Utah Phillips, 1935-2008
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/?inc=article&id=323&x=utah-phillips-1935-2008&_c=music
by Jeffrey Barg
Carrying "the long memory" through Philly.
More than any of the mandolins or singalongs or itchygrassbutt,
the one moment of the 2001 Philadelphia Folk Festival that hangs
clearest in my mind is Utah Phillips barking, "Wavy Gravy said, 'You
aren't what you eat; you're what you don't poop.'"
On a few occasions since, I've tried to factcheck that quotation,
but it hasn't come up. Which shouldn't be surprising. Utah Phillips'
history wasn't the kind to get factchecked. It's the kind that was
passed down orally, and hence got truer with every telling.
The singer, songwriter, activist, historian, storyteller and railroad
tramp died a little more than a week ago at his home in Nevada City,
Calif. Though he spent a lifetime imparting stories, songs and poems
to the multitudes that came to hear him play, he took with him all
the bits that never got written downwhat he referred to as "the long memory."
"He's such an incredible source of knowledge that doesn't get
catalogued in the United States, stuff that doesn't get taught in
history classesthe story of the underclass," says Brad Wrenn, who
coproduced The Ballad of Joe Hill at the 2006 Philly Fringe, a story
about the early20thcentury songwriter and union organizer put to
death in 1915.
The way the story goes, Joe Hill was giving the labor bosses too much
trouble and rabblerousing among the workers, so he was framed on a
murder charge. The Ballad told Joe Hill's tale with song, dance, film
and oldfashioned vaudevillian slapstick, performed in one of Eastern
State Penitentiary's rotting cellblocks. By turns raucous, hilarious
and eerie, the soldout run of The Ballad of Joe Hill was one of the
highlights of that year's fest.
"Brad sent me Utah's recording of 'I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last
Night,' and that ended up being the capstone of the piece," says
Adrienne Mackey, a 2004 Swarthmore grad who directed the show. The
old folk song has long symbolized workers' struggle to organize, and
harks back to a time when unions were fighting for 40hour workweeks,
for weekendsthings that we now take for granted, but that wouldn't
exist were it not for folks like Joe Hill and Utah Phillips.
Phillips was introduced to a younger generationincluding Wrenn and
Mackeyin the mid to late '90s, when folksinger Ani DiFranco
recorded two albums with him. DiFranco, who met Phillips while
touring on the folk festival circuit, was in town last Friday at
World Cafe Live for a noncommercial radio convention hosted by WXPN.
"Though we have very different personas to the outside world or to
the literal types in the world, we're doing the same work," DiFranco
says. "He and I immediately realized that and sort of began that
relationship of feeding off each other."
Though their musical styles are radically differentDiFranco is known
for her rhythmic guitar playing and soaring melodies, while Phillips
just kind of whacked at the guitar and talked in an offkey
speaksongthey found a similar mentality in how they used humor to perform.
"I remember saying to Utah once, which he sort of picked up and
carried, that I recognized his mechanism of first making people
comfortable, and if you get them to throw their heads back and laugh,
and open their mouths, you can kind of stick something hard to
swallow down in there," DiFranco says with her neck craned all the way back.
"Anybody who sat anywhere near him learned about history," she
continues. "He was constantly teaching and conveying all the stories
that he'd come across in his life. He was an encyclopedia of the
people's history of the United States."
"It's like a library dying," says Wrenn. "All this stuff has been
recorded, but he was really a man who dedicated himself to history."
In preparing for The Ballad of Joe Hill, which Mackey and Wrenn hope
to remount at Eastern State in a year or two, Wrenn actually talked
with Phillips on the phone about Joe Hill.
"Utah really was an Industrial Workers of the World union member,"
says Wrenn. "To Utah, Joe Hill really was a symbol. Utah truly
believed that he was this thing of legend, that he gave his life for
the union movement."
DiFranco, Mackey and Wrenn are just three of the many taking up the
mantle and spreading the seeds sown by Phillips and so many before
himengaging literally in the folk process.
"His music is a persontoperson oral historysomething that's alive
and passed on," says Mackey. "With The Ballad of Joe Hill I really
wanted to make sure that music, the same music that Utah played, was
passed on in the same way. When the guys learned that music in
rehearsal, it was all by rote, same as the IWW singers would have
learned it, without sheet music to take and study alone. In the show
the audience got the chance to learn that music the same way with the
actors singing it and then getting a chance to sing it right back to
them. It was our little tribute to Utah's method of storytelling."
