Utah Has Left the Trade!
Pete Seeger, Dar Williams & the Folk Community
Come to Rosendale In Support of Utah Phillips
Community Center in Rosendale
Sunday, April 20, 2PM
Story by Gary Alexander
"You bet I do! You're darn tootin' I do!" he said when asked if he had
any thoughts on the health care situation in America, prompting
reflection on who else could credibly drop a phrase like that these
days.
Although a guy named "Utah" in a town called Nevada City in the State of
California was feeling "a little rocky at the moment" on Sunday, his
voice on the phone came out in the mountains of New York as clear and
strong as ever when he spoke about the people staging a benefit in his
honor at the Community Center in Rosendale.on Sunday, April 20, at 2pm.
(The show is headlined by our national treasure
Pete Seeger
and
Dar Williams, along with the
Flames of Discontent,
Sarah Underhill
and the
High Meadow Larks,
Redwood Moose,
Jude Roberts
& Lily McCabe, and
Woodstock's
Norm Wennet.)
"I'm living with my wife Joanna in this old gold mining town of about
2800 people up in the foothills of the Sierra," Utah explained. "We live
on the edge of town on a rural lane in an old grove of cedar and oak
trees that's never been logged. It's a very small house but it suits us
just fine." Even on a "rocky" afternoon?
"That's the way it goes, kind of like a roller coaster but I did get out
to speak in church today," said the legendary performer of his excursion
Sunday to oblige a request from a new minister at the nearby Unitarian
Church he had helped to found. Recovering from a recent attack of gout
which periodically attends the condition of congestive heart failure
that underlies the reason for the fund-raiser, Utah was one of three
charter members she, (the minister), had asked to speak briefly about
the basis of their spiritual life. "That's something I do very, very
seldom but I had a few words."
By reputation, any time Utah Phillips stands to speak is an occasion.
Known around the world for the monologues and tales woven into and
around his songs, Red House, a leading folk music label, has even
released a Phillips CD (The Moscow Hold) of mostly spoken word which
rivals the work of many of today's stand-up comedians. Almost everyone
consulted while priming this article used the word raconteur to describe
him, even though he was born in Cleveland. So, how did he become such a
highly respected folksinger?
"I got backed into it," Said Utah, who moved west from Ohio with his
mother in 1947 before getting into some old fashioned ramblin' 'round,
running away so often, it is said, that his mom started wrapping his
lunch in road maps. "I always sang and, when I left Utah in 1969, I was
an unemployed organizer. I was on the lam. I had a head full of songs
I'd made up and all kinds of songs I'd learned. I'd worked picket lines
and migrant councils in the migrant camps but it was only when I got
into the east that I was told that I sang folk music. I didn't know what
that was."
Long before his tune "Green Rolling Hills" became a hit for Emmylou
Harris or "Rock, Salt & Nails" lit up recordings by Joan Baez, Steve
Young, Waylon Jennings and others or "Going Away" showed up on a
Flatlanders CD or Tom Waits and other artists recorded his songs
(including a Grammy-nominated album drawn completely from the Utah
Phillips songkit by husband-wife duo Jody Stecher and Kate Brislin);
long before he received the 1997 life-time achievement award from the
North American Folk Alliance or was Grammy-nominated himself for his
mesmerizing collaborations with Ani DiFranco (bringing the work to a new
generation); long before his weekly syndicated show Loafer's Glory- Hobo
Jungle of the Mind lost its National Public Radio slot; long before all
of this, Bruce Phillips, a Unitarian from Utah and card-carrying Wobbly
whose name can be mentioned in the same breath as Woody Guthrie, Joe
Hill, Jack Elliot and, of course, Pete Seeger, took a dip in the
American political pool.
"See, in 1968, I ran for the U.S. Senate in Utah as a peace candidate
and as a veteran who had put my time in over in Korea," Phillips
continued. "At that time I was working for the State of Utah as a mole
down in the basement of the state archives. When the campaign was over
and we took 6,000 votes as a peace candidate during the Vietnam war, my
job vanished at the state (level) and, in fact, I found I couldn't get
work in the state anywhere. Someone had always called ahead. It was a
blacklist and a friend suggested that I leave and try to make a living
telling stories and singing songs-which, in Utah at the time, seemed
absurd or illegal."
With $75 dollars in his pocket, Utah headed east in an old German VW bus
he called "Hitler's Revenge" that November, "crossing the belly of the
continent toward an uncertain future and that's when I discovered the
folk music community; the whole folk music world. I discovered Pete. I
discovered Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs, where so many singers started
out with Lena Spencer.
"Pete doesn't agree but I've told him a number of times 'Pete, you
invented this trade here.' While I know that all over the South and
Southwest there were cowboy singers or people who had been cowboys who
were traveling and singing there with the radio folks, the Carter family
and all of the traditional people. But, for people from a different walk
of life, who simply learned the music because they loved it and then set
out to travel around the country to perform it for people who also loved
the music, as a kind of missionary activity- sort of our 'People's
Music'- Pete invented that- the whole idea that it could be an
honorable, productive and useful profession.
