I'm at the annual
conference of the northwest branch of the Fellowship of
Reconciliation as I write. I've done a few songs so far, and have
been very well-received. It's an easy audience for leftwing
sentiment combined with acoustic music. These are mostly people a
bit older than I, who came of age during the times of the movements
against the war in Vietnam, and for civil rights. These movements
had lasting effects not only on the politics of those in attendance,
but on their taste in music. Also, they're members of an
organization that has a culture of its own, to some extent, which has
somewhat insulated it from the ebb and flow of social movements
(though it has also undoubtedly drawn so much from those movements,
too).
Groups like FOR in
places like western Washington feel slightly insulated from how
things are in what you might call Middle America. A nice little
bastion of sanity amid what often feels like the alienated drones in
the “real world.” But what of the times when those drones come
to life, and beyond the walls of the artificially-produced fortresses
of progressivism, the regular people get motivated to think outside
the box? Movements large and small can happen, and have broad and
lasting ripple effects. Like the 60's -- the repercussions of which
we'll still be feeling for many decades I'm sure.
I've been invited
for the first time this summer to play at the much-vaunted Vancouver
Folk Music Festival in BC. One of the headliners is Joan Baez. I'm
playing on the littler stages, she's on the big one. Of course, that
makes sense, because she's famous, and I'm not. And then, as
undoubtedly talented as she is (and she's better now than she ever
was, in my opinion), I wonder sometimes what her career might have
looked like if she had come of age in 1980 instead of 1960? No way
to know, of course, but my guess is she'd be far from a household
name for people of her generation today.
I'll be honest –
I envy the good timing people like her happened to have. I used to
envy her more back in the 90's. The folk music revival was long
over, as were the social movements that helped bring her to
prominence. And there was nothing like the media landscape of
independent radio stations that people actually listened to that were
killed off by Reagan's deregulation of the industry. (Turns out the
existence of independent radio stations popularizing local music and
covering local news in a nakedly capitalist society was completely
dependent on not allowing the big corporations to do what they
naturally wanted to do – buy everything up and turn it all to
shit.)
And then the
millenium was approaching, and things started getting more
interesting. Streaming audio became widespread. There were new ways
for independent artists to be heard, through the internet. And,
probably unrelated to this, there was a growing anticapitalist
movement throughout the world, including every state in the USA. And
then 9/11, the rise of empire, and with it a new antiwar movement.
Both smaller movements than the one that Joan Baez participated in as
a youth, but movements with a palpable impact on people like me.
I've been working
lately on
booking a tour for the fall around the US and bits ofCanada. I'm a booking agent. I pretty much only book my own tours,
but I'm still a booking agent. My main method for finding the folks
who might be willing to organize a show is haranguing my fans via my
email list and social media to get in touch with me about that
prospect. Then I stay in communication with them about it, nail down
a date that makes some kind of geographical sense, and try to be
encouraging in the process.
But
who are these people who step forward to organize gigs? They're
individuals who like my music, sure. But most of the time, they're
also people who are active in some kind of group – for the most
part, that means an independent local group of people involved with
some kind of political issue, or a chapter of a bigger organization
that's active around something or other. For me, that often means
people involved with the antiwar movement and the anticapitalist
movement, plus people involved with Palestine solidarity and
environmental activism.
It's far from
scientific, but the way my tours in the US and Canada have panned out
over the past 17 years or so of touring as a solo artist, it seems
like it might indicate a pattern.
There were many
years when I was habitually doing two driving tours of 2 or 3 months
each around North America each year – one in the fall and one in
the spring. Each tour would involve dozens of different towns and
cities from the last tour. And while lots of those gigs were in the
bigger cities in the northern part of the US and the west coast, a
lot of the gigs were in cities throughout the south, as well as in
lots of smaller towns.
During the antiwar
movement in the 60's there was an antiwar coffeehouse located outside
of every military base in the country. During the recent bout of
imperial wars, we've never gotten to the point of having more than a
handful of such coffeehouses. So it's a whole different scale, but
from late 2001 til around 2005, hundreds for sure, perhaps thousands
of towns and cities around the US had weekly peace vigils. At the
beginning they were often attended by dozens, sometimes hundreds of
people. And much bigger protest rallies were happening in places
like New York, DC and San Francisco every few months. For several
years I was going to DC to sing at protests so often, I thought about
moving there.
And although some
of the weekly peace vigils could look a bit sad at times, the
existence of all these vigils, among many other things, indicated
something significant. That in each of these towns, there was some
kind of organized antiwar presence. Each of those groups putting on
the vigils also did other things. Among them, they organized
concerts for people like me. Usually the concerts even had more
people coming to them that the vigils did.
