I wrote recently about how to have a good rally (hopefully as a small component of a broader movement that includes lots of other tactics). I emphasized the importance of music and culture in any successful social movement. Now I'll get more specific, and share with you my own songs that are especially relevant to the current situation. Lots of other people have written relevant songs as well, and you'll find some of them on my Song News Network feed. Here's my Trump Protest Playlist on Soundcloud, all in one place. Below, links to individual songs, and an explanation for why they're in the playlist.
When Trump was campaigning for the presidency and he first talked about banning Muslims from entering the US, Islamic State started using him in their propaganda videos, as anyone could have predicted. I wrote "God's Gift to the Caliphate" at that time, in late 2015.
It was only a couple weeks after that speech that Muslim passengers on a bus on the Kenya-Somalia border prevented Al Shabab from massacring Christian passengers (which they had done almost exactly a year earlier). I wrote "One Day in Kenya" as a tribute to the courage of these Muslim bus passengers who risked their own lives to save others (and as a sneaky way to criticize the xenophobes like Trump).
More recently, riffing off of Trump's main campaign slogan, I wrote a critical but hopeful appraisal of my homeland -- "America Has Never Been So Great" (but it could be).
When Trump banned Syrian refugees from coming to the US, regardless of where they might have been at in the long, arduous process of applying for asylum in the United States, it reminded many people of other times the US had banned groups or nationalities from entering the country, such as in the years prior to 1944, when European Jews were an unwanted element, and the St Louis was turned away. "Send Them Back" is about that episode in 1939.
Another time that people in the US were collectively punished for their national origins was when FDR signed the decree that all people in the continental US of Japanese descent should be imprisoned in camps. Trump has expressed his deep approval of this sort of thing. Here's "Liberty and Justice For All."
As the presidential decrees continue to be announced, people across the US are pouring into the streets and airports in solidarity with their fellow human beings who are being targeted. Back in the 1840's, when the US targeting of Mexicans involved making war on the country and annexing most of it, there were many US soldiers who deserted from the ranks of the military, rather than fighting, once they saw that they were participating in a nakedly imperial, unprovoked attack on a neighboring country. Some of them expressed their solidarity by joining the Mexican Army. They were called the San Patricios -- "The St Patrick Battalion."
Trump is far from the first US president to target Mexicans and others from Latin America for abuse, expulsion, etc. Around 2000 I wrote "No One Is Illegal" about this longstanding discrimination against so many people in the US on the basis of the color of their skin, their national origin, etc.
Mexicans being institutionally second-class citizens in the US is a longstanding bedrock principle of the US economy. Lots of would-be migrants die trying to cross the border every year. "Guanajuato" is about one of them.
During the George W Bush administration, many people were asking the same questions that are being asked on a widespread basis today. Namely, is it possible to stand by in the face of such horrors? In Bush's case, those horrors involved witch hunts in the US against many Muslims -- which continued under the Obama administration, incidentally -- and daily massacres committed against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan by the US military and military contractors. In 2003 I asked, did you "Strike A Blow Against the Empire."
Along those lines, many people were asking whether there was grounds to impeach Bush for his war crimes, or for him to be arrested by some international court perhaps. I asked a question then that many people were asking then, and now -- "How Far Is It From Here to Nuremberg?"
I predicted Trump's victory and I was not surprised when he got elected. The Democratic Party had long ago abandoned the working class (aside from Sanders and a few others), and many people voted from Trump who used to vote for Democrats, in the assumption that they might defend their interests more than the (other) party of big business, the Republicans. I wondered how they would be feeling once they realized that they voted for their class enemy, in reality, and I wrote "The Biggest Landlord."
Just before Trump took office there was huge speculation in the media and society at large about what he would actually do -- how would his tweets be turned into policy? I wrote "What's Gonna Happen."
Many people in the US and abroad identify with the idea of the US as a haven for refugees, as represented eloquently on the Statue of Liberty. I grew up thinking like that, too. As the Obama administration was deporting huge numbers of Honduran and Guatemalan refugees during the wave of emigration that followed the US-sponsored military coup in Honduras in 2009, I wrote "Statue In the Harbor."
Trump's whole narrative around Muslims involves Muslims being barbaric terrorists with a general tendency towards backwardness of all kinds. The historical reality is very far from this narrative. No situation more eloquently presents this dichotomy than the events of 1492, when the Ottoman Empire sent its navy across the Mediterranean to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Spanish Jews -- "1492."
Trump rails about terrorism, without acknowledging the basic, obvious fact that if you bomb somebody, they might just bomb you back -- "If You Bomb Somebody."
Under George W Bush, the US opened up lots of unofficial "black sites" where the CIA tortured people. Bush officially said torture was wrong, but that was just the official line -- the reality was completely different. Trump openly supports torture. When the Abu Ghraib scandal hit the press I wrote "After We Torture Our Prisoners."
Trump thinks patriotism is very important. He's even decreed that there should be a day where we show how patriotic we are -- in addition to July 4th and Flag Day and Presidents Day and all these other ones. Here's "God Bless the USA."
I wrote "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" a long time ago, but with an actual billionaire in the White House it seems even more appropriate than usual.
It's long been a desperate situation vis-a-vis the environment and climate change, and that's probably never been more true than today, both because we have never made the reforms to our society and energy grid that should have been made a long time ago, and because we now have an actual climate change denier in office -- "Here at the End of the World."
The Obama administration did too little, too late to help the folks at Standing Rock. Trump owns stock in the company that's building the pipeline, and is determined to see it built. Here's "Standing Rock."
Fracking has been banned in some parts of the US, because it's a terribly destructive practice that destroys the earth, air and especially the water. Trump is hoping to reverse these bans and impose the corporate will on the people. To which we say "No Fracking Way."
With deregulation and the promotion of ever more extraction of oil, gas, coal, etc., we will have lots more accidents such as the one that destroyed downtown Lac-Mégantic, Quebec -- "Oil Train."
As soon as Trump took office, Israel announced a massive program of settlement expansion. This is apparently not a coincidence. When the Israelis were building what is widely known as their Apartheid Wall in the occupied West Bank, I wrote "They're Building A Wall."
Some say Trump's election is evidence of severe divisions within the US ruling class caused by the desperation of their situation since the 2008 financial crisis, climate change, and other things. If that's true, then we need to kick capitalism while it's down -- "Kick It While It's Down."
Trump wants to deregulate everything even more than Reagan, Clinton and Bush did already. Which is really saying something, since those administrations collectively destroyed much of the regulatory infrastructure that this country used to have. Deregulation of industry will directly lead to people dying in larger numbers in industrial accidents such as this one in Hamlet, North Carolina that I wrote about in "Sometimes I Walk the Aisles."
There has been extreme violence meted out before and during the Obama years, directed at people of color, certain ones in particular. While Obama talked about bringing the country together and mitigating the racial divide and relationship between "law enforcement" and the general population, Trump wants none of that subtle stuff, and just proudly proclaims himself to be the "Law and Order" president. Under Trump, we can expect many more police killings such as that of Eric Garner -- "I Can't Breathe."
With the unleashing of the "Alt Right" and other white supremacists these days, combined with Trump's desire to weaken gun laws even more, we can expect many more massacres of all sorts. Such as the one in Charleston, South Carolina which I wrote about in "The State House Lawn."
Trump is emboldening the anti-abortion movement with his vice presidential pick especially. Elements of the anti-abortion movement are very violent. They kill doctors and nurses and bomb health clinics "In The Name of God."
Traditionally, when you're being oppressed by rich people trying to get even richer, you have to rebel to get anything changed around here. That's what the tenant farmers of upstate New York did in the 1840's, against massive property owners like Trump and his daddy. Except the Drumpf family was still in Germany in the 1840's, during the Rent Strike Wars. Here's "Landlord."
If Wall Street ever needed to be Occupied, it's now, with more billionaires in the cabinet than ever before. Many of them former Goldman Sachs officials. Here's "Occupy Wall Street."
Years before the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, the people of Iceland rebelled against the deregulation and corruption that had resulted in the Global Financial Crisis that Trump and his policies personify -- "Iceland, 2008."
Since Forecloser-In-Chief Mnuchin is part of the cabinet, we can forget about any People's Bailout. Here's "A Dream Foreclosed."
I don't know where Trump's intense hostility towards China is going to end us up, but I know what happened during the first trade war against China led by the UK, the US, France, Russia and others back in the 1830's -- lots and lots of Chinese people died, in order to force the Chinese government to allow the UK to export their deadly opium. Here's "Trade War."
In the darkest times it's crucial to remember that well-organized, big, militant social movements can change everything, anytime, anywhere -- "Everything Can Change."
One of the popular sayings during the anticapitalist movement that I was involved with at the end of Bill Clinton's presidency was "We Are Everywhere." An important thing to remember, when it can seem not to be the case.
Trump's cabinet picks make it very clear who he thinks the world belongs to -- other billionaires. Lots of the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties seem to agree on this principle. Many of us protesting Trump don't. We think the world is a commons, that should be shared. It's "The Commons."
Trump is the quintessential bully. Here's "Bullies."
Love -- combined with an inclusive, militant, massive mass movement -- can conquer all. Here's "Behind the Barricades."
Many, many people are hitting the streets in recent weeks in the United States. For most of them, my guess is they're doing it for the first time. I say this because every time I go to a major protest, I ask lots of random people if they have been to many other such protests. Most people, young and old, tell me this is their first one.
Since the recent upsurge in protest activity, a lot of long-time activist types have been writing helpful things about what kind of movement we need, and which way forward. Other people have been writing distinctly unhelpful things. And then whether their perspective is helpful or not, it can easily run the risk of seeming patronizing.
Those of us who have been involved with different social movements for a long time who have learned anything from the experience probably have a universal desire not to see mistakes we have made many times before get repeated again. Of course we know that many of these mistakes will be made again, and to no small extent we are now watching that happen -- and we're preaching condescendingly about it in some cases, or participating more usefully in ongoing developments in other cases (or some of both).
I do have a lot of opinions on what kind of movement we need to take on Trump and his cabinet of xenophobes, racists, and former Goldman Sachs employees. Namely, the same kind of movement we would have needed to take on the last cabinet full of former Goldman Sachs employees. The kind of movement that has brought governments and corporations to their knees in the past -- big, inclusive, militant, with lots of very frequent bouts of mass civil disobedience, which can take different forms at different points in history and in different societies.