"Just working, sleeping on couches and floors, building to better halls
and larger audiences over the years and living right close to the
ground," Utah said, "I learned from this folk music family that I don't
need wealth and I don't need fame or power. What I need is friends and
that's what I found and that's what's coming through for us in our time
of need."
Sarah Underhill, a Banshanachie (woman storyteller and song collector),
who will perform on Sunday, met Utah after she had come from the West
Coast in the late '70s to sail the Hudson on the Clearwater sloop and
wound up staying. She vividly recalls a Clearwater journey in Long
Island Sound with Phillips to protest the building of the Seabrook
Nuclear Power Plant at Portsmouth, New Hampshire and welcomes the
opportunity for the community to raise awareness about the nation's
health care situation and celebrate Utah's music and work as a devoted
activist.
"He's an incredible humorist who wrote a lot of songs about hopping
trains and being out on the great western plains that wound up being
sung by the Clearwater crew even though we were usually singing our sea
shanties and nautical stuff," said Underhill. "Now that some of us have
settled in the Hudson Valley, we still sing his songs when we get
together."
"We sailed from Beacon on the Clearwater, down the Hudson, around and
out on the ocean," Phillips recalled of the mission Underhill mentions.
"The Clearwater had never been out on the ocean and we sailed the coast
of New England, around Cape Cod to Seabrook to a big anti-nuclear rally.
I crewed on that and Peter Wilcox was the captain then. He wanted to
take the sloop into the harbor under sail and radioed ahead to have the
drawbridge over the harbor's entrance raised. So, here we were, under
full sail, bearing down on a bridge that was rising rather slowly and he
realized we were not going to make it, so he threw the anchor overboard
to slow the sloop down. It caught, then broke but it did slow the vessel
down. Captain Peter and the rest of the crew were diving for that anchor
while I was on stage singing."
UTU and CTU members protesting in 1995 using Utah's song as picket sign slogan.
Photo courtesy of UtahPhillips.org
|
Singer-songwriter Norm Wennet was involved with the Cornell Folksong
Society in Ithaca when he floored by the song "Daddy, What's A Train"
when Utah came in for a concert over 3 decades ago and met him at
festivals in the Northeast afterward, forming a friendship.
John Pietaro, core of The Flames of Discontent with his bass wizard wife
Laurie Towers, is also a Wobbly, or member of the historic IWW-
Industrial Workers of the World union, and feels Utah is perhaps its
best known living member.
"I've been a labor and protest singer quite a few years. IWW has long
been a 'singing union'," said Pietaro, an arts columnist for New
England's progressive Z Magazine whose group has an album titled I
Dreamed I Heard Joe Hill Last Night...A Century of IWW Songs featuring
workers' standards redressed in modern rhythms. "It was a group of
people that came together and said 'We can allow women, we can allow
blacks, immigrants and unskilled workers and we want the same union here
as for people in Germany, South America, anywhere.' And, in order to
really cross that barrier, they sang. Joe Hill said 'One song speaks
louder than a thousand pamphlets' and Utah Phillips is rooted in that
tradition. He carries the torch of Joe Hill."
Pietaro, who runs an annual "Philfest" at The Colony in December on Rock
City Road to celebrate the songs of Phil Ochs and a Woody Guthrie
Tribute there in July, specializes in topical and protest message songs.
"It's ironic that I work for a health care workers' union and much of
what I've been doing as part of my own job is fighting for universal
health care," he said. "Now, here is this great man who wrote classics
like 'All Used Up' who can't afford his treatment and there are millions
less visible than him suffering as the Bush administration pushes away
at Mediaid."
Dar Williams first met Utah when she opened some shows for him 15 years
ago. Their friendship developed further at festivals and concerts
through the years like a large fundraiser for the famous free speech
radio station KPFA in Berkeley as they underwent their management
shake-up in 1999 with Joan Baez, Spearhead and other artists sharing the
bill.
"I'm a big fan of Utah and there are things he didn't do in general and
specific ways in his career that helped him keep things on a human
scale," said Williams of a man who scorned the "parasites, and money
grubbers who own the music machine" in his assessments of the music
industry. "His motto was 'Make a living, not a killing' and, in order to
navigate the whole medical scene, it's almost as if you need to have
made a killing. If you stick to the human scale, you look to your
friends and we're his friends and he always gave generously of himself
and passed on things where he really could have climbed another kind of
ladder. I certainly don't do as much as he did but I try to do a lot of
fundraisers and I'm in line with that sense of responsibility because of
people like Utah, and specifically Utah."
Because of his heart condition, Utah has attempted retirement a couple
of times in the past few years. In October, last year, the inevitable
could no longer be put off.
