Utah Phillips' Stories, Songs, and Poems

transcribed by Atsuhiro Lee

*

What I do is I collect stories.  I seek out the elders and garner stories and
songs and poems.  Characterized critically as: "Oh, that's that Sixties stuff."
Like somebody doing old rock-and-roll would be doing "Fifties stuff."  Or,
"This is the Nineties, you know."

I have a good friend in the East.  A good singer, and a good folksinger, a good
song collector, who comes and listens to my shows and says, "You sing a lot
about the past.  You always sing about the past; you can't live in the past,
you know."  And I say to him, "I can go outside and pick up a rock that's older
than the oldest song you know and bring it back here and drop it on your foot."
Now, the past didn't go anywhere, did it?  It's right here, right now - I
always thought that anybody who told me I couldn't live in the past was trying
to get me to forget something that if I remembered it would get 'em in serious
trouble.

No, it's not that - that "that's Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Nineties" - that
whole idea of decade packages.  Things don't happen that way...  No, that, that
packaging of time is a journalistic convenience that they use to trivialize and
to dismiss important events and important ideas.  I defy that.  Time is an
enormous, long river, and I'm standing in it, just as you're standing in it.
My elders are the tributaries, and everything they thought and every struggle
they went through and everything they gave their lives to, and every song they
created, and every poem that they laid down flows down to me - and if I take
the time to ask, and if I take the time to see, and if I take the time to reach
out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs.  I can reach down
into that river and take out what I need to get through this world.

*

speaking while strumming a guitar onstage:

At the onset, those of you who may have heard me should probably turn to those
who may have not and calmly reassure them that this is in fact what happens
when I sit onstage.  Not much more.  This is about it.  You'll notice no sudden
or dramatic change in neither my instrumental or vocal attack, as it were.

This is nonetheless an American folk song.  Did you recognize it as such?  Of
course you would, you're folkies.  You don't hear 'em much anymore, don't hear
'em on your AM radio, huh?  Folksingers hardly ever sing 'em.  That's cause
they're boring.  Folk music is boring.  "Black fall, the die doe, blow ye winds
high ho," hell, that's boring, but!  I am a folksinger; this is a folk music
organization; you are ostensibly the folk, nest pas?  That means we own this
song together, right?  We have thereby incurred certain social obligations
which we will faithfully discharge, right?  We're gonna sing this damn song
together, boring or not!

*

I'm still in Nevada City, California, up there in the foodhills of the Sierra.
Call 'em foodhills cause it's spelled like that.  Oh, the old gold mining town
- I've talked to some of you about that - twenty-seven hundred people there,
one of the forty-niners' towns.  And I also told you about the only social life
in town being the, the Books of Harmony New Age Bookstore, where people go down
in the evening and channel dolphins, and Martians - it's a new-age
chronosynclastic infindibulum, or epicenter, as it were, Nevada City,
California.

Well, I was gone for a bit on one of the trips since I saw you last and I got
back, and my wife had bought the bookstore.  Um, so I am now ostensibly part
proprietor of a new-age bookstore in Nevada City, California, hehehehe, can you
picture that?  Whee!  Well, and I'm open to all those things.  If you live in
California, you've got to be open; if you're not they pry you open.

And I read as much as I can cause they got all the new men's literature in
there.  Most of my men friends belong to men's - Robert Bly's - drumming
circles.  Do they do that here?  Healthy!  They're out in the, in the
wilderness, caterwauling and flailing away at those things, and dragging their
scrotums through the underbrush.  It's healthy, I suppose...

We got narps, you got narps around here?  New-age rural professionals?  Out
cruising the backroads in their old green carryalls with their car stereos,
blaring meditation music out into the wilderness.  It's a conscience.  Whole
place lightning-struck by the peripatetic ruminations of the Tibetan ruling
class in exile, ahh.  Lot of Buddhists around there.

Meanwhile this very minute, old Jesse McVay the welldigger - no one knows how
old he is, lived in that county all of his life - is sitting at the bar of the
national hotel this very minute, looking at the freaks out in the street, and
muttering under his breath:

"Now matter how new-age you get, old age gonna kick your ass."

*

We never traveled together at all, you know, since the kids been little they've
always known that I vanished from their lives periodically.  And they never
really had any idea of what it is that I do.  What do I do?  If I don't know
why should they?

Yeah, Brandon, the fourteen-year-old, he got to travel with me, during the
summer.  But we got a chance to talk to each other as adults, you know, as -
well - as adults, instead of just father and son.  We left Boston - we were
headed up to the Left Bank Cafe in Blue Hill, Maine - and Brandon, just above
Marble Head, turned to me and he said, "How did you get to be like that?"