But as a professional performer who specializes in singing at protest rallies for the past 25 years or so, I feel like the most useful thing for me to focus on in terms of any advice involves the nitty gritty -- the logistics of pulling off that oft-maligned aspect of pretty much all social movements known as the protest rally or demonstration.
I'll be the first to say that effective movements always involve a lot more than just holding rallies in some public square for an afternoon and then everybody goes home. If such rallies are all that a movement involves, you can be sure it won't go anywhere.
But as a part of a broader social movement, the spectacle of the protest rally can play an important role in movement-building, if it's done right. If not done right, it can have exactly the opposite effect, and play an important role in movement-killing. In the interest of building the movement rather than killing it, I offer the following thoughts.
First a question: in the act of holding a protest rally, exactly what are we trying to achieve? And then the obvious followup: how do we achieve that?
Well, there may be many things we're trying to achieve through having a protest rally -- and some of them may be at cross-currents with each other. We often must prioritize one thing over another.
For example, one goal may be to have a really big demo. Another may be to use the occasion to educate the public about the issues at hand. Another may be to make sure we have an occasion where someone from every organization that came together to make the rally happen gets a chance to address the crowd.
While these are all sensible goals, they all risk losing the forest for the trees. It seems to me that the over-riding goal of this particular, small element of a social movement -- the protest rally -- should be to build the movement.
So the real question is, out of all the different strategies a social movement can employ to build itself, what role can a protest rally play in that?
My answer: it can foster a sense of community -- and with that, a sense of optimism. Optimism is the oxygen of social movements (and perhaps, to extend the metaphor, repression is the nitrogen). A social movement that is inclusive rather than cliquish, inspirational rather than preachy -- a movement with a culture, rather than an ad hoc collection of otherwise unrelated organizations coming together for a little while.
Most people attending the rally are already familiar with the situation. They don't need more people to tell them about it. That's depressing. They want people to talk about what plans they have for the near future in terms of future actions, protests, acts of civil disobedience, strikes, whatever is coming up.
Different people and organizations involved with the protest can find lots of ways of identifying themselves and their groups aside from taking up time on the stage telling us about their organizations. We need a movement that sees beyond that, and demonstrates this vision in many ways, including on the stages at the rallies, by prioritizing movement-building over station identification.
If movement-building requires optimism, and optimism requires a sense of inclusive community, then culture is the appropriate medium for the message. This can include really good speeches -- as long as the speakers are well aware that what they are doing, fundamentally, is theatrical in nature.
But it is music, poetry, skits, street theater, public art, giant puppets, marching bands that produce the oxygen at a rally.
These things don't all have to be political, but as long as the quality is there, it's usually better to prioritize politically relevant performers over performers who may be professional, or perhaps even really famous, but who don't have a powerful message that is related to the situation at hand.
The artists, musicians, comedians, actors, etc., are out there in huge numbers, all around you. If you don't know where to find them, where to connect with them, how to involve them in the rally you're organizing, then find out. Don't give up -- just go outside of your normal social circles and look in that cultural sphere. They'll be excited once you meet them -- they're already looking for you. They just don't know where to look for a protest organizer any more than you know where to find a horn player.
A bonus of protest organizers becoming well-connected with the cultural spheres is that stage hands know how to set up stages, musicians often know people who own sound systems, and they can teach you good microphone technique, which is essential for any speaker who wants to be taken seriously (and be heard).
In order to make this work well (that is, work), you need to think about things like whether you need to hire a sound company to run the stage (which obviously requires a budget of some kind), or whether this is something people with bits of equipment can cobble together themselves. If you're expecting crowds in the thousands, you'll definitely need to have a budget of at least a few hundred dollars to hire a sound company. If you're organizing something smaller than that, you may be able to easily cultivate the connections within the music scene that come with sound equipment.
In terms of attracting this kind of talent to your protests, you should know that what the artists who can make the protest an inspiring, worthwhile occasion want from you is to be taken seriously. That's all, really. Taking an artist seriously means understanding that they have needs in this situation. They need a sound system that is adequate for whatever they're doing -- which can vary wildly depending on whether we're talking about a 10-piece band or a singer with a guitar -- and they need an audience. So don't put the band on before the rally starts or after it ends. Put them on during the rally. Ideally with great frequency, and for long periods of time.
Keep your rally short. Leave them wanting more. This is theater, and all performers know these maxims. You need to, too. Two hours is a good maximum. Even that is long. All rallies, in my humble opinion, should be mostly music and other forms of culture, in terms of what happens on the stage. This is doubly true of any rally that's longer than two hours. If you're doing something like that, then you should look at it more as a festival than a rally. Which, really, is equally appropriate for the shorter rallies, as well.
If a rally is really good, well-timed, well-executed, and mostly cultural in nature, it shouldn't lose people as it goes. It may even grow in size as it goes on. This is a sign that there is an energy being created by the confluence of successful factors you have brought together that day. The kind of energy that makes people want more, want to come back.
If you are losing lots of people as the rally is going, you need to face the reality that you have failed to organize a good rally. You need to ask yourself what went wrong -- because, to be sure, something did. If you lost half the crowd over the course of your two-hour rally, something went very wrong.
Maybe people in the back couldn't hear anything because the sound system was too small. Maybe the speakers were preachy. Maybe there were too many speakers. Maybe they didn't know how to use microphones and couldn't be heard, even though the sound system was adequate. Maybe they were reading their speeches from pieces of paper that they couldn't see very well. Maybe there was barely any music, or the music that you had wasn't any good, or lacked sufficient mass appeal. Maybe you were focusing too much on letting everybody say something, rather than focusing on how the overall rally should flow.
I have attended a few rallies like that very recently, in the interest of full disclosure, which is really what inspired me to write this, as a form of self-therapy. I feel a little better now. If anybody reads this, shares it with their friends and tells me they found something useful in it, I will feel even more better.
THE ALBUM: Announcing the release of my new album, Punk Baroque! It's free to stream all you want, but if you can donate or Subscribe, this is very much appreciated. And if you like the music, please share it!
THE TOUR: The spring tour includes Canada, California, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, England, Scotland and Wales. Your help promoting a gig that's in your area would be appreciated immensely. You can tell folks about the gig(s), share this blog post or my website by whatever means, and you can print out this tour poster, fill in the local gig details, and put up copies anywhere you see fit! No permission needed to help promote a show... Here are some more ideas on DIY tour promotion.
THE TOUR THAT WAS: Friday, March 17th -- Facebook Event page Grace Memorial United Church 803 East 16th Ave. Vancouver, BC Sunday, March 19th, 6 pm Station Ho.st -- me and Scrap Matou -- Facebook Event page 1494 Ontario
Montreal, Quebec H2L 1S3 Monday, March 20th -- Facebook Event page Happy Goat Coffee Co. 35 Rue Laurel Street Ottawa, Ontario K1Y 4M4 Wednesday, March 22nd, noon -- Facebook Event page Workshop on legal rights -- I'm singing a few songs CSU Space (Hall Building, 7th floor) Montreal, Quebec
Friday, March 31st, 6:30 pm -- Facebook Event page The Resource Center for Nonviolence 612 Ocean St
594 Main St Placerville, California Sunday, April 2nd, 2 pm -- Facebook Event page Unity of Ukiah 321 North Bush Street Ukiah, California Sunday, April 2nd, 8 pm -- Facebook Event page The Backroom -- Chris Chandler opening 1984 Bonita Ave. Berkeley, California Sunday, April 16th, 8 pm -- Facebook Event page Maskinen Dronningholmsvej 74 5700 Svendborg Denmark Wednesday, April 19th Cafe Hellebaek Nordre Strandvej 95 3150 Hellebæk Denmark Saturday, April 22nd -- Facebook Event page Ungdomshuset Dortheavej 61 Copenhagen Denmark Monday, April 24th, 7 pm Enhedslisten building Fredensgade 20 b 8600 Silkeborg Denmark Thursday, April 27th, 7 pm -- Facebook Event page Kontrast Bethaniagade 3 Herning Denmark Friday, April 28th -- Facebook Event page 1000Fryd Kattesundet 10 Aalborg Denmark Saturday, April 29th -- Facebook Event page 10 Mindegade Aarhus Denmark
Monday, May 1st, 11 am Anticapitalist May 1st -- Facebook Event page Axeltorv Copenhagen Denmark Monday, May 1st, 3 pm Prosa tent Faelledsparken Copenhagen Denmark Monday, May 1st, 5 pm Karens Minde Kulturhus Wagnersvej 19 2450 Copenhagen Denmark Monday, May 1st, 9 pm Huset Absalonsgade 26 5000 Odense C Denmark Thursday, May 4th, 7:30 pm -- Facebook Event page
The Door
Voorstraat 142 Dordrecht The Netherlands Friday, May 5th Restaurant Hagedis Waldeck Pyrmontkade 116 Den Haag The Netherlands Monday, May 8th, 6 pm House concert -- email Dirk for more info Cologne Germany
Wednesday, May 10th, 8 pm -- Facebook Event page Postgasshalde 21 (house concert in an office!) Berne Switzerland
Friday, May 12th, 8 pm Klub am Besenbinderhof Besenbinderhof 62 Hamburg Germany Saturday, May 13th, 2 pm sans titre e.V. -- I go on at 4 pm at this event for refugees Französische Straße 18 DE-14467 Potsdam
Germany Saturday, May 13th, 8 pm Hobel Bar Emser Str. 124 12051 Berlin Germany
Tuesday, May 16th, 7 pm
Ermekeilinitiative e.V. -- Facebook Event page
Reuterstrasse 61
Bonn
Germany
Wednesday, May 17th, 8 pm
Garten oder Wohnzimmerkonzert
Im Bosseldorn 23
Heidelberg-Rohrbach
Germany Thursday, May 18th House concert -- email Peter for more info Frankfurt Germany Friday, May 19th Raumstation Rödelheim auf der Insel 14 (Hinterhof, letzte Treppe) 60489 Frankfurt Germany
Saturday, May 20th
Rothe Ecke Community Center
Naumbergerstr. 20a
Kassel
Germany
Sunday, May 21st -- Facebook Event page "Het lijkt wel vrede" event with me and others! Herent -- email Gert for more info Belgium Monday, May 22nd Vrijplaats Leiden Middelstegracht 36 2312 TX Leiden Netherlands Wednesday, May 24th Trades Hall Holme St Hebden Bridge HX7 8EE England
Friday, May 26th Royal Sovereign -- with the Commie Faggots! 64 Northwold Rd London E5 8RL England
Saturday, May 27th REDHOUSE Old Town Hall High Street Merthyr Tydfil CF47 8AE Wales
Sunday, May 28th, 2 pm Fair on the Square 2017 Memorial Square Hay-On-Wye Wales
Wednesday, May 31st Kitchen Garden Cafe 17 York Rd Birmingham B14 7SA England Thursday, June 1st Saith Seren 18 Chester St Wrexham LL13 8BG Wales Friday, June 2nd Fred's Ale House 843 Stockport Rd Manchester M19 3AW England
Saturday, June 3rd Fox and Newt Pub 9, Burley Street Leeds LS3 1LD
England Sunday, June 4th Little Theatre with Joe Solo The Avenue Middlesbrough TS5 6SA England Monday, June 5th, 6 pm 69 Cowgate Old Town Edinburgh EH1 1JW Scotland
Tuesday, June 6th, 9 pm MacSorley's Music Bar 42 Jamaica St, Glasgow G1 4QG Scotland Sunday, June 11th Buffalo Bar 11 Windsor Pl Cardiff CF10 3BY Wales
Once a year or so, some of the lazier journalists working for outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian feel compelled to ask this question in a headline. Or it could be their editors who are responsible. In any case, between the editors and the journalists, they generally fail to answer the question. Actually answering this question in the form of a news article is left to little-known independent media outlets such as Australia's Green Left Weekly.
