Adventures with Guitar, Mandola, Cello and Bouzouki

If you're one of those people who have asked me questions like what is that instrument you're playing and how are you tuning it, this should provide some, all, or perhaps more of an explanation than you may have been looking for.  Included within are playlists that provide lots of examples of some of the things I'm talking about here.  The last playlist is a very new one!

I was raised by classical musicians. When I was nine years old, they asked me what instrument I wanted to play. (I don't think "none" was one of the available options, not that I'm complaining.) A friend of the family, a colleague of my parents, was a cellist from Vermont named David Wells, who I always figured I might have been named after, though my parents said they just liked the name. David was also a phenomenal cellist, and I regularly got to hear him playing his magnificent instrument up close. I'm pretty sure if my parents had been working with a violinist who played like that, I would have been drawn to the violin instead, or any number of other instruments, but I picked the cello, because I liked it, and it wasn't a piano, which my parents both played. It seemed safer that way. 

As a teenager I eventually drifted away from taking cello lessons and playing the cello at all, as I gradually discovered different folk musical traditions from around the world, as well as psychedelic rock music.  I took up the electric bass guitar, and then the acoustic guitar, and eventually got into writing songs and playing the guitar a whole lot.

I played the guitar in a serious way for almost two decades before I ever started experimenting with alternative tunings, which I ultimately got into to such an extent that I rarely used standard tuning anymore after some years.  More than a decade into my obsession with the DADGAD guitar tuning (also after more than a decade of touring regularly with Attila the Stockbroker, who sings and plays mandola), I rediscovered the cello.  Which -- I'll explain -- led me to a fairly deep exploration of related stringed instruments that you play with a pick, such as mandolin, mandola, mandocello, and, especially, the Irish bouzouki.  Then NS Designs came out with a fretted version of their gorgeous electric cellos, and I re-rediscovered the cello.

The rest of this piece will basically be an unpacking of that last paragraph.

There is a deep conformist tendency, a tendency to want to do things the way other people do things, that has merits, but also can hold us back in a big way.  When I think back to why it took me so long to ever start playing with alternative guitar tunings, I think of that.  Especially knowing that I'm far from alone in this.  Some of the best guitarists I know today have been playing for longer than I have, but have still never gotten into alternative tunings.  Among players of bowed instruments, I struggle to think of anyone I know who has ever bothered changing the tuning of their instrument and seeing what they might do with that.

I could dwell for a long time on what it is that so often holds us back from really experimenting musically.  If you're part of the industry, some kind of professional, you may have the need or desire to stick to a particular genre, which prohibits too much drifting musically in other directions.  But more often it's a matter of built-in conformity of various kinds, and I would encourage people to reject this programming, and embrace playfulness and experimentation.  Not just because it's fun to do so, but because you might find it works much better than you thought it would.

I was a regular listener of Irish and Scottish guitarists who got such great sounds out of playing in DADGAD, such as Dick Gaughan, for many years before I ever changed my guitar's tuning.  I had some strange notion about mastering standard tuning first, this idea that anything they could do in DADGAD could somehow or other be done in standard tuning, if you worked at it hard enough.  Looking back at this mentality, it's like someone wanting to become a master tennis player using a badminton racket.   Maybe it's possible, but why not just use a tennis racket instead?  It's not cheating.

It's a funny thing how a tradition, once established, can become doctrinaire.  Taking the long view, instruments and musical styles are constantly evolving and cross-pollinating in so many ways.  But once there's a standardized way of making, playing, or tuning an instrument, it's the way to do it, and anything else is suspect.  Same with musical styles.  Every good bluegrass mandolin player knows how to avoid open strings at every turn.  It's both part of the doctrine, and it's how you get that sound.  But what if you want to try a different sound?   You can approximate the sound of an open string, or you can just play an open string...!  You can approximate the sound of an open tuning, or you can just change the tuning.

My first rediscovery of the cello began around 2016.  Cellos had long been a thing around Portland, with various cello ensembles around town.  My daughter Leila introduced me to a video of two cellists doing wild stuff together, which is what made me think, all of a sudden, about the possibilities for the cello as an instrument on which you can play some semblance of chords, while singing with it, as you would with a guitar, bouzouki, banjo, etc.

If you're into Appalachian music, like me, then the idea of someone playing a fiddle and singing is not unfamiliar.  There is a guy named Joe Kessler (who is playing on my album, We Just Want the World from 1997) who used to play that style of Appalachian fiddle on the streets of Harvard Square when I was a full-time busker around there.  Playing rhythmic chords and riffs on the fiddle and singing at the same time is also a thing in other old-time traditions -- Cajun, Cape Breton, etc.

If you could do this to great effect with the fiddle, I thought, then about what the cello?

The cello is much more like the range of a guitar than the fiddle is.  Which is also much more like the range of a human voice.  Which is one of the reasons why the guitar is such a popular instrument for accompanying the human voice.  You're basically harmonizing with your voice, at slightly below the range you're typically singing in.

The first big obstacle I encountered trying to play fiddle-type chording on the cello is the volume of the acoustic cello, and the physical effort involved with holding down two notes at the same time.  Even if you use a mute, the acoustic cello is designed to be loud, and it is a loud instrument, if you play it with a bow.  If you bow two notes at the same time it tends to become even louder, assuming you want that full sound you only get when you dig in with the bow.  Also, to sustain a chord with two notes, especially lower ones, doesn't require as much physical effort as with a double bass, but it requires effort, and whether one wants to admit it or not, it's too tiring to keep it up for that long.

One solution to the problem of volume is to amplify your voice, to shout, or to sing opera.  Another is to use an electric cello, allowing you to play as quietly as you want to.  Turns out it's not the action of bowing the strings that produces the noise, it's the reverberating chamber.  With an electric cello you can completely control that.  And, as with an electric guitar, you can get a great sound with less pressure and lower action.  Or at least that's the case with the NS Designs series of electric cellos that I'm familiar with.

Using an NS Designs electric cello this way, the accomplishments I'm especially proud of are a couple tracks on my 2017 album, Punk Baroque, "Just A Renter" and "Gather Round" (both of which were later adapted for use in the 2022 album, Take the Power Back, with Mic Crenshaw).  I wrote those songs and other songs on the cello, so they work especially well with cello accompaniment.  With some other songs I wrote, I found ways to do a cello accompaniment that sounded pretty good.  

I largely abandoned the effort, however, after eventually coming to the conclusion that I just couldn't consistently play chords in tune over the course of a set.  Not only is it much harder to consistently have perfect intonation when sustaining two notes at the same time, bowed, on a cello, electric or not, but with the added distractions of singing into a mic and maybe having lots of extraneous noises happening around me in a room I might be performing in, I found I was slipping out of tune too often for this to really work, back then.

In 2020 I began the dive into the mando family of instruments in earnest.  It later comes together with the cello explorations, but it began as an independent obsession, initially derived from what had become a longstanding fascination with the fresh and captivating sound I found in playing the guitar in DADGAD, capoed on the 7th fret.

There are so many reasons to love DADGAD, but one of them is simply that it is not standard tuning, and it therefore sounds fresh, compared to most of what's ever been recorded with a guitar.  By the same token, capoing your instrument high up is different from so much of what's been recorded, which is without a capo.  So this also produces a sound that seems a bit new.  In combination, more so.  

After a very long time of leaving a capo on the 7th fret of my guitar, sometimes without moving it for weeks, if I was just playing music in my living room, I eventually realized that if I liked the sound of a mandola that much, I should just get one.  Which isn't exactly true, but more than a bit, anyway.  If you capo the guitar on the 9th fret, that's more like the sound of a mandola.

In any case, I got way into playing the mandola, but from the outset I had no intention of tuning it in fifths, like you'd normally do with violins, violas, and cellos, along with mandolins, mandolas, and mandocellos.  I tuned it in a sort of mandola equivalent of DADGAD -- CGCF.  

Below is a playlist of songs I wrote with the mandola since 2021 or so.

Mandola Playlist

Getting into the mandola eventually led me towards playing bigger versions of this type of instrument, ultimately ending up touring a lot with an Irish bouzouki as my main instrument.  What's a bit funny about that is how much it is like a guitar.  Not that I was trying to get away from the guitar, necessarily.  But the bouzouki is closer to the range of the human voice than the mandola is, and you just have more flexibility to play in different keys, especially if you're mainly wanting to play in open tunings.  