It's a fair question.

I knew what he meant, but he didn't have all the language to say exactly what
he meant - what he meant to say was: "Why is it that you are fundamentally
alienated from the entire institutional structure of society?"

And I said, "Well, I've never been asked that, you know.  Now don't listen to
the radio and don't talk to me for half an hour while I think about it."  So we
drove and talked - we were on Highway 1 because it was pretty and close to the
water.  Got up toward the Maine border and there was a picnic area, off to the
side some picnic tables.  It was a bright, clear day.  So I pulled into their
parking lot; we sat down at the picnic tables, and I said, "Now, sit down, I
want to tell you a story, cause I've thought about it."

So I sat down and said, "You know, I was over in Korea."  And he said, "Yeah,
I've always wondered about that, did you shoot anybody?"  And I said, as
honestly as I could, "I don't know.  But that's not the story," I said, this is
what I was telling him:

I was up at Kumori Gap there by the Imjin River.  There were about seventy-five
thousand Chinese soldiers on the other side and they all wanted me out of
there, with every righteous reason that you could think of.  I had long since
figured out that I was the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time
for the most specious of reasons.

But there I was - my clothing was rotting on my body, every exotic mold in the
world was attacking my clothing and my person, my boots had big holes in them
from the rot.  I wanted to swim in the Imjin River, and get that feeling of
death, that feeling of rot off of me.  The Chinese soldiers were on the other
side; they were swimming, they were having a wonderful time.  But there was a
rule, a regulation against swimming in the Imjin River.  I thought that was
foolish, but then a young Korean fellow - cartworked for us as a carpenter - by
the name of Young Shik Han.  All of his family had been killed off in the war.

Well, he said to me in what English he had, "You know, when we get married
here, the young married couple moves in with the elders, they move in with the
grandparents.  But there's nothing growing, everything's been destroyed.
There's no food.  So [when] the first baby's born, the oldest, the old man,
goes out with a jug of water and a blanket and sits on the bank of the Imjin
River and waits to die.  He sits there until he dies, and then will roll down
the bank and into the river, and his body will be carried out to the sea.  And
we don't want you to swim in the Imjin River because our elders are floating
out to sea."

That's when it began to crumble for me, you know.  That's when I, well, I ran
away, and not just from that, I ran away from the blueprint for self-
destruction I had been handed as a man, for violence in excess.  For sexual
excess, for racial excess.  We had a commanding officer, who said of the G.I.
babies fathered by G.I.'s and Korean mothers that the Korean government
wouldn't care for so they were in these orphanages, and he said: "Well, as sad
as that is, someday this'll really help the Korean people cause it'll raise the
intelligence level."  That's what we were dealing with, you know.

So I ran away.  I ran down to Seoul City, down toward Askom.  Not to the Army.
I ran away to a place called the Korea House.  It was a Korean civilians'
[group] reaching out to G.I.'s to give them some better vision of who they were
than what we were getting up at the divisions.  And they hid me for three
weeks.  Late one night - I didn't have any clothes that would fit me - late one
night, it was a stormy, stormy night, the rain falling in sheets, I could go
out, cause they figured no one would see me.  We walked through the mud and the
rain - Seoul City was devastated.  And they took me to a concert at the Aiwa
Women's University.  Large auditorium with shell holes in the ceiling and the
rain pouring through the holes, and clyde lights on the stage hooked up to car
batteries.  This wasn't the USO, this was the Korean Students' Association.

The person that they invited to sing - I was the only white person there - the
person that they invited to sing was Marian Anderson, great black operatic
soprano who had been on tour in Japan, you see.  There she was, singing "Oh
Freedom" and "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen."  And I watched her through
the rain coming through the ceiling and thought back to Salt Lake [City].

My father, Sid, who ran the Capitol Theatre - it was a movie house but it had
been an old vaudeville house and he wanted to bring back live performances back
to the Capitol - in 1948 he invited Marian Anderson to comed and sing there.  I
remembered we went to the, to the train station to pick her up and took her to
the biggest hotel in town, The Hotel Utah, but they wouldn't let her stay
there, because she was black.

And I remembered my father's humiliation and her humiliation, as I saw her
singing in there, through the rain.  And I realized right then, I said,
"Brandon, right then I knew that it was all wrong, and it all had to change.
And that that change had to start with me."

*

I learned in Korea that I would never again in my life abdicate to somebody
else my right and my ability to decide who the enemy is.

