started my adult life as a poet, setting my verses to music and performing them with jazz musicians and blues guitarists, and it was always my intention one day to take my own show on the road and pursue my performing arts career in earnest.

In truth what performing I did was done mostly for fun until 30 years had passed, and I was well beyond my 50th year when my first album, Full Moon Night, was released in 1995. I had finally realized my lifelong dream of hearing my verses and musical arrangements realized to perfection by a wildly sympathetic team of serious players, cleanly recorded in the heat and clarity of public performance, and my years of work in the music business told me it was time now to follow the bardic call and hit the road for real.

So for almost ten years now I’ve criss-crossed the United States and western Europe, working through a vast network of old friends and new comrades to assemble bands of Blues Scholars and book myself into funky nightclubs, blues bars, art galleries, coffeehouses, churches, cultural centers, college auditoriums and music and poetry festivals from coast to coast to coast.

Living in New Orleans in the 1990s, I had my own band of Blues Scholars anchored by guitarist Bill Lynn and drummer Mike Voelker, and we played all over town from Margaritaville and the Mermaid Lounge to JazzFest and the House of Blues. But when I started travelling, it was a rare occasion when I could take my band from New Orleans on the road with me. There’s not much money in the poetry racket under the best of circumstances, and it’s all I can manage to sustain myself while I’m on the road.

Thus I generally travel by myself, hooking up with musician friends and friends of friends wherever I go. The cast of characters is always changing and the music behind me changes with them, so my texts sound different every night. Plus I get to play with a thrilling array of great musical friends and make new connections with outstanding players in their home locations, and that adds a level of excitement that’s hard to match.

On top of the music, the audiences and the performances themselves, the other great thing about travelling the bardic path is the incredible community of people who light up the way and see to the poet’s modest needs while I’m in their town. These are the people who pick me up at the train station and take me to the airport, bring me into their homes, put me up in their spare bedroom or let me sleep on their couch, feed me and get me high. They help me set up my gigs, drive me there, introduce me to all the people they know, take me out to dinner afterwards and help see to my recreational needs.

They’re the amazingly sweetest of friends, but they’re also fellow artists and journalists and educators and broadcasters and producers and creative people of every stripe, and their lives pulsate within the nexus of artistic activity and social consciousness that obtains in the places where they live. They’re always doing things themselves, making things happen, and they know what’s going on around them as well. I bring them news from our mutual friends and other scenes around the country and take their stories and concerns along with me to the next stop on the trail.

All this activity takes place well beneath the radar of popular culture and the entertainment industry, in locations only people like ourselves know about, involving music the likes of which is only rarely heard on the radio today, never played or seen on TV or even given notice by the daily press. It’s produced in profusion and joyously shared by people who live and work in obscure neighborhoods and deconstructed urban communities that are largely shunned by mainstream America and its mass media—important outposts of the vast teeming cultural underworld that throbs with heat and turmoil beneath the visible surface of American society and remains unseen and unrecognized by the world of the squares.

The downside to underground life in America is the relentless economic terrorism that grips our existence and very rarely lets up, even for a week or a month at a time. Nothing ever pays enough to cover the costs of everyday life in an appropriate time frame: we’re behind on the rent, out of groceries, always trying to keep them from turning off the electricity or the phone. Our cars break down, we don’t have any insurance and god help us if we get sick. Or we take much precious time away from our intellectual and creative endeavors to exchange for a miserable paycheck and some minimal benefits, postponing artistic production in order to bring up our children or tend to our afflicted.

If we get high we’ve got to worry about the police, and pay too much for our supplies, and go through a maze of incredible changes just to secure the substances we require. If we make music we’ve got to find people who will let us play and give us enough money to pay for what it cost us to get there. If we’re poets or writers or painters or dancers or fine artists of any sort, we are never allowed to forget that our work is not valued and will not be properly compensated no matter how good it may become. If we publish our magazines or produce our recordings and books, we can never solve the incessant problem of effective distribution and thus will always fail to reach our intended audiences.

But as an artist in America, once you take the vow of poverty, you’re free to be as creative and productive as you are capable, and it remains possible to do many great things despite the ever-present shortage of sufficient funds to provide for the necessities of daily life. We find a way somehow to make a life for ourselves within the economic exigencies to which our work has consigned us, keeping firmly in mind the promise once delivered by the Rev. Robert Grant in his nightly intro to the “Spiritual Sunbeams” program on WGPR Radio in Detroit: If you can take it—you can make it.

