When we look at history and how it's all unwound
There are few people on the planet that have been more tightly bound
With the liberation of our troubled human race
Than the man from Santiago with the beard upon his face
Dressed in green fatigues that he wore most of his years
As he led his country longer than any of his peers
And few men have been vilified more often in the news
Than Commandante Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz
Born into a country of Dengue and despair
Ruled by foreign armies ever since Columbus got there
He'd reject his privilege and join humanity
Forced to choose between his species and his family
And when legal means had failed to stop the suffering he saw
He decided it was high time to work outside the law
He organized a revolution with the rifle and the fuse
Commandante Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz
When you win a revolution, you might stop when you're ahead
But in the Havana Declaration the revolutionaries said
Wherever people anywhere are found to be oppressed
As long as we have hearts that beat within our chests
It is our duty to support them – and Cuba sent their troops
And Cuba sent their doctors, in ever-larger groups
And their leader was the one in the track suit and running shoes
Commandante Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz
It could have been someone else, and he might be the first to say
The movement makes the leader, not the other way
But around the world right now, sitting at their dinner plates
There are people praising this man who stood up to the United States
And lived life as a beacon for a new society
With housing, healthcare, education and the human right to dignity
Central to the vision for which he stood accused
Commandante Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz
I can't predict the future, but if the past is any indication
Many more will follow the trail of the little Cuban nation
And soon in Havana, I hope that we may see
A statue of the man, to go beside Jose Marti
But wherefore goes Havana, or Angola, Mozambique
I'll always remember the big man's rosy cheeks
If the world could vote for a leader, how many just might choose
Commandante Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz
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.
I looked at my phone a few hours ago, before going to bed, and checked the BBC headlines, as I often do. That's when I learned that the great Pete Seeger had just died at the age of 94.
I slept anyway, but not very well, with my thoughts racing all night. I have jet lag, too. I only just got back last night from 2-1/2 weeks of, well, hanging out with friends of Pete Seeger's for the most part, in Ireland and in New York City. (You can read about that trip across the Atlantic on my blog, too, if you like.)
Pete was one of the folks on the ground floor of a thing called the People's Music Network, that a wonderful songwriter and friend of Pete's named Charlie King started up along with other folks back in the 1970's, if I have the timeline right. Just last weekend I was at the winter gathering of PMN. It moves around from city to city, usually somewhere in the northeastern US, and this time it was in Queens.
At the gathering I was giving workshops and doing what they call mentoring sessions, trying to help other musicians out with improving their craft, and giving advice on how to attempt to make a living at this. My biggest piece of advice on that last point is always that all that really matters is whether you have fans who like your music enough to come to your shows, and organize your shows. The old system of getting signed to a record label and all that never worked well for most people, and more or less stopped working entirely around the time the airwaves in the US were deregulated in 1981 or thereabouts. So I tell them, you gotta figure out how to do it yourself, and network directly with your fans, and give away your music online so you might get those fans in the first place. I tell them that what established artists or other luminaries think of their music doesn't matter – they're not the ones who are going to be paying to come hear you play.
But then, Pete Seeger died. And though I still believe my own advice, and though Pete may not have had much impact on whether I get gigs or have fans who come to them or any of that, certainly Pete, the icon, and Pete, the man, had an impact on my life that would be hard to overstate. And there are so many people from so many generations and so many parts of the world who are, right now, undoubtedly saying the same thing.
If Pete ever had an obsession with becoming a famous musician, it seems he got that out of his system more than half a century ago, when he became famous, as a member of the Weavers. Soon after the Weavers had a string of hits, they were put on McCarthy's blacklist, and Pete took to the road, playing college campuses and other places where he could do shows while still on the blacklist, which is where my mother first heard him play, when she was a student at Oberlin College.
