RRC Extra No. 28: Dave Marsh Writes About Austin Hopes and Dreams

RRC Extra No. 28: Austin Hopes and Dreams

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The massive South by Southwest music festival (SXSW) has been held in Austin, Texas in the spring of every year since 1987. Dave Marsh reports on this year’s shindig.

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I know something about SXSW keynote addresses. Little Richard and Smokey Robinson both did theirs as, in part, dialogues with me—sitting live in front of several hundred people, Richard being Richard, Smokey being serious, sincere, smart, and as handsome as seventy will allow.

To a certain extent, it’s a setup: All the attendees who don’t care find other things to do and most of the rest come to have expectations affirmed. But it’s not that simple either. I had the best fun of the last twenty years just asking four questions, sitting and watching Little Richard rave for (I timed it) 17 and a half minutes without pausing for breath. Then he turned to me, clearly winded, and said breathlessly, “Ohhh, Dave! You’re still here. I bet you want to ask me some more questions.”

But it’s not that simple either. The best moments can also be absolutely pedagogical: Smokey ended with a seven minute spiel telling people how to find and deal with stardom, beginning with an admonition (“Thicken your skin”) and ending with a parable about the invention of show business. Since 2010 that last part’s gotten almost half a million hits on YouTube. Richard, who appeared in ’08, seemed to just rant but in reality he was preaching a sermon on the same theme as Smokey, offering all kinds of nuggets but coming back to the main point over and over again: “Sign your own checks!…Sign your own checks!” Afterwards, a young woman came up to me, eyes a brimful of tears, and said, “Thank you, thank you, that was everything I came here to learn.”

Steve Earle began by lecturing his audience: “Let me make something extremely clear. Kiss is not cool, Kiss was never cool, Kiss will never be cool.”

But Bruce Springsteen, this year, was something else again. He offered career advice wrapped in biography, history complete with instructive examples of where he’d swiped a couple of his classics: the doo-wop crooning that led to “Backstreets,” the way the Animals’ “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” provided the core of “Badlands,” and how and why “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” is “every song I’ve ever written including the new ones.” Rocker he may be, but not rockist: “The elements you’re using don’t matter. Purity of human expression and experience is not confined to guitars, to tubes, to turntables, to microchips. There is no right way, no pure way, of doing it. There’s just doing it.” Bruce wrestled with Lester Bangs and Woody Guthrie, post-authenticity, the transformative self, Roy Orbison’s paranoia, Phil Spector’s musical violence, the cover of Meet the Beatles as “the silent gods of Olympus,” the barely comprehensible existence of Nintendo-core, black death metal, and the yearning needs of soul. It was as if someone had managed to translate “A wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom tutti frutti” into a comprehensive treatise on the development and meaning (or lack thereof) of the past sixty years of Anglo-American popular music.

He avoided the hard political realities at the core of his new album, Wrecking Ball, in favor of talking eye to eye with an audience he assumed (correctly) consisted of people who either knew these things or needed to find them out. It was a practical speech, aimed at a specific group of people. He didn’t even know it was being broadcast live or, as far as I can tell, imagine that it would wind up all over the Internet, words stuck in the heads of millions of listeners. (The full audio’s at <http://npr.org>npr.org. It’s also worth looking at the segments posted on YouTube, particularly the stuff about the Animals.)

Raves arrived immediately, but I don’t think anyone’s used the term that best describes it for me: Generosity. The speech gave far more than it took and it held back on self-promotion (granted that the entire speech was wrapped in Bruce’s persona, but I’ve already quoted the only reference to his new album.)

Springsteen never has opening acts. That day he had five. Before the SXSW speech, Jimmy LaFave, Eliza Gilkyson, and Juanes sang Woody Guthrie songs (plus one original by Juanes). It was beautiful and loving, and all the things that a tribute to a great artist on his centenary ought to be. The highlight for me wasn’t Juanes singing a verse from “This Land Is Your Land,” which he told me later was the first time he’d ever sung in English onstage, but Juanes stepping up to challenge the audience when it didn’t sing along heartily enough. LaFave sang wonderfully as he always does, his Oklahoma roots deliberately on display, and his commentary on Woody’s music and life more trenchant than ever. And Eliza, firebrand that she is, kept the music contemporary, insisting on its relevance—or rather, insisting on her listeners paying attention to its continuing relation to the world descended from the one Guthrie described. Eliza has been the best female singer-songwriter for several years now, LaFave has been the best interpreter of Guthrie, Dylan and Springsteen for longer than that, and maybe this performance will help the news spread from Austin. Juanes, of course, is a rock star of Springsteen’s magnitude throughout Latin America and much of Europe; imagine John Lennon in Spanish.

That evening at the Moody Theater Springsteen had two openers–Low Anthem and Alejandro Escovedo with his full band each did about 45 minutes. (Springsteen had done a couple of numbers with Alejandro the night before at the Austin Music Awards show.)