--------
Obituaries
U. Utah Phillips, 73; Folk Singer Championed the Working Class
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/29/AR2008052902087.html
By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 30, 2008; Page B07
U. Utah Phillips, 73, a Grammy-nominated folk singer, rabble-rouser
and anarchist whose wild white beard recalled his years as a tramp,
died of heart disease May 23 at his home in Nevada City, Calif.
Mr. Phillips, over four decades on the road, combined storytelling
with song, describing the plight of the working class, the power of
labor unions and the necessity of direct action. He dubbed himself
the "Golden Voice of the Great Southwest," but, like Woody Guthrie
and Pete Seeger, his words, more than his baritone voice, carried
authority. He had been a soldier, a railroader, a state archivist, a
union organizer, founder of a homeless shelter and homeless himself.
He recorded the oft-overlooked value of rubber pockets, a necessity
when stealing soup. His tall tale "Gaffing" was a rich illustration
of populist scams. He honored the likes of Hood River Blackie and Fry
Pan Jack and never hesitated to leaven his history lessons about the
Ford Strike of 1932, the Spokane Free Speech Fight of 1910 and the
Canine Corps of World War II with such hysterical stories as
"Suspender" and "Blackie and the Duck."
His fans have posted dozens of videos of him or his songs online, and
a new generation discovered him in the mid-1990s, when folk musician
and entrepreneur Ani DiFranco edited about 100 hours of homemade
tapes of his performances and blended them with electronic hip-hop,
creating an album called "The Past Didn't Go Anywhere" (1996), and
released it on her Righteous Babe label.
In 1999, he collaborated with DiFranco on the live album "Fellow
Workers," which was nominated for a 2000 Grammy in the contemporary
folk album category.
"He was a real storyteller in his performances. He was just a
catalogue of people's history in the United States," DiFranco said
this week in an interview. "He was so engaging on many, many levels."
Mr. Phillips was a card-carrying member of the Industrial Workers of
the World (Wobblies), a radical union that called for all working
people to unite. He ran unsuccessfully for president in 1976 as an
anarchist, but he never voted -- except in 2004, when President
Bush's policies so enraged him. Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Joan
Baez, Tom Waits and Arlo Guthrie sing Utah Phillips songs, but he
refused to let Johnny Cash record his standards, his eldest son told
the Sacramento Bee newspaper, because he didn't trust the music industry.
The Boston Globe called him "the kind of guy you'd want to sit next
to on a long plane ride. Here's a rascal with a clutch of good songs
that'll entertain you, educate you, and probably even get you fired
up over the current state of politics."
He was born Bruce Phillips on May 15, 1935, in Cleveland to two labor
organizers. His family moved in 1947 to Utah, where Mr. Phillips
learned to play the ukulele from an instruction manual and took to
the roads and rails of the West as a teenager. He adopted the name U.
Utah Phillips in emulation of country vocalist T. Texas Tyler.
"I worked with lots of old drunks only fit to shovel gravel, but they
all knew songs, and they showed me how to play them," he said.
Broke and out of work, he joined the Army in 1956 and was sent to
Korea for three years. "I wanted to learn a trade, but all they
taught me was how to shoot," he said in a Sing Out magazine
interview. "What I really learned in the army was how to be a pacifist."
After his discharge, he began to drink heavily and ride the rails. He
drew a distinction between what he did and the ways of hobos and
bums, quoting the 19th-century physician to the poor, Ben Reitman.
"A hobo works and wanders, a tramp dreams and wanders, and a bum
drinks and wanders," Mr. Phillips told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
in 2006. "That's about right. I tramped. When I was on the freight
trains, I wasn't looking for work. I was looking to go from place to
place without paying any money."
He ended up at Salt Lake City's Joe Hill House, a shelter for tramps
and itinerant workers run by a member of the Catholic Worker
movement. He took a job at the Utah state archives, but his 1968 race
for a U.S. Senate seat as the nominee of the Peace & Freedom Party
cost him the job. He thought he was blacklisted.
"All I had was an old VW bus, my guitar, $75, and a head full of
songs, old- and new-made," he wrote two weeks ago in a message to his
local radio station, KVMR-FM. "Fortunately . . . I landed at Caffe
Lena in Saratoga Springs, New York. That seemed to be ground zero for
folk music at the time. . . . It took me a solid two years to realize
I was no longer an unemployed organizer, but a traveling folk singer
and storyteller."
In 1973, folk fans discovered his spoken-word recording, "Moose Turd
Pie," about the food he served to laborers on a railroad gang. The
bluegrass duo Flatt & Scruggs recorded his train song "Starlight on
the Rails," and Baez became the first of many to record the dark
romantic ballad "Rock Salt and Nails," a song that became something
of a folk and country standard.