As I'm organizing
this tour I'm thinking, when was the last time I had a gig anywhere
in the states of Virginia, West Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia or
Alabama? I used to play in all of those states regularly. The
Dakotas? Wyoming? Nebraska? It's been many years since I've had a
gig offer from any of those states, but again, I used to play in all
of them regularly. And in the states where I still do play
regularly, the gigs are much more likely than before to be in the
major cities. Like in Texas, I still do regular gigs in Houston,
Dallas and Austin, but the contacts I used to have in San Antonio,
Corpus Christi or El Paso seem to have vanished long ago.
The Occupy
movement was a nice, brief shot in the arm, but aside from that, my
experience of the past 9 years or so has been that, well, things are
looking a lot like they were before the WTO protests in Seattle in
1999. The groups like FOR still have their sort of built-in
constituencies. Those people that just have to do something, even in
times that don't feel particularly hopeful, are still out there,
mainly in the bigger cities, where they stand a chance of finding
each other.
The tour is coming
together just fine. There are plenty of big cities in the US. I can
bypass the “Deep South” and the Dakotas, too. In Canada things
have followed a similar course, though it took longer there. I have
nice gigs in several of the major cities there, but it's been many
years since I've played in many of the smaller cities where I used to
play regularly. There still seems to be enough going on with folks
in enough places to organize a good tour, though. But doing this
kind of loop around the continent twice a year like I used to seems
like a fantasy now. I doubt it would pan out if I tried to do that
again these days. It's hard to imagine what the second tour might
(or might not) look like if I tried to book a second one in the same
year.
There
were many years where I had so many gigs, mostly organized by small
groupings of peaceniks or anarchists across North America, that I
certainly had no need to seek gigs outside of the US. But I did,
anyway, because I love to travel and see the world, meet new people,
get involved with stuff going on in different places up close. For
years, I was on the road, touring, 9 or 10 months out of the year.
Living in such a massive country, with so many people and so many
cities, it didn't occur to me back then that within a few years, I'd
be doing most of my gigs outside the country.
There has been a
marked decline in these movements in most of Europe, too. But
despite that, and despite the declining economic situation on both
sides of the Atlantic as well, there are still a lot of people, a lot
of cities, and most of them quite a bit closer together than the
cities of North America. I don't know how I'd manage if I couldn't
tour in Europe. The fact that I had enough business savvy to start
this
subscription campaign, and had enough fans out there who still
have jobs and could join up with the scheme, also helped a lot.
I talk to other
DIY musician types who tour in the same kinds of networks as me in
the US, and their view of the activist scene in the US is similar.
Many of them are getting day jobs, aside from those who have also
discovered Europe along the way at some point. In one way or
another, they're having to branch out to make it work.
The thing is, in
this business, when you're singing original songs, you have to tour.
If you're in a cover band you can maybe get by playing local bars and
stuff. But if you do original music, you tour, and you don't play
the same town more than once or twice a year, generally. And if
you're not well-known, if you're not working with a promoter and
manager and a known booking agent and all that, you need to rely on
volunteers in each town to make it work. If you're doing political
music, those volunteers are probably going to be activists, and their
ability to organize something good, or at all, is going to be
dependent on the health of the activist scene in their town at a
given time.
Which obviously
has its pros and cons. In good times, it's great. Like for any
artist, if you get a chance to sing for a crowd of tens of thousands
of people, this counts as good. Between 2000-2005 I sang at protests
that big at least annually. Not since then, though, at all.
I used to tell
artists from small countries that if they wanted to make a living as
performers, they'd better cultivate connections in other countries
and sing in a language they speak there. There are exceptions, of
course. But as a general rule, that's how it is. You can only tour
Denmark for a few weeks before you've played in every city of any
size in the entire country. Then you have to either move on to
another country, or do something else with your life for another 6
months or so, until you might be able to play those cities again.
I used to say,
though, that if you're an artist from a country the size of the US,
you could get away with ignoring the rest of the world, as many
Americans tend to do anyway. I certainly know other artists who
still do, just out of ingrained habit. But I have more empathy with
them than ever, because I have no idea how they're making it work
these days, or if they are. It's one of those things you might not
readily find out by asking. People don't want to admit defeat, and
there are always credit cards.
This isn't a
message of hope and optimism, but maybe there's something to be said
for a little reality-check now and then. I'm looking forward to my
tour in the fall. And I'm looking forward to the next time when we
have a social movement that activates that wonderfully diverse bunch
of folks in the more out-of-the-way parts. It's much better to feel
like a fish swimming in a sea. As it is, I feel more like some
creature scrambling beneath the ice from one air pocket to the next
one. Hoping the ice will eventually melt again.
Every effective social movement in history that I am aware of has had
music at its core, from the Civil Rights movements in the US,
Ireland, or South Africa to the Palestinian struggle from 1948 to the
present. At every level of successful social movements, there has
been an awareness of the centrality of music – both as a means of
communicating important messages in the most impactful way possible
and as a means of fostering and maintaining a sense of community and
a sense of the vitality of the movement among its participants.