The Austin show was only Springsteen’s second since the release of Wrecking Ball and, like its predecessor—an Apollo Theater benefit in honor of SiriusXM’s tenth anniversary—it contained some beautiful one-off wrinkles. Instead of invoking Curtis Mayfield, Wilson Pickett and Smokey Robinson (and James Brown by way of a lunatic climb into the rigging), this time Woody Guthrie framed the action. Bruce opened with his now-17 member E Street Band doing “I Ain’t Got No Home” a cappella and closed with “This Land is Your Land” with Escovedo, Low Anthem, Joe Ely, and a couple members of Arcade Fire helping out.

Is there another performer in our culture who operates in both the folk-rock and soul-gospel traditions? It’s as fashionable lately to evoke Springsteen as a literary figure as it once was to display him as an articulate pseudo-gas station attendant. But what’s most remarkable is the ability to move smoothly among soul and gospel music and the folk and country tradition in the way that Springsteen does. He has reached the point now that on Wrecking Ball’s “Land of Hope and Dreams” he does both in the same song. Generally, one is lurking in the background of the other in any of his songs, especially live. (Which can’t be discerned if all your attention is on the lyrics which is where, I suppose, the shade of the Great American Poem lurks in the minds of the critics who think it’s mostly about the words.) Yet in pulling these sounds together, Springsteen is capable of convincing more than a few that the beloved community truly could be in our future.

The Wrecking Ball songs (at the Moody he played eight of the eleven) have the strongest connecting thread of any Springsteen album since The River–from the furious social questions of “We Take Care of Our Own,” through the economic despair and determination of “Jack of All Trades” and “Death to My Hometown” to the glorious anthem of hope “Rocky Ground”—with its invocation of God, who does not answer—to the final, unambiguous call to action, “We Are Alive.”

I don’t suppose Bruce Springsteen has a much clearer vision of where, exactly, that action must lead to prevent the “hard times come and hard times go” cycle that he pounds away at six consecutive times in the song “Wrecking Ball.” But you can glimpse what it might feel like in any great musical performance, not just one of his. And, from my perspective, that is the real purpose of SXSW. Truth is, there hasn’t been a commercially important act that broke out of the conference since Hanson, fifteen years ago. But so what? It’s still the biggest, best music school in the United States, maybe the world.

And while Bruce’s show couldn’t offer the kind of community that he evokes in songs like “Land of Hope and Dreams,” it did evoke a sense of musician solidarity that’s essential to what happens with SXSW at its best. It’s a glimpse, but even a full-on Bruce and the E Street Band show is just a glimpse of what it would be like to live with equality and justice every day.

SXSW is as imperfect as any other human project. The sheer size of it has outstripped Austin’s transportation infrastructure and its deficit is ever-widening. The business panels are just the record industry trying to talk itself into believing it still exists. Hip-hop, dance, and ethnic music never get an equal shot in the press coverage and Austin’s local Mexican/Chicano community is invisible.

But.

What SXSW offers is a chance to attend that music school not only as student but as teacher. Not to study music but to observe and participate in the stewing mess of it. I have gone to Austin for this peculiar rite of March madness for the past, I think, nineteen years. I went to speak, I went back to listen. I keep going back not because I think I’m going to find any next big thing, but because I might run into musical glory.

This year, I got it in half a dozen ways—from Bruce, of course, but also from Eric Burdon, whose surprise (even to him and Springsteen) appearance to sing “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” at the Moody was a fiery proof of every accolade heaped upon the Animals’ frontman earlier that day. Where else could I interview, in the space of forty-eight hours both Juanes and Eric Burdon? Where else could I see old Austin friends like LaFave, Gilkyson, Michael Ramos, Michael Fracasso, Joe Ely and the Krayolas? Where else could I spend an afternoon and evening at a taqueria with Alejandro, Jesse Malin, Lenny Kaye, Rosie Flores, and new favorites like Maren Parusel?

Where else could I (with massive help from David Alvarez at KUT-FM and my producer Jim Rotolo) put on a live Sunday radio show, from nine to eleven AM, with seven musical guests? None of them played a record or sang a song I’d ever heard before. And all of them were flat-out great. None of them got paid—at SXSW no artist at an official gig ever gets paid, and very few get paid at any of the others, either. It is, most of the time, music for the love of music.

I go to SXSW to recharge, to remember why I love music, why we’ve still got a chance. And this year, like that young woman said, I got everything I came to learn.—D.M.

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[Graphics added by editor of this blog]

Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon: Chris Mahin Remembers Woody Guthrie & A Song of Solidarity

 [This article is adapted from an essay written by Chris Mahin 4 years ago, on the 60th anniversary of the plane wreck that inspired Woody Guthrie's immortal song].

January 1948:

Tragic death of immigrant workers

inspires a song of solidarity

The fire began over Los Gatos Canyon. It started in the left engine-driven fuel pump. The plane crashed 20 miles west of Coalinga, California, on January 29, 1948. It came down into hills which, as one commentator noted, at that time of year are “a beautiful green, splendid with wildflowers … a place of breathtaking beauty.”