Ever since those days, it seems to me Pete was spreading a sort of gospel in his work, which I'd summarize like this:
Music is powerful. Every real social movement has music at its core, and the civil rights movement is a great example of that. And Woody Guthrie was a fantastic songwriter. Simplicity is good. Good to be humble, to live simply, for your own mental and physical health, and for the health of the planet. Simple messages work better, too. Just because you can play your instrument really well doesn't mean it's a good idea to show off. Nonviolent civil disobedience is good. Other tactics are understandable but they don't work as well. Love your neighbor. Surrounding hate with love works better than killing fascists. Think globally, act locally. Organize within your local community, and at all times, stay humble.
As much as he was a musician producing great music and writing great songs, he was an activist, always promoting the music of Woody Guthrie, and always promoting these ideas.
The first time I met Pete was at my first PMN gathering. I think it was 1990. He seemed pretty old to me then, though I guess he would have been barely 70, which doesn't usually seem very old to me these days. Hanging around some of these amazing songwriters I met there then – Pete, Charlie King, Pat Humphries, Fred Small and others – I realized then that I wanted to be like that, and that the way to get there was to immerse myself in the musical traditions from which all these people came. I also realized that there is something profoundly humbling about this very concept – the realization that you're nothing unless you're standing on the shoulders of those who came before you, consciously. You're not original – you're just playing the same chord progressions that were invented in Africa centuries ago. And you have very little right taking credit for a song you wrote that uses one of those chord progressions, either, so just get over the whole concept of originality, I learned through the examples of these people, especially Pete.
And in case that point wasn't made entirely clear in words and workshops, at the end of my first PMN gathering, after most of the attendees had left, there was Pete, sweeping the floor. Embarrassed not to be doing something useful, I picked up a broom and joined him in that endeavor.
After years of living on the west coast, trying to become a decent folksinger, woodshedding for hours every day learning songs from throughout the ages like I knew I was supposed to if I wanted to be any good, very consciously following Pete's example, I started trying my hand at songwriting again. At the Clearwater festival on the Hudson River, which Pete was involved with starting up a long time ago, I first got turned on to the music of Phil Ochs. Living on the west coast I discovered Jim Page. Those two songwriters had an immense impact on me, and I had written a song that was very much influenced by their stuff, though not as good.
I was back east again around 1993 and went back to a PMN gathering in upstate New York. There was a songswap, one of many, and Pete was one of the folks swapping songs, just another guy with a banjo. Like everyone else, I pretended not to care that he was in on that songswap – didn't want to annoy the guy by being starstruck. I sang the very long song I had recently written, a sort of global social movement historical survey that I was calling “Ballad of the Proletariat.”
Very conscious not to say anything critical in a public space, Pete waited until I was standing alone on the grass somewhere and he came up to me.
“You know,” he said, “'proletariat' is a long, Latin word. It might as well be in Swahili or Chinese.”
I changed the title. Eventually, at Anne Feeney's suggestion, I edited out some of the verses so the song came in at under five minutes, rather than the original eight. (Still very long, though, but somewhat more managably so.)
A couple years later I was back living on the east coast, in Connecticut. It was either in Pete's regular column in Sing Out! magazine, or else in the info that came along with announcements about upcoming PMN gatherings that he put it out there that he was always looking for good new songs. I'm not sure I would have bothered him otherwise, but since it said he was looking for new songs, and he published his PO Box right there in the magazine, I ventured to send him a lyric I had just written after the Oklahoma City bombing, to the tune of Dylan's song, “Who Killed Davey Moore?” I guess he liked the lyric OK, but I wonder if it was the local (Connecticut) address that interested him more than anything.
I lived with my girlfriend at the time in Southbury, but I probably used my mother's return address on the lyric I sent him, and I guess I must have given him her phone number. One day I was visiting my mother, once again attempting to follow her directive to clean up and organize the vast array of stuff I was perpetually storing in her attic, when the phone rang. My mother talked for a minute with whoever called, and of course it was her house, so I figured the call was for her.
Then she called me down from the attic and handed me the phone, whispering with excitement, “it's Pete Seeger.”
“Hello, David? I got this song lyric from you about Oklahoma City. Have you ever heard of the Clearwater Festival?”