All that said, then, let me welcome you to the first installment of what will be a periodic report from the bardic path by means of which the poet pledges to bring his readers pertinent news and information from the far-flung outposts of the underground. I’ll hope to see you on the road, and I’ll tell you more the next time I write. Happy trails!

© 2004 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.

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On The Road #2

A Column by John Sinclair

(Amsterdam, September 23, 2004)—It’s three o’clock in the morning at the secret headquarters of the International Roots Music Collective in Amsterdam and nobody’s quite ready to turn in yet. Head Root Clay Windham, a guitarist and bassist from East Texas by way of New Orleans who’s been here just over a year now, is putting his magic touch on the recording console set up at one end of the long office suite, cuing up a track cut a couple of days ago with singer Carla Van Zanten.

The Polish kids who’ve been crashing across the hall, Klaudiusz Klosek on trumpet and Mateusz Ruczynski on hand drum and mouth percussion, take a final toke off the hash pipe and shuffle across the room to where the microphones stand awaiting them. The tape rolls and Klaudiusz lays down a tasty trumpet obbligato to Carla’s vocal that blossoms into a brilliant full-fledged solo laced with intelligence and wit that belies the player’s tender years.

A well-travelled young woman from Canada named Noa Nirnberg dances loopily around the floor in synch with the sounds wailing through the playback monitors, and Ludwig, the Surinamese music master and resident computer genius, ponders a thorny technical problem at the mixing table with the mental assistance of a big conical fatty made of tobacco and fine hydroponic Dutch marijuana.

It’s a typical night of merriment and music making at the International Roots Music Collective, the product of a diverse bunch of players whose actual composition changes pretty much with the phases of the moon. The Collective is located in what they call an “anti-squat,” an unrented office building in the middle of an industrial park in the far southeastern sector of greater Amsterdam, where the building’s management has allowed diverse artists and other humans to occupy the office suites while management seeks a proper corporate tenant for the building.

The anti-squat concept grew out of the popular Dutch practice of people moving into unused buildings and squatting there without rental fees until they’re either evicted or stay long enough to petition the local government to recognize their “squatters’ rights” to the building and gain ownership for themselves. The IRMC headquarters are in a modern office building surrounded by busy corporate office complexes operated by companies like McDonald’s (the local training center is right next door), Securicore, Vaillant heating systems, Spring, and the like. The area is crowded with office workers and their cars all day but virtually deserted at night when the anti-squatters do their art work.

Clay lucked into this situation when he took on a guitar student who turned out in real life to be responsible for overseeing this fully-outfitted but empty office building and offered his teacher a substantial space in which to squat and pursue his musical dreams. Clay and an ever-changing collective of fellow musicians began rehearsing at the space, and then one night Clay met Ludwig at a party and was soon introduced to a producer and engineer named Wolf who had a little recording studio that was being pressed to find a new place for itself.

The next thing they knew, Wolf and his posse had found appropriate space to set up their equipment, and Clay Windham and the IRMC were the proud hosts of their own cooperative recording facility. The group’s benefactor, Clay’s guitar student, decided to underwrite the cost of installing proper musical gear and keeping things going, and all of a sudden the former member of the New Orleans Jazz Vipers was watching his dream unfold right in front of him.

Myself, I lucked up on the IRMC in cyberspace, sitting at my computer in Detroit and trying to figure out how I was going to get back to Amsterdam and where I was going to stay when I got there. My first foray into the land of the free last winter had been marked by three months of solid scuffling and the constant search for someone to take me in for the night. I had no housing budget and barely enough cash to deal with the daily food and drug administration issues, and I ended up beholden to my guitarist and musical director, Mark Ritsema, for taking me in to his Dutch beatnik apartment in Rotterdam and putting me up for most of my exploratory stay.

Now I’m totally convinced that I must make my home in Holland, and this time my stay here is scheduled to last from mid-August through the winter until Mardi Gras, and—except for three weeks back in the States—I’ll be trying to find enough work here to live on, rent an apartment and bring my wife Penny over to join me.