There were 32 people on board that day, but the names of only four are recorded for history. The newspaper articles about the crash describe an accident involving a Douglas DC-3 carrying immigrant workers from Oakland, California to the El Centro, California Deportation Center. Those accounts give the name of the plane’s pilot (Frank Atkinson), and co-pilot (Marion Ewing). They mention the name of the stewardess (Bobbi Atkinson) and the guard (Frank E. Chapin). However, the newspaper stories do not include the names of any of the 27 men or of the one woman who were passengers on that flight, victims who were buried in a mass grave at Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno, California. The newspaper reports simply dismiss them as “deportees.”

One visitor to the crash site described the scene this way:

“I was born and raised in Coalinga and can remember going to the crash site the day after the incident. My father, older sister, and I viewed the crash and even though I was about six years old at the time, I can remember it as if it happened yesterday. It was a cold and damp day and even though the reports were that the site had been cleaned up, this was not the case. The sadness of seeing the meager possessions of the passengers and the total lack of respect by those who had the task of removing the bodies will be something I will never forget or forgive.”

Three thousand miles away, a man who had himself once been forced to leave his family to look for work took notice. Musician Woody Guthrie left his birthplace in Oklahoma during the Great Depression and then did plenty of “hard traveling” before ultimately ending up in New York. He was outraged by the callous indifference of the news stories which couldn’t be bothered to mention the names of the workers who died in the crash. Out of his anger came a song – “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee),” a ballad in which he assigned symbolic names to the dead:

 

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,

Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;

You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,

All they will call you will be “deportees” …

 

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,

Our work contract’s out and we have to move on;

Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,

They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves …

 

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,

A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,

Who are these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?

The radio says, “They are just deportees”

 

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?

Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?

To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil

And be called by no name except “deportees”?

 

The song, as Woody Guthrie wrote it, was without music; Guthrie chanted the words. “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee)” was not performed publicly until 10 years after the plane crash, when a school teacher named Martin Hoffman added a haunting melody and Woody’s friend Pete Seeger began performing the song in concerts. The song’s eloquent plea for justice for immigrant workers has stirred the conscience of fair-minded people in the United States ever since.

Often referred to simply as “Deportee,” the song’s continuing broad appeal can be seen in the fact that it has been recorded by wide variety of artists. Among the musicians who have covered the song have been Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, and Bruce Springsteen, as well as the Irish musician Christy Moore and the English singer Billy Bragg. The list also includes the Kingston

Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston

Trio; Cisco Houston; Judy Collins; The Byrds; Joan Baez; Arlo Guthrie; Sweet Honey in the Rock; Hoyt Axton; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Roy Brown Ramirez, Tito Auger and Tao Rodriguez-Seeger; and Paddy Reilly, among others.

January 29, 2012 marks 64 years since the plane wreck near Los Gatos Canyon. The lyrics of Woody Guthrie’s song about the disaster sound as if they were written just days ago, not more than six decades in the past. (This is especially true of the verse “They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.”)  The 64th anniversary of the tragedy falls during a presidential campaign marked by vicious attacks on immigrant workers.

The great labor leader Mother Jones once said that we should mourn for the dead and fight like hell for the living. On this 64th anniversary of a terrible loss, we should pay special heed to the appeal for the unity of all workers which rings out so beautifully from Woody Guthrie’s song. Today, we can honor the dead of January 29, 1948 best by speaking up in defense of the living immigrant workers of today – regardless of documentation status — and by demanding that the rulers of this country cease their cowardly attempts to use the immigration issue as a wedge to divide the workers of this country.

————————————————————————————————————————————

Chris Mahin

<mailto:chris_mahin@yahoo.com>chris_mahin@yahoo.com

[Click the links in the names of the performers above in order to listen to some of the versions of "Plane Wreck";  there are no Woody Guthrie versions available on you tube, and the closest to an original is the Cisco Houston version, with extra benefit of Cisco's sonorous, velvet voice]

Danny Alexander Occupies 2011 And Music

This is Danny Alexander’s sum up of the year, his Occupation as a music writer and political thinker.

Take Em As They Come

Thursday, December 29, 2011

2011 in Review: My Occupy 25

I hate making year end lists. I’m a slow listener, for starters. And other than superficial run-ins with the radio, I tend to listen to one thing at a time. Once I get into some music enough to write about it, I don’t look up much until the writing’s done.

I reviewed about 22 albums in 2011.  Since my I-Tunes lists about 22 new album releases a month, I’ve deeply listened to (and this is being wildly generous to myself) at most 1/12th of the music high profile enough for a (let’s call it) national conversation about the state of our music.  Since about half of what I’ve listened to is regional and not likely to be listed in I-Tunes new releases, it’s safe to guess I’m listening to less than 1/24 of what we might talk about in a year-end review.  So, while I’m sometimes asked to do those things, I’ve never seen it as a gauge of what mattered most that year.  It’s what mattered most to me, which is, at best, an argument for the importance of some things others might have overlooked or undervalued.