But the much-vaunted investigative journalists working for these aforementioned trend-making publications in the English-speaking world's capital cities might be forgiven for their ignorance. After all, in order to find out where the "protest singers" (the term itself is a derisive sort of thing invented in the 1960's to discredit the art form in question, but never mind) are these days, you have to look beyond the Billboard charts and turn off your local commercial radio station.
If these investigative reporters in New York, Washington and London did look beyond pop radio hits, perhaps they looked to the premier independent media collaboration in the United States, as it bills itself, the much-loved daily news and information show, Democracy Now!. But if they're looking to this immensely popular show to answer this question for them, they should once again be forgiven for their ignorance, since according to my own year-long study of Democracy Now! music breaks, 83% of the songs played during the period of my study were by Grammy-winners or people who had a #1 hit. And a majority of the artists played were dead.
But rather than just incessantly whining about this sorry state of affairs, I decided to do something about it. I've actually been working at this in my free time for months, without telling you. But I'm telling you now. On May 1st, 2016 I'll be launching the Song News Network.
Well, the sky's the limit, but what it will be to begin with is a daily news feed on Facebook (yes, I know, but there are reasons) consisting primarily of songs by independent artists. Generally songs topically related to something that just happened somewhere in the world (whether it was covered by media or not) and songs about something that happened on this date in history.
I have been collecting songs from most of my favorite artists (living and dead, but mostly living) over the past couple months, and will continue to do this. I'm scheduling posts that will go out on the relevant date for songs about things that happened in the past that we would do well to remember. Obviously for the songs about current news, songs will go up as soon as I hear about them.
If you like this idea and you want to help make it a success, there are things that you can do:
In terms of that last request, just to be clear, this is not an open mike. It is curated by me, and I have all kinds of high standards for what I'll be putting up. But I welcome all kinds of submissions of songs about current or historical events.
Given that the internet is largely divided along linguistic lines, and given that there is only one language that I speak with any degree of fluency, the songs that go up will mainly be in English. (Please feel free to steal all of my ideas here if you want to create a similar network in another language!) Given my musical inclinations and background, there will be a lot of acoustic guitars involved with this, especially in terms of the initial spate of songs I'll be posting. However, please understand that I'm just as interested in submissions of hip hop or punk rock material as I am in more folky stuff.
Yesterday, 19 November 2015, was the 100th anniversary of the execution of labor organizer and troubadour, Joel Emanuel Hagglund, aka Joe Hill. I discovered when I woke up this morning and looked at my phone that it was also the day that my dear friend, Herman George van Loenhout, better known simply as Armand, died at the age of 69.
I had one last Joe Hill-related gig last night, one of scores of Joe Hill-related gigs I've done since early in 2015. I had only been in the green room behind the stage at the Alberta Rose Theater in northeast Portland when a member of the local band, General Strike, slowly entered the room. He was walking with difficulty, using a walker to stay upright. He was one of three musicians in the room who did not walk with ease anymore. Observing this fairly obvious fact, he joked in an exaggeratedly old-sounding voice, “is this the infirmary?”
Musicians often die young. It's often a very public death. They usually keep on performing long after they should have stopped, long after they lost the ability to sing on pitch or to sustain a note, long after they couldn't really play their instrument anymore, as they struggle with one illness or another, on and off the stage. They often keep performing not out of vanity, but out of necessity, since most musicians are poor – especially the professional ones.
As any self-aware professional musician will tell you, the most likely way for a musician to die is behind the wheel, or in a plane – Buddy Holly, John Denver, Stan Rogers. Then there are the many who die at the peak of their careers while in their twenties because the combination of the fame and the drugs and alcohol was too much for them – Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Gram Parsons, Amy Winehouse.
Many others who are not quite so inclined toward self-destruction die in their fifties due to too many years of the very exhausting combination of life on the road combined with too much drugs and alcohol over the years. I think of Jerry Garcia, and my dear friend and long-time touring partner, Alistair Hulett.
Armand died too young, but for some reason it seems relevant to point out that he didn't drink, and his drugs of choice were of the psychedelic variety. The tobacco he mixed with his hashish did not do his lungs any favors, to be sure. But the drugs never got in the way of his spell-binding performances, except to the extent that they were part of the act.
If you look on the web you will find almost nothing in English about Armand. I would have wanted to write something about him anyway, but this fact compels me to do so that much more.
An hour ago, the English-language Wikipedia entry on Armand was just this:
“Herman George van Loenhout (born 10 April 1946 in Eindhoven, died 19 November 2015), better known as Armand, was a Dutch protest singer. He was known as 'the Dutch Bob Dylan.' His greatest hit song was 'Ben ik te min' ('Am I not worthy?'). Armand came to the fore during the hippie generation and was an advocate of cannabis.”
Now there's one more paragraph that has very recently been added, I just noticed. It talks of the “reviving” of his music career after 2011. Media types love to refer to things like that, but really, although he did get some major press attention in the past several years due to various artistic collaborations he was involved with, his career didn't need reviving. He's been a successful professional musician since the early 1960's, and his career was doing fine before and after 2011.
I last saw him a few weeks ago in the hospital in Eindhoven, the city in the Netherlands where he lived, where he grew up. There are many people who knew him far better than I, and many, many others who know his music far better than I. There has never been an English-subtitled video made for any of his songs as far as I know. No documentaries about him with subtitles that I've ever found. He was an entirely Dutch phenomenon. And in the Dutch-speaking world, Armand was and is a household name, across the generations.
Armand was often caricatured, and was widely both loved and ridiculed, sometimes by the same people. He came to be the one person who more or less represented the spirit of the 1960's in the Netherlands, so depending on where you stand in the culture wars, either you loved him, or he made you feel very uncomfortable. For many, especially for people of his generation, he was a constant reminder of something you weren't -- or had once been, but had later rejected.
What a difference fifteen years can make. Fifteen years ago, when I met Armand, he was not yet old, and I was not yet middle-aged. I was 33 and he was 54. In other words, I was one of those people who still nominally qualified as a member of “the youth.” The anti-capitalist movement was thriving throughout Europe, North America and elsewhere at the time, and Armand was hungry to be a part of this phenomenon.
But lest people get the wrong idea, let me clarify what I mean by that. Armand wanted to be at the center of the action, not because he was seeking more fame, but because that's who he was. If he had been trying to get more famous, he would have sung in English or French (both major languages which he spoke with complete fluency). Aside from covering some old American folk songs and the odd Bob Dylan song (which he did brilliantly), he wrote and sang in Dutch – thus essentially limiting his potential mass appeal to the Netherlands and part of Belgium.
Armand's influence on society was easy to ascertain. Mention the man by name, and Dutch or Flemish people will often laugh immediately. But mention instead the title to one of his well-known songs such as “ Ben ik te min,” and the tears will well up in their eyes, especially if they're men of a similar age. Armand's words spoke to the very essence of what it meant to be a young person in a relatively conservative, stiff, Protestant society who wanted, needed to break out of that restrictive mold and discover an entirely different value system, where love and laughter were infinitely more important than things like money, social status or driving a fancy car.
Today many of us take for granted the cultural victories of the Sixties generation, the overcoming of so many taboos and forms of internalized repression that so many more people suffered from before the Sixties began to make it OK to be an effeminate man, a masculine woman, a free lover, an artist. OK to not give a shit what your neighbors think, to reject careerism in favor of living a full life. OK to reject patriotism and embrace multicultural internationalism.
But for those who were rejecting the repressive aspects of the old society back then, for those who in the Netherlands were known as the Provos, like Armand, it was all much more challenging, much more cutting-edge than many younger people today imagine. People like Armand were not just caricatured back then – they were actively hated, and regularly beaten by police, arrested, imprisoned.
I hope those out there who know more about Armand and more about the Netherlands than I will forgive me if I get anything wrong here – I don't read Dutch and I'm not inclined to verify facts even if I did. (Never trust a songwriter for that sort of thing. We're all naturally prone to exaggeration.) But I'll tell you a little more about the man.
Armand was born on 10 April, 1946, less than a year after the end of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. As a child, he lived right near the Philips Electronics factory, and had chronic lung problems of the sort that seem to me to be the direct result of industrial poisoning. The first of many times he was hospitalized with pneumonia was at the age of seven. The doctors at the time didn't think he'd make it very far into adulthood.
He was, as far as I gather, one of those small, weak boys that develops a great sense of humor in order to survive childhood. He was only a teenager when he was hanging out on the docks, I think in Antwerp, with sailors from somewhere else, I think it was Jamaica, as I recall him recounting to me, and he first discovered marijuana, years before most white people in Europe or North America had done so.
Along with so many others at the time, he also discovered rock and roll, and in so many ways these things – drugs and rock and roll, and sexual liberation – were not just ways of rejecting the repressed, walking-dead society of the dominant culture in the traumatized 1950's. Not just rebelling in order to embrace a more sensible, more free understanding of the glories that life has to offer us. Not just a rejection of status, wealth, and consumerism. But also an active embracing of other cultures, and an active rejection of empire, colonialism, racism and xenophobia.