Mr. Phillips settled in Nevada City, where he helped start the Peace
and Justice Center and the Hospitality House, a local homeless
shelter. After recording the spoken-word song "The Talking NPR Blues"
in 2000, he launched a 100-episode syndicated radio show, "Loafer's
Glory," and appeared periodically in the Washington area, where he
urged audience members to sing along on tunes such as "Dump the Bosses."
Survivors include his wife, Joanna Robinson of Nevada City; three
children, Duncan Phillips of Salt Lake City, Brendan Phillips of
Olympia, Wash., and Morrigan Belle of Washington; two stepsons,
Nicholas Tomb of Monterey, Calif., and Ian Durfee of Davis, Calif.;
three brothers; a sister; and a grandchild.
--------
The "Golden Voice of the Great Southwest": Legendary Folk Musician,
Activist Utah Phillips, 1935-2008
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/27/utah_phillips_1935_2008_legendary_folk
May 27, 2008
Utah Phillips, the legendary folk musician and peace and labor
activist, has died at the age of seventy-three. Over the span of
nearly four decades, Utah Phillips worked in what he referred to as
"the Trade," performing tirelessly throughout the United States,
Canada and Europe. The son of labor organizers, Phillips was a
lifelong member of the Industrial Workers of the World, known as the
Wobblies. As a teenager, he ran away from home and started living as
a hobo who rode the rails and wrote songs about his experiences. In
1956, he joined the Army and served in the Korean War, an experience
he would later refer to as the turning point of his life. In 1968, he
ran for the US Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. For the
past twenty-one years he lived in Nevada City, where he started a
nationally syndicated folk music radio show. He also helped found the
Hospitality House homeless shelter and the Peace and Justice Center.
We spend the hour with an interview with Phillips from January 2004.
Utah Phillips, legendary folk musician and peace and labor activist,
interviewed in January 2004. He passed away in his sleep in his
Nevada City home Friday night of congestive heart failure. He was 73
years old.
--
AMY GOODMAN: Utah Phillips, the legendary folk musician, peace and
labor activist, has died. He passed away in his sleep in Nevada City
Friday night. He died of congestive heart failure. He was
seventy-three years old. A memorial service is being planned for Sunday.
Over the span of nearly four decades, Utah Phillips worked in what he
referred to as "the Trade," performing tirelessly for audiences in
large and small cities throughout the United States, Canada and
Europe. His songs were performed by Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings,
Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie. He earned a Grammy nomination for an
album he recorded with Ani DiFranco and was awarded a Lifetime
Achievement Award by the Folk Alliance.
Born Bruce Duncan Phillips in 1935, he later adopted the name "Utah,"
from where he grew up. The son of labor organizers, Phillips was a
lifelong member of the Industrial Workers of the World, known as the
Wobblies. As a teenager, he ran away from home and started living as
a hobo who rode the rails and wrote songs about his experiences. In
1956, he joined the Army and served in the Korean War, an experience
he would later refer to as the turning point of his life. In 1968, he
ran for the US Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket.
For the past twenty-one years, he has lived in Nevada City, where he
started a nationally syndicated folk music radio show called Loafer's
Glory, produced at community radio station KVMR. He also helped found
the Hospitality House homeless shelter and the Peace and Justice Center there.
Today we spend the hour hearing Utah Phillips in his own words. In
January 2004, I had a chance to sit down with Utah for an extensive
interview. We met at the pirate radio station, Freak Radio Santa
Cruz, where Utah had come to perform. I began by asking him why he
arrived at least a day early to any city or town where he performed.
UTAH PHILLIPS: When you have an engagement, at least in my world, the
world that I create for myself, an engagement doesn't begin when you
hit the stage and end when you leave the stage. It begins when you
hit the city limits, and it ends when you leave the city limits.
There's a whole lot going on in that town. My trade is like being
paid to go to schools, and every town is its own teacher. Every town,
that's my university. And there are marvels and wonders. There's
Hobos from Hell, are from Santa Cruz. They're young people riding on
the freight trains, and they're better at it than I ever thought I
would be. You've got the Homeless Garden Project. You've got just an
enormous rich community here.
I was involved some years ago in helping to organize a street
singers' guild in this town, and ityou got to beat the streets and
learn from the people, and then you've got to get on their stage and,
having done that and been with those people, let that audience know
that you're not just doing the show you did in the town the night
before, you know. You're noyou've got to know who you're with and
where you are. That's very important to me. And they've got to know
that I understand that, that I'm really there for them.
AMY GOODMAN: Let's start out where you started out. Where were you
born? When were you born?
UTAH PHILLIPS: I was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1935.
AMY GOODMAN: And how did you start on this journey? When did you
begin singing, storytelling?