This is a pretty strenuous transition for an impoverished American poet who celebrates his 63rd birthday on October 2nd, but in the middle of my frenetic musings about the immediate future there appeared an e-mail from Clay Windham in Amsterdam announcing the evolution of the Roots Music Collective and the establishment of the secret headquarters in the southeast. I fired back with a query about the possible availability of temporary living space for visiting artists and Clay said c’mon, so I finally had found a place to hang my hat in the ’Dam.

Then there was the problem of a plane ticket, but my friend and benefactor from the wilds of Vermont called with the promise of a $500 donation and my guardian angel from San Francisco woke me up early one morning with a mercy call to say that he’d arranged my passage by virtue of some excess frequent flyer miles at his disposal, and all of a sudden I’m virtually up in the air already. Finally, my girl at High Times, Annie Nocenti, expedited the payment of my $500 stipend for a story I’d written for her, and now I had some eating money as well.

Things were fairly quiet when I arrived at the IMRC, but that wouldn’t last too long. The great Texas harmonica man, Paul Orta, was in residence between some dates in Germany and a festival in Belgium, and he and Clay were busy getting a few tunes together for the next show. Paul has been touring Europe for years and has a dozen or so CDs in circulation dating back to his days in Austin when he was with the house band at Antone’s backing up Jimmy Rogers, Lazy Lester, Stevie Ray Vaughan and a host of others. He had brought Clay over to Amsterdam in the summer of 2003 to play some dates together and was now enjoying the benefits of having served as the godfather of the Roots Music Collective.

I spent a couple of days in Rotterdam with Mark Ritsema getting ready for our opening slot at the DKT/MC5 concert at the Paradiso in Amsterdam on August 22nd, and when I got back to HQs I met three more members of the Collective newly in residence. They were all terrific people, and the funniest thing was that they’d come all the way from Arkansas on their first trip to Europe: The Right Reverend Ernie Cleveland of Hot Springs on washboard, percussions and vocals, and the Flying Magoos out of Eureka Springs—Gates Magoo on guitar and vocals, the great Mary (Opal) Fly singing with deep soul and playing alto and soprano saxophones like nobody’s business.

Clay knows Mary from New Orleans, and now that she’s a Magoo she and Gates have been in Europe for several months, touring Germany and the Netherlands with Rev. Ernie, playing on the streets and spending some time during the formative days of the IRMC in the anti-squat in the southeast. The three raggedy razorbacks have just made their way through a series of small German towns, entertaining the citizens in the streets, singing for their suppers and staying one step ahead of the long stern arm of the law.

Ernie and the Magoos are at the pad when Clay comes home one night with the two Polish kids he found playing on the streets of Amsterdam, and before they head back to the States Wolf and Ludwig have shown up with the first installment of studio equipment for the Collective. Paul Orta has come and gone on to Madrid and London and Berlin, and Noa is yet to show up.

As they prepare to leave, I tell the denizens of the two Springs that they have to hook up with Dotty Oliver in Little Rock because I’ll be writing about them in my On The Road column in the Free Press. So hey there, Ernie and Mary and Gates, see you when you get back to the International Roots Music Collective in Amsterdam!

A parting note for my many friends on the East Coast and in the Midwest: on this birth day of John Coltrane—a Holy Day of Obligation in any country in the world: I’ll be making a short trip to the United Snakes next month to participate in several extraordinary events. First is two nights of “Speaking of Jazz” concerts to be staged in New York City October 22–23 as part of the opening celebration of the new Jazz at Lincoln Center concert facility, where poets Oscar Brown Jr, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Gil Scott-Heron, Yusef Komenyaaka and this writer with be featured with musicians Sonny Fortune, Reginald Workman and Rashied Ali.

On Sunday, October 24th, at 7:00 pm, I’ll be performing with Dee Pop, Daniel Carter, Ras Moshe and other musical friends at CBGB Lounge on the Bowery. And in Detroit on November 4, 5, 6, and 7 we’ll be celebrating the 40th Anniversary Reunion of the Detroit Artists Workshop with a whole panoply of events featuring Amiri Baraka, Edward Sanders, and original Artists Workshops musicians, poets, artists and photographers like Lyman Woodard, Ron English, Danny Spencer, Marcus Belgrave, Kenny Cox, Robin Eichele, George Tysh, Bill Harrris, James Semark, Ken Mikolowski, Jerry Younkins, David Sinclair, Leni Sinclair, Ellen Phelan, Howard Weingarden, Gary Grimshaw, Emil Bacilla, Carl Lundgren and a host of others—fully 40 years older and still kicking with both feet.