I never once visited Armand without him recounting a story about an experience he had hanging out with a friend from Turkey, Morocco, Jamaica or some other place. Yes, the stories usually related to smoking hash. Yes, this kind of thing can be easily caricatured. But for Armand's generation especially, this embracing of other cultures was a real act of rebellion as well as discovery. Learning that there is such wisdom to be found in the lives, lifestyles, and philosophies of people outside of the Netherlands, outside of the often-stifling West.
Armand was a multi-lingual person who embraced not only the drugs of the Others, but their languages, their intellectuals, and their music. He became a musician in the mold of so many others who were discovering the rest of the world at the time, discovering improvisation, seventh chords, syncopation, electricity and the like. He excelled at all of it, and his excellence was even recognized by the record companies and radio stations, which began to bring into every household in the Netherlands the songs this man wrote -- though his songs were very controversial, and many of them were not played, and were censored in one form or another at the time.
Although Armand later came to represent what they might call the Drug Culture in the mainstream press of the past few decades, you need look no further than the covers of his albums to see how engaged he was with international politics. On one of them you will find the widely-viewed, very disturbing photo of a Vietminh soldier being summarily executed by a US-backed South Vietnamese soldier.
The form of rebellion that Armand most represented was a rebellion of values and lifestyle. Underpinning this rebellion is the idea that if you have a society full of people who are too busy having a good time enjoying the finer things in life, there might not be anyone left to do things like join the Army, run the banks, collect taxes, etc. But he was never far from what we might call the more confrontational forms of rebellion.
One of Armand's best friends was a guy I met at a protest in Germany in 2000, a fellow resident of Eindhoven named Antwan. Antwan was best known at the time for being a very active participant in a struggle to save the village of Ruigoord from destruction by the ever-expanding industrial ports of western Amsterdam. Antwan spent weeks living in a tunnel beneath a road, in which he was almost buried alive by being run over by a bulldozer. Much of the port is now a massive Starbucks bean-roasting and distribution plant. Though the surrounding farmland was lost in the struggle, due to the efforts of people like Antwan, the village of Ruigoord itself was saved.
When I met Antwan, he told me about Ruigoord and about his friend Armand. Soon after, next time I was in the Netherlands, I visited Antwan, and together we went to Armand's house, where I met him and his long-time partner, Marrit.
They were both dressed like psychedelic hippie Dutch peasants. Marrit still wears wooden shoes, as she always did back then. Armand's English was so good, you wouldn't necessarily guess he was Dutch. You could tell he was from somewhere else, but he spoke English with the kind of vocabulary that would have sounded very colloquial if you were hanging out in Greenwich Village in 1968. Marrit, by contrast, with her wooden shoes and braided hair, spoke with a perfect Dutch accent, like the kind of Dutch accent an actor would imitate in a movie if she were trying to sound unmistakably Dutch.
That first conversation was one of many other similar ones – long, intense, moving erratically from the topic of cannabis to civil disobedience to the history of the Ottoman Empire. I had never heard of this phenomenon known as a chillum, but I became intimately familiar with this ridiculous method of smoking hash and tobacco together through a wet cloth. Sort of like putting ice in a bong, except it's a pipe instead of a bong, and a wet cloth instead of ice. Partially because of his exhibitionist chillum-smoking habits, along with his habit of writing songs with frequent references to cannabis, LSD, and other things like that, he became known in the Dutch press as Holland's “national smokestack.”
As far as I could tell as a non-Dutch speaker, Armand would allow himself to be put into the role of the Sixties Throwback in the Dutch media regularly, only to regularly break out of the box they put him into, demonstrating again and again his eloquence, his musicianship, and his wit. At his shows, his audiences were laughing uproariously about every thirty seconds. Unfortunately not me, since I don't speak Dutch, although whenever I was in the audience he'd throw in a couple more English songs than usual for my benefit.
Although he's a thousand times better-known in the Netherlands than I am, Armand would do gigs with me in squats and punk social centers in Holland as a double-bill. When I sang, he sat in the front row and listened avidly to every word. Soon after I wrote my song, “The Commons,” I sang it at a gig in the Netherlands, and Armand translated it into Dutch and made his Dutch version of the song a standard part of his performances after that.
We discovered we shared a birthday in common, and every April 10 since then, his would generally be the first birthday greeting of the day for me. This is due to the time difference, of course, since most of North America would still be sleeping when the Europeans were starting their day. And also because it's easy to remember a friend's birthday when it's the same as yours.
Four years ago we celebrated our birthday together, going to the Efteling theme park in Holland. Kind of like Disneyland, except way cooler, way cheaper, and way more Dutch. (And smaller.)
It was just after Armand's “revival” that the new second paragraph of his English Wikipedia entry refers to was happening. He had been on a hiphop-oriented TV show popular among the youth, and he came to the amusement park prepared for what he apparently knew would happen. In his knapsack was not only a day's supply of pre-rolled joints, but also a stack of color photographs of himself for him to sign for fans.
As soon as we entered the park, he was pretty much swarmed by children. The adults all knew him, too, of course, but they mostly maintained more of Dutch reserve about the situation, not wanting to bother him. The kids didn't give a shit though, and they all gathered around him, asking him if his orange hair was real (“real hair, but not the original color”), and asking for his autograph. At every ride we went on, he had to stop for a couple minutes to talk to the star-struck worker running the ride. And everywhere we went, we smoked joints, which might seem completely outrageous to many readers, but for Armand, in Holland, was completely anticipated behavior which failed to raise a single eyebrow.
Marrit was with us, and my wife and child as well, and all the rides which looked too sickening for me, Reiko or Marrit to deal with, Armand was up for, so he and Leila were the only ones in our group to survive that swinging pirate ship thing. Why the fuck anyone would want to experience sea-sickness if they're not on a ship without a choice in the matter is beyond me, but there's obviously a market for it, otherwise Efteling would go out of business, along with Disneyland.
He was one of those rare people who read every mass email I ever sent out as if it was a personal message to him. One of my best boosters, he would write me frequent emails to tell me how a song I had just posted had moved him to tears. Last February he wrote with great excitement to tell me that he was doing an album with a popular Dutch band called the Kik. It was to be an album of all Armand songs, chosen by the Kik, and one of the dozen songs they chose was Armand's translation of “The Commons.” (“You're in the phone book!” he wrote me excitedly once it was clear that this song was going on the album.)
They sang that song and others on TV and radio stations and at shows for large audiences throughout the Netherlands last summer. Armand definitely didn't fizzle out, no question – he went out on a strong note. He and the Kik did twenty shows last summer. (Which in the Dutch context means playing in every city in the country, plus some other towns.)
I was passing near Eindhoven in September and I dropped by his apartment for a visit. He had just gotten some very bad news about the state of his lungs from the hospital. He was clearly short of breath. He said that over the summer on the tour he was often so weak that he made sure he was always using a really sturdy mike stand, so he could hang on it when he needed to, if he was having trouble standing. Somehow, though, as any listener could tell you, he still delivered great renditions of his songs, even in that condition. He was always at his best when he was on stage – the stage revived him, no doubt, every time (as it will often do).
The next time I saw him was a couple weeks later when I was coming back through Eindhoven for another visit. This time he was in the hospital, with his seventh bout of pneumonia since he was a kid. He was very frail, weak, getting oxygen through a tube. I had long ago noticed how small he was, though not until I knew him for years. Beneath his usually multi-layered, multi-colored hippie outfit, you wouldn't be able to tell how little he was unless you hugged him hard, and our physical contact usually involved something more like a pat on the back than a real American hug.
I was pretty sure at the time that this would be the last time I would see him. Some of his friends said he had been really sick before and had pulled through, and I hoped they were right, but it was hard to imagine this tiny little sack of skin and bones could survive much longer, despite his intense love of life. It was probably the love of life that had sustained him far beyond when most people would have given up, I'm sure.
I'm not going to try to wrap this up with some kind of effort to summarize the significance of this beautiful man. There are no summaries. Life is way too big for that kind of thing. I'll just leave you with one of Armand's favorite poems, one by the English poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy, published in 1873. (In an email from a few months ago, he quoted the poem and raved about how good it was, telling me about how he had just recited it at a gig.)
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
A lot's been happening this month. I
feel compelled to share a few thoughts on that, musically annotated.
Mainly links to relevant songs. All the links below are to places
where you can listen to a song (for free), unless otherwise noted. Some of the songs are embedded on the page as well as linked.
Steel
birds streak through the sky above the Syrian Levant
The
pilot flew the plane all the way from Nantes
Explosions
rock the cities in this proxy civil war
So
many innocents killed, everyone has lost the score
Jean-Pierre
fired a missile and was heard to say
He
wished he could be home in France at his favorite cafe
Not
fighting in a conflict that shows no sign of ever ending
As
the Eagles of Death were descending
The
bars were filled with people on a balmy Friday night
Out
enjoying the weather, having a drink or a bite
Watching
football in a stadium, hearing a live band
Washing
dishes in a restaurant or shopping for the latest brand
The
luckiest ones stayed home, catching a TV show
Not
knowing how glad they'd be that they didn't go
Out
that evening to join a war they had just last week been protesting
When
the Eagles of Death were descending
The
Right is overjoyed, prepared to do their best to try
To
use these acts of terror to continue to deny
Asylum
for the refugees, who are largely fleeing the same men
Who
took over their towns and cities at the very same time when
They
escaped the carnage to attempt to cross the sea
To be
refused safe haven in the land of fraternity
Where
this war that has come home keeps rivening and rending
As
the Eagles of Death were descending
But oftentimes anecdotes from history
speak more powerfully to the present than the present itself, and I
think the story of the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire saving the lives
of hundreds of thousands of European refugees in 1492 after the
Ottoman defeat in Granada says more than anything we could say about
the horrors of last Friday.
My latest album, The Other Side (that's
the Bandcamp link -- you can also buy in physical form via my new online store), includes “Before the War Came Home,” which is a
song I wrote last January after the last massacre in Paris.
When events like this happen in the
Muslim world, of course, they often barely make the news. This is
primarily due to endemic European-American racism. Also because if
something happens more often somewhere, it's less newsworthy. (For
example, there have been over 1,000 mass shootings in the US since
Sandy Hook, but only a handful of them made the headlines. Such as
the ones this year in South Carolina and North Carolina that are
memorialized on my latest album.)