He proceeded to invite me to come play at the festival, and he told me about other festivals that happened on the Hudson River that I should sing at. He was clearly in local organizer mode. At the time, the usually secretive, pacifist, communitarian religious sect known as the Bruderhof were experimenting with opening up to the world and playing a clear role as part of the left, and Pete clearly thought that was great.
“Have you ever heard of the Bruderhof? No? They're sort of Christian communists, and they have a community in Connecticut. They're having a gathering which you might like to attend.”
Which I did, of course. I agonized over the invitation to Clearwater, because I had already bought a plane ticket to go to Ireland. I planned to busk my way around Ireland and England, though I ended up just getting really sick soon after I arrived, and not busking much at all. In any case, I didn't go to the festival, but I did take Pete up on his invitation to visit during a meeting of the Beacon (New York) Sloop Club when I got back from Europe.
Pete of course met a lot of people, and by the time I got to the Sloop Club Pete didn't remember who I was. I reminded him of the song I had sent him, and then he seemed to remember, or at least pretended to. It was funny to see him, and his wife Toshi, in that atmosphere, because I had the distinct impression that everybody else was trying to avoid both of them. My guess at the time was if they talked to either of them, they might be asked to do something. In any case, it was a great opportunity to hang out and talk for a good while. Pete had me sing a few songs for everybody. They put up with it politely.
A couple years later at a Grassroots Radio Conference in upstate New York, Pete, me and Granny D were on the bill, all performing (or speaking, in Granny D's case) in a big tent outdoors. I was so excited to have a gig with Pete. When I met Pete there in the tent, he said, “so you're David Rovics.” Again, we met for the first time.
I don't know if that gig had anything to do with it, but it was maybe a year or two afterward that my sister left me a message telling me about something that had come in the mail to my PO Box, which she was checking for me when I was away from home, which at the time was Boston. Later I saw the piece of mail in question myself. It was a check for $100 with a brief note saying, “send me everything you got.” I thought about framing the check and putting it on the wall, but I needed the money, so I deposited it. Plus I just didn't believe in the whole idea of impressing people with such things. I've told this story to few people. Not into name-dropping or that sort of thing. Too much Pete Seeger influence there. But it was one of the best days of my life, getting that phone call from my sister about that little piece of mail.
I sent him all the CDs I had recorded up til that point, as requested. Usually Pete's main form of communication involved a particular postcard, of which he must have had a large collection. It was a picture of the Milky Way galaxy, with a little arrow pointing to one of the tiny spots of light on one of the arms, and the words, “you are here.” On the other side would be a few words, like “thanks for the CDs” or something, and his little signature drawing of a banjo, and his first name, Pete. Later he started signing the postcards, Old Pete.
I figured if he wanted all those CDs back then, he might want future releases, so now and then if I recorded one I thought he'd like (like the ones that didn't have too many electric guitars involved), I'd send him one. I'd occasionally get back a little note that I'd treasure to a fairly ridiculous degree, that would just say something like, “great CD.” When Pete used an adjective like “great,” it was something to especially treasure. He didn't seem to be a huge fan of adjectives like that.
I guess he had someone helping him with his overwhelming amounts of mail, and I felt bad about ever bothering him, really, because I knew, having read his biography, that he spent four hours every day answering his mail. Whenever I'd send him a CD, after he told me send my CDs to him, before getting the postcard, I'd get a handwritten but photocopied letter explaining that he got too much mail and couldn't listen to CDs, and then to lessen the impact of these words, he'd include bits of whatever song he was working at recently.
I took the hint anyway, and only sent him a CD every few years or so. About as often, I'd send him a song lyric if I thought I had written one he might particularly like. I did this when I wrote a song about the bombing of Hiroshima. He sent it back to me, with handwritten sheet music in the margins. Maybe I hadn't told him that I already had music to it, I don't remember. But he thought he'd write the melody for it anyway. If I had better business sense I would have probably thrown out my own music for the song and used his, thus being able to say that I co-wrote a song with Pete Seeger. But I didn't, and I don't know where that letter is. I'm shit at saving stuff like that, I'm too itinerant.
