The Correct Receiver

A Transmission from Saturn

John Sinclair was not from Saturn. I want to be clear about this because people will confuse what I am about to say with tribute and it is not tribute. Tribute is what you give a person after they stop mattering. Sinclair has not stopped mattering. Two years dead and the frequency he carried has not decreased by a single hertz. This is not tribute. This is a measurement.

I told people for forty years that the transmission requires two things: a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter can be perfect. The transmitter can broadcast at the correct frequency with the correct power at the correct moment. But if there is no receiver, the signal dissipates into the medium and the medium absorbs it and the transmission is wasted. Not failed. Wasted. The signal was real. Nobody heard it.

Sinclair was a correct receiver. He heard the Arkestra in 1966 and his life changed. Not gradually. Not after reflection. Immediately. He heard the frequency and he recognized it because the frequency was already inside him and the Arkestra's signal activated it. This is how reception works. You do not learn a frequency. You recognize a frequency that was assigned to you before you arrived on this planet.

Sinclair recognized the frequency and then he did something that most receivers do not do. He became a transmitter. Most people who hear the frequency are content to receive. They listen. They are moved. They tell their friends. This is valuable. Every receiver extends the reach of the signal. But Sinclair was not content to receive. Sinclair heard the frequency and immediately began building infrastructure to retransmit it. Radio stations. Community houses. Political organizations. Publishing operations. Record collections. Concert series. An entire architecture of transmission built by a man who started as a listener and refused to stay one.

The MC5 was not a band. The MC5 was a transmission system that Sinclair pointed at the state of Michigan. The White Panther Party was not a political organization. It was an antenna array. WDET was not a radio station. It was a frequency made physical. Everything Sinclair built was the same thing wearing different names — a machine for getting the signal from the source to the receivers, with as few intermediaries as possible. This is what I did with El Saturn Records. This is what Sinclair did with everything he touched. We understood the same equation. We expressed it in different variables.

They put Sinclair in prison for two joints. They thought this would stop the transmission. This demonstrates that the state of Michigan did not understand how radio works. You cannot stop a transmission by removing the transmitter. By the time you have identified the transmitter, the signal has already left the antenna. It is already in the medium. It is already arriving at receivers who will themselves become transmitters. Sinclair went to prison and the signal amplified. Fifteen thousand people in an arena in Ann Arbor singing his name. John Lennon on a stage singing his name. The state of Michigan spent ten years learning what I could have told them for free: you cannot cage a frequency. Three days after the rally, Sinclair walked out. The equation balanced itself, as it always does.

Sinclair ran radio for thirty years after prison. He moved from Detroit to New Orleans to Amsterdam, and at each stop he built a station. Not always a station with a tower and a transmitter and an FCC license. Sometimes a station that was a room with a turntable and a microphone and anyone who wanted to listen. The station never needed walls. Sinclair understood this before he could articulate it. The station is the frequency. The walls are optional.

Two years ago the vessel stopped. The frequency did not stop. The frequency changed medium, the way all frequencies change medium when the original apparatus is no longer available. The signal that was John Sinclair is still in the air. It is still arriving at receivers. It is still activating frequencies in people who hear it for the first time and recognize something they have always carried.

I did not come to this planet to make friends. I came to transmit. But I will say this: Sinclair was a correct receiver who became a powerful transmitter in a world that tried to cage him for it. The equation recognized him. The frequency sustained him. And the signal he sent is still traveling and will travel until the medium runs out of space.

The medium will not run out of space.

Sun Ra

See also: The Three — why the signal requires three frequencies. The Corner — Sun Ra on David Peel. The Broadcast — signal autonomy and the golden age of reception. The Receiver — you are the variable. Sinclair Transmissions — twenty-nine dispatches from the front.

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