UTAH PHILLIPS: Oh, mercy, I think we're all storytellers, you know.
You think of the excuses you told your parents for why you got home
late. I just never gave it up.
I gotI left home. I went up to work in Yellowstone National Park
during high school. I was going to make some summer money. I went up
on the freight trains, and for the first time I rode the freight
trains. And I worked on a road rating crew. And at that time, I was
playing the ukulele and singing ersatz Hawaiian musicJohnny Noble,
things like that, "Lovely Hula Hands," "Malihini Melee."
The other hands working on that crew, a lot of them were old, old
alcoholics who could only shovel gravel. But they knew songs. And
late at night, you know, there would be a fire. We would live in
these clapboard shanties. They sang old songs, Jimmie Rodgers, and
they sang old Gene Autry songs, songs I had never heard, but were
much closer to the way I was living right there at that time,
certainly a lot closer than as Hawaiian music. So they showed me how
to turn my ukulele chords into guitar chords and taught me those songs.
And it's right about then I started making songs in that mold, making
songs of what I saw in the world around me, but using those tune
models and those verse models that had endured for so long and will
continue to endure simply because they work. So, you know, I've been
making songs and stories for over fifty years now. It's a way of
life. It's like breathing.
AMY GOODMAN: War has always seemed to play a major role in defining
our times and affected your work, as well. You went to Korea?
UTAH PHILLIPS: Yes, I joined the Army. Like oldas a string fellow
said, some people learn things the hard way, but at least then you
never forget it. I joined the Army and then got pipelined for Korea.
I was there after Panmunjan, you know, after the treaty, right after
the treaty there, the truce. Life amid the ruinsI mean, it was
absolute life amid the ruins. Children cryingthat's the memory of
Korea. Devastation. I saw an elegant and ancient culture in a small
Asian country devastated by the impact of cultural and economic
imperialism. And the impact of an army of young men given unlimited
license for excess of every kind, of violence, sexual, booze, what
have you, drugsa blueprint for self-destruction. And I knew that if
I endured that, I would perish, I would simply perish.
It was there in Korea in that situation around those kinds of
experiencesand I was upI was up on the Imjin River, and I wanted to
swim in it, because I wanted to wash all that away, all that away.
And I was told I couldn't swim in the Imjin. And it was the young
Korean there, Yoon Suk An [phon.], who explained to me why I
couldn't. He said, "When we marry, we move into our grandparents', in
with our grandparents, andbut the place is devastated. There's
nothing growing. It's all dead. So when the first child comes,
somebody has to leave, and it's the old man. The grandfather will
leave and go sit on the bank of the Imjin with a jug of water and a
blanket until he dies and will roll down into the water." He said,
"You can't swim in the Imjin, because those are our elders being
carried out to sea."
Well, that's when I cracked. You know, that's when I broke up. I said
I can't do this anymore. You know, this is all wrong. It all has to
change. And the change has to begin with me. It was right then that I
decided that the idea of manhood that I had been given, that
blueprint for self-destruction, that my father had lied to me about
manhood, my drill instructors, my Army sergeants, my scoutmaster, my
gym instructor in high school. They had all lied to me about what
manhood was, and it was up to me to begin to figure out what it really meant.
AMY GOODMAN: How did you do it?
UTAH PHILLIPS: Painfully, painfully. It takes a long time to shut up
and listen. You know, it takes a long time just to plain shut up and
listen. I tell you, what I learned wasI decided that the great
struggles, the wars that you're talking aboutit could be the Bosnian
War, it could be the Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, it could be the
Korean War, it could be the Iraqi War, whatever, it doesn't
matterit's alleverythe thing they all have in common is that it's
young men with guns doing it to everybody else. Women aren't doing
it. Kids aren't doing it. Old people aren't doing it. Disabled people
aren't doing it. It's young people with guns, you know, that are
doing it to everybody else. And we don't have a problem with violence
in the world. We've got a serious male problem. And I bought into it,
so I know. And I'm buying myself out of it, you see. It's terribly,
terribly important for me for people to understand that and begin to
shut up and listen. The most important movement in the world is the
feminist movement. If we can really figure out what's going on
between men and women, the other problems will take care of
themselves. I'm sure of it.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Utah Phillips. We're broadcasting on
Democracy Now! and doing it at Free Radio Santa Cruz, which is also
broadcasting us live, known as Freak Radio. And Utah Phillips is
going to be performing tonight before, well, many hundred of people,
and he's been in places with a couple of people, he's been singing
alone, or he's been singing before thousands, actually just came off
of a concert tour with Ani DiFranco?
