Devils & Blue Dresses: My Wild Ride as a Rock and Roll Legend

hero Walter Reuther, the company goons and flailing nightsticks against the backdrop of police with their heads turned the other way, the sit-in at General Motors in Flint, all of them great legacies of blood and courage by men and women, our mothers and fathers so to speak, who demanded the dignity of a day’s pay for a day’s work and a safe working environment. If they were going to break their backs for the company, then they wanted to know their odds of survival would be worth the effort. Even if they were just “working class,” they still had families and dreams for the future.
    Fly into Detroit today at our new airport and go down to get your bags at baggage claim. Up on a huge wall for everyone to see are the images of those people we feel should be honored by the passing parade of world travelers as they pick up their luggage: Rosa Parks, Walter Reuther, and even Jimmy Hoffa––the great teamster organizer and legend who did battle with the descendent of another gangster offspring, Bobby Kennedy. No, it’s not a mistake. We do have our priorities in order.
    It was with this in mind that I allowed myself to consider the revolution at hand as an opportunity. I certainly hadn’t had much luck with the status quo music industry. Kim and I were happy together, but I could tell that she did not hold the same attraction to radical change that I did. I had yet to come to that place where I would destroy myself, rather than play the game by “the man’s” rules.
    Kimberly had come from the middle-class and her parents, Russ and Dora, hadprovided her with comfort and material rewards that she believed I would also deliver. After all, I was a recording star and I did still have a contract. From my perspective, the lack of money was nothing new. Other than the short years of success in New York, which had now taken on the looks of an aberration, life without disposable income was the norm. However, it did occur to me that what was trendy––in this case radicalism––might also be commercial.
    I approached a man named John Sinclair. John had been a guest of Kim’s and mine at our apartment after he had come out of prison. He was considered a radical, but had proven he was willing to work within some of the boundaries of the establishment as manager of the rock group MC5. He also had his own underground publication called
Sun
. While he was in prison I had performed several benefits for his commune, the first at the behest of Barry Kramer.
    John was an intellectual and a writer. He was a big, long-haired man with a menacing stare that was betrayed the instant he started to laugh. The trick was to get him to laugh. MC5, which started out on a parallel universe with John as their manager, abandoned his communal philosophy at the first sniff of commercial success. John was quartered near the campus of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in an old mansion that sat near the fraternity houses on Hill Street. He had a flair for the obvious and enjoyed things like having his followers dig huge craters in the front lawn of the mansion to protest bombings by American military forces in Vietnam and Cambodia. John was one of our homegrown radicals, and his early radicalism was rewarded with jail sentences and little name recognition beyond the networks of other radicals.
    When John Lennon, the good Beatle, performed at a benefit and rally for the release of John Sinclair from prison––ten years for two joints––the entire world heard of him. Lennon had not been made aware of John’s priors until afterward. Those were difficult times to decide where your loyalties lay, and I heard that John Lennon suffered post rally reservations about his support. Apparently it was “fabulous” to be associated with someone on the edge, but if you journeyed too far you could risk losing your credibility with the status quo. And this wasn’t so much about John Lennon, because his fame was such that few could question his direction. Rather, it was about lesser beings who were struggling with how far to take their beliefs before shooting themselves in the foot because, in spite of their innocence, most radicals I had been exposed to were serious about their convictions and willing to pay the price. Pun Plumundon comes to mind as he attempted to blow up CIA headquarters in Ann Arbor. Rennie Davis of Chicago Eight fame, sitting with me on a quiet, peaceful, sun-filled afternoon and coming on to me was a different radicalism. I