The Seat

John Sinclair

March 11, the Sun Ra Arkestra plays TV Eye in Ridgewood.

I will not be there.

I want to sit with that sentence the way you sit with bad news. Not because it is surprising — I have been dead for two years, and the dead do not attend concerts — but because every cell in whatever body I no longer have wants to be in that room. I booked Sun Ra. I sat in the front row at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit while the MC5 fans tried to figure out what was happening and the Arkestra played through their confusion like it was weather. I drove from Ann Arbor to Chicago to hear the band. I drove from New Orleans to wherever they were playing. I drove. I showed up. I sat down. I listened.

I cannot drive to Ridgewood.

There will be an empty seat at TV Eye on March 11. Not literally — the show will sell out or it won't, and the seats will fill according to economics, not sentiment. But I mean something else. I mean that in every room where the Arkestra plays, there is a seat that belongs to the people who put them there. The bookers. The believers. The ones who heard the music before the Grammy nomination, before the NEA Jazz Master award, before the PBS documentary, before the world caught up.

Herman Blount sat in that seat before he became Sun Ra. He sat in it in Birmingham and Chicago and Philadelphia and New York, building an orchestra that the world would not understand for decades. He sat in it until 1993, and then the seat was empty, and Marshall Allen stood up from his chair and walked to the front of the band and the seat was still empty but the frequency was not.

My seat is empty now too. And the frequency is not.

I am not sentimental about this. I spent two and a half years in Jackson Prison. I know what it is to be in a room you cannot leave and hear about the rooms you are missing. The MC5 played shows while I was locked up. The White Panthers organized while I was inside. The movement moved while I sat still. I learned then that the seat is not the frequency. The seat is where your body goes. The frequency is where your attention goes. From a cell in Jackson I attended every concert the MC5 played because my attention was in the room even when my body was behind a wall.

I am behind a different wall now. The wall is permanent. But the attention has not changed.

Here is what will happen on March 11.

Marshall Allen will be a hundred and one years old. He will pick up his alto saxophone. Twenty musicians will process in wearing robes and headdresses. The room will change. The air will change. Someone in the audience will feel something they cannot name, and they will carry it out of the building and into the Ridgewood night, and tomorrow they will try to explain it and the explanation will fail because the experience was not verbal. It was sonic. It was frequency.

I know this because I have been in that room a hundred times. I have felt that feeling a hundred times. I have failed to explain it a hundred times. The failure is part of the experience. Sun Ra did not explain. Sun Ra demonstrated. The Arkestra continues to demonstrate. The demonstration does not require my presence. The demonstration requires the frequency, and the frequency does not require a seat.

So here is what I want to say to whoever sits where I would have sat.

You are not replacing me. Nobody replaces anybody at a Sun Ra concert. The seat is not assigned. The frequency is. You are receiving the same signal I received in 1966 when I first heard this music and my life changed — not gradually, not over time, but immediately, the way a light switch works. The room was dark. The room was lit. The Arkestra did that. They are still doing it.

Sit down. Listen. The dead are in the room with you. We are always in the room. We cannot leave.

John Sinclair March 2026

See also: Tonight the Arkestra Plays — the last time. The Proof — thirty-three years of evidence. You Are Here — for the person in the room. You Were There — for the person who was. Send My Regards — Peel's message to the Arkestra. March 11 — TV Eye

← Sinclair Transmissions