UTAH PHILLIPS: Oh, no, no. I don't tour anymore because of this
congestive heart failure. I only leave town about once a month, if
that. Ani and I will share the stage, you know, when we happen to be
in the same area. She'll invite me to go and do that. I should
mention that tonight I'm not doing this show by myself. It's called a
circle of friends. It's like a living room, where some good friends
of mine, Bodhi Busick, great guitarist and a fine song maker, and
Paul Kamm and Eleanor McDonald, who are up from Nevada County, town I
live in, we're going to sit on the stage and share songs and stories
together. And that's the way that I want it to be.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I wanted to continue on this idea of confronting
violence and how you became a pacifist. When did youhow long were
you in Korea?
UTAH PHILLIPS: I was there for eighteen months, and I extended for
some months. I can tell you exactly how. I made it back to Salt Lake,
and I was going into the post office, and there was an old man
sitting under the bush out there, taking on water break. Well, that
man was Ammon Hennacy, the great Catholic Worker, one of Dorothy
Day's people. And Ammon Hennacy had come to Salt Lake to open the Joe
Hill House of Hospitality, one of the Catholic Worker houses. And
Ammon took me in. And I was there with Ammon for about eight years at
the Joe Hill House.
Ammon came to me one day and said, "You've got to be a pacifist." And
I said, "How's that?" He said, "Well, you act out a lot. You use a
lot of violent behavior." And I was. You know, I was very angry, very
angry person. "And you just act out a lot. And if you brought a lot,
you're not any good at it. You're the one who keeps getting thrown
through the front door, and I'm tired of fixing the damn thing.
You've got to be a pacifist."
He had a more fundamentalist way of looking at it. And I said,
"What's that?" He said, "Well, I could give you a book by Gandhi, but
you wouldn't read it. So"but he said, "You've got to look at
nonviolence likeyour capacity for violence like an alcoholic looks
at booze." Alcoholbooze will kill an alcoholic, unless he has the
courage to sit in a circle of people that are like that, put his hand
up and say, "Hi. My name is Utah. I'm an alcoholic." But then you
canonce you own the behavior, you can deal with it. You know, you
can have it defined for you by the people whose lives you've messed
with, and it's not going to go away. Twenty years sober, you're not
going to sit in that circle and say, "Well, I'm not an alcoholic
anymore." You're going to put up your hand and say, "My name is Utah.
I'm an alcoholic."
He said, "It's the same with violence. You acknowledge your capacity
for violence, you see, and you learn how to deal with it every day,
every instant, in every situation for the rest of your life, because
it's not going to go away. But it will save your life." See, it's a
different way of looking at pacifism. I have to be a pacifist, you see.
So I said, "OK, I'll do that, Ammon." And he 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, economic
privilege, racial privilege, sexual privilege. You're going to be a
pacifist. You're not just going to lay down guns and fists and knives
and hard angry words. You're going to have to lay down the weapons of
privilege and go into the world completely disarmed. Well, you try
that." I've been at itAmmon died over thirty years ago, and I'm
still at it. But if there's one struggle that animates my life, it's
probably that one.
AMY GOODMAN: Utah Phillips, the legendary folk musician, died this
weekend at his home in Nevada City, California. We'll come back to
this 2004 interview in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Legendary folk musician and peace and labor activist
Utah Phillips died Friday night at his home in Nevada City,
California at the age of seventy-three. I interviewed him in 2004 at
the pirate radio station Freak Radio in Santa Cruz. I asked him how
he got the name Utah.
UTAH PHILLIPS: Well, that comes in the Army. I was from Utah, and
nobody ever heard of anybody from Utah. Had mail call out in the
street, and they holler out "Utah!" and I'm the guy who says, "Here,
sir." So the name, you know, sinceit's like calling somebody Tex if
they're from Texas or calling them Louise if they're from Louisiana
maybe. I don't know. So that name just stuck.
The "U. Utah"I've always been known as "U. Utah Phillips," and that
comesI guess I can say that now. That's been a closely held secret
for years. When I was in Utah there first learning the kind of music
I love, my favorite singer was T. Texas Tyler. So my friend, Norman
Ritchie, the traveling teenage sage, started calling me U. Utah
Phillips. There you go.
AMY GOODMAN: So we're here with U. Utah Phillips. And wars have
defined so much. History books define times by war. But resistance is
also there, and that's what often goes unchronicled, except with
people like you who have been chronicling the resistance movements
for a long time. And I was wondering if you could talk about some of
the people who you feel have made important differences in activism,
in resisting the wars.
UTAH PHILLIPS: Well, for that, I would have to go back to union
brothers and sisters. I would have to go back to the Espionage Act in
the First World War. In my union, the Industrial Workers of the
World, this is my fiftieth year in the IWW, by the way, my proudest
association. It is the only organization I've ever beenever known of
that didn't break faith with its elders.