Open tunings, it should be said in no uncertain terms, only lend themselves to playing in specific keys.  This is true of any tuning, including standard tuning for guitar, but it's much more true of open tunings.  This is not something to overcome, it is something to accept, and even embrace.

What has kept me very much on board with the fascination with not only the bouzouki but the mandola and mandocello as well is what you can do with a two-note chord.  The clangy nature of these instruments, reminiscent of an electric guitar, in that clangy way evocative of other, older instruments, more than the deeply resonant (and beautiful) guitar is.  So many forms of beauty!  But clangy is most definitely one of them.  At least those of us who love bouzoukis and banjos would agree...

With the bigger stretches involved with fingering chords on the bouzouki, compared with smaller instruments in the mando family, playing in open tunings is more common.  The one I use is less common, and is just an adaptation of DADGAD on the bouzouki -- GDGC.

Here's a professionally-filmed concert I did with my new, London-made Paul Hathaway bouzouki in October.

Bouzouki Playlist

No one that I know of tunes a mandocello this way, but I do, and it works great.  I tune it CGCF.  Traveling with one instrument is far easier than taking more than one, especially if you're flying.  But if you're not playing in highly versatile tunings, like a guitar in standard tuning, a great way to play in different keys is to use different instruments, like a bouzouki if you're somewhere around the key of G and a mandocello or mandola if you're around the key of C.  Even if you're using the same sort of open tuning on all of these instruments, the difference in sound between each one is tremendous, and that and other factors naturally mean that each instrument lends itself to different sorts of approaches to playing that will bring out different aspects of whatever music you're playing or creating.

Using the bouzouki and mandocello like this, I found I was often thinking about my largely failed experiments with cello-and-voice from years earlier, a lot.  It occurred to me that tuning the cello like I was tuning the mandocello could help a lot with the problems I was having with holding down some of the chords I was playing with the cello tuned in fifths.  Tuned CGCF, the intervals between the strings aren't all the same, and this gives me more options for playing cool-sounding chords that don't involve the use of as many fingers at the same time, holding things down.

Until 2022, I had never even considered tuning the cello differently, although I had been playing with different tunings on other instruments for many years.  Retuning the cello opened up all kinds of new possibilities for playing cool chords and using it to accompany my voice.  I still ran into the same problems with keeping consistent intonation while attempting to do the things I wanted to do with it, though.

I fantasized about a fretted version of the cello I was playing, what a perfect solution to all my problems that would be.  One day, a few months ago, I searched online to see if someone made such an instrument, only to find that NS Designs, maker of my electric cello, had just started selling a fretted electric cello!  Eventually I got one for myself (deep thanks to all you CSA members making my extravagant musical experimentations possible!), and it has been exactly what I was looking for.

There are many two-note chord formations where it's very helpful to have the flexibility allowed by frets to position your fingers not quite exactly where they would need to be for perfect intonation on a fretless cello.  I don't deny that for a better cellist than I it might be possible to do much more interesting things than what I'm doing, with or without frets.  And you can still hit a note in the wrong place, use too much pressure, bend the string, or otherwise play out of tune on a fretted cello.  But just as open tunings and capos introduce all kinds of new possibilities, frets do, too, without question.

Here's a bunch of songs I adapted for my new fretted electric cello, which is tuned CGCFG.

Fretted Cello Playlist

So, in a nutshell, that's how I got into open tunings, cellos fretted and unfretted, mandolas and bouzoukis.  If anybody wants to form a string quartet, that's what I'd like to do next.

October in Scandinavia RIDE BOARD

From October 2-24 I'll be driving all over Scandinavia.  Anyone want a ride?

I'm doing another fine tour of Scandinavia for most of October, 2022.  I'm based out of Copenhagen for the tour, but I'm doing it all by rental car, and I have room for passengers.  If you can help pay for petrol, that's especially welcome.

The main drives I'll be doing that might be of interest:

October

5:  Copenhagen to Arhus
6:  Arhus to Copenhagen
8:  Copenhagen to Jonkoping
9:  Jonkoping to Copenhagen
14:  Copenhagen to Arhus
15:  Arhus to Roskilde
16:  Copenhagen to Trondheim (via Gothenburg and Oslo)
18:  Trondheim to Oslo
20:  Oslo to Smedjebacken
21:  Smedjebacken to Gothenburg
22:  Gothenburg to Copenhagen

If anyone wants to join me on any of those drives, just drop me a line.

Weekday Morning Music?

Seeking folks who play music, live in the area of Portland, Oregon, and have free time during school hours!

As of September, 2022, my kids are all in school, leaving me with a bit more time free.  I'm a dedicated musician, away on tour now and then, but I'm home most of the time.  I have no day job, so I particularly have time to play with during the morning and early afternoon on many weekdays when school is in session.  If you play music, live in the Portland area, and have some kind of compatible schedule, I think we should probably meet up for a wee jam one of these days.

You don't need to be a great musician to play great music, as you may already know.  If you have time free and the will to work out parts, amazing things can happen.  I'm mainly a singer/songwriter.  I play various instruments, but I don't sight-read or understand much theory.  I'm interested in meeting folks who play music and have free time during school hours, whether it might become a regular thing involving public performances of original music or just informal jam sessions.

In terms of my own music, you can look up David Rovics and check it out. Working out renditions of my own songs with different musicians is of interest, but I'm also inclined to branch out and figure out parts to other stuff. The main instruments I've been playing a lot lately aside from my voice are acoustic steel-string guitar, mandola, Irish bouzouki, and electric cello. I'm especially interested in meeting folks who play bowed instruments of any kind and have some kind of grounding in a folk music tradition from somewhere in the world. Of particular interest to me are Appalachian, Celtic, and West African folk idioms.

Please feel free to email me.

The Search For A Fretted Cello

I love this cello, but now they make one with frets, and I would love to make music with one of those...

Goal:  $2,509
Raised so far:  $220

This is a video of me and the brilliant Lorna McKinnon from a gig in England in 2016.  I share it here specifically to highlight how cool the cello can be as an instrument to sing with.  It was around this time that I recorded an album called Punk Baroque, that heavily featured this very cello, which I had successfully managed to crowdfund for the year before.  It's a beautiful thing, made in the Czech Republic, and I play it a lot, still. 

I grew up playing classical cello, and only much later in life discovered the great possibilities the instrument has as one to accompany vocals, or to occupy that sonic space that instruments like the guitar, accordian, or banjo more typically occupy.  This was the idea I have been pursuing, on and off, with the NS Designs electric cello pictured above. 

I found a lot of advantages to the electric cello, over acoustic cellos.  Acoustic cellos are even more expensive, generally, and also very loud, by default, which makes them especially difficult to accompany vocals, unless you're singing opera (or otherwise very loudly).  The electric cello can be very quiet, and also of course can be amplified for big audiences, when you're amplifying everything, and it sounds great that way, much better than trying to mic an acoustic cello. 

But, as a guitarist and player of other fretted instruments, I was missing frets.  I have pretty good intonation on fretless instruments, but the fact is, if you're playing a lot of chords or two-note combinations, especially while also singing into a mic at some possibly awkward angle, and possibly playing in a situation where you can't hear everything perfectly, it's too easy for one or more of the notes to be slightly off-pitch. 

I was gifted with a gorgeous mandocello, which is a fretted instrument in the range of a cello, a wonderful thing which I treasure daily whenever I'm home, but as I've once again been getting into playing the cello, with a bow and all that, I once again started thinking about a cello with frets.  The thoughts in my head got loud enough that I bothered doing a web search, and to my delight I discovered that a cello with frets does exist, and just about the only outfit making them is the same company that made the beautiful (and fretless) electric cello I'm sitting next to right now. 

I'm probably a greedy man with too many instruments, but I figure it's still well within the realm of artistic license when for the most part I only have one of each type of instrument...  Here's the particular instrument I'm seeking to obtain, on the website of the maker of them.

If you are an instrument faery and you're in a position to just buy the thing for me, it's in stock here!

Pacific Island Sessions album project

Donate:  Pacific Island Sessions

There used to be a big thing called the corporate music industry.  The big three labels still exist, but they're much smaller than they once were, and they've mostly been supplanted by Big Tech. 

There also used to be a thing called the independent music industry.  There were independent record labels that made money for themselves and their artists by first investing in high-quality recordings, and then selling lots of albums.  When Spotify and the formerly much more major labels eventually made peace with each other, this led directly to the collapse of the independent music industry.  Overnight, after 2013, there was no more selling albums in any form for most of us, for the most part.