"My heart is enlarged and very weak," Utah said. "I was sent down to
California-Pacific Hospital, the best cardiac unit in the country, for a
heart transplant. This was at the beginning of Feburary (2008), and it
was determined by a group of experts there, and myself, too, that I
would not survive a transplant... So, the alternative was to keep me
there for the whole month of February, run a variety of medicines
through my heart-electrolytes, coreg and so on, to see what I would
tolerate, eventually to get it right and send me home with the
alternative to a transplant- which is continuous home medication.
"I'm getting used to carrying this shoulder bag around with my life
support in it and people around me have to get used to it, too, but I'm
doing okay...It has a bag of medicine in it, which shows up here on dry
ice every other day in several packages, and an electronic pump which
all sit pretty nicely in this small shoulder bag. There's a tube that
comes out of the bottom and goes up to a permanent IV implant in my
chest and that catheter ablation goes directly to my heart to pump a
continuous supply of that medication 24 hours a day to keep my heart
beating more regularly, help my breathing and send the right signals to
my kidneys not to eliminate all that fluid- which was a big problem with
me.
"So, that'll be for the rest of my life that I'll be carrying this
around, besides taking a lot of oral medications nine times during the
day," he summed up. "So, I guess I really have left the trade- which I
regret enormously"
Then Utah reached the part which in his estimation made me "darn
tootin'"..."I think there's a lot of people out there who assume the
reason we're up against it here is because of the tremendous high cost
of medical care and that's why there's a benefit happening with Pete and
Dar Williams and some other good friends in your part of the country.
"I'm 73 years old. I'm on Medicare...The month in the hospital, the
pump, the oxygen machine I sleep with that makes oxygen out of the air
and rumbles every night in my bedroom, my pacemaker-defibulater on the
other side of my chest- I'm a cyborg now, all of that was covered by
medicare...Medicare is something that, during the 1930s, enormous
numbers of American working people, who were all up against it,
developed so much pressure from the bottom that it forced the government
to create it. It's something that American workers got together and
created for ourselves- to take care of each other. That's why there's
never been any problem being in the medicare system.
Utah Phillips and the Rose Tattoo around 1976.
Photo courtesy of UtahPhillips.org
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"And, besides other good things like minimum wage, unemployment
insurance, workman's compensation; things that are unheard of any place
else in the world, the people here got those things but medical social
security is the centerpiece of all of that...What I'm saying is
socialized medicine works. Anybody who's got an argument with that, send
'em to me and I'll tell 'em. It works. Here I am, okay? I should be dead
but I'm not and I'm getting excellent care. As much as an anarchist as
*I am, I realize that it's through the help of my fellow workers all
over the country through the tears that has enabled this to happen...It
does work. There shouldn't be any argument there. The object is to lower
the age requirement to zero. And stop fighting these dumb wars. And stop
the money pump that's pumping waelth from the bottom to the top at a
furious rate, impoverishing the working class. Reverse that, get that
money back and put it to work, giving everybody exactly what I've been
able to enjoy through medicare."
Utah also wanted to clarify his current circumstance: "The reason these
benefits are happening throughout the country is that I had to leave the
trade. I can no longer be on stage. I left, after about 40 years, fairly
close to the high end and I'm not talking about 'the industry.' I always
worked at a 'sub-industrial' level. I was a journeyman at my trade,
working close to the street- small clubs, small concert halls; making a
living-not a 'killing,' which is all I ever wanted... I was doing fairly
well and, when I finally decided I couldn't do this anymore, our income
went from a reasonably good one to zero. So, that's what stranded us
here.
"My medicines are covered. We own the house we live in, thank God, or we
couldn't afford to live here. But we've got property taxes. We've got to
heat the place. We've got to keep the lights on and keep ourselves
fed... My wife, Joanna, and I are giving ourselves a year to get on our
feet- to decide how we're going to make a living from here on and the
good people in the folk music world- it's a family, behaves like a
family- are coming together and helping float us over this year until we
get on our feet."
There is scarcely anything more that needs to be said about Pete Seeger,
who turns 89 next month, than here is an opportunity to see him perform
in person. Rosendale Cafe proprietor Mark Morganstern, who originally
organized the event for his cafe and acquired use of the community
center due to public response, advises that there will be no advanced
sales or reservations.
Utah said he would try to arrange a live phone hook-up to speak to the
audience directly and, if you've got some Utah Phillips CDs you've been
meaning to get, now would be a great time to do it. Go to
Utahphillips.org
or
Cdbaby.com.
Hobo Utah hopping a train.
Photo courtesy of UtahPhillips.org
-Gary Alexander
Gary Alexander
is an independent journalist and scholar whose focus of
interests range through a variety of disciplines. Under various names,
he has written (and ghost written) upon history and current event;
science and technology, as well as music and the arts in books and for
national periodicals. While particularly attentive to the subtle and
complex impact upon cultural imagination and contemporary structures of
presumption which activity in the above mentioned topics tend to have,
Alexander treats his topics with a slightly more than occasional resort
to humor.
Posted on April 23, 2008
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Utah in 1974.
Photo courtesy of 
Utah speaks at an IWW gathering.
Photo courtesy of 
Photo courtesy of