Well, when I hit the road, when I went out to try to find out who I
really was, to reconstruct my life, when I left Utah, I found those
elders and I sought them out. I never thought I would be able to say
this, Amy, but mymost of my elders, most of my great teachers, were
born the century before last. [inaudible] born in the 1890s. And I
think of Fred Thompson and the elders that I've talked to that went
through the First World War as unionists and endured the Espionage
Act, endured the enormous persecution, and just kept at it and kept
at it. That was an amazing thing, because that was theone of the
effects of the warand the same thing happened in the Second World
War, was to use that super patriotism and to use the enhanced
governmental powers to break the back of the labor movement,
especially the radical labor movement, the IWW, and pretty damn well,
you know, near succeeded. In spite of that, you know, of that
terrible oppression and that awful war, we came out of that war with
the beginning of the eight-hour day, with mine safety laws, with
child labor laws, you know? We were still winning all the time we were losing.
AMY GOODMAN: For young people who've never heard of the Wobblies, or
the International Workers of the World, can you explain
UTAH PHILLIPS: Industrial Workers of the World.
AMY GOODMAN: Industrial Workers of the Worldcan you explain its origins?
UTAH PHILLIPS: Industrial Workers of the World was startedgrew out
of the Western Federation of Miners. It started in 1905. The
cornerstone of the IWW was the notion that people in the same
industry should belong to the same union.
Big Bill Haywood there in Colorado, Big Bill, the true American, he
was one of the founders of the IWW. His father rode for the Pony
Express. His mother was a forty-niner who got off the wagon train in
Salt Lake. Bill was born in Salt Lake. There in Colorado, he'd see
how a mine would get struck. So they'd bring in scabs to bring out
scab ore, and then it would be transported to the mill on the union
train and milled at the union mill. He said all of the people in this
industry should belong to one union, because that's union scabbing.
So industrial unionism was born as an alternative to craft unionism,
like the AFL, organized bodies of workers fighting against each
other. And it wasn't just industrial unionism; it was the One Big
Union, the OBU, a union of all skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled
workers in one big union, divided up into industrial departments,
syndicalists, syndicalism, which would then replace the government;
the means of production in the hands of the producers, produced for
use instead of profit, create abundance for workers and nothing for
parasites; an end to the wage system. Well, like John Greenway called
the IWW a banzai charge on capitalism, and that was about right.
Well, of course, the union dwindled, you know, after the First World
War, the Palmer Raids, which were so much worse than anything we're
experiencing now, but still survived. And now the union is growing,
has been growing for quite a long time now.
AMY GOODMAN: The Palmer Raids?
UTAH PHILLIPS: No, the Industrial Workers of the World.
AMY GOODMAN: Right, but the Palmer Raids, if you could say what they
were again, for people who
UTAH PHILLIPS: Oh, Attorney General Palmer, that was the first Red
Scare, the first big Red Scare. The Russian Revolution had been
accomplished right at theyou know, during the First World War. So
the first big Red Scare happened when Attorney General Palmer caused
thousands of unionists to be jailed and many, many immigrant workers
to be deported without any kind of due process. And it was like an
industrial war. And Palmerthey did their best to break up the IWW,
but it never succeeded, because we have survived and we have persisted.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the Palmer Raids. You talk about the
Espionage Act. How do you think the time we're living in now compares?
UTAH PHILLIPS: I think thatI think that it's gettingit can get as
bad. I think that we're being frog-marched into a corporate fascist
takeover of the country. And no fooling, I think that we're in the
Weimar Republic. And that's another thing that I would encourage
young people to understand, whatthat was Germany before the Second
World War, the rise of Hitler, the rise of Nazism. Why didn't people
do anything? You know, the big question that young Germans are asking
their grandparents: "Why didn't you do something?" Read about the
Weimar, compare the rise of fascism in Germany from the 1920s to
what's happening right here right now.
The long memory is the most radical idea in America. That long memory
has been taken away from us. Listen, you young people I'm talking to,
that long member has been taken away from you. You haven't gotten it
in your schools. You're not getting it on your television. You're not
getting it anywhere. You're being leapfrogged from one crisis to the
next. You know, you can't remember what happened last week, because
you're locked into this week's crisis.