The last time I saw Pete in person was over ten years ago, behind the stage at the big protest on February 15th, 2003, in Manhattan. We each sang one song at the protest, on that bitterly cold day. Pete and Toshi were freezing, Pete looking very red from the cold, and there were no heaters in the tent. There was loads of press there, jockeying for position to try to interview Danny Glover, Susan Sarandon and Desmond Tutu. Pete and Toshi were huddling on folding chairs, ignored, patiently waiting for Pete's turn to sing. He sang “Over the Rainbow,” which struck me as an odd choice. I kept them company, and we talked, I don't remember about what.
By the time I got around to reconnecting with People's Music Network gatherings, Pete didn't seem to be attending them anymore. He was slowing down as he approached his nineties, as people generally do, though of course I'd hear reports about his movements, running into his grandson Tao regularly at SOA protests and elsewhere.
Hanging out with Tommy Sands a few days ago in Ireland, he recounted some wonderful stories about Pete as well as Tao, who in recent years was the one who went out in Pete's stead to receive awards intended for his grandfather. Tommy said it had been Tao's idea to throw a big 90th birthday bash for Pete at Madison Square Garden. One of the many musicians invited to sing at that was Tommy. He brought his family with him, and they had a great time, by all accounts. Years before, Tommy and Pete co-wrote a song. Can't remember which one that was. While Tommy was there in New York singing for Pete's 90th birthday, I was singing at a decidedly smaller event in Copenhagen, also celebrating Pete's birthday, along with a veritable who's who of 1960's-era Danish songwriters, all of whom had been profoundly influenced by Pete.
I'm sure Pete felt a deep kinship with Tommy, given that they were in so many ways in the same line of work. Both folksingers keeping alive rich musical traditions, both songwriters, both deeply involved with various peace processes, both very much involved with their own local communities, which for Tommy meant Northern Ireland.
One of the pictures on the wall in Tommy's studio is of him, Tao, Gerry Adams and David Irvine. Adams of course is a leader of Sinn Fein, previously a leader of the IRA. Irvine had been the leader of the UVF, the Ulster Volunteer Force. Both men with a long history of using guns to further their political agendas, who were both trying to turn over a new leaf, and find less violent means of working out their very significant differences.
As Tommy recounted the story to me, Irvine refused to shake Adams hand. Undeterred, in a reassuring voice, Adams said to Irvine, “alright, David.” Irvine said to Adams, “alright, Gerry.” And then Tao sang Pete's beautiful original composition, “Where Have All The Flowers Gone.” Though Adams and Irvine didn't shake each others hands, they both sang along to the song. Both men had good singing voices, Tommy reported.
Though Pete was once again absent from the PMN gathering last weekend, his spirit was everywhere, as usual. The “musicians in residence” for PMN in 2014 are a venerable duo of folksingers who together go by the name, Magpie. They recounted the story of what must have been one of the last recordings Pete made, when they visited him at his home in Beacon, not long after Toshi died. They wanted Pete to play a banjo part to a song they were putting on a new album they were working on, and he happily obliged, playing his part with consummate skill as usual. Though his singing voice had been shot for years in his advanced years, his ability to chop wood or to play stringed instruments had apparently not suffered.
They didn't want to keep him, figuring maybe he needed some rest or something, but Pete kept them there for hours, regaling them with stories, as he was known to do at times. Four generations have grown up listening to the music of Pete Seeger, and engaging with the musical and political traditions he helped keep alive. I really can't imagine what folk music, or the civil rights movement, or the antiwar movement, or the environmental movement, or the twentieth century, or I would have been like without him. But I'm sure that long after his passing from the Earth, my daughter's will not be the last generation to grow up listening to the music and stories of Pete Seeger.