Got back from Korea; I was so mad at what I'd seen and done I wasn't sure I
could ever live in the country again.  I got on the freight trains up in
Everett, north of Seattle, and kind of cruised the country for two years makin'
up songs, but I was drunk most of the time and forgot most of those.

I'd heard that there was a house in Salt Lake City by the roper yards... where
there was a clothing barrel and free food.  So I, I got off the train there.  I
was headed for Salt Lake anyway.

I found that house right where they said it was, but most of all I found this,
this wiry old man, sixty-nine years old. Tougher'n nails, heart of gold, fella
by the name of Ammon Hennacy.  Anybody know that name?  Ammon Hennacy?  One
of Dorothy Day's people, the Catholic workers, during the Thirties they started
houses of hospitality all over the country; there're about eighty of 'em now.

Ammon Hennacy was one of those; he'd come west to start this house I'd found
called The Joe Hill House of Hospitality.  Ammon Hennacy was a Catholic
anarchist, pacifist, draft-dodger of two World Wars, tax refuser, vegetarian,
one-man revolution in America - I think that about covers it.

First thing he said, after he got to know me, he said: "You know you love the
country.  You love it.  You come in and out of town on those trains singin'
songs about different places and beautiful people.  You know you love the
country; you just can't stand the government.  Get it straight."  He quoted
Mark Twain to me: "Loyalty to the country always; loyalty to the government
when it deserves it."  It was an essential distinction I had been neglecting.

And then he had to reach out and grapple with the violence, but he did that
with all the people around him.  These second World War vets, you know, on
medical disabilities and all drunked up; the house was filled with violence,
which Ammon, as a pacifist, dealt with - every moment, every day of his life.
He said, "You got to be a pacifist."  I said, "Why?"  He said, "It'll save your
life."  And my behavior was very violent then.

I said, "What is it?"  And he said, "Well I can't give you a book by Gandhi -
you wouldn't understand it.  I can't give you a list of rules that if you sign
it you're a pacifist."  He said, "You look at it like booze.  You know,
alcoholism will kill somebody, until they finally get the courage to sit in a
circle of people like that and put their hand up in the air and say, 'Hi, my
name's Utah, I'm an alcoholic.'  And then you can begin to deal with the
behavior, you see, and have the people define it for you whose lives you've
destroyed."

He said, "It's the same with violence.  You know, an alcoholic, they can be dry
for twenty years; they're never gonna sit in that circle and put their hand up
and say, 'Well, I'm not alcoholic anymore' - no, they're still gonna put their
hand up and say, 'Hi, my name's Utah, I'm an alcoholic.'  It's the same with
violence.  You gotta be able to put your hand in the air and acknowledge your
capacity for violence, and then deal with the behavior, and have the people
whose lives you messed with define that behavior for you, you see.  And it's
not gonna go away - you're gonna be dealing with it every moment in every
situation for the rest of your life."

I said, "Okay, I'll try that," and Ammon said "It's not enough!"

I said: "Oh."

He said, "You were born a white man in mid-twentieth century industrial
America.  You came into the world armed to the teeth with an arsenal of
weapons.  The weapons of privilege, racial privilege, sexual privilege,
economic privilege.  You wanna be a pacifist, it's not just giving up guns and
knives and clubs and fists and angry words, but giving up the weapons of
privilege, and going into the world completely disarmed.  Try that."

That old man has been gone now twenty years, and I'm still at it.  But I figure
if there's a worthwhile struggle in my own life, that, that's probably the one.
Think about it.

I'd always wanted to write a song for that old man.  He never wanted one about
him - he's that way - but something mulched up out of his thought, his
anarchist thought.  Anarchist in the best sense of the word.  Oh so many times
he stood up in front of Federal District Judge Ritter, that old fart, and he'd
be picked up for picketing illegally, and he never plead innocent or guilty -
he plead anarchy.

And Ritter'd say, "What's an anarchist, Hennacy?" and Ammon would say, "Why an
anarchist is anybody who doesn't need a cop to tell him what to do."  Kind of a
fundamentalist anarchist, huh?

And Ritter'd say, "But Ammon, you broke the law, what about that?" and Ammon'd
say, "Oh, Judge, your damn laws the good people don't need 'em and the bad
people don't obey 'em so what use are they?"

Well I lived there for eight years, and I watched him, really watched him, and
I discovered watching him that anarchy is not a noun, but an adjective.  It
describes the tension between moral autonomy and political authority,
especially in the area of combinations, whether they're going to be voluntary
or coercive.  The most destructive, coercive combinations are arrived at
through force.