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Note: More information on the International Roots Music Collective in Amsterdam may be found at www.rootsmusiccollective.com. More information on the Grand Opening Celebration of the new Jazz at Lincoln Center facility in New York City—including the October 22-23 “Speaking of Jazz” concerts— may be found at www.jazzatlincolncenter.org.

© 2004 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.

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On The Road #3

A Column by John Sinclair

(Amsterdam, October 18, 2004)—Quiet as it’s kept, Amsterdam is blessed with a vital underground arts and cultural community that thrums and vibrates with creativity and intelligence but only rarely can be seen to intersect with the surface world of popular culture.

The city’s cannabis coffeeshops, seed stores and psychedelic dispensaries provide visible proof that there’s something quite different going on here, and its permissive approach to public sexuality is equally refreshing. But these tendencies are merely the tip of the metaphoric iceberg with respect to the depth and vastness of Amsterdam’s alternative community.

Underneath the city’s image as a picturesque, friendly but a little edgy tourist destination beats its secret heart, pumping out cutting-edge art and expressive culture that inspires and informs the level of intelligence and consciousness necessary to sustain urban life on a human scale—the way it used to be in the United States, way back in the day before they started to dummy everybody down.

The cultural revolution that erupted in America and Europe in the 1960s may have sputtered into terminal stasis by the mid-’70s, but it took root in the consciousness of an entire generation of Dutch artists, cultural and social activists who simply refused to give up the struggle to create for themselves a world they could live in.

These young visionaries extended the oppositional principles and creative social strategies of the cultural revolution into effective action and developed operational methods for moving their ideas into the realm of social reality. When their progress was impeded by the refusal of the established order to embrace innovative forms of social organization, the cultural warriors banded more closely together, redoubled their efforts and persisted in their determination to make social change in their lifetime.

As a result, the impact of the cherished ideals of the cultural revolution may be felt in the workings of everyday life in 21st-century Amsterdam, where citizens enjoy universal health care, public welfare for the disenfranchised, extended unemployment benefits and early retirement for the workers, stringent rules for the protection of the working class on the job, price controls and other measures for the protection of the consumer in the marketplace, the operation of an efficient public transportation system, government funding for a wide range of arts and cultural activities, unstinting support for the city’s incredible array of museums and cultural institutions, total decriminalization of the recreational drug user with a workable system for the licit distribution of marijuana and psychedelic substances, intelligent regulation of the legal sex industry, and a general sense of tolerance for individual differences and active concern for the well-being of the entire populace.

Spearheaded by organized labor, founded in the principles of collective bargaining and social consensus, and informed by the tenets of the cultural revolution, this national system of social organization has come to be known as “the Dutch way.” It’s worked well to serve the needs and aspirations of most of the citizenry and to “take care of people who have less,” as one worker put it.

But right now “the Dutch way” is under serious attack by the current government of the Netherlands, a reactionary right-wing coalition led by the Christian Democrat party. Its ascension to power two years ago coincided with a sharp and unexpected economic downtown which the right wing proposes to combat by adopting the American method of attacking, denigrating, undermining and stripping working people and the unemployed of hard-won wage gains, comprehensive medical coverage and other essential benefits and entitlements. So they’re looking to the ugly, inhuman, socially irresponsible policies of the Bush administration for ways to weasel out of the Dutch social compact and institute a more “efficient” system that will better serve the obscenely greedy corporate sector.

But while the great mass of Americans—dazzled perhaps by the spectacular entertainment media and the prospect of unlimited product acquisition—have mutely acquiesced to the insistent corporate demand that they reduce their lives to fit the ever smaller dimensions dictated by the insatiable profit cravings of their employers, our Dutch counterparts are beginning to fight back in a big way.

“This is a declaration of war,” the president of Holland’s biggest trade union federation told the International Herald Tribune on the eve of the October 3rd anti-government demonstration that filled Amsterdam from the Museumplein to the Leidseplein with 300,000 angry citizens. This massive outpouring of opposition to the government’s plan to reduce taxes, cut government spending, slash unemployment and disability benefits, and push back the retirement age from 55 to 65 followed effective one-day strikes on successive Mondays which shut down the public transportation systems in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. And the week after the demo, the railroad union walked off the job for a day, curtailing travel throughout the country.