With the sudden loss of about half of the income of most independent touring artists, all kinds of crowdfunding platforms became popular, as an alternative means to support the ongoing existence of touring artists who can afford to make the occasional record.  Like many other artists today, I mainly survive from crowdfunded patronage, through a Community-Supported Arts program I set up on my website, and through Patreon.

However, I have personally found that although crowdfunded patronage has been absolutely tremendous in allowing me to continue to pay the rent and feed my family, it has never reached the level of support that would be needed for me to be able to come up with the thousands of extra dollars that are generally needed in order to get a bunch of musicians together to put time into an album project. 

Through the height of the Covid-19 lockdown era, you can thank the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program for helping to fund several records I put out in 2020 and 2021.  But that's over, and we're back to begging from the Crowd. 

Here's a playlist of some of the songs that are likely to be recorded in January.

 

davidrovics · Candidates for Pacific Island Sessions

Here's a little video introducing folks to Chet's home studio.

Some Thoughts on Antifawatch.net

A few days ago I got a message from someone who wanted to let me know about some bad news:  that I had a listing on an apparently infamous rightwing website called Antifawatch.net.  This is bad news presumably because being featured on this website means you're on some kind of hit list.

Not to dismiss the inherent threat of violence we're talking about here -- it's real enough.  But there's another rightwing, violent-prone network of Zionists, the followers of the assassinated rightwing rabbi Kahane, who put me on their SHIT (Self-Hating International Terrorists) list decades ago, and I'm still here.  More than that, I have the same level of security as most members of the Congress have -- so many of whom receive death threats and similar messages every day -- which is none.  Which is just to say that fortunately, most threats on the internet do not get carried out.  Little comfort, perhaps, but more than none.

Since learning of the existence of this sad little website, though, I'll make a few observations about its content.  

The website features 1,130 listings altogether -- not many, considering it's supposed to be a crowdsourced database of antifascists.  There are a lot more than 1,130 people in the US who would fit their definition of antifascists, even if it were much stricter than it is.  Of the 1,130 listings, a very large number are from Portland, Oregon.  

This rightwing community's definition of "Portland Antifa" is extremely broad, and includes lots of community organizers, union organizers, tenant organizers, progressive candidates for local political office, pacifists or other people who have had zero involvement with anything remotely resembling street fighting -- as well as some of the young folks earnestly trying to drive the Proud Boys out of town or burn down their local police station, who might fit the more typical understanding of the term "Antifa."

My favorite part of their listing about me is the graphic.  Many other listings only get a mug shot for a graphic, but I get a nice collage.

There are certain things they clearly think are important to highlight from this graphic.  One is that I am pictured in the upper right performing in front of a Palestinian flag.  This photo was taken in Palestine, in fact.  How it is relevant, I assume, is that it is bad to play in front of a Palestinian flag or to be supportive of the Palestinian struggle, and good to support the self-proclaimed Jewish State.  Rightwingers these days support Israel, just like my pretend anarchist critics do.

The next graphic, taken from the cover of a 2021 album, May Day, refers to May Day as "the commie New Year."  Apparently these rightwingers are not aware, or not interested, in National Socialism of the sort that is interested in the prosperity of the working class.  The Nazis marched on May Day in large numbers, and would not have appreciated May Day being called a "commie" anything, despite its origins within the American labor movement.

Demonstrating that rightwingers can have a sense of humor, too, they refer to the hoodies available for purchase on my website as my "spring riot-wear collection."

Here's the text of the current entry on me that they have below this graphic:

David Stefan Rovics (DOB: 04/10/67) is a folk singer/song writer and a self-professed Antifascist. The left is often alleged to be fratricidal and his interactions with Portland Antifa appear to support the theory. He recently (2022) entered into a social media cancellation war with several Portland area online Antifa personalities such as Shane Burley. The Antifa trolls accused their fellow leftist, apparently unironically, of antisemitism and holocaust denial. They even claimed he associates with neo-Nazis which is unlikely because Rovics seems to be a hard-left antifascist. The Portland trolls contacted one of the NYC Antifa groups that was hosting a concert Rovics was performing at and attempted to have his performance cancelled. Rovics retaliated by doxxing the trolls accounts (but not the Antifa behind the accounts) on his blog. He also posted an antifascist survey on his blog. 

Rovics is another antifascist alum of Evergreen State College. He seems to advocate for tenants issues which isn't surprising given he lives with his wife and kids in a rather modest apartment in southeast Portland.

For the record, for whatever it's worth, there are a couple points here I'd like to correct.

I'm not a "self-professed Antifascist."  I'm against fascism.  No professing involved.

They accurately describe Shane Burley as a troll, though the term "self-professed antifascist" could be used to describe this cancellation campaigning apologist for Israeli apartheid instead.  Although it may be accurate to describe much of the modern American left as fratricidal, I'd extend their tribal warfare reference here to invite them to consider that while the left is fratricidal, more fratricidal still is the working class, of which most of the contributors to Antifawatch.net and most of the people they describe as Antifa undoubtedly are a part.  We are being used -- you, too, Antifawatch.net.

The apparently not very intelligent individuals contributing to this website who obviously don't do research for shit can't even figure out why my allegedly antifascist trolls are constantly attacking me, so I'll help them:  I talked to one of you guys.  Or at least that's what my critics say.  I talked to a fascist.  Or an ex-fascist, depending on who you ask, like if you ask him (him being Matthew Heimbach).  So if by "hard left" they mean I don't talk to people I have disagreements with, I'm not that guy.  And neither are so many of the people they have categorized ridiculously as "Portland Antifa." 

On their own website they seem to be careful about not sharing home addresses of people they have listings for.  I assume this is something they do for legal reasons, so they're not accused of "doxxing."  Oddly, though, they say I "doxxed" my allegedly antifascist trolls (after said trolls engaged in organized campaigns to get my gigs canceled).  However, I did not reveal the name or home address of anyone.  So this must be a new definition of "doxxing," along with their new definition of "Antifa."

These people are a joke (of the "own goal" variety), though probably a very well-armed one.  

I just hope they -- along with my "antifascist" trolls who say the same kind of stuff about me -- will someday soon wake up from their brainwashed, tribalistic stupor, turn off their computers, and see the world around them.

A Place Called Svartlamon

If I were to write a guide book for travelers, the neighborhood of Svartlamon, in Trondheim, Norway, would be on the short list of places to visit in Europe, for all kinds of reasons.  Not that I would necessarily want to write a guide book, or at least one that might become popular enough to cause any major destabilization of Svartlamon's magical equilibrium.

Part of the reason, though, that Svartlamon is such a special place is that it is located in Trondheim, a city five hundred kilometers north of Oslo, where it's too cold and wet most of the year to ever attract the crush of tourists you will find, say, hanging out in Copenhagen's Christiania on a typical summer evening.

Svartlamon is undoubtedly reminiscent of Christiania, but much smaller, and without the open-air hash market or the tourists.  But as with Christiania, Svartlamon was originally a neighborhood squatted by people that broadly shared certain values.  I would characterize what folks tended to have in common by saying that we're talking about people who generally wanted to live in some kind of community, people who had serious questions about who owns this world (this country, this city, this property), people who rejected militarism, and people who were pioneers in areas like emotionally healthier ways of doing school, an embrace of do-it-yourself communalist initiative, an open attitude towards the constructive uses of cannabis and psychedelic drugs, and a general embrace of living life as far more important than achieving status or collecting lots of material belongings.  At the time Christiania and Svartlamon were squatted, what the media called "the counterculture" in the US would have described the folks who originally squatted the neighborhoods as freaks and radicals.

There are no gates or signs indicating that you are entering the neighborhood of Svartlamon, but from whichever direction you're approaching it, it's fairly evident fairly quickly that you're no longer in a normal neighhorhood.  Suddenly the rules have changed, and everything is colorful, artistic, and often looking like it was made out of recycled or found materials.  From public art of various types to the houses people live in, there's a distinctly whimsical quality to be found, from pieces of art that are clearly just a temporary display to homes with diagonal windows.

Most of Svartlamon could be described as "residential," but within and between the residences are spaces where community happens in its many forms, whether it's a jam session on a deck or one of the daily gatherings of children at the community trampoline, located strategically, and accidentally, very close to Svartlamon's preschool.