Like Ammon said, "Force is the weapon of the weak."

*

Mark Twain said, "Those of you who are inclined to worry have the widest
selection in history."  Why complain?  Try to do something about it - you know,
it's [been] goin' on nine months now, since I decided that I was gonna declare
that I am a candidate for the presidency of the United States.  Oh yes, I'm
going to run.

Shopped around for a party.  Well, I looked at the Republicans.  Decided
talking to a conservative is like talking to your refridgerator.  You know, the
light goes on, the light goes off, it's not gonna do anything that isn't built
into it.  But I'm gonna talk to a conservative any more than I talk to my damn
refridgerator.  Working for the Democratic party, now, that's kind of like
rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

So I created my own party: it's called the Sloth and Indolence Party.  I'm
running as an anarchist candidate in the best sense of that word.  I've studied
the presidency carefully.  I have seen that our best presidents were the do-
nothing presidents: Millard Fillmore, Warren G. Harding.  When you have a
president who does things we are all in serious trouble.  If he does anything
at all: if he gets up at night to go to the bathroom, somehow, mystically,
trouble will ensue.

I guarantee that if I am elected, I will take over the White House, hang out,
shoot pool, scratch my ass, and not do a damn thing.

Which is to say: if you want something done, don't come to me do it for you,
you gotta get together and figure out how to do it yourselves.  Is that a deal?

*

That's when [Fry Pan Jack] told me - you know, he'd been tramping since 1927 -
he said, "I told myself in '27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor,
I will henceforth cease to work."  Hah!  You don't have to go to college to
figure these things out, no sir!  He said, "I learned when I was young that the
only true life I had was the life of my brain.  But if it's true the only real
life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain
to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption
that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?"
Fat chance!

He was old enough to remember the sleigh rods under the boxcars, riding the
rods.  Fry Pan Jack; the two bums.

the bum on the rods is hunted down as an enemy of mankind
the other is driven around to his club, is fatted, wined, and dined

and they who curse the bum on the rods as the essence of all that's bad
will greet the other with a winning smile and extend the hand so glad

the bum on the rods is a social flea who gets an occasional bite
the bum on the plush is a social leech, bloodsucking day and night

the bum on the rods is a load so light that his weight we scarcely feel
but it takes the labor of dozens of folks to furnish the other a meal

as long as we sanction the bum on the plush, the other will always be there
but rid ourselves of the bum on the plush, and the other will disappear

and make an intelligent, organized kick: get rid of the wasted crush
don't worry about the bum on the rods - get rid of the bum on the plush

*

We the American people are enormously wealthy.  You know that?  Who owns all of
those trees in the national forest?  This is not a rhetorical question.  We do!
Who owns all of that offshore oil you read about in the newspaper, huh?  We do!
Who owns all of those minerals under the federal land?  We do!  It's public
property, you know.  But we elect people to go to Washington - who are those
assholes?  What have we gotten ourselves into now?  They go to Washington, they
lease off what we own - public property - to private companies, to sell us back
our own stuff for the sake of a greasy buck!  That's dumb!


*

I brought my daughter, Morrigan Bell - she was eleven years old - I brought her
back East during the summer.  We traveled around a good bit here and there, and
again it was the sort of thing where she had never traveled with me at all.  It
was quite different; she's quiet - lighthearted, but she doesn't need to be
entertained all the time, she can really take care of herself.

I wanted her to particularly meet her godmother, Dorothea Brownell, in Saratoga
Springs; who she and Harriet her sister, elegant Victorian women, befriended me
many years ago in Saratoga and always gave me a place to stay.  They were
antiquarians of the first order; antique women of the first order.

And it was delightful going to Greenwich, Connecticutt, while Dorothea was in
the country, because they had to give up the big house when Harriet died.
[Was] looking out the window seeing Dorothea who was eighty-three and Morrigan
my daughter on the bench there, and watched Dorothea start teaching her how to
make lace.  She's a wonderful artist and makes beautiful lace.  Well,
Dorothea's in the hospital right now; I'm gonna visit her on Wednesday before I
go over to Amherst, the pioneer valley.  A fine, fine teacher.

Now you see, I'm a, I'm a constant source of embarrassment to my daughter.  Why
are teenage kids so conservative?  I don't do that to them; we don't do that to
them, do we?  I mean, how?  Where?  What?  I act out a lot, see, and I mortify
her in public places, and I don't mean to but she sure gets mad at me.