I don't know about you, but I feel a somewhat surprisingly personal sense of loss at the death of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Anything else aside, this man and the popular social movement he has played a huge role in, not only within Venezuela but around the world, has been a massive, positive influence for untold millions of people. He and the many positive aspects of the transformational process that has been underway in Venezuela and most of Latin America, really, especially since 1998, have changed the lives in a very physical way for millions of our sisters and brothers, and have been an inspiration for those struggling to make the world a better place in every corner of the Earth, very much including within the belly of the imperial beast, here in the USA.
For those of us who have spent much of the past 15 years protesting in one form or another at gatherings of the global elite -- meetings of the World Trade Organization, the World Economic Forum, and other such spectacles -- there was always one consistent voice within those meetings that denounced these elitist proceedings as eloquently and as firmly as his friends in the streets outside the halls of power.
And as the years have passed since his first landslide election victory in 1998, one after another Latin American country has seen the left come to power, with people like Evo Morales go from leading a union to leading a nation. I don't have any idea what those of us in places like the USA would have done over the past 15 years without the example of the Bolivarian Revolution shining its light in what often seems like an otherwise fairly dark room. An imperfect light, to be sure -- I can already imagine some of the emails I'll be getting by tomorrow from some of my favorite anarchists -- but a powerful light nonetheless, and Hugo Chavez has been at the center of it.
One of the most memorable experiences of my life will probably always be December 17th, 2009, on a very cold, cloudy day in Copenhagen, when I had the privilege of being one of the performers to warm up for Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and other speakers at a large hall a short walk from the house I usually stay at when I'm in town.
Here's a video someone took of me singing my "Song for Hugo Chavez" at that event, which was broadcast soon thereafter on Venezuelan television. (I know this because I got emails from both supporters and detractors of the Commandante after it aired, which made reference to this song on the TV.) The picture to the upper right was taken from the door to my bedroom here in Portland, Oregon. It's a tattered poster from that event 4 years ago.
And here is a video from the great Uruguayan songwriter, Daniel Viglietti, which I think sums up the spirit of the Bolivarian Revolution brilliantly, his song, "A desalambrar" (with English subtitles on this video).
I'm sure I'll have more to say on this subject later, but for now, signing off. La lucha continua!
Icon of Scottish folk music, international socialism, and Australian punk rock dead at 57
Today is my daughter Leila's fourth birthday, and while this occasion brings my thoughts back to the day she was born, the past 24 hours have otherwise been full of fairly devastating news.
If the left can admit to having icons, then two of them have just died. Yesterday it was the great historian and activist Howard Zinn, with whom I had the pleasure of sharing many stages around the US over many years. Much has been written about Zinn's death at the age of 87, and I think many more people will be discovering his groundbreaking work who may not have heard of him til now.
And then less than a full day later I heard the news that my dear friend, comrade and fellow musician Alistair Hulett died today. He was thirty years younger than Professor Zinn, 57 years old, give or take a year (I'm shit at remembering birthdays, but he was definitely still years shy of 60). Ally had an aggressive form of cancer in his liver, lungs and stomach.
I last saw Alistair last summer at his flat in Glasgow where he had lived with his wife Fatima for many years. (Fatima, a wonderful woman about whom Ally wrote his love song, “Militant Red.”) He seemed healthy and spry as usual, with plenty to say about the state of the world as always. He was working on a new song about a Scottish anarchist who had run the English radio broadcast for the Spanish Republic in the 1930's.
I first met Ally in 2005, at least that's what he said. I seem to recall meeting him earlier than that, but maybe it's just that I was already familiar with his music and had been to his home town of Glasgow many times before I actually met him. His reputation preceded him – in my mind he was already one of those enviably great guitarists who along with people like Dick Gaughan had done so much to breath new life into the Scottish folk music tradition. I had also already heard some of his own wonderful compositions, sung by him as well as by other artists.
In 2005 the Scottish left was well mobilized, organizing the people's response to the G8 meetings that were happening in the wooded countryside not far from Edinburgh. Alistair was involved both as an organizer and a musician, and we hung out in Edinburgh, in Glasgow, outside a detention center somewhere, and out by the G8 meetings in an opulent little town with an unpronounceable Scottish name.