But, then, I do have a desire to sum up the year, in some way that makes sense in terms of how I work.  I started writing about music as an act of rebellion- . . . Read More Here

I’m New Here: How Music Helps Imagine The Past Year

Reflecting on the terrain of the last 12 months,  I’m bringing a lot of baggage and experience with me, but the terrain is really new.  I am new here.  For 20 years or so I’ve been saying something about the economic revolution taking place independently of anyone’s will.  About the new kind of automation that electronics, globalization and robotics has wrought.  About the irreconcilable conflict created between the growing number of people who cannot meet their survival needs within the system of profiteering called capitalism.  About how Wall Street bankers and politics have become intertwined into a system that requires force to maintain itself.  And then came last year, and all of these are on the agenda.  Each of the last twenty years has seemed to last 20 years;  and then, in one year, we seem to have experienced at least 20 years, things have moved so swiftly.  This mix on CD is an ode to that motion. After each selection where I could find a comparable you tube video, that selection is linked.

I’m New Here – Gil Scott-Heron (I’m New Here) – opens this mix because, as the year opened, anyone who had eyes and ears knew that, though we may have been around for over 60 years, we were on a different terrain.  And no matter how far wrong you may have gone, you can always turn around . . . (Gil Scott-Heron’s memoir, The Last Holiday, is scheduled to be released mid-January 2012).  He died May 27, 2011 and I can’t help imagining the serene smile in his voice (on his face in the video) comes from foreknowledge of this year’s events.

“I’m New Here”  — the official video is here:

Africa Must Wake Up – Nas & Damian Marley (Distant Relatives) – the “sleeping sons of Jacob,”  exhorted in this record, have in fact begun to awake.  The allusion could relate to the Jacob’s ladder theme, we are climbing Jacob’s ladder to freedom.

“Africa Must Wake Up” 

A Night in Tunisia – Charlie Parker (composed in 1942 by Dizzy Gillespie)  and it started in Tunisia.  To say that what started resulted from the self immolation of a disgruntled worker is the least insightful sense of what causality means.  In some sense, both Africa Must Wake Up (with its reference to “Yesterday we were Kings”) and this 70 year old jazz standard help us understand that the events of the last year were many years in the brewing.
“A Night In Tunisia” – Charley Parker Septet (live at Town Hall, 1945)

• The next three tunes come from the streets of the cities of northern Africa, in the midst of what we have called the “Arab Spring”:

El Général ft. Mr. Shooma – Ta7ya Tounes  (Tunisia)   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7npf7vO9Hs

Wa2t El Thawrageya  – Revolution Records  (Egypt) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Xr9OS7o48
and an Egyptian Protester singing the same song on Wall Street:

7oukouma By Lotfi double Kanon DK (Algeria)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdQksrlLOlU

(I wanted to put Concierto de Aranjuez – Miles Davis/Gil Evans (Sketches of Spain) in here, in this spot, as a reference to Spain and the Indignados movement.  There was no space on the disc, and I had to cut other tunes for the same reason)

“Concierto de Aranjuez,”  Miles Davis Sextet (Sketches of Spain)

 

• American enters the fray: What is wrong in America?

Who Will Survive in America -  Kanye West/Gil Scott-Heron (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy).  This was first recorded in 1970 as Commentary #1 By Gil Scott-Heron.  It was a biting poem that challenged the “rainbow left coalition” of the SDS, Black Panthers and Young Lords.  In the original piece, Gil suggests that SDS might consider digging a tunnel to China, probably at that time a reference to the growing connections between the New Left and the Chinese revolution, rather than conditions in America.  For this recording Kanye West sampled only part of the original, eliminating the section dealing with SDS.    A first description of what is wrong with America – “America is now Blood and Tears instead of Milk and Honey” — what the rest of the world is challenging us to deal with.  Kanye/Gil says “All I want is a home, a wife and a children and some food to feed them every night.”  When he concludes with the suggestion to “build a new route to China if they’ll have you,” he could be challenging the what became known as the 1% (and the 99%): Who Will survive?

“Comment #1″ — original version (1970)

“Who Will Survive in America (Gil Scott-Heron sampled by Kanye West)

Love Me, I’m a Liberal – Phil Ochs (Phil Ochs in Concert) – This is a classic in the voice of what we now label as “Democrats.”  We’ve seen so many of them approaching the Occupiers attempting to either co-opt or to shame us.  They tell us they are really on our side; or they tell us that our real enemy is “the right.”  And yet year after year we have gotten sucker-punched by the same liberals who promise us the good life and then figure out out to take the goods.

“Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” Phil Ochs.