I carry things around with me to kind of rag people, um, well let's see.  God,
well, I wouldn't leave home without my cockroach.  I always have my roach with
me.  There's a rubber cockroach; it's a tramp roach, Fry Pan Jack calls that a
tramp roach.  He gave that to me.  He says, "You know, if you're poor, and you
haven't got any money, you're out on the street and you're hungry, you, you go
into a restaurant with this, and you put it in the bottom of a bowl of soup,
and then you eat down to it and say: 'Eccch!  What's that?' and you storm out,
and you say, 'I'm not gonna pay for that!' and you leave."

Save you a lot of money!  That little jewel'll save you a lot of money!  Little
feelers sticking out the side of a sandwich, god, you say, eat half of it, say,
"Look at that!"  Leave it!  In the hands of an unscrupulous child, can you
imagine what you could do with that in the lunchroom at your school?  You could
put that in your, in your jello mold, god, you know, and some monitor or
teacher's gonna come by and say, "Augh!  Look at that!  What is that?"  And you
look at it and say: "Oh, it's a cockroach!  Shlurrrp!"  You've got to mess with
people, day and night, you have to mess with people!  You gotta mess with 'em!
They just kind of sink into a cryonic torpor and they're never seen again, god!

I have my dice for people I don't like - gypsy fortune-telling dice.  I like
everybody, those people who know me know I try to get along with everybody, you
know, but over the summer I had some fairly serious heart problems, so I
decided that I couldn't afford to like everybody anymore, you know?  I went on
a low social cholesterol diet.  No more fatheads.

And so, I run into one of 'em - somebody I don't like - and say, "I'm gonna
tell your fortune with these gypsy fortune-telling dice," and I roll the dice,
and they're blank.  There's no spots on 'em.  And say, "God, I hate to tell you
this, but you don't have any fortune.  No future.  That's it for you.  Hehehe!"

We were in the Grand Union, [a] supermarket, getting some food, over by
Greenwich or Cambridge, one or the other, with old Dorothea Brownell,
Morrigan's godmother - now this is education!  A little kid was fussing at the
checkout counter, stuck in one of those baskets - it's all the lights in those
places, make kids crazy, we all know that, don't we?  Well, and the kid was
fussy, and the parents were ragging on the kid, and... I get them to laugh, and
the parents laugh, and the checkout person laughs.

Morrigan starts punching me in the side, and said - yelling at me! - she said,
"Why can't you be normal?"

And old Miss Brownell rapped Morrigan on her shin - rudely - with her cane, and
said: "He is normal - what you meant to say is 'average.'"

That's education!

*

I was invited to the State Young Writers' Conference out at Cheney, which was a
Eastern Washington university.  And I didn't want to embarrass my son, you
know, and I was gonna behave myself cause I had to live there then - it was a
chore.  But I got on the stage - it was an enormous auditorium; there were
twenty-seven hundred young faces out there, none of them with any prospects
anybody could detect - and off to the side of the stage was the suit-and-tie
crowd of people from the school district and the principals, and the, the main
speaker following me was from the Chamber of Commerce.

Well something inside of me snapped.

And I got to the microphone, and I looked out over that multitude of faces and
I said something to the effect of:

"You're about to be told one more time that you're America's most valuable
natural resource.  Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources?
Have you seen them strip mine?  Have you seen a clear-cut in a forest?  Have
you seen a polluted river?  Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural
resource!  They're gonna strip mine your soul!  They're gonna clear-cut your
best thoughts for the sake of profit, unless you learn to resist, cause the
profit system follows the path of least resistance, and following the path of
least resistance is what makes the river crooked!  Hmph!"

Well there was great gnashing of teeth and rending of garments - mine.  I was
borne to the door, screaming epithets over my shoulder, something to the effect
of: "Make a break for it, kids!"  "Flee to the wilderness!"  The one within, if
you can find it.

Well, I wrote them a nice letter though, as I oozed out of the state, headed
for Nevada City.  I sent it to their little literary magazine.  I respect kids.
I love especially little kids.  Little kids are assholes.  But they're their
own assholes, see, it's when they, when you grow up and become somebody else's
asshole we're all in trouble, you know, like bankers or B-52 pilots and such.

*

Ask a kid: "Who are your heroes?"  Chances are they'll give you the names of
made-up people.  Huh?  He-Man.  Barbie.  I don't understand it about heroes, it
really bothers- what happened to the time when heroes were flesh-and-blood
people?  You know, people like Emma Goldman or Elizabeth Gurley Flynn or Mother
Jones or Big Bill Heywood or Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, great boxers, you know,
Joe Lewis.  Grandparents!  What's wrong with your grandparents being heroes?