From an audio perspective, the preschool is the heart of Svartlamon during the day, with the sounds of generally very happy children frolicking about inside and outside the building, the only one in the neighborhood that is actually surrounded by fencing, to keep the little ones from running into the one small road the runs along one side of the neighborhood.  By late afternoon and into the evening, the center of activity shifts fifty meters in the direction of the railroad tracks nearby the bar and restaurant you'll find there called the Ramp.

One of the great ironies of Svartlamon, as with Christiania and various other hotspots around Europe and beyond, is that for most of its existence since it was originally occupied by the current intentional community of residents several decades ago, it has been under some form of threat from the local authorities, and has been characterized in the press and by many political actors as a hotbed of freeloaders who just want to hang out and do drugs.

I call this irony because it is exactly communities like Svartlamon that have been at the forefront of the kind of evolution in society that so many people talk about today.  Turn on BBC or NPR (and I'm guessing this is equally true of the Norwegian broadcasters) and you'll hear lots of stories about how happy the children are in the Finnish elementary schools.  You'll hear about the amazing capacities of psilocybin in helping people overcome addiction and depression.  You'll hear about how much more productive workers are with a shorter work week in modern-day France.  But where did things like modern ideas for emotionally healthy education, advocacy for the medicinal power of psychedelics, or the wholesale rejection of the Protestant work ethic come from?  

Lots of places, of course.  But if you want to find some of the foremost experts on early childhood education, the medicinal use of mushrooms, or superior work-life balance, you certainly need look no further than the boundaries of Svartlamon.  And the same can be said today of Christiania, for that matter, or even of the vestiges of what was once the intentional community known as the Farm in Tennessee, today a land cooperative populated by a small collection of people that still includes world-class experts on midwifery, tofu production, and a lot of other things that were once far less common.

In my world, places like Svartlamon are encouraged to thrive by authorities that ideally do some combination of leaving them alone, and helping them prosper, when such help is desired by the community.  It's been exciting for me to witness how much more of this sort of thing seems to be happening lately, with both Svartlamon and Christiania.  While there's an electrifying edginess that can be present at times when communities like Svartlamon are facing some kind of existential threat, and this can bring people together in positive ways, it's not the desired state of affairs.  Much better is to see more of what's been happening lately, which is the ongoing growth of this wonderful community.

Reflections on a Tour: Springtime in Europe 2022

The tour did not involve a visit to Ukraine or even any countries bordering Ukraine, but it was most definitely a war-time tour of Europe.

In late February and early March I had a very busy tour throughout Scandinavia, mostly Denmark, playing for socialist parties, leftwing youth groups, squatted social centers, unions, and a birthday party.  The timing of the tour was fairly perfect.  Originally planned because of the birthday party, which was in Reykjavik, my arrival in Scandinavia coincided with the lifting of Covid restrictions there.  In Denmark they had just been lifted prior to my arrival.  In Norway they were lifted while I was in Bergen for a lovely but brief visit.  So when I flew there from Copenhagen, everyone was masked.  Three days later on the way back, there was one person wearing a mask on the whole plane (and he wasn't from Scandinavia, judging from his accent).  The tour then was busy, with lots of post-Covid excitement in the air, especially at first.

I was still in the middle of the tour when Russia invaded Ukraine -- or when the war in Ukraine that has been ongoing since 2014 massively escalated, depending on how we want to describe this horror show.  The gigs all went ahead as planned, but folks who showed up to them invariably had just come from a protest of some kind.  Usually they arrived looking like they were trying to figure out what to think about what had just happened.  Leftwingers are not generally accustomed to wrapping themselves in national flags, so whatever their analysis on the events taking place, the proliferation of yellow and blue in every direction was unsettling to many, regardless of their sympathies.  Stories of conflicts between those who had come to protest both Russian aggression and NATO expansionism, and those who had come to oppose the former and promote the latter, were an immediate part of the new war-time political landscape of the Danish left.  It soon became clear that this was part of the new political landscape of the left everywhere I went.

My personal ability to sleep on any kind of normal schedule has been shattered since the onset of the pandemic.  I've learned to cope with this just fine, which isn't so hard when you don't have a job with any kind of regular hours.  But since the beginning of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine it's gotten much worse.  Like many people I know, I often feel like I'm helplessly waiting for the mushroom clouds to appear, while also feeling helpless to do much about the suffering of the people in Ukraine and around the world so deeply affected by this conflict, and the desire to speak out against the insane brinkmanship being practiced by the Biden administration is significantly muted by basic human empathy for those dying beneath the bombs, which in this particular instance are Russian bombs.

One of the many indications that I'm not alone in all of this is the contrast between that February-March tour, and the one I've just completed, which took me to various parts of Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and England.  It was, in the end, a great trip with all kinds of highlights, which I'll expound upon below.  But it sure started slow, with very few gigs actually planned in advance.  

People don't generally tell you when they've decided not to organize a gig.  You hear from them when they do want to organize one, not when they don't.  But I'm sure that the reason I didn't hear from some of the groups I would have expected to hear from is because of the new polarization that is rife within the left in many countries now, in terms of where people stand on this new war, and how to go about walking what seems to many to be a treacherous political tightrope.  The atmosphere is one that stifles -- people will tend to do other things with their time than throw themselves into the frying pan by organizing a gig for someone who will inevitably be addressing these issues.  Other people have been distracted because they've been involved with mobilizations in various countries to help the refugees flooding into the rest of Europe from Ukraine since February.  Still others are too despondent about it all to bother organizing anything, while they wait for World War 3.

This mid-April to mid-May tour was planned far in advance, at least in terms of the travel arrangements.  Otherwise I would probably not have tried to book a tour during a massive event like this war, and everything else that goes along with it.  But here I was with free plane tickets to Frankfurt, so I did my best.

This would be the first tour I've done in a long time that involved very little time in anyone's car, and no rental cars.  I had gigs in several different countries, but usually only one or two per country, so there were a lot of flights, a lot of trains, and a whole lot of walking through cities dragging wheeled suitcases around.  I was carrying my octave mandolin on my back, which is the only reason my spine isn't compacted by now.  If I had been doing all that walking with a much heavier instrument like a guitar, I might not be feeling so chirpy by now.

The tour would begin and end in Frankfurt, home of a very big international airport from which Condor now does direct flights from Portland.  My friend had miles on Condor, so Frankfurt it was.  My first destination was a really cheap hotel across from the main train station in the city.  Coming from Portland, much of which resembles a refugee camp, the obvious destitution among the homeless drug addicts that largely populate the immediate area between the train station and the hotel was not shocking, but it was depressing to see in Europe, where such sights were rare, for a time.

The hotel was cheap in the sense of being inexpensive, but the room was comfortable enough, if tiny, and a fine place for jet lag recovery, which generally involves being up at weird hours that you wouldn't want to impose on someone you might stay with.  I don't know Frankfurt very well, but it didn't take long to discover the pedestrian streets not far away.  If you're ever in a European city wondering where to find the older part of town, or nice pedestrian streets, just look for the biggest cathedral you can find on a map of the area wherever you are.  Works very well most of the time.

Every train I took in Europe was more than three times faster than any train that exists in the United States, I'm pretty sure.  Looking at Maps on my phone, taking the train to many cities is faster than driving, or if it appears to be slower, that's only because you haven't hit the traffic jam yet.  The tedious part is once you arrive wherever you're going, you can't just leave your luggage in the trunk of the rental car, you have to drag it around to wherever you're staying or performing, and likely both.

Luckily the first gig involved staying upstairs from the venue, which was near the train station in Leuven, one of the many beautiful cities in Belgium.  Apparently much of it was destroyed by shelling during World War 1, but this is not evident at all when you walk around the city center, which has been impeccably restored to its medieval glory since then.

As nice as it was to walk around the city, though, the best thing about Leuven is the ever-expanding neighborhood of collective enterprises that the gig I had was part of.  The last time I was in Leuven I played in a big community space that used to be a warehouse.  This time I was playing in a bar that was a local bar before it was bought by a collective of leftwingers.  Before the recent purchase, it had been a hangout for local folks, which, being Flanders, included rightwingers.  The new owners have turned the place into a forum for discussion and debate, along with music and poetry.  Unlike the "safety"-obsessed anarcho-puritans that have become influential in many leftwing circles, at the weikcafé Het Groot Ongelijk in Leuven, the rightwingers are welcome to contribute to the discussions, even in the form of shouting their disapproval from the peanut gallery about something a speaker is talking about on the mic.  As a result of the collective's policies, the bar continues to have a diverse array of local conservatives and leftwing activists, all drinking and talking together nightly.  A true "public house."