The Dutch resistance to the right-wing attack on their way of life is a hopeful sign indeed. As we see in America, when people fail to resist they are forced to accept whatever degrading conditions the bully-boys of the government and its corporate masters wish to impose upon them. These right-wing demagogues are weak, cowardly characters who get over by intimidating the people, propagating an endless series of Big Lies and bullying the populace into bowing down to their demands. But when people stand up in resistance and refuse to back down, the bullies can be forced to turn and run.

That’s why a culture of resistance is so important to a healthy social order. A culture of resistance in everyday life, shaped and expressed by the creative imagination and defiant attitude of committed artists and cultural workers, can form the ideological and emotional underpinnings for popular movements of resistance to oppressive and exploitative conditions of every kind. And a culture of resistance to the idiocy and reductive intent of the popular entertainment industry—Turn Off Your TV Set!—can help engender a high level of sensual intelligence and creative production throughout the entire community.

The culture of resistance in Amsterdam today is mentally and physically rooted in the raggedy community of avant-garde artists, musicians, poets, other creative individuals and their compatriots in poverty who have “squatted” and established residence in myriad vacated apartments and abandoned buildings all over the city. Living nearly rent-free, often in quarters much larger and more desirable than they could otherwise afford to occupy, the squatters have gained the time and space to concentrate on their creative pursuits and make any kind of art or social action they might want to.

The squatters’ movement in turn is rooted in the civic belief that buildings and housing units left unoccupied tend to be detrimental to urban life and can sap the health and vitality of the neighborhoods they infest. Thus property owners and real estate speculators are allowed only one year of vacancy before their space is up for grabs. Once installed, the squatters may remain in place unless and until paying tenants are secured or other legitimate uses are approved by the local governing body.

There are squats of all sorts in Amsterdam, but most intriguing are the communal art squats where sizable groups of artists and creative associates take over large empty industrial buildings and make them into places where they can live, work, exhibit and perform to their hearts’ content. The larger squat communities have established impressive on-site cafes where exhibits, performances and dances are staged and food and drink are served to the residents.

I had the pleasure of visiting a gigantic squatters’ community called ADeM on John Coltrane’s birthday, a holy day of obligation which falls on September 23rd, for the opening night of its seventh annual ROBODOCK festival. Housed in a former shipyard on the waterfront in the western sector of the city, the venerable ADeM collective was ousted from its previous spot in 1997 when the area it inhabited was slated for redevelopment. ADeM’s fierce resistance to the threat of displacement ultimately resulted in the city authorities granting them possession of the abandoned shipyard as their new base of operations. The initial ROBODOCK festival was staged the following fall in celebration of the community’s first year on the site.

Entering the ADeM grounds was like stepping back in time 30 years to the glorious days of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, free concerts in the parks, rude rustic rock festivals thrown together on somebody’s farm, the exhilarating theatrical spectacles created by the Living Theatre, Ken Kesey’s mind-blowing Trips Festivals, the utter irreverence of the Fugs and the MC5 and the Mothers of Invention, the all-pervasive spirit of pleasure in the pursuit of sensual experience and creative expression, and the thrilling vibration of mass communal resistance to the insane machinations of the established order.

Suddenly here on the Amsterdam waterfront was a living realization of the hallowed concept of Free Space—a liberated zone dedicated to creative production in a harmonious communal environment fully controlled by its inhabitants. This was exactly what we had dreamed about back in the day, and it was exhilarating to witness this contemporary manifestation of the revolutionary spirit in action almost three decades after it had been given up for dead in the United States.

But this is one of the rewards of prolonged resistance, and it provides compelling testimony to the positive effect of a culture of resistance that keeps alive the social visions and humanistic values advanced by the creative artists and cultural warriors who labor at the very core of modern life to infuse their fellow citizens with the spirit of intelligence, compassion, imagination, experimentation and discovery.