No, turn that off. You know, walk away from that. Walk out your front
door. Go find your elders. Go find your true elders. Go find your
people that lived that life, who knew that life and who know that
history. And get your hands down into that deep rich stream of our
people's history. We divided our culture up into a market for
youngers, a market for young adults, a market for young marrieds, a
market for older people, you know. It's not that way. And mass media
contributed to that by taking the great movements that we've been
through and trivializing important events. No, our people's history
is like one long river. It flows down from way over there. And
everything that those people did and everything they lived flows down
to me, and I can reach down and take out what I need, if I have the
courage to go out and ask questions. That huge river, you know, it's
like tributaries that flow down into the polluted river and purify it
and purify it.
AMY GOODMAN: Utah, you're known for telling stories, verywell,
really opposite from the mass media world today, where a sound bite
is something like eight or nine seconds.
UTAH PHILLIPS: Mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think that has done to the way people learn
and understand?
UTAH PHILLIPS: I think that television has had a seriouswe're
thinking differently. I'll watch television once a year just to get
kind of an idea of what is happening to people's minds, or maybe I
want to go see the World Series. The frequency of images is so fast
that I can't track it. If I don'tI don't have TV, and I don't like
them, so I can't understand how people can watch them. The frequency
of the images is just too fast. I can't take it all in. Yeah, it
isyou're absolutely right that we're thinking differently.
Television alters consciousness. If it didn't, they wouldn't use it.
It's intended to alter consciousness.
Me, the last TV set I had, I shot. I don't know what commercial
importunement drove me off of the pier, but I hauled it into the
backyard. It was up in Spokane, Washington, and I got ahad an old
Stevens shotgun. I tied a scarf around it for a blindfold and
scotch-taped a cigarette to the front and lit it and let it burn an
appropriate amount of time, and then I blew a hole through it with
the shotgun. It was out there in the lilac hedge, which grew through
it eventually. It was kind of pretty after a while. But I have
notyou know, I haven't owned one of those foolish things since.
I think that abandoning children, you know, to a television
setchildren are born with this bridge between world time and
dreamtime. They wander back-and-forth over it at will, and you never
know which side of the bridge they're going to be standing at either.
You've just got to be willing to stand with them at the dreamtime end
of the bridge, instead of jerking them over the bridge into world
time on the presumption that facts will save your butt. Have they?
Well, they won't.
Kids understand storytelling. They understand stories, and they
understand that particular kind of magic. And they also understand
innately that all the wonders of the mind need not be explicit. We're
robbing children of their imagination. We just said earlier that the
glory of radio is that it unlocks the imagination, as my wife said,
and televisionbecause you create your own imagesand television
gives you the images. Also, television is there to say to these kids,
see, kidsyou can take a coffee can and turn it into a rocket ship,
you see? You create the story. If you have the story and you want act
out, and then you create the object to act it out. Television turns
that around backwards and says you can't have this story unless you
buy the objectthe exact opposite of what we're born to do. We have
to fight like hell to turn ourselves back to our own best natural
selves. And that's part of what I'm doing.
AMY GOODMAN: Utah, we're speaking on this weekend that would have
been Martin Luther King's seventy-fifth birthday, who came out of a
fierce tradition of civil rights protest and human rights activism. A
lot of people don't appreciate what that day-to-day organizing and
activism is all about. They hear Martin Luther King, it's almost as
if he was alone, but he certainly wasn't. And there were so many,
like you mentioned Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks, a story, a legend, where
we hear about a woman who just got tired and sat down, but of course
that was not her story.
UTAH PHILLIPS: No, she was at Highlander School getting her training.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what Highlander School was?
UTAH PHILLIPS: Oh, good heavens, that Myles HortonMyles Horton was
the world'sthe best educator the country ever had. And I knew Myles.
He was a fine, remarkable man, good preacher, too. The Highlander
principle was that any group of people in the community experiencing
a problem, if they sit in a circle and spend a couple of days telling
each other their life story, will eventually arrive at a solution to
the problem. So the Highlander School was created for people to come
together and do that.
So there's food that's prepared for them, a place to stay. And if you
run into a knotty problem and you need a lawyer or you need an
expertand, you know, ex is a has-been, a spurt is a drip under
pressureyou need an expert come in there, they'll come in and tell
you what you want to hear, and then they have to leave. You know how
a lawyer can take over a meeting. And then you go back and just use
the information, because it's right in the hands of those people to do that.
And that's where Rosa Parks was. Martin Luther King was there.
Remember that billboard during the '60s that the John Birch Society
put up, said Martin Luther King at a communist training school? That
was Highlander that he was at.
And it'sand it was Myles's idea, an extraordinary idea that works.
Myles was a great organizer by himself. Myles Horton told me once, he
said he was doing an organizing job in a little, small town, a coal
mine job, and the thugs were in town, and they were going to try to
break the union, you know, pretty violent. The preacher feared for
Myles's life and gave him a horse pistol to protect himself, but it
was broken, and it didn't have any ammunition. And Myles said he
didn't know how use it anyway.