Rich Man’s World – Immortal Technique (The Martyr)– When the liberal is unable to convince us, then comes the voice of the 1% directly.  ‘I am the 1% . . .politicians in my pocket for a few hundred thousand G’s. . .”  If the language is explicit, the actions of the 1% are at least as explicit: there is nothing here that isn’t being done to us and around the world many times over.

“Rich Man’s World” — Immortal Technique — This video made especially for Occupy is extraordinary, one cut I actually prefer to the audio only CD.

No Pay Day – Vasti Jackson (Stimulus Man) –What is wrong with America is there is no pay day this Friday, and the bills mount up regardless.  Somebody tell me, “if there is a bailout for AT&T, why isn’t there a bailout for you and me.”  This is what has brought the many thousands into the street world wide, this feature of a system gone awry, that cannot make the pay days.

(No you tube version)

Housewife’s Prayer – Pistol Annies  (Hell on Wheels) — What brings many to the street is the end of the job, the end of money, the end of hopes and aspirations and food to feed the children, even, in this case, “my man can’t get no overtime.”  There is no other way . . . Thinking of setting my house on fire.  This could be suicide (as in “going off the deep end”), but it could also be destroying the edifice in order to build something new.

“Housewife’s Prayer” – Pistol Annies

Union Town –Tom Morello (Union Town) Morello, as “The Nightwatchman,” celebrates the battles in Wisconsin, which he locates directly in the strength of the union movement (historically as well as in Madison).  “This is a union town. . . if they come to strip our rights  away we’ll give ‘em hell every time.”  There is a history here that is important:  not that the union is the model for the future, or even the organized expression of the resistance.  The union was the organization established to fight the employer, and as such has always had to fight defensive battles.  How can we divide  “fairly” the spoils between me and “my capitalist”?  The unions of public workers are in a direct contest with the state, and consequently find themselves in a precarious position – one where the right to strike is even more grudgingly accepted by the governmental employer;  where the right to strike may even appear a political question.  And what happens when so much of the public sector is turned over to the private (here in Chicago the battleground is now education)?  How can we go beyond giving them hell every time?  This was composed for and performed in Madison and taken around the country, with Morello on the “Justice Tour.”

“Union Town” — Tom Morello   Use this one to check out some of the many other versions on youtube:

• Occupy Tunes there are so many of them, many downloadable for free and/or visible on youtube.  This is  a small sample.  Plus there are so many artists who have responded to the movement (nationally and locally) that there is no way to encompass them.  Within the last few days I’ve actually gotten Rise Like Lions, a documentary of Occupy footage from around the country that is over an hour long, and introduced by this, the last lines from  “The Mask of Anarchy,” a poem by Shelley written  after a  massacre carried out by the British government at St. Peter’s Field,   Manchester, 1819 but not published until after Shelley’s death. Some 60,000 people, protesting poor economic conditions in the wake of the end of the Napoleonic wars as well as the lack of the right to vote were attacked by the British cavalry.  15 people were killed, 4-700 were injured in what was ironically referred to as the Battle of Peterloo, a sarcastic comparison to Waterloo:

Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you –

Ye are many – they are few.

#OccupyWallStreet – (celestino Anthony?)

(No youtube)

Occupy Wall Street Anthem – DJ Mackboogaloo: this is a Chicago “House Music” version with a repeating background lyric:   “Public Enemy #1:  Wall Street.”

There are so many versions of an anthem, you have a lot to choose from, none of which comes even close to the kind of “house music” of the anthem on the CD.  Here are three: (1) Doodlebug of Digable Planet – (2) DJ Mackboogaloo’s house music accompaniment to Alex Jones “911 was an inside job” “End the Fed” video (includes a little occupy wall street snippet in the title) otherwise a conspiracy fantasy promo; (3) Called a HipHop Anthem, seems to plod too much to be in that genre:

Occupy (We the 99) – Jasiri X  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oxv9kIFJh5Y

We are the 99% – La Guardia  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIV9vTiZsCU

• Where do we go from here?

Color – Mary J Blige (Soundtrack for the film Precious) – until she was about 30, Mary J Blige said, in introducing the song, it seemed to her that she saw in black and white;  and then, with a new vision of where she had been and what was possible, she could now see in color. That experience is what she brought to the process of writing this song for the film. Hence the exclamatory “I can see in color. I never knew I could.”  The old order cannot persist when the rulers cannot rule in the same way and when the ruled begin to envision other possibilities.  Many people are beginning to see in color.  Perhaps they are pastels and not quite vivid yet.  Perhaps they are emerging from what Saramago called blindness and seeing, or even blind while seeing.  The metaphors are many, the truth is deep.

“Color” Mary J Blige: this is a live version in which she explains why the name of the song; and this, in which the sound is much better, but the visuals are nowhere nearly as compelling:

Burn It Down — Los Lobos (Tin Can Trust) “I couldn’t say a word, it’s only dignity I heard, and once I go there is no coming back . . . I’ll burn it down.”   There is only one thing you can do with a system that strips your dignity.  In the metaphoric sense, burn it all down and start anew.  There is no going back. This is finally a move to a society where people care for each other rather than a system that thrives on commodities and profits.