Next month we’ll look at some of the events, organizations, groups and creative people I’ve come across in the Netherlands. In the meantime, if you’re coming to Amsterdam for the Cannabis Cup November 21-25, stop by the 420 Café and buy me a coffee and a reefer. And wherever you are, please join me then for the opening week of my new internet radio program, The John Sinclair Radio Show, broadcasting live from the cannabis coffeeshops of Amsterdam at www.JohnSinclairRadio.com. The program premieres on-line at 10:00 pm (Dutch time) on Monday, November 22, with a new one-hour show posted at the site each night that week and every Monday night thereafter.

—Detroit
October 29, 2004

© 2004 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.

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On The Road #4

A Column by John Sinclair

(Amsterdam, December 4, 2004) The late afternoon sky over Amsterdam was beginning to darken as the impromptu 4:20 group gathered around a couple of tables at the Coffeeshop Amnesia. Just outside the front door people are bicycling down the cobblestone street along the Herengracht canal, while male pedestrian traffic thickens on the block-long side street where a series of red-lit windows are staggered on both sides of the lane to display the considerable charms of a corresponding number of professional sex workers. There's a charming display on array in the Amnesia as well, but it's laid out behind the hash counter in the back of the room and it points toward another sort of pleasure center: the one in your brain that gets lit up when the tetrahydracannabinol hits your bloodstream and drifts up into the cranium. Of course, this nexus sits very near the sex gratification center itself, but THC also helps enhance creative activity, music and art appreciation, and intelligent conversation, which is what we're after at the Amnesia today. I feel right at home at this particular setting because it's owned and operated by my friend Sissi, the only female coffeeshop proprietor in the city and one of the first people I met on my first visit to Amsterdam as High Priest of the 1998 Cannabis Cup festivities. Sissi was managing the incomparable Quentin Hotel near the Leidseplein at the time, and she knows how to make people feel comfortable. Now it's a month or so before the 2004 Cannabis Cup is to convene, I'm determined to become a permanent resident of the Netherlands, and my fellow celebrants at the 4:20 table comprise a disparate bunch of American expatriates of various tenure here whom I've just recently met. They get together at the Amnesia, Sensi Seeds, the 420 Cafe or elsewhere in the Centrum virtually every afternoon at 20 after 4:00 to get high, have a coffee, tea or juice, compare notes on their various interlocking activities, and talk plenty shit, as we used to say. The dean of the gathering is the man they call the Cannabis Poet: Lee Bridges, 77, who fled the United Snakes almost half a century ago and has habitated a very wide world ever since. But he bases himself in Amsterdam and keeps ends together by writing, performing, and hustling his little books of poetry Oooo-weeee, Whew and others and his new volume of memoirs titled Me, Two on the streets and everywhere he goes. The love and respect everyone feels for Mr. Lee is almost palpable in any setting he may visit, and he's clearly an important member of this well-seasoned collective. Then there's the dude they call the Hemp King of Ohio, a shaggy lawyer from Athens, Ohio named Don E. Wirtshafter who's a pioneer in the modern-day world hemp industry, a veteran combatant in the War on Drugs, proprietor of The Hempery and frequent visitor to Amsterdam, where he seems to know everybody in the local cannabis community. Don E. has recently embarked on a new adventure as a grass-roots patron of the arts and is helping Mr. Lee realize the publication of his book of memoirs after the original sponsors have faded out of the picture. Don's also assisting another member of the circle, a character called Eagle Bill who's been active in the cannabis movement here for years and has just published his own memoir, a slim volume titled 10% THC. Eagle Bill, most widely noted as the developer of the cannabis vaporization technique that's gaining increasing popularity among potheads, has been suffering serious health problems including a couple of heart attacks and a crippling foot infection resulting from diabetes that temporarily curtailed his regular duties as the house vaporizer at the Hash, Marijuana, Hemp Museum operated by the founders of the Sensi Seeds company. While Eagle Bill was out of action earlier this year, his position behind the Museum's vaporization mechanism was filled by a woman known as Zoe, an inventive visual artist, marijuana activist, professional clown and calligrapher from Connecticut who now splits her tome between Ohio (where she lives with Don E.) and Amsterdam. Zoe is also a fierce proponent of Mr. Lee and is currently busy organizing an exhibit of her visual works to open at the Homegrown Fantasy coffeeshop during Cannabis Cup week. Helping Zoe mount her painting show is another key member of the consortium, Henk Botwinik, a closely-focused creative presence, stage producer, webmaster and wild idea man who has all the skills and persistence required to bring his conceptions to