See, my mother, she worked for the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations]
as a labor organizer, and she made sure that we had appropriate heroes, flesh-
and-blood people.  She would clips columns out of The Cleveland Plain Dealer, a
good labor paper in its day, [and] paste 'em in scrapbooks.  We could take it
to school to share with our kids at the equivalent of show-and-tell.

Scrapbooks were mainly filled with clippings about bank robbers.  She seemed to
favor bank robbers.  Called them class heroes.  Didn't understand at the time
what she meant - I do now.

*

I was in Chicago, several years ago.  I was invited to play at a nightclub.  At
a nightclub?  Can you imagine that?  Can you see me in a nightclub?  It was the
old Quiet Knight upon Belmont Street, across from Cliff Raven's Tattoo Parlor.
Well, I went up there at three o'clock in the afternoon to The Quiet Knight
cause I was scared.  Fought my way past the guard dogs, got up there.

The janitor had taken the garbage out - he was in the big hall by himself, just
sitting in the, just under the, just a nightlight up on the stage, an older man
- he was sitting there playing The Moonlight Sonata, beautifully, quietly.  I
stood in the shadows; he didn't know I was there.  Great shock of white hair
standing back on his head, deeply incised lines on his face.  Looked closely
and saw he was just playing with the one hand - the other was a stump off to
about here.

Well he began to pound the piano with the one good hand and in a rumbling
baritone voice, started to sing "Freiheit" - "Freedom."  The song of the
Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.  The war that if we'd gotten
involved in it there might not have been a second World War.  He sang "Los
Quatros Generales," "The Jarama Valley," "White Cliffs of Gandeza."  Powerful
music of the Spanish Civil War.

Well that was Eddie Balchowsky.  Eddie Balchowsky had been a concert pianist,
brilliant pianist, as a young man, but he went, joined the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade, and went to Spain to fight against Franco of the fascists.  Crossing
the Ebro he got his arm blown off.  Well they put him in the field hospital on
morphine, which turned him into a junkie for the next thirty years of his life.
He haunted the alleys of Chicago a mad poet, derelict, drug addict, alcoholic.

He began to put himself back together.  Got the job at the Quiet Knight so he
could practice the piano; Richard Harding was good about that.  And not just to
learn songs of the Civil War, but he learned Haydn's and Lizst's left-hand
variations, he could play the Bach Shacon [?] with one hand, and beautifully.
His daughter Reina just sent me recordings, tapes that he made for her I'd
never heard; he could play, oh, a whole classical repertoire on the piano, with
one hand.  Chopin, that was his favorite.  Well, he taught me powerful things
about endurance, about holding on.

I left Chicago; week later I got a call - said Eddie Balchowsky had died.  So I
sat down and made him up a death song.

Week later I got a call from Eddie.

First thing I asked him was, "Hey Ed, where're you callin' from?"

Well, he said he was calling from Chicago!  I said, "Hell, dead, or in Chicago,
it's all the same to me, fella."  And a week after that I was at the Quiet
Knight sitting on a barstool with Eddie Balchowsky himself sitting across from
me: Had us a chance to sing him his death song.  He was amused.

Well it was just a while ago that Ed Balchowsky at the age of seventy-four was
found on the subway tracks in Chicago.  They just had a museum show of his art
and poetry and music, and recollections from old comrades all over the country,
and there I sang his death song.

*

God, what some people have on their front lawns nowadays.  I know a family of
flamingos living in L.A. that have a plastic Italian on their front lawn.

*

I hate chickens.  One more chicken I eat is one less chicken I have to share my
oxygen with.  I limit my bigotry to chickens, racists, homophobes, and the
French.

*

I was traveling through Illinois when I was invited to stop and sing at a
memorial, there in the little town of Mount Olive.  Now, who of note in
American history is buried in the cemetary at Mount Olive, Illinois?  I'll give
you a hint: it was a woman, it was the Union Miners' Cemetary.  D'you have it
yet?  Mary Harris.  Mary Harris Jones.  Mother Jones.

It's hard for the mind to encompass a life that embraced the presidencies
between Andrew Jackson and Herbert Hoover; why, when Mother Jones was a little
girl there were people still alive who remembered the Revolutionary War.  And
she died on the eve of the New Deal.  Her millinery shop burned down in the
Chicago fire, and she had heard Abraham Lincoln speak - in person.