“Burn It Down” — Los Lobos  performed at the Santa Monica studios of KCRW for “Morning Becomes Eclectic.”

I CAN see color.  I always knew I could.

Lew Rosenbaum, December 27, 2011

_________________________________________________________________

What I wanted to put on the disc, but what I couldn’t for space reasons”

Money Craving Blues Blind Alfred Reed        (no you tube)

We Are the Workers   Fisticuffs    (You’ll Not Take Us Alive)  (no you tube)

Our Generation (The Hope Of The World)     John Legend & The Roots  (Wake Up!)

Against All Odds    The Generators  (The Last of the Pariahs)  (no you tube, but this is You Against You from the same album http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3ijmZbx1zA
2

Bruce Springsteen Introduces “Somewhere in America”

The Boss agreed to write the introduction to ‘Someplace Like America.’ (photo: Public domain)

(reposted from Reader Supported News)

‘Someplace Like America’

By Bruce Springsteen, The Washington Post

20 December 11

View Photo Gallery – A new book gave Bruce Springsteen the chance to write his thoughts about three decades of tough times in our nation. The following are excepts of his foreword to “Someplace Like America,” by Washington Post photographer Michael Williamson and writer Dale Maharidge, both Pulitzer Prize winners.

Someplace Like America: Tales From the New Great Depression,” the latest collaboration from Columbia journalism professor Dale Maharidge and Post photographer Michael S. Williamson, tells the story of American industry and its workers – a story the two began to document more than 30 years ago and published in the mid-’80s in “Journey to Nowhere.” That work inspired Bruce Springsteen to compose the lyrics to “Youngstown” and “The New Timer.”

The Boss agreed to write the introduction to “Someplace Like America.” His words are adapted for publication here, along with some of Williamson’s pictures.

had completed most of the “Tom Joad” record when one night, some 15 years ago, unable to sleep, I pulled a book down off my living room shelf. I read it in one sitting, and I lay awake that night disturbed by its power and frightened by its implications. In the next week, I wrote “Youngstown” and “The New Timer.”

That book – “Journey to Nowhere,” by Dale Maharidge and Michael S. Williamson – put real lives, names and faces on statistics we’d all been hearing about throughout the ’80s. People who all their lives had played by the rules, done the right thing and had come up empty, men and women whose work and sacrifice had built this country, who’d given their sons to its wars and then whose lives were marginalized or discarded. I lay awake that night thinking: What if the craft I’d learned was suddenly deemed obsolete, no longer needed? What would I do to take care of my family? What wouldn’t I do?

Without getting on a soapbox, these are the questions Maharidge and Williamson posed with their words and pictures. Men and women struggling to take care of their own in the most impossible conditions and still moving on, surviving.

As we tuck our children into bed at night, this is an America many of us fail to see, but it is a part of the country we live in, an increasing part. I believe a place and a people are judged not just by their accomplishments, but also by their compassion and sense of justice. In the future, that’s the frontier where we will all be tested.

How well we do will be the America we leave behind for our children and grandchildren.

Now, their new book, “Someplace Like America,” takes the measure of the tidal wave 30 years and more in coming, a wave that “Journey” first saw rolling, dark and angry, on the horizon line. It is the story of the deconstruction of the American dream, piece by piece, literally steel beam by steel beam, broken up and shipped out south, east and points unknown, told in the voices of those who’ve lived it. Here is the cost, in blood, treasure and spirit, that the post-industrialization of the United States has levied on its most loyal and forgotten citizens, the men and women who built the buildings we live in, laid the highways we drive on, made things and asked for nothing in return but a good day’s work and a decent living.

It tells of the political failure of our representatives to stem this tide (when not outright abetting it), of their failure to steer our economy in a direction that might serve the majority of hard-working American citizens and of their allowing of an entire social system to be hijacked into the service of the elite. The stories allow you to feel the pounding destruction of purpose, identity and meaning in American life, sucked out by a plutocracy determined to eke out its last drops of tribute, no matter what the human cost. And yet it is not a story of defeat. It also details the family ties, inner strength, faith and too-tough-to-die resilience that carry our people forward when all is aligned against them.

When you read about workers today, they are discussed mainly in terms of statistics (the unemployed), trade (the need to eliminate and offshore their jobs in the name of increased profit) and unions (usually depicted as a purely negative drag on the economy). In reality, the lives of American workers, as well as those of the unemployed and the homeless, make up a critically important cornerstone of our country’s story, past and present, and in that story, there is great honor.

Maharidge and Williamson have made the telling of that story their life’s work. They present these men, women and children in their full humanity. They give voice to their humor, frustration, rage, perseverance and love. They invite us into these stories to understand and allow us to experience the hard times and the commonality of experience that can still be found just beneath the surface of the modern news environment. In giving us back that feeling of universal connectedness, they create room for some optimism that we may still find our way back to higher ground as a country and as a people. As the folks whose voices sing off the book’s pages will tell you, it’s the only way forward.