I asked him then if he wanted to do a tour with me in the US. He took me up on that a year or so later and we traveled from Boston to Minneapolis over the course of two weeks or so, doing concerts along the way. Many people who came to our shows were already familiar with Alistair's music, while many were hearing it for the first time and were generally well impressed with his work as well as his congenial personality, despite the fact that many people reported to me discreetly that they couldn't understand a word he was saying.
Americans aren't so good with accents at the best of times, and to make matters worse Alistair was largely doing songs from his Red Clydeside CD, which is a themed recording all about the anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist rebellion that rocked Glasgow in 1917. Naturally the songs from that CD are also sung in a Glaswegian dialect which can only be understood by non-Scottish people in written form, if you take your time.
Alistair was determined to retaliate for my having organized a tour for us in the US, which he did three years later in a big way, organizing a five-week tour for us of Australia and New Zealand from late November 2008 until early January of last year.
Our tour began in Christchurch, New Zealand. This turned out to seem very fitting, since Christchurch is where Alistair moved as a teenager, along with his parents and his sister, in the mid-1960's. He resented having to leave Glasgow, which was at that time a major hotbed of the 1960's global cultural and political renaissance -- a renaissance which had decidedly not yet made its way to little Christchurch, New Zealand. Alistair described to me how the streets of this small city were filled with proper English ladies wearing white gloves when he moved there as a restless youth.
The folk scare came to Christchurch, though, as with so many other corners of the world at that time, and at the age of 17 Alistair was in the heart of it. Our tour of New Zealand included a whole bunch of great gigs, but it was also like a tour of the beginning of Alistair's varied musical career. All along the way on both the south and north islands I met people Alistair hadn't seen for years or sometimes decades. I cringed as someone gave us a bootleg recording of Alistair as a teenager, figuring wrongly that it would be a reminder of a musically unstable early period, but it turned out to be a fine recording, a vibrant but nuanced rendition of some old songs from the folk tradition.
After two weeks exploring the postcard-perfect New Zealand countryside, smelling a lot of sheep shit, and getting in a car accident while parked, we headed to Sydney. Upon arriving in Australia I discovered a whole other side to Alistair and his impact on the world. Though his Scottish accent never seemed to thin out much, he lived for 25 years in Sydney and was on the ground floor of the Australian punk rock scene, playing in towns and cities throughout Australia with his band, Roaring Jack. The band broke up decades ago but still has a loyal following throughout the country, as I discovered first-hand night after night. In contrast with the nuanced and often quite obscure stories told in the traditional ballads which Alistair rendered so well, Roaring Jack was a brash, in-your-face musical experience, championing the militant end of the Australian labor movement and leftwing causes generally, fueled by equal parts rage against injustice, love of humanity and alcohol.
Since the 90's Alistair has lived in his native Glasgow, while regularly touring elsewhere in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. He's played in various musical ensembles including most recently his band the Malkies, but mostly his work has been as a songwriter and solo performer, also recording and occasionally touring with the great fiddler of Fairport Convention fame, Dave Swarbrick. His more recent songs have run the gamut from a strictly local Glasgow song written to support a campaign to save a public swimming pool to the timelessly beautiful song recorded by June Tabor and others, “He Fades Away.”
“He Fades Away” is about an Australian miner dying young of asbestosis, from massive exposure to asbestos, a long-lasting, daily tragedy of massive proportions fueled by, well, greedy capitalists. It is surely more than a little ironic that Alistair was taken from us at such a young age by the industrial-world epidemic known as cancer, so much like the subject of his most well-known song.
The song is written from the perspective of the wife of a miner who is dying of asbestosis. The melody of the song is so beautiful that quoting the lyrics can't come close to doing it justice, and I won't do the song that injustice here – just go to the web and search for “He Fades Away,” it's right there in various forms.