Last Thursday there was a multiple-suicide-bombing attack in Beirut. A few days before that in
Baghdad. Last month in Ankara. Last summer's suicide bombing in the
town of Suruc, Turkey, just across the border from Kobane, Syria is
the one among those many horrible attacks that I commemorated in
song.
The police killed another Black man in
Minneapolis the other day. Still awfully hard to breath if you're
Black in America. CeCe McDonald is a trans African-American woman
from Minneapolis who almost became another victim of a similar racist
attack in that city, except that she managed to successfully defend
herself – and then was imprisoned for doing that. (And then there
were Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant – endemic
institutional racism represented especially well by the Portland Police Department.)
In the news in Oregon and around the US this month is the
fact that there is a housing crisis, and the average rent in Portland has doubled over the past few
years. The town is gentrifying rapidly, along with many others. There is no rent control –
it's banned in Oregon on a statewide basis, along with 47 other US
states. We need to overthrow the landlord class. There will be many
more children spending Christmas in a tent this winter in the USA.
Relations with Cuba have not been
normalized yet, but they keep talking about it. The moronic governor
of New Jersey insisted earlier this month that the Port Authority of
New York not allow flights from New York to Havana until the Cuban
government turns over the FBI's #1 Most Wanted Terrorist, Assata Shakur, who has been living in Havana since she escaped from prison
in New Jersey over three decades ago, having been convicted of a
crime she never committed. Meanwhile it is the corrupt governor of
New Jersey who belongs in prison, not Assata.
Today, November 19th is the
100th anniversary of the execution by firing squad of IWW
songwriter, cartoonist and organizer, Joe Hill.
A lot of the shows I've done this year
in Europe and North America have had a Joe Hill theme, such as every
show on the west coast tour I've just done here in the US. The one two nights ago in LA included an all-star cast, and was very memorable, singing along with Tom Morello, Joan Baez, Boots Riley, Ziggy Marley, Tim Anderson, Jill Sobule and other great musicians.
The show
with me, Chris Chandler, George Mann and others in Reno, Nevada last
week was recorded nicely and put up on YouTube in two parts, in case
you didn't catch one of those shows live – Set One and Set Two. There's also a video of Chris Chandler and I doing a spoken word and song collaboration on Joe Hill.
Do you know why there's never been a
coup in the US? Because we don't have a US embassy. But
unfortunately, the rest of the world does. US foreign policy is the
primary reason why much of the Middle East is currently in a state of
chaos and war. But 27 bigoted US governors don't want to take any of
the tiny number of Syrian refugees Kerry has said we'll accept.
They're afraid that these people who are fleeing terrorists are going
to be infiltrated by terrorists.
After Anders Breivik massacred scores
of Norwegians in a very similar mass killing several years ago, no
one called for keeping Norwegians from settling anywhere. This
double-standard is called racism. These 27 governors are all racist
scum. Maybe they should arrange to give the Statue of Liberty back
to France, since we're not using it, and never really have.
The example set by the draconian
punishment of heroic whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden sets a chilling example when it comes to the US “leadership
of the free world” that the thugs in Congress like to drivel on
about.
They interviewed Senator John McCain on
NPR yesterday morning. He said we could “fight IS here or we can fight
IS there [in the Middle East]. I'd rather fight them there.” John
McCain is a fool. The very reason why they're over here is because we're over there. And as long as we stay over there, the next attack is coming soon.
P.S. The Other Side 2016 World Tour is
coming together well. That'll be late January through late March.
But there are still plenty of dates left to fill! So especially if
you live in any of the following regions, I'd love to hear from you
about any gig ideas you may have: Texas, Florida, New York, New
England, Quebec, Ontario, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland,
Belgium, the Netherlands, England, Wales, Scotland!
P.P.S. Baby is due on May 1st,
so I'm sticking around the Pacific Northwest in April and May. In
other words, I'd love to do gigs that are within a few hours' drive
of Portland in April and May if anybody wants to put something
together!
P.P.P.S. Please support the arts and
join my CSA if you're able to do such a thing.
Certain activities dominated my summer
at home in Portland, Oregon. Sweltering in the heat of the hottest
summer in recorded history. Breathing the smoky air from the biggest
forest fires in recorded history, much of which were not that far to
the east of the city – as the crow flies, as the smoke blows.
Spending time with my family. And, when alone, as I often was,
reading the news, writing songs, and crying.
Some of this may be news to my wife, but she doesn't read my rambling blog posts. Though now that
I've said that, one of you will probably tell her. But please don't
– she has limited free time, and her own writing to do. But
anyway, I do my crying alone. It's much easier that way, because
people freak out when a grown man cries, unfortunately. Much of the
world is still very sexist like that.
Of course, we're trained to ask
incredibly stupid questions when someone is crying. Even when a
child is crying, we automatically say, “what's wrong?” Meaning,
of course, there is something wrong with crying. Something wrong
with feeling. Unless you're laughing (but not too loudly).
Feeling, of course, is how you get
through life, unless you've managed to kill that part of yourself,
usually through some combination of drugs, alcohol and mindless
entertainment – the three main pillars of modern western society.
(Yes, as some of you know, I smoke pot and drink espresso regularly,
both mind-altering substances. But not strong enough ones by
themselves to stop the feelings, from my extensive experience.)
I would just like to point out, though
it's a needless thing to do, since I'm preaching to the converted
here, that if you have not spent the past few months crying as you
hear about what's going on in the world, you're already dead. Which
is sad, because you didn't die by accident – you were killed. But
since this is a metaphorical kind of death, you can be resurrected.
It starts with feeling. Everything starts with feeling, actually.
Scientists figured that out, did you
hear? Some people have something missing in their brains so that
they don't feel. Studies of these people find that they're
completely dysfunctional and have no motivation to do anything in
life. Which isn't surprising to anyone who's really living, but
there's this longstanding macho idea you've probably heard of that
real men don't feel anything, and that feeling things gets in the way
of achieving things, which isn't true. Maybe it depends on what
you're trying to achieve. But basically if you don't feel, you don't
live.
I had this tour of Europe planned, but
what I really wanted to do as soon as I got there was rent a big car
and drive south, in order to take refugees north, where countries
like Germany and Sweden were (and are) offering them asylum. As is
their duty under international law, but most national governments
don't give a shit about international law. (Take the USA, for
example, which is constantly sending refugees to their deaths without
asylum hearings. Every day.)
But I didn't do that. I did the
responsible thing for a subsistence musician. I chased the paying
gigs as usual, in the countries where the paying gigs are for me.
Which, luckily for my sanity, involves hanging out and singing for
activists and other wonderful people, along with lots of refugees,
particularly on this tour.
The tour started out with one gig in
the US, and then several dozen in Europe. I flew from Portland,
Oregon to Salt Lake City, Utah.
Portland, the city where Joe Hill first
became a card-carrying member of the Industrial Workers of the World.
Salt Lake City, the city in which he was falsely accused of murder,
put on trial, and executed by firing squad, 100 years ago next month.
(Next month I tour the west coast with a bunch of other musicians,
in part of the ongoing process to celebrate the life and work of this
wonderful Swede.)
Starting, if I recall correctly, with
the 25th anniversary of Joe Hill's execution, a group of
folks in Salt Lake known as the Joe Hill Organizing Committee or
something like that, began having periodic commemorations, with
musicians and speakers and such. The last one was on the 75th
anniversary.
There were some funds left from the
last commemoration in a bank account, which turned out to be
difficult to access, since most of the committee members from that
time were now dead. But the surviving members managed to get the
rules changed so they could access the funds, and they raised a whole
bunch more, largely from the remnants of the local labor movement.
Two nice young people picked me up at
the airport, one of whom was on the committee, and was, I believe,
the only member of the committee under the age of 60. I'm pretty
sure she was also the only committee member who was familiar with my
music, and she was the one responsible for getting me to sing at the
commemoration. Along with the great Philadelphia punk band, Mischief
Brew, who I hadn't seen in years.
They picked me up at the airport and
took me to a party at the home of one of the other committee members,
where the rest of the committee was hanging out, along with an
assortment of musicians and other folks. It was somewhat surreal,
after one committee member after the other kept on welcoming me to
Salt Lake City first, and then asking me what kind of music I play.
Really...?
A lot of people don't realize that
there are loads of progressives in Salt Lake City. They had a mayor,
Rocky Anderson, who was one of the most progressive mayors in the US
when he was in office, and that was fairly recently. There are all
kinds of stupid ideas people have, which are easy ideas to have if
you've never spent time in Utah, because few people or other outlets
of information will tell you otherwise.
But unless you're one of those boring
people who think that tattoos, piercings and vegetable oil are
indications of progressive thought, Salt Lake City has way more
progressive people in it than some cesspool of narcissism like San
Francisco does. (I think I just pissed somebody off.)
Anyway, all those progressives were not
at the gig in Salt Lake. They were somewhere else. But the couple
hundred folks who did come to the gig were a great bunch. Mostly
they stuck around from beginning to end.
Which could be interpreted in various
ways. Either the people who heard about the gig were the more
engaged elements of the local labor movement -- all of whom were
present, I would guess. Or that Judy Collins doesn't have as much as
an audience as she used to have, since she was the headliner, and the
crowd did not grow significantly when she was due to be on stage.
It was a great day, though. Some of my
favorite musicians were on the bill – along with Mischief Brew
there were more acoustic types like Anne Feeney, Mark Ross, and Joe
Jencks, who was especially impressive. Man, that guy can play the
guitar, and the bazouki, really well. And what a voice, and what a
songwriter. Check him out, if you haven't run across him yet.
An unexpected surprise at the event was
seeing my friend Tayo Aluko in the crowd. Tayo is an actor and
singer originally from Nigeria, who has been living in England for
most of his life. I may be improvising on the chronology a bit, but
basically when he discovered the life and music of the
African-American communist scholar, linguist, athlete and musician,
Paul Robeson, Tayo quit his job as an architect and became a
full-time artist and rabble-rouser. He had gigs in British Columbia,
and thought he'd go check out the Joe Hill commemoration in Salt Lake
City.
Being a struggling artist these days,
rather than a well-paid architect, Tayo took a Greyhound all the way
from Vancouver to Salt Lake. Now that's serious dedication.