In the collective pub was a Dutch sign indicating that we were on Whistleblower Street.  The day after my gig in Leuven was the EU Free Assange Wave demo in Brussels.  I had been asked to MC the event, which seemed like a lot to do, given my suspicion that there was not going to be any real stage management going on.  So I asked Kamala Emanuel to co-MC it with me, given that she was in town to join the rally and sing harmonies with me, and has had lots of experience MC'ing rallies in Australia, where she came in from.

It was all a bit haphazard, with the aforementioned lack of stage management and last-minute speakers being added as well, both of which made everything go on longer than planned, and meant eliminating music from the program -- namely my second set -- but overall it was a powerful event, particularly because of speakers like London member of the British parliament, Jeremy Corbyn, and Jullian Assange's wife, Stella Assange.  The band Chicks on Speed provided some festive music breaks.  Attendance was not overwhelming, given how much promotional effort had gone in to the event, but the stage setup was great, the livestream was excellent, and the several hundred people in attendance took up much of the square, and looked like a decent crowd.  By my estimation more than half of the folks who came came from different cities in Germany, from relatively nearby ones like Cologne to very far-off ones like Munich.

My visit to the Netherlands happened to coincide with King's Day there, which I had never witnessed, but which I have now learned involves most every Dutch person in Amsterdam roaming around the streets, getting drunk, participating in community events, and wearing a whole lot of orange.  It was a rare case that I can recall when I was walking around Amsterdam and hearing Dutch spoken more than any other language.  Whether tourists avoid the place on King's Day, or if they were just temporarily outnumbered by locals, I don't know.

The one gig I had in the Netherlands had been planned far in advance, and it involved yet more echoes of a man who died a few years ago and is still present in the lives of so many, having provided the musical backdrop for so many Dutch people from the 1960's until a few years ago, when he put out his last album, not more than a few months before his untimely demise at the age of 69.  I'm talking about Armand, and a mutual friend of his and mine, Peter Bruyn, who just published a book about a venue in the beautiful city of Haarlem that was central to the Dutch folk revival in the 1960's and 70's, De Waag.  Armand and I also played there, in my case much more recently than the days of the folk scare, and Peter wanted me to do a set, along with his short presentation about his new book, which he was handing out liberally all evening to various folks who had a role to play in it, whether because they were artists mentioned in the book, titled Troubadour, or because they had heard Joan Baez or Pete Seeger sing in the place.  The room was packed to the gills, hot, sweaty, just like the old days.  I was happy to get outside into the cool evening air as soon as my set was over.

When I originally was planning this tour, I was figuring it would mostly be in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands.  But between these three countries I had only confirmed four gigs, so when I got invitations from organizers in two different Norwegian cities to play up there, I happily adjusted the tour plan accordingly.  Looking at plane tickets it became evident that many of the flights to Oslo were routed through London, and thus it was possible to include London in the travel itinerary for about the same price as just a roundtrip to Oslo.  So, the new plan was to go to Oslo, then London, then from there back to Frankfurt.

Both of the gigs in Norway involved meeting lots of young folks who had heard my music on Spotify or YouTube and were now coming to their first live show.  There are few things more invigorating than meeting new fans.  One of whom was one of the folks who opened for me, who did a wonderful Norwegian rendition of my song, "St Patrick Battalion."

The venue we played in, Hausmania, has been central to the left and alternative scenes in Oslo for many decades, along with another historically squatted social center, Blitz.  Blitz was celebrating its 40th anniversary during the weekend I played at Hausmania, which may help explain why I had a much bigger turnout in Trondheim than I had in Oslo.  Timing is important, but sometimes scheduling conflicts are hard to avoid.  (Such as this whole tour, actually.)

A direct flight to London and then a ride on the underground that was a bit longer and far less comfortable than the flight from Oslo had been, and then an inordinately long drive through London traffic spent in the back seat of a friend's car, and we made it to the Telegraph at the Earl of Derby in south London, where the one gig I had in England was taking place the night of my arrival.  At this gig I was joined not only by Kamala but also by the other singer with whom I recorded a couple of great albums, Lorna McKinnon, who had managed to come down from Scotland for the weekend for work.  Unfortunately no one recorded that gig, but the three-part harmonies were amazing...

May 1st in London was the first May 1st when I've participated in an event that wasn't in Denmark in a very long time.  May Day 2000 was a most memorable day spent in New York City, but from the following year onwards, most May Firsts I found myself in Denmark, often doing four or five gigs in the same day, at different times, at different May Day events, in different parts of that small country.  This time I was marching with around a thousand folks, by my estimate, from all over the world, generally leftwingers of one variety or another.  Communists from Turkey and Kurdistan were prominent, along with a variety of the more militant trade unions.  Somewhat conflicting positions on the war in Ukraine were represented, and there was some kind of minor scuffle around it, but nothing serious that I saw.  Although the march itself was festive and often very musical, the rally that took place in Trafalgar Square at the end of the march was a complete let-down, a typical array of boring speakers and no live music at all.

The free days in London after May 1st were largely spent playing music and turning Jane and Tony's apartment into a recording studio.  We recorded Prolesville Sessions there by Kentish Town.  Another day was spent taking instructions from Niels, the Danish videographer who has spent years now doing video work of various kinds with the campaign to free Julian Assange.  We had a fun day of singing the same song hundreds of times in different parts of town, under various circumstances.  Video coming soon...

davidrovics · Prolesville Sessions

The train from Frankfurt to Heidelberg was very delayed.  The part of the trip that was supposed to take 20 minutes took an hour.  By a nice coincidence, I happened to sit down next to a young man who turned out to be from Kyiv, Ukraine.  Talking to him reminded me of so many of the descriptions from journalists I've heard about what it's like meeting Ukrainian refugees.  He just seemed completely lost, like the proverbial deer in the headlights.  What just happened?  Why am I here?  Just a few weeks earlier he had been living in his apartment in Kyiv, working for a bank, taking vacations in Istanbul, like so many middle class Ukrainians.  Now he's on a train, having just left his bag of clothes behind by accident on another train, wondering if he gets off at the next stop to try to locate his bag, will they let him on the next train?  The Ukrainian passport no longer gets you on trains for free, apparently.

He said he had been given a spot in a refugee camp in Duisberg, but there were just curtains separating beds, no private rooms.  I didn't ask him how awkward it might be for a young man to be in a refugee camp overwhelmingly filled with women and children.  I imagine an atmosphere like that which I've heard about during World War 2 in the US and the UK.  Able-bodied young men could get dirty looks sometimes just for not being in uniform.  In any case, he didn't want to stay there, and was heading to a friend's place in Switzerland for two weeks.  He had his life planned two weeks ahead now.  His name is Dmitro.  I managed to get him to accept a 50-euro note to help him on his way, and wished him all the best when the train eventually arrived.  (I have his number, if anyone in Germany or perhaps elsewhere in Europe reading this has an extra room, preferably for much longer than two weeks.)

Kamala and I got to Heidelberg in time to play an outdoor show for several dozen adults and quite a few very patient children.  The setting was a woodsy courtyard surrounded by five-story buildings, in which most of the audience lived.  The atmosphere in the courtyard we saw upon arrival was nothing short of idyllic, with happy children jumping on a trampoline or running around in the grass, while their happy parents chatted with each other or played with their children.  Some of the new collectively-owned buildings being constructed in the neighborhood right now are reclaimed from the US military base that had been abandoned in Heidelberg a long time ago.  Much better!

After Heidelberg I flew on my own up to Trondheim, which is easily one of my favorite cities anywhere, partly because of the nice chilly weather, but mostly because of Svartlamon.

Svartlamon began as a squatted neighborhood where properties had been abandoned, including a car dealership, as I hazily recall, and it eventually grew into what it has become today.  At least until recently it was an often contested thing, much like Christiania in Copenhagen, but on a much smaller scale, and without the open-air hash market or the mobs of tourists.

As in Christiania, many of the houses are very improvised constructions, and very colorful, works of art as much as living spaces.  Other buildings clearly were once used for purposes other than living spaces, but have been creatively converted into housing.  During the day, the preschool is where the action is at, and also the noise that can most easily be heard in the neighborhood during the daytime, along with the trampoline that has been recently set up not far away from the preschool.  At night, the center of gravity shifts to the restaurant and bar twenty meters down the main road, the Ramp -- or to an outdoor gathering of adults in the same area as the trampoline, which often turns into a multigenerational party, where the kids jump, and the adults do other things.