Mostly though, Mother Jones was the miners' friend.  Down in Kentucky,
Tennessee, West Virginia.  Well, the men'd be organizing the underground
workers, the miners; Mother Jones had already organized their wives and led
them over the snow-covered game trails down into the hollows, where, armed with
mops and brooms, they drove the scabs out of the coal pits.

Now, Mother Jones wasn't an organizer; she was an agitator.  Which meant often
enough she was hated as much by the organizers as by the bosses.  One time
Mother Jones was out in Colorado at the great Ludlow strike.  Now that was a
strike to enforce the eight-hour day, which the state of Colorado had made a
law; but they couldn't enforce it, cause Rockefeller owned the militia.  Now,
the governor promised not to send the militia into the coal fields, but he
lied, and he did.  Mother Jones was in the union hall down there at Ludlow and
word came that the militia had entered the coal fields.  Well, she leapt up and
she screamed, "Let's go get the sons of bitches!" and she stormed out.  She
didn't look to see if anybody was following her.

Nobody was following her.  She just flounced up the road alone and confronted
the militia.  And that was the year that president Theodore Roosevelt called
Mother Jones "the most dangerous woman in America."  And she was eighty-three
years old.  That's some kind of dangerous.

*

Like old Campbell said, freedom is something you assume; then you wait for
somebody to try to take it away from you.  The degree to which you resist is
the degree to which you are free.

*

Jack Miller kept the senior citizens' center for a long time up there in
Seattle, Washington.  Jack had spent most of his life in the forest, as a
logger or a "timberbeast," they called 'em in those days, cause you were
treated like an animal.  There were no bunkhouses - he recalled sleeping on the
ground with his fellow workers, with their wet clothes in the rain[y] forest
piled in a heap next to the fire, hoping that they would be dry by the time to
go to work the next day.  They spoke many different languages in the forest,
and they could hardly talk to each other - it was just like Lawrence.  He said
most of 'em had never been to school; most of 'em couldn't read or write.

Jack Miller could remember The Verona.  There was a shingle-weavers' strike up
in Everett, Washington - it was called The Everett Massacre; it's another one
of those that didn't make it into the history books.  The Wobblies [members of
the Industrial Workers of the World, an international workers' union], they
chartered a steamlaunch called The Verona, and they had it sailed up there to
Everett bringing strike relief; and as the boat sailed into the pier, Sheriff
McGray had ringed the whole pier with armed deputies.  He just deputized every
drunk and every bar in town and put a rifle in their hand.  Well, they
surrounded the boat, and when they lowered the gangplank, Sheriff McGray walked
to the end of it and said, "Who are your leaders here?"  And they shouted back
with one voice: "We are all leaders here."

Well that scared the tar out of the law, you know, and they began shooting;
those deputies began shooting.  A lot of those Wobblies were killed.  Some of
the deputies were killed in the crossfire, though, so when the Wobblies - those
that survived - made it back to Seattle, they were arrested, and they were
thrown in the [local] County Jail on the charge of murder.  Whole bunch of 'em.

Well, that jail was an all-steel jail - it was the newest affair, all made out
of steel.  It had just barely opened, so the heat wasn't on and there was no
blankets and you couldn't get any smokes.  So, those Wobblies, they passed a
note from one cell block to the other, and then by common consent, the next
day, they were all gathered in the middle of each cell block.  And when the
noon whistle blew, they began to jump up and down simultaneously; up and down,
up and down, singing all the time, and finally they hit the resonating
frequency of that jail and cracked the south wall.  They broke the jail.

And Jack Miller said, "Thus proving, everlastingly, what a union is: a way to
get things done together that you can't get done alone."

"Armed only with our sense of degradation as human beings, we came together and
organized, and changed the condition of our lives."

*

"i will not obey"

the new ruling party is holding the aces
the rest of the cards are all missing faces
i'm sorry i can't know you today
what can one say?
i will not obey

give us your sons and give us your daughters
no one is safe or immune from the slaughter
how indifference makes then rage
what can one say?
i will not obey

national guard or freedom fighters
all houses belong to cigarette lighters
but who hides in the smoke?
what can one say?
i will not obey

better perhaps to perish outside
of the bunkers where our generals hide
i turn away and spit
what can one say?
i will not obey

give us the minds of your children to learn
the substance of books we have not yet burned
but can they read the sky for rain?
what can one say?
i will not obey

soon all tyrants will feel our impatience
we choose to create our own combinations
i was always willing to agree
what can one say?
i will not obey

the essence of contract is agreement
not coercion or obedience
and agreement is sacred
what can one say?
i will not obey

there're so few wars of people's liberation
for the people have so seldom risen; only the armed faction
listen, the armed faction lies
they recreate the state through their action
when the people rise
it is not they, but the state, which dies

i sing this song for the prisoners' release
most of all now for the new state police
you see, the guns have changed hands - again
what can one say?
i will not obey

*

These old songs, these old stories - why tell them?  What do they mean?