Woody Guthrie: Redder Than Remembered

Scott Borchert

in the May Monthly Review

Will Kaufman, Woody Guthrie, American Radical (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011) 264 pages, $29.95, hardcover.

On January 18, 2009, two days before Barack Obama’s inauguration, close to half a million people gathered for a free concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. They were sung to and spoken at by a handful of musical artists, actors, politicians, and other prominent figures, including the President Elect and the illustrious Bono. Near the end of the concert, Pete Seeger, his grandson Tao Rodríguez-Seeger, and Bruce Springsteen led the crowd in a rendition of that old patriotic chestnut “This Land Is Your Land.” Naturally, everyone sang along, just as people have in countless classrooms, school pageants, political conventions, and rallies since Woody Guthrie’s most famous song entered the national consciousness in the 1960s.

Who knows what was going through Pete Seeger’s mind at that moment? There he was: the musical highlight of this state-sponsored spectacle, framed by the stars and stripes, and singing what might as well be the unofficial national anthem of the United States. A surprising image, considering that the United States once declared Seeger a dangerous subversive, hauled him in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and sentenced him to ten years in prison for courageously sticking to his First Amendment guns. The sentence was overturned in 1962 but Seeger was blacklisted from major media outlets, and it took years for the stigma to fade—to the extent that it ever did.

And yet, by 2009, Seeger was apparently considered normalized (or perhaps domesticated) enough by elite opinion to be featured at the official inauguration concert. But Seeger had a trick up his sleeve that day. After singing their familiar way from “the ribbon of highway” to “the Gulf Stream waters,” the trio launched into three relatively unknown (and often censored) verses, with Seeger reciting each line loud and clear, just before the others chimed in. They sang about hungry people huddled outside the relief office; they attacked the very concept of private property; they set out on the “freedom highway,” and defied anyone to stop them. In other words, they seized upon the radical message of “This Land Is Your Land” and rehabilitated it in front of what was probably the largest single audience the song has ever had.  [To read more please click here.]

Gil Scott-Heron

Thanks to Rock & Rap Confidential for this notification.

Great clip for “The Bottle” here

May 27, 2011
Gil Scott-Heron, Spoken-Word Musician, Dies at 62

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK (AP) — Musician Gil Scott-Heron, who helped lay the groundwork
for rap by fusing minimalistic percussion, political expression and
spoken-word poetry on songs such as “The Revolution Will Not Be
Televised,” died Friday at age 62.

A friend, Doris C. Nolan, who answered the telephone listed for his
Manhattan recording company, said he died in the afternoon at St. Luke’s
Hospital after becoming sick upon returning from a European trip.

“We’re all sort of shattered,” she said.

Scott-Heron’s influence on rap was such that he sometimes was referred
to as the Godfather of Rap, a title he rejected.

“If there was any individual initiative that I was responsible for it
might have been that there was music in certain poems of mine, with
complete progression and repeating ‘hooks,’ which made them more like
songs than just recitations with percussion,” he wrote in the
introduction to his 1990 collection of poems, “Now and Then.”

He referred to his signature mix of percussion, politics and performed
poetry as bluesology or Third World music. But then he said it was
simply “black music or black American music.”

“Because Black Americans are now a tremendously diverse essence of all
the places we’ve come from and the music and rhythms we brought with
us,” he wrote.

Nevertheless, his influence on generations of rappers has been
demonstrated through sampling of his recordings by artists, including
Kanye West.

Scott-Heron recorded the song that would make him famous, “The
Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” which critiqued mass media, for the
album “125th and Lenox” in Harlem in the 1970s. He followed up that
recording with more than a dozen albums, initially collaborating with
musician Brian Jackson. His most recent album was “I’m New Here,” which
he began recording in 2007 and was released in 2010.

Throughout his musical career, he took on political issues of his time,
including apartheid in South Africa and nuclear arms. He had been shaped
by the politics of the 1960s and the black literature, especially of the
Harlem Renaissance.

Scott-Heron was born in Chicago on April 1, 1949. He was raised in
Jackson, Tenn., and in New York before attending college at Lincoln
University in Pennsylvania.

Before turning to music, he was a novelist, at age 19, with the
publication of “The Vulture,” a murder mystery.

He also was the author of “The Nigger Factory,” a social satire.

Did Robert Johnson Ever Get To Chicago? Dave Marsh Muses on HollerIfYaHearMe

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

100 Years of Robert Johnson

Dave Marsh writes:

Somebody asked if Robert Johnson ever got to Chicago. I looked for the fact in a few places and then realized that what I was going to get was somebody’s version but that it was more complicated than anybody’s version. I’m not sure I have a version, certainly not one I’m married to, but if I did, this is what it would be. [Click on HollerIf to read the rest of this essay]

Carlos Santana: “I Am Here To Give Voice To The Invisible.”