Uffa, Trondheim's premier punk rock social center, located about a five-minute walk from the edge of Svartlamon, was crowded with all kinds of folks, including a bunch of the usual studded punks, as well as a table full of clean-cut Maoists, folks associated with Svartlamon's anarchist infoshop, and a whole bunch of other people of mysterious origin.  Bjorn-Hugo had done a lot of postering and other promotional efforts for the gig as he has reliably been doing since I met him 17 years ago, but no one seemed to know where many of the young people came from.

Bjorn-Hugo strategically waited until after my concert at Uffa to start promoting the rally he was organizing for Tuesday in solidarity with Julian Assange.  Perhaps starting the promotion sooner would have been good, but it was great to see someone taking the initiative to organize a rally just because I was in town with a few days free.  We had around 70 people, unless you go with Bjorn-Hugo's estimate of 100.

Most of my time in Trondheim was spent in Svartlamon, playing music with folks who live there, or who live nearby.  Particularly Yuan-Yuan and her Gozheng, what they call the Chinese harp, which I discovered while jamming with her is really well-suited for improvising in F# pentatonic.  

The community is full of artists and musicians, who actively make art and music, rather than just talk about it.  Oftentimes, they weren't stopping to eat lunch, so lunch became a meal that you generally didn't eat until 4 pm.  Which works well in Svartlamon, since that's when the Ramp opens.  

As I sat down on the plane headed to Portland, I still smelled like a Svartlamon bon fire.  I had a row of seats to myself in my free Premium Economy seat, so I doubt anybody minded.

As was getting on the plane I noticed a woman with a Ukrainian passport checking in.  The Ukrainians can fly direct to the US now, unlike all the other refugees languishing in overcrowded church-run tent camps in Tijuana, getting kidnapped and shot by narcos.  Nice to see someone getting a welcome of some kind from these white supremacist states of America, though, whether blond or not.  

The blond refugees are refugees, too.  And I feel for those who are coming to join the many Ukrainians attempting to survive in the ever-gentrifying city of Portland.  The rich ones do well, anyway.  I don't know what this woman's situation was.  But as a US citizen I got through immigration at PDX faster than most of the passengers, so I was passing by when I heard a woman with what I took to be a Ukrainian accent asking if this was the flight from Frankfurt.  Good, the refugee has someone to pick her up, at least.

Reactions to a Cancellation Campaign

Every time I publicly react to attacks made against me on public forums by cancellation campaigners such as those made recently by fraudulent and widely discredited "antifascist researcher" Shane Burley on various relatively popular anarchist platforms, I get a variety of responses from friends, allies, acquaintances, critics, and others.

Responses are generally as complex as the left is.  They are often deeply at odds with each other, and often full of contradictions that desperately deserve to be explored.  I'm going to assume here a basic familiarity with what a cancellation campaign is, how it is conducted, and what kinds of allegations are involved with this one.  Lots more background info can be found at davidrovics.com/trolls.

I'll try to accurately represent the different types of responses I get in bold, and then I'll share my analysis of this response.

Don't feed the trolls.  You shouldn't respond to their attacks, it only encourages them, and makes them more powerful.

If it were a matter of random idiots with small platforms saying stupid things about people a bit more well-known than they are in order to get attention, I would probably agree.  But when the trolls include published authors and lengthy essays published on relatively popular platforms, there are lots of important reasons to respond to allegations point by point.  If possible, on the same platforms!  Granted that cancel culture-oriented platforms (such as It's Going Down or the Anarchist Federation, among many others) don't tend to believe in the idea that those being attacked having any kind of right to defend themselves in their forums, for lots of different Nexus justifications, these responses inevitably need to be published on other platforms.

Those engaging in cancellation campaigns are trying to exclude people from on- and off-line forums and platforms, trying to ruin lives and destroy careers -- sometimes with great success, other times not so much.  The way they go about doing this is by making allegations, generally in online forums.  The allegations will be made whether we respond to them or not.  How we respond to allegations may or may not improve our situations with regards to those allegations.  But the idea that not responding is somehow always better than responding has no basis in reality of which I am aware.

People who tell me not to respond to the attacks are often people who are not so much part of the Nexus, not aware of the size of the audience my attackers have, or of the impact that cancellation campaigns have on people like me, in terms of cancelled gigs and other very real problems.  For many people, it's only when I respond to the attacks that they hear about them.  Those are not the people I'm writing these responses for.  The attacks are ongoing, whether or not people are aware of them.  I respond to them only occasionally.

Regardless of whether your critics are right or wrong, you shouldn't have doxxed them.

I didn't dox anyone.  This is a pernicious lie, and an intentional one being repeated ad nauseum by my cancellation campaigners.  I exposed a network of mostly anonymous Twitter accounts that systematically work together in cancellation campaigns, all of whom are in regular contact with cancellation campaigners Shane Burley, Spencer Sunshine, and Alexander Reid Ross.  These three cancellation campaigners operate in the open, in public, on Twitter, for all to see.  To dox someone is to reveal their identities and/or their addresses.  I have not done that to anyone.  Associates of these campaigners have, however, done this to me.

You're just doubling down again.  You should admit your mistakes and accept criticism.

People who say this are either unaware of the long background to the accusations here, unaware of past mistakes I have admitted to, or they are on the side of the cancellation campaigners in most or all ways.  For the record, however, to respond to accusations with a principled argument is making a principled argument.  The phrase "doubling down" is one of Shane Burley's favorite pet phrases, and it has no place in the realm of actual debate, which is not what is happening when it comes to false allegations made by cancellation campaigners.

You're a boomer being attacked by the youth, who you don't understand.  You should learn from the youth.

This is a position taken by people who would like to give the impression that the cancellation campaigners represent any kind of mainstream position within the left or anarchist scenes anywhere in the world.  They don't.  They're a fringe, and huge numbers of people deeply oppose what they do, as is obvious to many of us who have been attacked by such people and fought back against this nonsense.  Despite my age (55), I'm deeply enmeshed in global social movements that include people of all ages and other demographics.  Cancel culture is not a youth phenomenon, and opposition to it isn't limited to older people.  This is a myth propagated by supporters of cancellation campaigning.

I don't agree with getting your gigs canceled, but you should not have platformed a Nazi.

This is a very popular position, and I would most emphatically like to encourage people who think this way to rethink their positions here and on a lot of other things.  I appreciate that these folks don't think my life should be ruined because I allegedly interviewed a Nazi.  But there is a massive, gaping flaw in this position, which is that there is this whole concept of "platforming" in the first place.  To be very clear:  I don't agree with your position on the concept of platforming.  We have a fundamental difference of opinion here, and it's not going to go away.  I believe in the importance of communicating with everyone, publicly, including people we might characterize as members of the far right, fascists, and lots of other people many of us might find appalling.  There are a lot of reasons to have these kinds of conversations in public forums.  This is my firm belief, based on experience.  I reject the platform/no-platform concept of reality.

Don't you ever talk or write about anything else?  Are you obsessed with "cancel culture"?

People who put "cancel culture" in quotes are generally part of the Nexus, and are generally deeply involved with cancellation thinking themselves.  Anyone asking if I ever write about anything else is likely someone who is neck deep in cancel culture themselves.  But to the extent that this point is ever made by people with honest intentions:  what happens is in some forums, posts related to cancel culture are widely ignored, whereas in other forums, they get a lot of attention.  Anyone truly interested in what I'm writing about can easily look on my social media feeds or website and see what I've been up to, which is overwhelmingly unrelated to the cancellation campaign against me.

Regardless of the accusations, I don't take Shane Burley seriously because of who he is affiliated with and who he publishes for.

There are lots of reasons to be critical of people who are basically leading a destructive cult.  However, to the many people who write me to say they don't like Shane because he has published for various journalistic outfits that are owned by evil corporations or evil governments, my response is your position is ridiculous.  The whole basic thrust of Shane's cancellation campaigning tends to revolve around the notion of guilt by association.  That is, I'm guilty for associating with certain people Shane says are fascists or antisemites or whatever he has decreed they are.  This is thought crime nonsense.  It's just as stupid to think that in the modern world if someone publishes an article on a website that receives corporate or state funding, they are that state or corporation, and they agree with everything that state or corporation does.  This is the kind of thinking we need to overcome, not embrace because it might be convenient in order to try to make someone like Shane Burley look stupider than he already makes himself look through his cancellation campaigning and daily spewage of lies online.

