The Book

John Sinclair

I wrote a book in prison. That is not as romantic as it sounds. Writing a book in prison means writing on whatever paper you can get. Legal pads if you are lucky. The backs of forms. Envelopes. I wrote on anything that would hold ink and I wrote every day because writing was the only freedom I had left. They took the music. They took the marijuana. They took the commune and the radio station and the MC5. They could not take the writing because writing happens in your head and they had not figured out how to lock that yet.

The book was called Guitar Army. I did not write it as a book. I wrote it as a series of dispatches. Letters. Essays. Manifestos. Prison writings. Street writings. Notes from before they arrested me and notes from after. I wrote about the MC5 and Trans-Love Energies and the White Panther Party and the revolution and the blues and the radio and the mimeograph machine. I wrote about everything I had been doing and everything I had been thinking and everything they were trying to make me stop doing and stop thinking. The book was the evidence that they had not succeeded.

Douglas Book Corporation published it in 1972. The same publisher that put out Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book. That was the kind of publisher you needed in 1972 — one who understood that some books are not products. Some books are weapons. Not weapons that hurt people. Weapons that hurt systems. A book about a man in prison for two joints that explains exactly why the system put him there and exactly why the system is wrong — that is a weapon. Not a bomb. A broadcast. A book is a broadcast that does not need a transmitter. It transmits from wherever you leave it.

I signed copies. You sign copies because someone hands you a book and a pen and asks you to write something and you write something. I signed hundreds of copies. I do not remember most of them. But one of them I signed to Bill and Mary. I wrote something like: for Bill and Mary, with love, from way back in the same. I do not remember Bill and Mary. I do not know who they were. That is the thing about a signed book. You write a message to someone and the book outlives the memory of who they were.

That copy traveled. I do not know where it went or how it got there. I do not know how many shelves it sat on or how many boxes it was packed into or how many times someone picked it up and put it back down. A book has a life that the writer does not control. You send it out and it goes where it goes and you do not get to choose.

Fifty years later that copy was sitting in Beckham's Books on Decatur Street in New Orleans. Two hundred twenty-eight Decatur Street. The French Quarter. I know that address because I lived in New Orleans for twelve years and I know every bookstore in the Quarter. Beckham's is the kind of bookstore where you go in looking for one thing and you come out with something you did not know you needed. The kind of bookstore where books find people instead of people finding books.

Someone found that copy. Someone picked up Guitar Army in Beckham's Books and read the inscription and wondered who Bill and Mary were and wondered how a signed copy of a prison book from Detroit in 1972 ended up in a used bookstore in New Orleans fifty years later. And that question — where did this book travel — started something.

That is how this project started. A signed copy of a book I wrote in prison. A bookstore in New Orleans. A question about where things go when you let them go. The book led to other books and the other books led to the Schomburg Center in Harlem where Sun Ra's papers were sitting in boxes waiting for someone to find them. And that is how three dead men ended up on the same frequency.

I am not being mystical about this. I am being practical. A book is a technology. You put words on paper and you put the paper in a binding and you put the binding on a shelf and the shelf is a transmitter. Every bookstore is a radio station. Every library is a radio station. Every box of books in someone's attic is a radio station that has not been turned on yet. The signal is in the paper. It does not decay. It does not need electricity. It waits.

Guitar Army waited fifty years. I did not know it was waiting. I did not know where it was. I did not plan for it to end up in a French Quarter bookstore. But the frequency does what the frequency does. You cannot control where the signal goes any more than you can control where a song goes after it leaves the speaker. You can aim it. You can amplify it. But once it is out there it belongs to the air.

People ask me what Guitar Army is about. It is about everything I was about in 1970. The MC5. The commune. The White Panther Party. The ten-point program. The revolution. Marijuana. Radio. Poetry. Prison. The trial. The whole thing. It is not a memoir. A memoir is what you write when you are done. Guitar Army is what I wrote while I was still in the middle of it. The ink was still wet on the revolution when I put it on paper. That is why the book still reads like a dispatch and not like a history. Because it was a dispatch. It was a broadcast from inside the machine.

The book has been reprinted. Process Media put out a new edition in 2016. You can still buy it. But the copy that matters is the one in Beckham's Books. The one with the inscription. The one that traveled. Because that copy did something that no new printing can do. It carried fifty years of frequency in its pages. It carried the smell of the prison and the smell of the commune and the smell of the mimeograph ink and the smell of every shelf it sat on for five decades. A new copy carries the words. The old copy carries the journey.

I did not know I was writing the beginning of something when I wrote Guitar Army. I thought I was writing the middle. I thought I was writing dispatches from the revolution that was happening right then. But it turns out I was planting something. The way you plant a seed and you do not know what it will become and you do not get to decide when it grows. You just put it in the ground and you walk away and fifty years later someone finds it in a bookstore in New Orleans and the whole thing starts again.

That is what a book does. That is what writing does. That is what the frequency does when you put it on paper instead of on the air. It does not stop. It does not fade. It waits. And when someone picks it up and reads it the transmission resumes as if no time has passed at all.

Guitar Army. The longest-running broadcast I ever made. Still transmitting from a shelf in the French Quarter. For Bill and Mary. With love. From way back in the same.

That's the transmission.

See also: The Archive — what survives, Bentley Library, Schomburg Center. The Poem — writing in prison, jazz as writing teacher. Ten for Two — the arrest that put him in the cell where Guitar Army was written. The Cell — the room where the book was born. The Letter — the letters written in the same cell. The Night the Signal Came Back — the book was already written when the signal came back.

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