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10. A Mythical Figure John Alexander Sinclair, who had recommended the MC5 to Russ Gibb, was a Renaissance man of sorts whose music column in the Fifth Estate represented just one of many facets of his involvement in Detroit’s arts community. He was born in Davison, Michigan, on October 2, 1941, the son of a career employee at Flint’s Buick Assembly Plant. Following graduation from high school in 1959, Sinclair attended Albion College before dropping out in favor of hanging out on Flint’s north side, attracted to the black culture that dominated that part of town. He returned to school at the University of Michigan, Flint College, and received a B.A. in American literature. By April 1964, Sinclair had moved to Detroit and enrolled in graduate school at Wayne State University, where he completed course work for his M.A. He wrote his thesis on William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.1 Growing up in the 1950s, Sinclair became a big fan of blues and R & B while listening to the radio. “Man, I used to listen to ‘Frantic ’ Ernie Durham every night on WBBC from Flint,” he recalls. “He was my idol. He played Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Sonnyboy , and Howlin’ Wolf, and he would rhyme everything he said, like ‘Great Googa Mooga Shooga Wooga!’ or ‘We’ve got the jive that’s truly alive.’ I thought he was the greatest.” Such a fan was Sinclair that he had even billed himself “Frantic John” while playing records at a high school dance.2 In college, Sinclair’s musical tastes expanded to include the “free jazz” movement represented by artists such as John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Pharaoh Sanders. He also pursued the Beatnik scene by way of poetry readings at clubs such as the Purple Onion near Brush and John R, and at Verne’s Bar on Forest between Cass and Woodward. In the fall of 1964, he met and began a relationship with fellow student Magdalene “Leni” Arndt, 107 who shared his interests in the arts. Arndt had emigrated from East Germany in 1959 and was living with relatives in the Detroit area while putting herself through school at Wayne State.3 It couldn’t have been a better match. Leni loved jazz and “wanted to be a beatnik real bad.”4 After meeting John, she started to tag along when he visited the jazz clubs on writing assignments. Leni recalls that at the time, she and John were living together in a big house on Hancock Street: “There was no heat, the furnace was broken, and the owner wouldn’t ‹x it, so John and I would put our feet in the oven to stay warm.”5 On November 1, 1964, the couple, along with fourteen friends, including poet-‹lmmaker Robin Eichele, jazz trumpeter Charles Moore, and political activist Martina Algire, founded a small bohemian artist colony and social collective they named the Detroit Artists Workshop. “Back when I ‹rst arrived in the area, Leni, George Tysh and some of the others, had been members of a similar group that had a place called the Red Door Gallery over on Second and Willis,” says Sinclair. “It closed in the summer of 1964. We took what they’d been doing and expanded on it.”6 At its outset, the Detroit Artists Workshop issued a communal manifesto calling for a community of artists to support each other. The members of the DAW made a point of avoiding mainstream life, which John Sinclair liked to refer to as the “death system.”7 The sixteen original members each contributed ‹ve dollars to pay the ‹rst month’s rent on a two-story house at 1252 West Forest , in the Warren-Forest neighborhood, adjacent to Wayne State. It was an inner-city neighborhood populated by beatniks, students, and lower-class whites and blacks, many of whom had originally migrated from the South. Within a year, they were renting six other houses and two storefronts, providing space for a print shop, a performance and meeting center, and more living area for members and for anyone else who wanted to hang around.8 At the Workshop, Sinclair stayed busy producing jazz concerts and poetry readings, as well as photography and painting exhibitions by local talent. There was an “Open House” on Sunday afternoons. Leni started taking photos chronicling the jazz and art world that they lived in, and the Artist Workshop journals published many of them, including photos of John Coltrane, Yusef...

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