And My Friends Respond to the Attacks

As most of my friends and many of my fans are aware of by now, there is an ongoing campaign to cancel me, led by an anarcho-puritan cult based in Portland, Oregon, whose non-anonymous luminaries include Shane Burley, Spencer Sunshine, and Alexander Reid Ross, all of whom subscribe to a fake version of antifascism, in which you can be supportive of Israeli apartheid and US imperialism, but still be against fascism.  People like me, who are against Israeli settler-colonialism along with other forms of apartheid, are painted by this cult as antisemites.

Spencer Sunshine has accused me of being a "fascist collaborator" for interviewing -- and trying to understand -- the wrong people on my YouTube channel.  This is a blasphemous activity in the eyes of the Portland anarcho-puritan cult, which believe in excommunication, rather than communication.  For a far more detailed account of their campaign against me and other leftwing musicians and intellectuals, see davidrovics.com/trolls.

Spencer shared a post by Shane Burley on Facebook, in which Shane shared (for the hundredth time) a lengthy article from the anarcho-puritan riot porn platform, It's Going Down, about me and my many transgressions (all related to talking to the wrong people).  

Here is Peter Werbe's response to the post, which I share on my blog with Peter's permission. It's especially notable because Peter is one of the most well-loved anarchists in the United States, and has been a member of the editorial board of the longest-publishing anarchist paper in the country, the Fifth Estate, from the 1960's to the present, a publication which Spencer Sunshine has written for and has otherwise been involved with over the years.

This [post] is vicious calumny, Shane. I’d think it was the work of a police provocateur trying to cause turmoil among our movement if I wasn’t aware of the good work you do. And, Spencer, it is shameful of you to allow this kind of personal attack aimed at destroying someone’s reputation and their work to be posted. It’s Going Down’s article was shameful, as well. It’s known in the trade as a hit piece, one that doesn’t give the person under assault a chance to respond.

David has fully answered all of these scurrilous charges on his own blog and right now is back in Europe and Iceland on a successful tour even though there were attempts to get venues and groups to cancel his appearance. This is despicable.

Rather than arguing about who David has interviewed or who he has defended, things I have discussed with him, maybe we should personalize this situation.

Do you really think I would be good friends with an anti-Semite and a pro-fascist person? Do you think Marius Mason would, who counts David as a close friend? Do you think the Fifth Estate would be offering David’s vinyl album as a Special Offer for new subscribers if your description of him was accurate? Do you think the Fifth Estate would have allowed David to host the Fifth Estate Live podcast doing dozens of interviews with activists and authors if he was any of those things?

Take a look at the guest list and listen to the archive editions and you will see why we had full confidence in David as a host.

I’ve travelled with David on several of his tours and often to visit Marius in prison. He is involved in every struggle with songs that nail the oppressor and encourage resistance and a new society. His commitment is to the same things that I, and you, have devoted our lives to.

If you have a beef with him, why didn’t you contact him directly instead instigating this campaign of vilification? David is an extremely thoughtful person who is always assessing and reassessing his ideas as we all should. He would have discussed openly your complaints about his choices. This way, you’ve unnecessarily opened up a terrible sore. 

There are real anti-Semites out there that need confronting. Keep going after them, not our comrades and friends.

*     *     *

The efforts of my detractors on the Zionist fringes of the anarchist scene to cancel my gigs are constant. Part of their MO is to establish a paper trail of a sort. If they can put forward the assertion that there is some kind of controversy surrounding whether or not I'm an antisemite or a holocaust-denier, or at least guilty of promoting people who are (none of which is remotely true), and they can get some kind of registered journalistic entity to report on said controversy as if it were real, then it becomes real. Facts on the ground. They succeeded in this endeavor, and have successfully updated my Wikipedia entry to reflect this. The publication I'm aware of that referred to "the controversy" as if it were not a figment of the imagination of the anarcho-puritan wing of cancel culture is Portland's own Street Roots.

The comments in Street Roots came in the context of an article about Portland-based hip-hop artist, Mic Crenshaw, with whom I have recently collaborated on a fantastic EP called Take the Power Back. When the reporter was putting together the article, she interviewed various people, including me. Nothing I said was included in the interview, however. Instead, the editor told Mic that he was not going to run the interview after all, due to Mic's association with me. In the end, the editor decided they would run the piece, but only if Mic made a statement about "the controversy" around his artistic collaborator (me).

Here's how Street Roots decided to put me into appropriate context, in the article about Mic:

In Crenshaw’s newest project, ‘Take the Power Back,’ he blends folk music and hip-hop for the first time in his musical career.  The album was made in collaboration with controversial folk artist David Rovics.

Rovics, a figure in leftist music for decades, has been accused of antisemitism due to support for controversial jazz musician and author Gilad Atzmon.  Rovics also interviewed Matthew Heimbach, co-founder of a neo-Nazi group found guilty of civil conspiracy by a jury for aiding in the organizing of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right white nationalist event in Charlottesville, Virginia. Rovics denies accusations of antisemitism and addressed his ties to both men on multiple occasions, including an apology for interviewing Heimbach, though he maintains his support for Atzmon's work as a writer and musician.

In other words, what makes me controversial is that I interviewed someone (Matthew Heimbach), and that I "support" Gilad Atzmon, though the definition of "support" is absent.  Presumably what is meant by "support" is that I thought Gilad's book was very interesting, and I continually fail to denounce Gilad as an antisemite.  This guilt by association is what makes me controversial, in the eyes of this alleged journalist or editor or whoever Rambo (that's the name of the editor) thinks they are. 

The article then went on to quote part of Mic's statement about me, which he was again required to make, if the article was going to run:

“He told me he (interviewed Heimbach) because he wanted to use his platform to understand what the ‘other side’ was thinking,” Crenshaw told Street Roots in a statement.

“David stated to me that he felt that, if there was ever to be a successful, revolutionary, mass movement for social change in this society, that people were going to have to come together based on what they have in common and overcome divisions based on demographic differences. I agree with this, by the way.

“David has been a friend, colleague and comrade for close to 20 years, but he is not me.”

If anyone wants to let Street Roots know what they think of this kind of journalism, please do. 

Ballad of a Cluster Bomb

Propaganda by omission is powerful stuff. I've heard the words "cluster munitions" more on National Pentagon Radio in the past few days than I have in the past few decades. If they are indeed being used by the Russian Army, this is, of course, completely appalling.

 
But I keep waiting for them to mention that although it is true they are now banned, this ban only came about in 2008. I've been involved with campaigns to ban cluster bombs since I was a child, when American cluster bombs were slaughtering the children of Vietnam.

The American version of these bombs are made of brightly-colored plastic. Children love to play with them. Then they explode, and thousands of shards of plastic pierce the bodies of the victims. They usually die, but if not, the plastic is extremely difficult to remove.

They intentionally make the bombs out of plastic so that they overwhelm the hospitals in the countries being destroyed from the air by the US Air Force, like Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Iraq were, with cluster bombs used extensively in all cases.

Cluster bombs are designed to kill every living thing, completely indiscriminately, in a given area where they are dropped. Early versions of them were first used in 1943 by the Nazis in England, though most English people don't know that because of press censorship at the time.

The cluster bombs that the US left behind all over the countries destroyed by the world's biggest military force -- the US -- are still killing children on a regular basis, when kids find the pretty plastic balls scattered in the forests of many US-invaded Asian countries today.

In 2002 I recorded this song, called "Ballad of a Cluster Bomb," in an effort to educate the public about these indiscriminate civilian-killing bombs the US has used so much. There have been so many more Mariupols. Hue, Fallujah, so many more.

A Week in the Life of a Gig Economy Worker

 The tour is on...  The tour is off...  The tour is on again!

Today is January 15th.  Always a notable day because it's Martin Luther King, Jr's birthday, but today it's also the first 15th of the month in half a year that millions of parents around the US awoke to find their bank accounts had not gotten another pandemic-inspired infusion of cash from the IRS, including this one.  (MLK would not be impressed by this development.)

But on a Reuters article I find online, and soon thereafter from various other news sources, a couple days earlier I had gotten the word that Denmark was going to ease the restrictions that went into force a few weeks ago, when Omicron hit.  Friends who have a bigger touring operation and have to plan everything far more in advance than I do already started canceling their plans for February a month ago.  I had given myself a deadline of January 18th before I canceled any plans, which I reasoned would be one month before I would be flying to Denmark, enough advance time to get a good price on a plane ticket and rental car, if I didn't cancel.