It is undoubtedly a privilege of someone like Alistair that he will be remembered passionately by people, young and old and on several continents, long after today – by friends, lovers, fellow activists, fellow musicians, and many times as many fans. And he will long be remembered also as one of the innumerable great people, including so many great musicians, who died too young.
On our last tour, so recently, he was meeting new friends and renewing old friendships every single day, so very full of life. Among the friendships he was renewing was that with his elderly parents, who came to our show in Brisbane, a couple hours from where they retired on the east coast of Australia. Though the exact causes of Alistair's illness will probably never be known, it seems to be a hallmark not just of war, but especially of the industrialized world's ever-worsening cancer epidemic, that so many parents have to see their children die so young.
I was watching my baby daughter sleep in her carseat outside of the Sacramento airport about ten hours ago when I noticed a missed call from Brendan Phillips. He's in a band called Fast Rattler with several friends of mine, two of whom live in my new hometown of Portland, Oregon, one of whom needed a ride home from the Greyhound station. I called back, and soon thereafter heard the news from Brendan that his father had died the night before in his sleep, when his heart stopped beating.
I wouldn't want to elevate anybody to inappropriately high heights, but for me, Utah Phillips was a legend.
I first became familiar with the Utah Phillips phenomenon in the late 80's, when I was in my early twenties, working part-time as a prep cook at Morningtown in Seattle. I had recently read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, and had been particularly enthralled by the early 20th Century section, the stories of the Industrial Workers of the World. So it was with great interest that I first discovered a greasy cassette there in the kitchen by the stereo, Utah Phillips Sings the Songs and Tells the Stories of the Industrial Workers of the World.
As a young radical, I had heard lots about the 1960's. There were (and are) plenty of veterans of the struggles of the 60's alive and well today. But the wildly tumultuous era of the first two decades of the 20th century is now (and pretty well was then) a thing entirely of history, with no one living anymore to tell the stories. And while long after the 60's there will be millions of hours of audio and video recorded for posterity, of the massive turn-of-the-century movement of the industrial working class there will be virtually none of that.
To hear Utah tell the stories of the strikes and the free speech fights, recounting hilariously the day-to-day tribulations of life in the hobo jungles and logging camps, singing about the humanity of historical figures such as Big Bill Haywood, Joe Hill or Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, was to bring alive an era that at that point only seemed to exist on paper, not in the reality of the senses. But Utah didn't feel like someone who was just telling stories from a bygone era -- it was more like he was a bridge to that era.
Hearing these songs and stories brought to life by him, I became infected by the idea that if people just knew this history in all it's beauty and grandeur, they would find the same hope for humanity and for the possibility for radical social change that I had just found through Utah.
Thus, I became a Wobbly singer, too. I began to stand on a street corner on University Way with a sign beside me that read, "Songs of the Seattle General Strike of 1919." I mostly sang songs I learned from listening to Utah's cassette, plus some other IWW songs I found in various obscure collections of folk music that I came across.
It was a couple years later that I first really discovered Utah Phillips, the songwriter. I had by this time immersed myself with great enthusiasm in the work of many contemporary performers in what gets called the folk music scene, and had developed a keen appreciation for the varied and brilliant songwriting of Jim Page and others. Then, in 1991, I came across Utah's new cassette, I've Got To Know, and soon thereafter heard a copy of a much earlier recording, Good Though.
Whether he's recounting stories from his own experiences or those of others doesn't matter. There is no need to know, for in the many hours Utah spent in his troubled youth talking with old, long-dead veterans of the rails and the IWW campaigns, a bridge from now to then was formed in this person, in his pen and in his deep, resonant voice. In Good Though I heard the distant past breathing and full of life in Utah's own compositions, just as they breathed in his renditions of older songs.
In I've Got To Know I heard an eloquent and current voice of opposition to the American Empire and the bombing of Iraq, rolled together seamlessly with the voices of deserters, draft dodgers and tax resisters of the previous century.