When I went to high school - that's about as far as I got - reading my U.S.
History textbook, well, I got the history of the ruling class.  I got the
history of the generals and the industrialists, and the presidents who didn't
get caught.  How 'bout you?

I got the history of the people who owned the wealth of the country, but none
of the history of the people that created it, you know?  So when I went out to
get my first job, I went out armed with somebody else's class background - they
never gave me any tools to understand or to begin to control the condition of
my labor, and that was deliberate, wasn't it?  Huh?  They didn't want me to
know this, they didn't.  That's why this stuff isn't taught in the history
books, cause we're not supposed to know it.  Understand that.

No, if I wanted a true history of where I came from, as a member of the working
class, I had to go to my elders.  Many of them, their best working years before
pensions or Social Security, gave their whole lives to the mines, to the wheat
harvest, to the logging camps, to the railroad.  Got nothing for it, just
fetched up on the skids living on short money, mostly drunk all the time.  But
they led those extraordinary lives that can never be lived again, and in the
living of them, they gave me a history that is more profound, more beautiful,
more powerful, more passionate, and ultimately more useful than the best damn
history book I ever read.

And I've said so often before: the long memory is the most radical idea in
America.

*

The St. George Hotel - Santa Cruz, California.  Oh, it was a big palace of a
hotel in its day, but, fallen on hard times, it became the flophouse.  Many
times I walked down the dark, dank halls of that hotel, smelling of old tea
bags and urine.  The halls, I mean.

Get down to room twenty-four - there was a poster on that door, a faded old
poster of an old, old man, wearing a bowler hat with sleeve garters, hunched
over a musical saw.  And underneath, in bold black letters, it said: "Tom
Scribner - Musician and Revolutionary."  I thought, "Whoa!  Somebody who knows
who he is!  Why, that's like gold!"

It was Tom Scribner in there, all right.  Tom started in the forest in 1916,
and every place he went in the forest he took a little printing machine, cause
he knew that knowledge was power, and he would run out underground newspapers
in the logging camps: The Redwood Ripsaw Review, The Lumberjack News.  He was
always getting busted for it, too; he was told to hit the skids and walk out of
the forest.

Skids?  Put this word back in your head.  Up in the Northwest they would cut a
logging road through the forest, line it with saplings, hooks the chokers onto
the big logs behind horses and skid them out.  See, down the skid road.  The
towns, a tent town built up alongside the skid road, and eventually became the
cities; the first one was Seattle.  The oldest part of any town is that skid
road - shortened, in our time, to skid row.  But that's where that comes from:
the old logging skid road.

Well Tom, Tom Scribner was a red.  He never got a pension, he never got Social
Security.  He lived in the flophouse hotel, the St. George, and he played the
musical saw on the streets in the gin mills and in the pizza parlors, you see.
And he became a great teacher to many of us.  I can call Tom Scribner up any
time of the night or the day, and they'd only one pay phone on his floor;
somebody would have to go down and pound on his door.  He was in there, in the
dark, lying on the bed - he didn't use a mattress, he was just on the springs -
chain-smoking Camels, and he had emphysema in both lungs, which was a bizarre
kind of courage.

Well they'd roust him out; he would hobble down the hall, pick up the receiver
of the phone, swear at whoever was on the other end for being exhumed from his
room, and I'd finally say, "Tom, Tom!" - this was on my nickel - "Tom, slow
down a minute!  It's Utah, I got a question for ya."

He spoke that workers' shorthand, that sort of slices the fat off of any kind
of argument.  One time I said over the phone, "Tom, I'm in a debate over here
at the Unitarian Church on bringing back the military draft; they're going to
try to bring back the military draft so I'm debating it.  Now, you tell me what
you think."

Well, there was a long pause.  Then the voice come back at me over the wires.
"Nnuh.  When I started in the forest, most of my workmates was Scandahoovians:
Norwegians, Danes, Fins, Swedes.  Most of 'em left the old country fleeing
conscription to fight another dumb European war.  Yeah, the wealth of the West
was built on the backs of draft dodgers.  It's an American institution -
deserves to be honored."

And I don't have to think about that anymore; it's all been thought about!

(END)