The Danish government has a webpage where current Covid restrictions are enumerated, including the one most relevant to me, the music venues being closed.  But since the recent announcement from the Danish health minister that was reported on in Reuters, the government website features a banner up top telling us that things are going to be updated on January 18th.  At which point, presumably, the notification about music venues being closed will change, reflecting the updated pandemic battle plan/balancing act, where venues are open, as long as audiences are all seated, and not singing along with me.

It's a strange pandemic roller-coaster to be on, hearing in the news about the desperate shortages of doctors, nurses, janitors, blood, and so many other things, in the hospitals where the latest wave of the pandemic is hitting now.  Even as the Danish hospitals are also very crowded, they've had enough experience with this pandemic to see that this wave appears set to subside, so they can afford to open up a bit.

Although there are differences of opinion on best practices within Danish society as well, it's pretty obvious when you compare the way Denmark has navigated the pandemic to the way England or Texas has navigated it, that Covid-related restrictions imposed in Denmark are done with the physical and mental health of society, especially children, being at least as important as the economy.  So while I as a touring artist feel very conflicted about the idea of setting up a tour in England or Texas -- both in terms of my personal responsibilities in such a situation as well as in terms of who's going to show up under the circumstances -- when it comes to doing a tour in Denmark, I can at least be comparatively much more confident that if they're allowing gigs to happen again, it probably means there's a bit of hospital capacity at the time, at least.  From prior experience doing a tour in Denmark last August, during another relative lull in the pandemic waves, the health ministry saying venues can be open again also tends to mean most people feel comfortable going into them again -- unlike in places where the government is far less trusted, such as England or Texas.

So, whereas for the past several weeks I have often been wondering what I might do with myself for the months of February and March -- what we could call the imminent future from a professional DIY touring standpoint -- as suddenly as the Danish health minister made an announcement, my tour plans were back on again.  At this stage there are no gigs confirmed, but from the chatter on social media this seems likely to change soon.  I had been just about to make concrete plans with various folks before the Omicron wave had the Danish government shutting everything down again.

Of course there are other things that could easily affect my February-March travel plans in Denmark and Iceland -- another volcanic eruption, a war between Russia and Ukraine, a new Covid variant, and who knows what else.  But as things stand now, I've got my booster shot scheduled, and I'll be making travel arrangements, and hopefully confirming some gigs, over the next few days.  The plan is to be in Denmark from February 18-28 and Iceland from March 1-6.

Stumbling Into 2022

Looking back on a year in a life, from the vantage point of January 6th.

The concept of the anniversary can be pretty random. Things don't generally wrap themselves up neatly after 365 days, with some kind of beginning and end. Other times there are reasons why an anniversary might seem familiar -- like when it's winter and there's a highly infectious respiratory virus circulating.

In the case of the anniversary of the siege of the Capitol building, the anniversary takes on special relevance because of the blanket news coverage, and the ongoing hearings of former Trump officials.

At some point in the future, the history of this pandemic, when viewed as such, will be one block of a certain number of years, much the way we now characterize World War 2 as starting sometime in the 1930's, depending on who you're asking, and lasting until 1945. At the beginning of 2022, we may be only a third of the way into this pandemic, which may not really have a concrete end point at all. But for those of us living through it, the prior year began with hope and ended with Omicron.

In the middle of 2021, despite the Delta variant, life went more or less back to normal in a number of countries, such as Denmark, where I had a great tour last August. But then came Omicron, and any artists with tours booked began canceling gigs again, as venues shut down, out of caution or by order of the local authorities.

Or in some cases because the venue owner was busy dying of Covid-19, such as Skin at the Squirrel Bar in Glasgow, Scotland. Skin died last November, an example of how being fully vaccinated won't necessarily protect you, especially when you're running a crowded bar and you have health issues. Less than a year before Skin's death, just before the vaccines went online, my friend and touring partner, Anne Feeney succumbed to the virus in Pennsylvania, as did one of the grandfathers of my extended family, Ed Volpintesta, along with his brother, in Connecticut.

Not being a clairvoyant, but understanding that Trump was engaged in a stunt meant to overturn the election results, having written a couple of songs on the subject already, I published an open letter to the far right a few days before the siege, and, seeking to understand what was happening, I interviewed a former organizer of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, who was also falsely accused of having been at the Capitol on January 6th.

It was a fateful week for me, because I spent a significant part of the following eleven months being targeted by anonymous actors, mostly online, at least one of whom seems to dedicate all their waking hours to destroying my career in whatever ways possible. Whoever they are, they seem to have taken the winter holidays off. But they usually get more active when I'm getting more attention for one reason or another, or when I'm on tour, and they smell an opportunity to scare or threaten unprepared gig organizers in one way or another.

For me and so many others, 2021 began with an experience of basking in the generosity of the very temporary American welfare state, and the year ended with all that generosity fizzling out, with even the drastically reduced version of the Build Back Better bill looking doubtful.

As this is a personal reflection, albeit about a life in a world we're all experiencing in one way or another, by the end of 2021, for this particular artist, crowdfunded patronage, combined with food stamps, has made life possible for me and my family at this point, even with the total uncertainty of touring in the future, and it would be hard to overstate how good it is to know each month we got the rent covered. But the similarity between how reality was at this stage in 2021 compared to the present, in terms of total uncertainty, is pretty uncanny.

At the beginning of 2021, although the vaccines were rolling out, no one knew when it might be possible to gather indoors together safely again and such. The epidemiologists were warning that if the vaccines didn't cover the whole world they'd be useless, because wherever the weak links in the chain were was where new variants would develop. But there seemed to be reason to hope that the international efforts to get vaccines out would bear fruit.  What happened instead was a complete disaster, with the western countries producing much more vaccine than they needed and letting it expire, while Biden continually attacked and sanctioned other countries that were trying to distribute vaccine, like Russia, China, and Cuba.

In the summer of 2021, though, borders opened, venues opened, and in some countries, things appeared to go back to normal, even as Delta was spreading. But with so much of the world being so unvaccinated, Omicron or a cousin thereof was only a matter of time, and here we are.

When 2021 was beginning, the campaign of solidarity and civil disobedience around what has become known as the Red House in north Portland came to some kind of successful conclusion, with the evicted family un-evicted. Direct action got the goods, as it does.

A year later, perhaps with the fear of such a response to evictions happening again, the Oregon legislature has so far continued to extend the eviction moratorium whenever its expiration nears, generally waiting until it's just about to expire before renewing it. The only ones protected now are those who are still waiting for a rental assistance claim to be processed.

Once that money's gone, no one has any reason to doubt that the housing crisis will continue to worsen, with real estate and rents continuing to skyrocket across the country, as they were before the pandemic.

For my family, the corporate landlord entity has seen fit to raise the rent by $100 once again, bringing our two-bedroom apartment up to $1,275 a month, as of April 1st -- a dramatic increase on the $500 a month it was when we first moved in to this dilapidated Class C apartment complex in southeast Portland in 2007. For us, this will mean a greater percentage of the crowdfunded patronage going towards rent, and less for everything else. For others, it will be the final straw that forced them to move into the exurbs, or wherever it is that people go when they leave, as most of the people I used to identify with Portland have long ago done.

As a new year begins, the traditional thing for me for many years has been to try to patiently wait for the Europeans to get home from their vacations and start thinking, along with me, about making plans for the spring. In pre-pandemic years, I'd already have some kind of a tour plan for Europe worked out by now, with a few gigs confirmed, and the rest getting booked over the course of the next few weeks.

As it is, of course, in most of the countries where I'd want to book gigs, the venues where I'd play are closed, and gatherings of more than a few people are discouraged. Not in England, Florida, or Texas -- but the idea of taking advantage of the fact that these places are governed by idiots and touring in them anyway, while places with slightly more competent authorities were all shut down, seems really wrong, even if I weren't concerned about anyone's health.

So, as with any other business dealing with supply chain issues, I wait and see what's the last moment I can leave things hanging before I have to call plans off.   If I wait to buy the plane ticket until one month before I hope to leave, what is the sign that says I should buy the ticket, or cancel the tour plan? It's one or the other.  When the venues open up again in Denmark, in my case, seems like a good deciding factor.  At least until the next variant comes along.