life. Henk heads a production company called Creative Resources and has been deep into the life of the imagination since he was a boy, when he broadcast a little radio program and published a neighborhood newspaper from his command post in his bedroom. I met Henk in the Amnesia late one afternoon while I was ranting and raving about radio broadcasting one of my life's central passions since I was a teen-age disc jockey back in the late 1950s with another new American friend in Amsterdam, a cat from the mountains of Colorado named Larry Hayden who spends four months each winter supplying oxygen injections to skiers and then slowly squanders the proceeds over the course of the next eight months as a resident of Amsterdam. Larry is one of the kindred spirits I'm always seeking and finding! in my travels, and we've hit it off in a flash over a carefully-assembled joint of tobacco and hash. While I'm speaking my dreams of getting back on the airwaves after 18 months of silence since I left WWOZ in New Orleans last year, a slight little fellow sort of staggering by looks over and mutters, "We could do that right here." "That would be Henk," Larry explains, performing the requisite introductions and preparing a new smoke for Henk. It turns out that Henk has a primitive radio production setup that includes his laptop and a couple of Shure stage mikes. He can borrow the other stuff, he says, "and we can set up right here around the table and conduct our broadcasts. I'll record them live on the hard drive, create us a website and post the programs on the site that night." Voila! We're about to be on the air with our own radio show, beaming out into the universe from our own tiny spot on the world wide web. Hayden spots a 5-cent piece on the table and announces that will be our budget, because we can do the whole thing among the three of us with no capital outlay required: Henk, as producer, will provide the equipment, technical know-how, website development and broadcast production skills; Larry will serve as executive producer, seek sponsors, line up guests and somehow pull everything together; and I'll bring the music, sit behind the mike, interview the guests and provide the continuity. Just over a month later we're actually broadcasting the John Sinclair Radio Show from the Amnesia, the 420 Cafe, Sensi Smiles, Homegrown Fantasy, Barney's Breakfast Bar and the Cannabis College for the entire week of Cannabis Cup 2004. We cut 16 one-hour segments in six days of live broadcast production, and after a week Henk has them all posted on our website, www.JohnSinclairRadio.com, along with several installments of this column and other pertinent information. But however immediately successful our little guerrilla broadcast project may be, it pales in comparison to the carefully-developed long-range plan of the group's eminence gris, the guy they call "Arkansaw Sam," to launch his long-awaited Genesis Project, a subject to which no end of 4:20 conversations have been and will continue to be dedicated. Sam's master plan calls for the creation of a large integrated environment which will provide space for growing cannabis, preparing and packaging it, selling the seeds to growers and the produce to coffeeshop outlets and individual smokers, and applying the net proceeds from cannabis sales to funding neighborhood health care, job training, arts and cultural activities and educational programming for community residents. Sam's been working on perfecting his plan since before he left Arkansas for Amsterdam, cultivating contacts in the local political system who might be able to help him realize his dream, studying the growing process, scouting locations for the Genesis Building, relentlessly preaching the plan to friends and casual acquaintances. But it's a great idea, and I for one am praying that Sam will be able to bring it to fruition in our lifetime, because I wanna be on board when it happens. But that opens up a train of thought and a chain of events that must be explored in a subsequent column, because it's time to get outta here for this month's installment. Maybe next time we'll take a closer look at the coffeeshop culture and how it evolved, as well as introduce some of the Dutch artists, musicians and cultural workers encountered so far. Happy holidays, everybody! CODA: Tomorrow (December 5th) is Sinterklaas Day in Holland and the hundreds of Black Peter characters mostly Dutch persons in severe blackface who have flooded the streets of the Centrum for the past couple of weeks will celebrate their Grand Finale for another year. The legion of Black Peters is an inescapable visible reminder of the ugly racial history of the Dutch people, who excelled in shipping slaves from Africa to the Americas and, of course, established the universally reviled system of apartheid to facilitate maximum exploitation of the human and natural resources of South Africa, among other atrocities. The great American novelist Ishmael Reed examined the Black Peter issue in depth in his book The Terrible Twos, written to commemorate the 200th birthday of the United States of America. Reed said some consider Black Peter the brains behind Sinterklaas, running the show while Santa shills for Pete's underground radical organization. If that's the case, this deeply disturbing Sinterklaas thing would be a whole lot easier to take.