Santana is Booed for Using Baseball’s Civil Rights Game to Speak Out for Civil Rights

Dave Zirin

May 16, 2011  in The Nation

Major League Baseball’s annual Civil Rights Game was poised to be a migraine-inducing exercise in Orwellian irony. Forget about the fact that Civil Rights was to be honored in Atlanta, where fans root for a team called the Braves and cheer in unison with the ubiquitous “tomahawk chop.”

About the Author

Dave Zirin

Bud Selig Carlos Santana Major League Baseball

Forget about the fact that the Braves have been embroiled in controversy since pitching coach Roger McDowell aimed violent, homophobic threats at several fans. Forget that this is a team that has done events with Focus on the Family, an organization that is to Civil Rights what Newt Gingrich is to marital fidelity.

The reason Atlanta was such a brutally awkward setting for a Sunday Civil Rights setting, was because Friday saw the Governor of Georgia, Nathan Deal, sign HR 87, a law that shreds the Civil Rights of the state’s Latino population. Modeled after Arizona’s horrific and unconstitutional SB 1070, HR 87 authorizes state and local police the federal powers to demand immigration papers from people they suspect to be undocumented. Those without papers on request will find themselves behind bars. Civil rights hero, Atlanta’s John Lewis has spoken out forcefully against the legislation saying “This is a recipe for discrimination. We’ve come too far to return to the dark past.”

But there was Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, celebrating civil rights in the Georgia, and chortling excitedly about the 2011 All-Star game in Arizona. In the hands of Selig, irony becomes arsenic. Thank God that Commisioner Selig was stupid enough to choose the Civil Rights Game to honor, among others, the great musician Carlos Santana. Santana was supposed to be the Latino stand-in, a smiling symbol of baseball’s diversity. And maybe, he would even play a song!

But Bud picked the wrong Latino. Carlos Santana took the microphone and said that he was representing all immigrants. Then Santana added, “The people of Arizona, and the people of Atlanta, Georgia, you should be ashamed of yourselves.” In a perfect display of Gov. Nathan Deal’s Georgia, the cheers quickly turned to boos. Yes, Carlos Santana was booed on Civil Rights Day in Atlanta for talking about Civil Rights.

Then in the press box, Santana held an impromptu press conference where he let loose with an improvised speech to rival one of his virtuoso guitar solos. He said, “This law is not correct. It’s a cruel law, actually, This is about fear. Stop shucking and jiving. People are afraid we’re going to steal your job. No we aren’t. You’re not going to change sheets and clean toilets. I would invite all Latin people to do nothing for about two weeks so you can see who really, really is running the economy. Who cleans the sheets? Who cleans the toilets? Who babysits? I am here to give voice to the invisible.”

He went on to say, “Most people at this point they are either afraid to really say what needs to be said, this is the United States the land of the free. If people want the immigration law to keep passing in every state then everybody should get out and just leave the American Indians here. This is about Civil Rights.”

Where was Bud Selig during all this drama? It seems that Selig slunk out of a stadium backdoor in the 5^th inning. If there is one thing Bud has become an expert at, it’s ducking his head when the issues of immigration, civil rights, and Major League Baseball collide. If Selig really gave a damn about Civil Rights, he would heed the words of Carlos Santana. He would move the 2011 All-Star Game out of Arizona. He would recognize that the sport of Jackie Robinson, Roberto Clemente and Curt Flood has an obligation to stand for something more than just using their memory to cover up the injustices of the present. If Bud Selig cared about Civil Rights, he would above all else, have to develop something resembling a spine. But if Bud is altogether unfamiliar with the concept of courage, he received one hell of an object lesson from Carlos Santana.

Democracy Now Interviews Harry Belafonte On Art And Using The Platform You Have

“Sing Your Song”: Harry Belafonte on Art & Politics, Civil Rights & His Critique of President Obama

Interview on Democracy Now! by Amy Goodman. Legendary musician, actor, activist and humanitarian Harry Belafonte joins us for the hour to talk about his battle against racism, his mentor Paul Robeson, the power of music to push for political change, his close relationship with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the U.S. role in Haiti. A new documentary chronicles his life, called Sing Your Song. The son of Jamaican immigrants, Belafonte grew up on the streets of Harlem and Jamaica. In the 1950s, he spearheaded the calypso craze and became the first artist in recording history with a million-selling album. He was also the first African-American musician to win an Emmy. Along with his rise to worldwide stardom, Belafonte became deeply involved in the civil rights movement. One of Dr. King’s closest confidants, he helped organize the March on Washington in 1963. “Going into the South of the United States, listening to the voices of rural black America, listening to the voices of those who sang out against the Ku Klux Klan and out against segregation, and women, who were the most oppressed of all, rising to the occasion to protest against their conditions, became the arena where my first songs were to emerge,” Belafonte tells Democracy Now! [Click here to view the broadcast or to read the transcript]