Particularly given that Judy Collins did not attract a crowd, it
would have been so much nicer to have the finale of the event being
Tayo, which would have been rapturous. Instead, the finale was Judy,
who is undoubtedly a phenomenal singer, but also the richest, least
political, and least relevant artist on the bill.
No offense to Judy – none of these
things are her fault. And really no offense to the organizers either
– you got to make these tough decisions when organizing events, and
trying to attract a crowd to them. And to be fair, they did
originally ask someone both famous and very political to headline –
Pete Seeger. They called him up and asked him if he'd do the gig.
He told them he would, if he was still alive. Then he died.
One really special element to the event
was the presence of three members of Joe Hill's family who came over
from Sweden – his grand nephew, grand niece, and grand grand niece.
I think I've got that right. The youngest member of the family
wrote a very moving, short song about Joe Hill's execution, which she
performed with her mother and uncle. And her uncle built her guitar,
so it's altogether a very musical family.
I love playing gigs with other
musicians, since they're often really cool people. Most gigs I do by
myself. Which is also lovely, and there are other cool people in the
world who aren't musicians, too, of course. But musicians are easier
to relate to, generally. Joe Jencks and I stayed in the same house,
the home of a guy who I never met, a big house full of musical
instruments. We were about ready to form a band by the end of our
visit.
A nice woman gave me and Anne Feeney a
ride to the airport the next morning. Anne was heading home to
Pittsburgh, and I was flying to Copenhagen, via Denver, though we
would soon be rendezvousing in Sweden, a few days later.
The Denver airport is the only major
airport in the US that I can think of that doesn't have a Starbucks,
and also has no other decent coffee anywhere to be found.
Which might not suck all that much,
except every time I'm there I'm reminded of this fact, because of the
one time I was stuck at the airport for eight hours, waiting for a
flight to Durango that kept being delayed, supposedly because of a
light dusting of snow. (One of many US airports where I have been
stuck in transit for eight hours or more. Which isn't quite so bad
if there's decent coffee.)
When I fly to Europe I usually try to
have at least two days to recover from jet lag. But then a good gig
might come up that messes up that plan, and I don't make nearly
enough money to turn those down.
So upon landing in Copenhagen on the
afternoon of September 7th, I got the rental car, took a
nap in it, and drove the two hours in rush hour traffic from there to
Odense, where I was doing a show in a pub, sponsored by the
“red-green coalition” party in the Danish Parliament,
Enhedslisten.
It was my only gig in Denmark on this
tour that wasn't in the vicinity of Copenhagen, and several folks
drove from all over the western parts of the country to catch it. It
wasn't otherwise a huge crowd, but the few people who were there
really wanted to be there. The sound system was mysteriously not
working, so I played acoustic, which worked fine. If I had been
trying to remember lyrics on my own, with the sleep deprivation and
jet lag, it might have gone really badly, but with the tablet on
stage in front of me, I didn't forget a word.
Attila says the tablet has deprived me
of any punk rock credibility I might have had. But other people say
it's cool to be a geek these days. So maybe I can still be a punk, I
don't know. Or maybe I never was one.
From the first gig in Europe to the
last, there was talk of refugees. And real live refugees, as well,
on many occasions.
Most people I know in Denmark were
somehow involved with trying to help the Syrians and others who were
and are walking down the highways of the country, mostly en route to
Sweden. So many people were bringing them food that there was too
much of it. People were offering them places to stay, but oftentimes
the refugees were unable or unwilling to accept these offers, either
for fear of being fingerprinted in a country in which they didn't
want to claim asylum, or because they wanted to keep going toward
Sweden.
After the gig in Odense I did have a
couple days to recover from the jet lag, which I spent staying with
friends near Helsingor, on the Baltic Sea.
I spent much of my time there sleeping,
taking advantage of my hosts' hospitality, which included several hot
meals a day, and walking. I walked from the school where I was
staying (part of which is now the Hellebaek B&B, which I highly
recommend for anyone traveling in Denmark) to the center of Helsingor
several times, which is a long walk. I listened as I walked to an
audiobook version of the recent work, An Indigenous People's History
of the United States, which is fantastic.
Listening to this book, I was reminded
once again of some of the lesser-known events of the year 1492, and
it occurred to me how terribly relevant the story of the Ottoman
defeat in Granada is for us today. Particularly the bit where the
Spanish rulers declare that all Jews had three months to leave Spain
or be killed, and how the Ottoman Sultan responded to this
declaration – by sending the Ottoman fleet to Spain to rescue
hundreds of thousands of Europeans, and bring them to Ottoman lands,
where they and their descendants lived in peace and prosperity, and
still do. While in other places, Europeans were busily exterminating
pagans, Jews, Muslims, atheists and even their fellow Christians,
especially the non-white ones, on both sides of the Atlantic.
On September 10th I met up
with my dear friend, comrade and fellow rabble-rousing songwriter,
Kristian von Svensson. We played at the venerable punk rock social
center in the Norrebro neighborhood of Copenhagen, Bumzen. Earlier
in the day, the place was kitted out with bedding, in expectation of
refugees spending the night, but they didn't end up making it there
for one reason or another.
From early in the evening until late,
the place was filled with people of all ages, mostly on the younger
side, who treat me like a rock star. There are very few places
outside of Denmark where I get the rock star treatment. But just a
little of that goes a long way to making me feel like I'm doing
something right. Folks were singing along to my older songs with
great enthusiasm, and it was even caught on film for posterity.
(With a little camera sitting on a windowsill near me – not a
professional job or anything, but fun, if you're into home movies.)
On September 11th there was
a peace demonstration in the center of Copenhagen. One of the themes
at all the Danish peace demos is the opposition to Denmark's
participation in NATO's disastrous military campaigns in places like
Afghanistan and Libya, and opposition to the Danish government's
purchasing of fancy new fighter jets from the US. At this demo, not
surprising given the choice of date, there were a whole bunch of 9/11
conspiracy people, fairly aggressively pushing their world view, with
a wingnutty style that matched the content of their thinking
perfectly. Some of them spoke from the stage, too, presumably
because they were invited to do so, which was somewhat shocking.
(This would never happen in Germany or many other countries.)
This would be the first of several
demonstrations I would sing at during the course of my tour. The
biggest being almost exactly one month later, in Berlin.
After Kristian and I sang at the demo,
we split for Malmo, over the bridge that crosses the Baltic Sea,
which separates Denmark from Sweden. We joined Anne Feeney, and the
well-known leftwing Swedish songwriter, Jan Hammarlund, at a
conference organized by the most leftwing party represented in
Sweden's parliament.
The cultural evening preceded the
actual conference, and culminated in a fabulous set by a one of those
bands that you will run into frequently on both sides of the Atlantic
these days, who are clearly influenced by some combination of Balkan
music and punk rock. I wanted to kidnap the fiddle player and take
her on the road with us, but I figured she might not approve of such
a plan, and so I didn't. (I only like kidnapping people who want to
be kidnapped.)
The next day we were in Oslo, where we
met up with our mutual friend, another Swedish songwriter, future
rock star Elona Planman.
She was touring on her own, but had
eight days free, which coincided perfectly with our plans. Due to my
fairly impressive car-packing skills (which mostly involves the basic
principle I learned from Alistair Hulett, that you can put a guitar
upside-down in the backseat, so the neck is in the floor well and the
body is flush with the door, thus taking up very little space), we
managed to fit three adults, three guitars, and luggage in a small
rental car.
There had been a big demo in cities
throughout Europe that afternoon in solidarity with refugees,
including in Oslo. Unfortunately we couldn't sing at any of the
demos that day, since we were spending the whole day in the car,
driving from Malmo to Oslo. The crowd at the punk rock bar,
Maksitaksi, was a quality crowd, but lacking in numbers, due, I
think, to the fact that people were tired after spending the day
demonstrating. There was also a meeting going on related to refugees
across the street, which may have also depleted our potential
audience.
Touring with Kristian and Elona was
like a constant party (minus the drugs or alcohol, for the most
part). It's strangely so rare to spend significant amounts of time
with two other people of such like mind. All very different people,
and very different musicians as well, but with a lot in common.
In Norway the gigs were largely either
in punk rock venues, or cafes run by Maoists. These things vary a
lot depending on the country, the city, and the scene, but for sure
on this little tour of Norway, the biggest and most attentive
audiences were at the Maoist venues, which also definitely had the
largest numbers of red flags.
On the way up to Trondheim we were
pulled over by a cop, who just wanted to know where we were going and
why and stuff like that. It was a very unusual thing to happen in
Scandinavia. I'm still not sure what that was about, and I didn't
ask at the time, though I suspect (and hope) it was just a safety
thing.
It's a long drive from Oslo to
Trondheim, and there are probably a lot of drivers who don't take
breaks to rest along the way. The cop seemed especially to want to
know if we had driven that day all the way from Denmark, where the
car was rented. Which would have been nuts. But that's when I
thought maybe he was just looking out for drivers who might be about
to fall asleep at the wheel.
There is not a single cup of decent
coffee to be found anywhere between Oslo and Trondheim, and all the
food sucks, too.
In Trondheim the three of us did a
workshop in a little leftwing infoshop in the wonderful, squatted
neighborhood of Svartlamon.
The idea was a workshop about
songwriting and making a living as a DIY musician. But it seemed
like at least half of the folks there were hoping to hear music, and
we lost half the crowd by the end of it. We had a great time,
though, and it was pretty wild to see how much we all thought the
same way about these things. (This was also recorded and is
apparently up on the web somewhere.)
Two different couples for whom I have
great affection and admiration in Svartlamon have had babies since I
last saw them, so there was lots of playing with babies going on
during our fairly leisurely visit to the city. We had three gigs in
four days, but they were all very nearby, so the days were ours.
On our way back south, another night in
Oslo, a little house concert, where one of the folks in attendance
was involved with providing 120 winter jackets per day to all of the
refugees coming into Oslo.
As with Germany and elsewhere, many of
the donations are from individuals, but local companies are also
donating lots of stuff, too. In many cases the folks providing these
things are so well-organized that the refugees have no idea they're
volunteers, and not working for the government.
All over Scandinavia as we drive and
walk around, and later all over Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands,
the most common poster to be seen wheatpasted all over the place
included the words, “refugees welcome.”
With some variation – in Glasgow, one
guy at my gig there had a t-shirt that read, “aye, refugees
welcome.” The Scottish version.
Back in Malmo for a gig at the
collective house that Kristian lives at, I took some folks for a beer
run in our rental car, where we passed a bustling refugee center.