In reference to the power of lying propaganda, a friend of mine used to say it takes ten minutes of truth to counteract 24 hours of lies. But upon first hearing Utah's song, "Yellow Ribbon," it seemed to me that perhaps that ratio didn't give the power of truth enough credit. It seemed to me that if the modern soldiers of the empire would have a chance to hear Utah's monologues there about his anguish after his time in the Army in Korea, or the breathtakingly simple depiction of life under the junta in El Salvador in his song "Rice and Beans," they would just have to quit the military.
Utah made it clear in word and in deed that steeping yourself in the tradition was required of any good practitioner of the craft, and I did my best to follow in his footsteps and do just that. I learned lots of Utah's songs as well as the old songs he was playing. Making a living busking in the Boston subways for years, I ran into other folks who were doing just that, as well as writing great songs, such as Nathan Phillips (no relation). Nathan was from West Virginia, and did haunting versions of "The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia," "Larimer Street," "All Used Up," and other songs. In different T stops at the same time, Nathan and I could often be found both singing the songs of Utah Phillips for the passersby.
Traveling around the US in the 1990's and since then, it seemed that Utah's music had, on a musical level, had the same kind of impact that Zinn's People's History or somewhat earlier works such as Jeremy Brecher's book, Strike!, had had in written form -- bringing alive vital history that had been all but forgotten. With Ani DiFranco's collaboration with Utah, this became doubly true, seemingly overnight, and this man who had had a loyal cult following before suddenly had, if not what might be called popularity, at least a loyal cult following that was now twice as big as it had been in the pre-Ani era.
I had had the pleasure of hearing Utah live in concert only once in the early 90's, doing a show with another great songwriter, Charlie King, in the Boston area. I was looking forward to hearing him play again around there in 1995, but what was to be a Utah Phillips concert turned into a benefit for Utah's medical expenses, when he had to suddenly drastically cut down on his touring, due to heart problems. I think there were about twenty different performers doing renditions of Utah Phillips' songs at Club Passim that night. I did "Yellow Ribbon."
Traveling in the same circles and putting out CDs on the same record label, it was fairly inevitable that we'd meet eventually. The first time was several years ago, if memory serves me, behind the stage at the annual protest against the School of the Americas in Columbus, Georgia. I think I successfully avoided seeming too painfully star-struck. Utah was complaining to me earnestly about how he didn't know what to do at these protests, didn't feel like he had good protest material. I think he did just fine, though I can't recall what he did.
Utah lived in Nevada City, and the last time I was there he came to the community radio station while I was appearing on a show. This was soon after Katrina, and I remember singing my song, "New Orleans," and Utah saying embarrassingly nice things. I was on a little tour with Norman Solomon speaking and me singing, and we had done an event the night before in town, which Utah was too tired to attend, if I recall.
Me, Utah, Norman, and my companion, Reiko, went over to a breakfast place after the radio show, talked and ate breakfast. Utah did most of the talking, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that his use of mysterious hobo colloquialisms and frequent references to obscure historical characters in twentieth-century American anarchist history was something he did off stage as well as on.
I've passed near enough to that part of California many times since then. Called once when I was nearby and he was out of town, doing a show in Boston. Otherwise I just thought about calling and dropping by, but didn't take the time. Life was happening, and taking a day or two off in Nevada City was always something that I never quite seemed to find the time for. Always figured next time I'll have more time, I'll call him then. It had been thirteen years since he found out about his heart problems, and he hadn't kicked the bucket yet... Of course, now I wish I had taken the time when I had the chance, and I'm sure there are many other people who feel the same way.
In any case, for those of us who knew his music, whether from recordings or concerts, for those of us who knew Utah from his stories on or off the stage, whether we knew him as that human bridge to the radical labor movement of yesterday, or as the voice of the modern-day hobos, or as that funky old guy that Ani did a couple of CDs with, Utah Phillips will be remembered and treasured by many.
He was undeniably a sort of musical-political-historical institution in his own day. He said he was a rumor in his own time. No question, one man's rumor is another man's legend, but who cares, it's just words anyway.
