Thousands and thousands of people witness his plea, his face and voice broadcast on a thirty-foot screen inside the University of Michigan’s Crisler Arena, in Ann Arbor, in the early morning of December 11, 1971.

Getting him home is why they’re all here. Fifteen thousand protesters pass joints around the smoke-filled stadium at a rally for Sinclair, who’s more than two years into a ten-year prison sentence for a minor drug conviction that involved two marijuana cigarettes and an undercover police officer.

The political and musical roster kicked off at 8:00 p.m. on December 10 with speeches from activists such as Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg, and Black Panther Bobby Seale and performances by artists ranging from Motown’s own Stevie Wonder to New York street musician David Peel.

Now it’s after 3:00 a.m., and John and Yoko are still waiting for their cue to go on.

But no one has been waiting for this moment as long as Sinclair, who’s already spent years behind bars (although not in maximum security). The prisoner—speaking via a telephone hookup from his prison work farm, around fifty miles from the stadium—is a cofounder of the White Panther Party, an antiracist offshoot of the Black Panthers, and is dubbed by Creem magazine the “High Priest of Heavy.”

The crowd gathered at the John Sinclair Freedom Rally is mesmerized.

So are the FBI informants embedded among them.

John and Yoko—dressed, a reporter observes, “in matching black leather jackets, unzipped to reveal ‘Free John Now’ T-shirts”—follow David Peel onstage.

In addition to being an activist, Sinclair is also known as a poet and a music reviewer and was the manager of the Detroit rock ’n’ roll band MC5. He’d once commented that “rock musicians are often old, retired, and forgotten by the time they’re thirty, and don’t even have the benefit of a pension.” With John Lennon now thirty-one and Yoko thirty-eight, the rockers Sinclair is counting on to save him have, by his own standards, already aged out.

“Apathy won’t get us anywhere,” John tells the crowd. “So flower power failed, so what, let’s start again.” He picks up his acoustic guitar and launches into a set of four political songs, culminating with one he’s written called “John Sinclair,” with its imperative chorus, “Gotta, gotta, gotta set him free.”

John later acknowledges that his radical period “almost ruined it [his music], in a way. It became journalism and not poetry.” But on this night, fans pass immediate and harsh judgment.

They walk out.

“It was a rational act,” Creem magazine writes in its review of the protest concert. “In a word, they were awful. The music was boring. And it was four a.m.”

*  *  *

Clack, clack, clack go the typewriters as FBI agents compile reports based on informants’ findings. The dossier is stamped CONFIDENTIAL and distributed to field offices in seven cities.