And a few blocks later, several dozen people marching through the
streets in solidarity with said refugees, on the way to do something
at the center.
One of the folks helping run the gig
was a Palestinian who had been living in an overcrowded refugee camp
in Syria before that became untenable. He was one of the earlier
Syrian arrivals to Europe, having lived in Sweden for three years
now, after having a miserable time first in Italy, where he had to
stay because of the Dublin Treaty.
The last gig that Kristian, Elona and I
did together was in a union hall in Copenhagen, from the union
federation known as 3F. It was an unexpectedly fun gig.
The 3F gigs are always great –
appreciative audiences, good pay. But although most Danes are very
fluent in English, this is often somewhat less true of the labor
movement's rank and file, who are less likely to have gone to college
(where instruction is mostly in English). In Copenhagen, however,
even the rank and file of the labor movement speaks excellent
English, and this was very evident from the responses of the audience
when I was doing my thing. I think they had more trouble
understanding Swedish than English, according to one Danish friend's
report. (Kristian and Elona mostly sing in Swedish -- which closely
resembles Danish in written form, but less so when spoken or sung.)
My next stop was Great Britain, where I
was due to do six gigs in seven days, starting in London. I stayed
in London with my favorite soft-hearted, dog-loving photojournalist
who pretends to be a hard-nosed cynic, Guy Smallman, who has been
making frequent trips in recent months to places like Calais and
Hamburg, which both have large refugee populations, and lots of
activities related to them. In Calais these are often characterized
by the French police brutalizing people and making their lives much
more difficult than they already are. In Hamburg, it's more about
covering the amazing efforts local people have been making to try to
accommodate the influx of refugees in need of housing, food and
clothing.
My first gig in London was singing a
few songs at the launch party for Attila the Stockbroker's new
memoir, Arguments Yard. I've got a copy, which I'm looking forward
to reading. Attila and I have done something like 14 tours together
over the past 15 years, so apparently I'm in the book... One of the
performers at the packed venue in the center of London was a leftwing
comedian, the best I've ever heard, named Jeremy Hardy.
In England, the fact that the Labor
Party had a grassroots democratic vote of its own membership for the
first time ever, resulting in the election of the most leftwing
leader the party has ever had, was the biggest topic of conversation.
And it's quite a development. This
man, Jeremy Corbyn, is Facebook friends with Guy, who has known him
for something like twenty years. It may be a total fantasy, but the
idea of Corbyn being Prime Minister of the UK at the same time as
Bernie Sanders is president of the US is a pretty wild notion. Which
I think very unlikely.
Particularly unlikely when you take in
the media coverage of Corbyn in Britain. Driving around in my rental
car, I listened a lot to BBC Radio 4, as I often do when I'm there.
It's an interesting thing with BBC. The World Service makes BBC
appear progressive for the most part. This is the image the BBC (and
perhaps the British establishment generally) wants to convey to their
many foreign listeners, for whom the World Service is intended.
But within England it's a different
story, and I heard almost nothing but ridicule aimed at Corbyn from
just about everyone on Radio 4 who talked about him. And most people
on Radio 4 were talking about him most of the time. If it was a
program that had anything to do with the news of the day, and not
some radio drama about the love affairs of the royals.
Glasgow was also a place for me to feel
somewhat rock star-ish, with people enthusiastically singing along to
the older songs they knew. The thing was that when they weren't
singing along with me, they were talking loudly and drinking
excessive amounts of alcohol. In between songs they were breaking
into pro-IRA chants and snippets of rebel songs. Most of the people
in the bar were drinking a green substance known as Venom. A sweet
mixed drink of some kind. (I had a sip, for sociological purposes.)
Outside of the Squirrel Bar in Glasgow,
I witnessed for the first time the following sequence: an extremely
drunk man tripped over the curb backwards and landed on his head with
a horrid thwack. And then he immediately started snoring loudly.
Which was very reassuring for me, because I thought he might have
died when he hit his head on the sidewalk.
His friends seemed unconcerned about
that possibility, though when he woke up eventually, they were
diligently making sure he didn't fall again, helping him walk and
such. “You'll never walk alone,” the song goes, very popular
among footballers throughout Europe. Not sure if that's the kind of
thing the song is referring to, though.
Edinburgh, the ancient capital of
Scotland, is a much more posh, and smaller, city than Glasgow, and
the audience at the show there was true to form. Attentive, quiet,
and not drunk, at least not in any noticeable kind of way. Back
again in England, in Birmingham a young man spoke at the gig who was
off to Calais the next day. Solidarity everywhere. There was also a
fabulous opening set by a local songwriter named Alan Sprung. (No
relation to Roger Sprung, for any of you hardcore folkies who might
be wondering.)
The one gig I did in London where I was
doing a full show was the last gig in Britain, at an art gallery run
by Palestinians, called P21.
A whole bunch of folks came from my
email list, and from the efforts of the organizer, who wasn't
involved with the gallery, but was offered the use of the gallery for
the occasion. Somehow or other, either because no one had looked at
the fine print, or because no one had been told about it, the gallery
folks planned on taking almost the entire money from the door for
their “expenses.” This was the first gig I've ever done where
the venue took 80% of the door. If you're thinking about doing a gig
in London, avoid the P21 gallery!
By now, the month of September was
over. It was October 1st, and I was flying to Munich. I
rented a car at the Munich airport, and headed towards the small town
in the picturesque Bavarian mountains, where I would spend the next
three nights.
There are three brothers, all really
great guys. One of them is a professional rock climber, and he's the
one out of the three who first heard my music. The other two are
musicians, and both absolutely stellar ones at that. Together they
make up half of two different bands, one more acoustic-oriented, and
one solidly punk rock.
Their acoustic band and I did one of
the gigs together – the Bumble Boys.
It was great to hear their set, but
otherwise the gigs were a bit odd. People in Bavaria seem to have
too much money, as far as I can tell, at least in the countryside.
Maybe in the actual city of Munich it would be different, but I've
never had a gig there, aside from singing at the G7 protest there
last spring. But being in the mountains and hanging out with the
Bumble Boys was a pleasure. Especially the baby.
In Freiburg I played at the squatted
social center by the railroad tracks known as KTS. It was a
“refugees welcome” gig, and among the fifty or so people in the
room were a dozen or so refugees. One who I talked to was a
French-speaker from somewhere in Africa. The folks at KTS had made
piles of food, which was all eaten happily and eagerly.
Some of the same people who organized
the KTS gig are also very involved with refugee solidarity. Among
other things, they had briefly set up a volunteer welcome center just
outside of Freiburg's refugee camp. But the only place they could
set it up on was a little patch of dirt on privately-owned land, and
the landlord objected, so they couldn't stay there.
There was one strange young blonde
hippie handing out strange fliers about some kind of natural medicine
which KTS folks said was a form of neo-fascist propaganda.
Germans can be very sensitive about
anything smacking of paganism coming from other Germans, since that
was a big part of the Nazi shtick back in the day. Germans are often
skeptical when I tell them that in Scandinavia, England, the US and
elsewhere, paganism and natural medicine is not at all associated
with fascism. (Most of the pagans in the US that I know grew up
Jewish, so that would be especially weird if they were closet Nazis.)
At the end of the night, the hippie with the flyers was told to
leave. She cried. I felt bad for her, but didn't know what to say.
My next actual gig was in Cologne, but
first I made a detour to Gent, in Belgium, to sing one song at a
press conference against the TTIP. Which is an evil trade deal you
should know about – the Atlantic version of the TPP deal, which
Hillary Clinton has just joined Bernie Sanders in ostensibly
opposing, though I'm sure that's just her positioning herself to look
more leftwing in order to win the Democratic nomination, before she
goes and stabs us all in the back afterwards, like usual for her and
other leaders of her corporate, undemocratic party.
In Gent we had the press conference,
and made a little video in front of Cargill's big factory on the
outskirts of town.
I hadn't slept well the night before,
since I arrived in Gent to be welcomed by my host who I had
been in touch with, and her extremely drunk husband and his equally
drunk friend, who proceeded to spend the rest of the evening regaling
me with stories that were almost entirely impossible to understand,
since half the time they were lapsing into Flemish or French, both of
which they spoke far better than English.
I then slept in a room with no door on
it, which meant I didn't sleep much, until the drunks started snoring
rather than shouting. A slight improvement. Naturally, they didn't
have to get up in the morning to go sing at a press conference, like
I did.
There were only a few people at the
show in Cologne, which was too bad, because the venue, Underground
Cologne, is a really cool spot. There's a big squat in the
neighborhood, complete with a military helicopter sitting on a roof.
(I'm pretty sure it doesn't fly anymore.)
Of the few people at the gig, one had
come all the way from Berlin – about six hours on the train. A
quality crowd, even if it were just her. And it was nice to hear the
Children of Lir play, a local band that was on the bill with me at
the Underground.
After a long drive to Berlin, the high
point of the tour began. There were two gigs in towns in former East
Germany outside of Berlin, and one protest in Berlin. Despite the
fact that my pickup mysteriously wouldn't function through their
sound system, it eventually worked out and I sang three songs for an
estimated 250,000 people.
The streets of that big, lovely city
were filled with marchers from all over the country, many of whom had
come there in buses. There were more buses than I've ever seen in
one place. Literally for miles you could walk down a big wide
street, with bus after bus parked side by side – not end to end,
but side by side. And on other streets, yet more buses, this time
parked end to end.
The whole thing was a model of good
organizing, from the buses and the massive crowds to the highly
professional stage, sound system, screens broadcasting the
proceedings with a three-camera shoot, great people giving speeches
from all over the German left, and great musicians.
Unlike at similar big demos in the US,
there were no rock stars on the stage. I'm sure there would have
been rock stars who would have gladly played for free for such a
crowd. I don't think they were asked. The musicians who did play
were uniformly really good, DIY bands, including a feminist,
anti-fascist hiphop artist and a punk band called Radio Havana.
Performers who attract audiences, to be
sure – I talked to the singer in Radio Havana, and he said they
usually get 300 people coming to their shows. Which means they have
a serious following, far bigger than mine – but not nearly on the
rock star scale of things.
On either side of the demo were the two
gigs in the eastern German towns. One was in Brandenburg, and the
other in Bad Belzig. Both of these gigs were “refugees
welcome”-themed events, with great crowds of people, almost none of
whom had any idea about my music, most of whom were older easterners
who did not speak much English.
In the media, when refugees and eastern
Germany are mentioned in the same article, it's usually to talk about
the anti-immigrant group in Dresden, PEGIDA, or to talk about Nazis
burning down asylum centers. But in both Brandenburg and Bad Belzig,
the mayors of the towns, and very mainstream organizations such as
the Lions' Club and the Rotary Club were sponsors of the events.
Dozens of refugees came to each gig from the local refugee centers,
and were warmly welcomed with food, and the occasional person who
spoke both Arabic and German.
The main person coordinating these
gigs, and getting the sponsorship of everyone involved, was a local
social worker who I originally knew from Cologne a long time ago,
named Regina Schwartz. Regina also made what everybody says are very
poetic translations of dozens of my songs into German, which she
read aloud to the assembled audiences before I sang each song. This
made the whole thing drag a bit for me and probably for others who
were fluent in English, but for most of the people there, it seemed
to work well.
There were many women and children, but
most of the Syrian refugees there were young men. Some journalists
have pointed out that part of the reason why Angela Merkel is
welcoming the Syrian refugees so enthusiastically is because she and
others in Germany know that the German population is rapidly aging as
well as shrinking, and without a very large amount of immigration,
this trend will continue, which is bad for the German economy.
Immigration, as people know who are not xenophobes reacting
emotionally to these things, is good for national economies,
particularly in countries like Germany and Sweden, which have such
low birth rates.
In any case, the contrast between these
young Syrian men and the mostly elderly Germans in these towns was
very noticeable. It was also interesting to note that the Syrians
who spoke the best English were usually the ones with the lightest
skin. I've never been to Syria, but hanging out with these guys made
me wonder about the class divide in Syria, and how it breaks down in
terms of skin color and other factors. Several of the Syrians were
so white, they would fit right in in Scandinavia. The rest would fit
in more easily in Sicily or thereabouts.
A large group of Syrian guys came to
the gig in Bad Belzig because someone simply walked to the closed
infoshop where they were hanging out outside, using the free wifi,
and said there's something happening at the church around the corner.
I don't think they even knew what it
was that was happening there, but within a minute or so, they were
all in the church attending my gig, and helping set things up for it.
At the gig in Brandenburg, a former English teacher from Syria had
stayed up all night the night before making Arabic translations of my
set, which people projected on a screen as I sang the songs in
English. (Which was a great idea, except that the stage lights kind
of made the screen almost impossible to see if you weren't in the
front row.)
Then a stop in Dusseldorf – an
interview at a TV station that was organized by the same folks who
had organized the gig in Cologne.
The original idea was to be on TV
before the gig in Cologne, to help promote it, but that didn't work
with my schedule, so I was on TV after all my gigs in Germany were
over. But it was great – so professional, with a three-camera
shoot and an expert interviewer, as fluent in English as he was in
his own language.
It's always so nice to be on TV in
Germany or in England or elsewhere, but it always makes me wish this
would ever happen in my own country. (Aside from public access
stations, which are great, but not at all on the same level of
professionalism as the more mainstream stations in Europe that seem
to have no problem having someone on who expresses political views
such as mine).
I arrived in Brussels early the
following afternoon. The folks putting on the house concert there
said they'd be home by late afternoon, so I just poked around the
neighborhood for a few hours. I had set the GPS to take me to the
address of the show, and then found parking and walked around.
I was walking down one street when
someone knocked on a window, from the inside, as I passed by. I
thought, maybe it's someone involved with the house concert who
recognizes me or something. I turned around and went back to the
window where I had just heard the knocking, and was momentarily
surprised to see a nearly naked woman smiling at me. Ah-ha! I was
in the red light district. After that, there were many more knocks
on windows as I passed them. I eventually settled for a large chunk
of the afternoon in a cafe with virtually no customers, with a young
woman behind the counter, chain-smoking cigarettes and listening to
very loud Spanish pop music.
The house concert turned out to be in
the backyard of a collective house, on a freezing, rainy night.
Because it's the red light district, rent is cheap if you're not
renting a window to work out of. People don't want to live in the
neighborhood.
But the folks in the collective house
have a great deal on the place, all the more so because they have a
huge backyard with a big one-room house in it. The house used to be
full of junk, but they cleaned it up and now they use it as a place
for having events.
The roof of the house in the backyard
is made of glass panels, so it's like a greenhouse. Some of the
panels are smashed or otherwise not there, and the place was very
damp and moldy, but otherwise quite welcoming, by squat standards.
Folks made two campfires, one of them
in the house in the backyard. There were no chimneys or anything,
but most of the smoke eventually made its way through the holes in
the roof. Much of it lingered in the house, making the place very
smoky, especially since the wood we were burning was mostly wet.
My clothing still smells like acrid
smoke. There were several dozen people present on a rainy, cold
Wednesday night outside, which makes me wonder how many people might
have showed up if it not been quite so inclement.
Despite the cold weather and rain and
all that, and it being a Wednesday night, there were two other
musicians on the bill, both young folks who did very long sets full
of their feelings and opinions about everything, by the end of which
many of the audience members had given up on the weather and left.
But the crowd that remained that I played for was very appreciative.
The following day the rain continued,
as a thousand or so people gathered for yet another protest against
TTIP.
Which had a serious refugee lining to
it, given the times, and given that people are aware of the intimate
connections between economics, wars, and the inevitable flows of
refugees fleeing these man-made disasters. A couple weeks earlier,
the Belgian labor movement had gathered to protest TTIP, with an
estimated 100,000 people attending. But this protest was elements of
the left not involved with labor, for the most part.
The atmosphere in Brussels that day
felt very strange, especially in the area of the European buildings,
the city being the capital of Europe, so to speak, with official EU
institutions taking up much of the urban landscape. So many of the
cars were limousines or other fancy cars filled with politicians,
lobbyists, and other such scum (aside from the occasional leftwing
MEP, who mostly don't drive in fancy BMWs anyway).
Police and soldiers lined the streets
all over Brussels, turning away anyone without the right credentials.
I joined one group of French-speaking
people who were clearly headed to the demo, and it took us a long
time to eventually find the route that we were allowed to take that
would lead us to the proceedings. As I walked past some smug yuppies
who were commenting on the demo they had just passed by, one of them
said to the other, “these people couldn't organize a brawl in a
pub” or something to that effect.
I wondered if she knew about the
100,000 people who had protested there two weeks earlier. But hey,
when you're opposing the richest, most powerful forces in the history
of the world – European and American capitalists – perhaps not
winning right away is not an indication of poor organizing skills...?
In any case, the yuppie spoke too soon,
or at least she would have thought so if she had tried to drive a car
following that rally, as I did.
After singing a couple of songs, I beat
a hasty retreat back to my rental car, with the plan to drive to
Eindhoven to pick up a couple of friends, and then from there to
Utrecht for the evening's gig. However, I had only gotten about one
block away from where I parked before I had a front row seat there in
my car to witness a bunch of folks very efficiently blockading a
major road by dragging big metal barriers into the road, like the
kind police use. They then stood behind the barriers – a smart
place to stand, given the aggressive attitude of many of the drivers
in their fancy cars with their suits and ties on, who would have had
to first hit a metal barrier if they wanted to plow into any of the
protesters.
This was the only road blockade I
personally witnessed, but judging from the completely snarled traffic
throughout the city in every direction, I'm pretty sure they were
blockading many other roads as well. It took me exactly an hour to
get from the center of Brussels to the ring road, which I think was
only around five kilometers away.
This was not the only traffic-related
excitement for me that day, unfortunately.
Driving with my friends from Eindhoven
down the highway towards Utrecht, traffic was stop-and-go now and
then, though mostly it was moving OK. But at one point I noticed a
red car that just stayed in the fast lane after the traffic had
started moving again a good 30 seconds or so already, before the car
got going. That's when I passed the red car, and got into the fast
lane myself. Then the stop-and-go traffic started up again, and,
while completely stopped in traffic, we got rammed from behind – by
that very red car I had noticed a minute earlier.
The driver of the fancy new red car was
a very fashionable young Dutch woman with tight pants and a fur coat.
She acknowledged in writing on the trans-European form for traffic
accidents that all European drivers have with them in their cars that
she had hit us from behind, which means she was at fault. Hopefully
things go OK with the insurance companies, unlike several years ago
when I was also stopped in a road and was hit by another attractive
young white woman, who totaled the car Alistair and I were following,
and then proceeded to total our car. Although we had a lawyer friend
helping us for free, we were unsuccessful in getting that woman to
pay the $1,200 we ended up having to pay the rental car company for
the deductible.
My gig that night in Utrecht was
originally to have been a double-bill with the rocking hippie legend
of the Netherlands since the early 1960's known as Armand, but he's
sick in the hospital. So I visited him there, and did the gig with
another group that the organizer had gotten to replace him, a
fantastic trio of guys who all live in a squat in the ADM squat in
Amsterdam, called the Bucket Boys.
The trio consists of three singers
doing lots of great, bluegrassy vocal harmonies, with one guy on
banjo, another on a one-string tub bass, and the other playing
percussion on a bucket. The percussionist is originally from
Tennessee, but has been living in Amsterdam so long that his English
is peppered with Dutch grammar and phrases.
The final gig on the tour involved one
more stop in England. I returned my German rental car in Dusseldorf
and flew again to Heathrow, where the only car they had left for me
to rent was an SUV, which I drove to Harlow, getting there in time to
be early for the gig.
The place in Harlow was a historic punk
venue that had been around since the beginning of the punk rock
phenomenon in England. Attila used to live in Harlow back in the
80's, and played there often, as did the poet who was the first,
brilliant act on the bill, Janine Booth.
The venue is called the Square, though
it was originally called Square One (a better name). It's closing
after all these years, and the volunteers who run the place decided
to go out with a bang, having lots of acts play there who had played
there long ago.
I never played there in the 80's, but
the Square in Harlow was one of the first gigs I ever did in England,
back around 2000 or so. The organizer of that gig introduced me.
Appropriately for a venerable punk venue soon closing its doors, the
other of the three acts on the bill, and the one that attracted most
of the audience members under the age of 50, was a very youthful band
having their first gig ever.
Next tour: the Joe Hill 100 Road Show
on the west coast of the US.
I wrote recently about how to have a good rally (hopefully as a small component of a broader movement that includes lots of other tactics). I emphasized the importance of music and culture in any successful social movement. 