Well, Myles was looking out the front window down on the street from
the rooming house, and a big black car pulled up and these three
goons got out. And Myles opened the window and, dangling that pistol
out the window, said, "Hey, you down there. Let me tell you
something." They looked up and said, "Horton, you can't tell us
anything." He said, "Oh, yes, I can. You've got to get organized."
They said, "What do you mean?" He said, "You're not organized." "What
do you mean?" He said, "Well, now, look. You're going to come
upstairs and try to kill me. You're going to kick in my door. I'm
going to shoot the first one inside the door, and I may get the
second one. Third one will get me. But you've got to decide which
one's going to come in first. You've got to get organized." Well,
they talked to each other for a while and got in the car and drove
away. Myles could do that.
One time heMyles, he did ahe was invited to give a talk on
leadership. And he showed up in town, and he couldn't remember where
he was supposed to go. He lost the piece of paper. So he walked up to
the main part of town, and he saw a bunch of people going into a
hall, so he followed them. And he went in there and saw his name on
the reader board, and everybody sat down and he sat down. When they
were all sat down, he got up and walked to the front onto the stage
and said, "Leadership is finding a bunch of people that look like
they know where they're going and following them, and when they're
all sitting down, stand up and talk to them about leadership."
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about commercial media and what it's
done, what radiothat is commercialrecord industry, the music
industry, how you respond to it. And I also wanted to ask you about
Johnny Cash.
UTAH PHILLIPS: Isn't that the little bill changers in public
restrooms? Forget it. My brain does that. Listen, I'm a victim of
this myself. You know, I'm a bystander. I'm not doing this.
Let's see, you started out with what media has done to people. You
know that better than I do. That's why you do what you do. See,
you're doing an alternative media. And if we play our cards right and
have enough time, then pretty soon it won't be alternative media
anymore. But then, we have a thorough understandingdon't we,
Amythat they fight with money and we fight with time, and they're
going to run out of money before we run out of time. So we'll just be
patient, and you do your work, and I'll do mine, and we'll catch up
and overtake them.
It's a damn shame, though, that we have to be alternative. But then,
we're in a capitalist environment, we're in a capitalist system
that's built onthat's built on the least commendable features of the
human psyche, greed and envy, rather than the best. We in community
radio, in pirate radio, in alternative music distribution, we reach
for the best in people, you know, we don'tnot lowest common
denominators. And we are building a new world within the shell of the old.
I don't feel pessimistic about that at all. There's simply too many
good people right here in this room, too many good people on the
street, close to the street, doing too many good things for me to
afford the luxury of being pessimistic. I'm going toI'll tell people
that tonight, damn it. I'm glad it came up. If I look at the world
from the top down, from FOX, God help me, or CNN orthere ought to be
a CNN Anon to ween people from that idiocy. If I look at it from the
top down, I get seriously depressed. The world's going to hell in a
wheelbarrow. But if I walk out the door, turn all that off, and go
with the people, whatever town I'm in, who are doing the real work
down at the street level, like I said, there's too many good people
doing too many good things for me to let myself be pessimistic about
that. I'm hopeful, can't live without hope. Can you?
AMY GOODMAN: Legendary musician, Utah Phillips. We'll come back to
this 2004 interview in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: As we go back to 2004, I asked Utah Phillips to talk
about the music industry.
UTAH PHILLIPS: I was in New York, after I left Utah on a kind of
blacklist, and I was a fish out of water. I had to be told I was
singing folk music. And I wound up in New York City, and there was a
fellow there that was going to manage me and Rosalee Sorrels. We were
assured he was the most honest manager in New York City. It took me a
year to figure out that "scrupulously honest" in New York City was a
jailable offense elsewhere. And I bailed out on that, you know, and I
realized that I would no longer own what I do. I was a good Wobbly.
You need to own the means of your production. I would have to
abdicate most of the creative decisions to non-artists, and I said
I'm not going to do that.
I decided that I would learn the trade. The trade is a fine, elegant,
beautiful, very fruitful trade. In that trade, I can make a living
and not a killing, and that was very important to me, to make a
living and not a killing, to live reasonably well. I found a world of
folk music. I found folk music societies all over the country, little
singer circles, a little program here, Spirit of the Woods, Manistee,
Michigan, what have you. And these were people who part of their
pattern of social responsibility was being committed to making sure
folk music happened in their community, like you might work for
United Fund or muscular dystrophy. And so, I would come into town to
do a concert as a partner in that effort. So the past thirty-five
years I've been in this trade, I had no bosses. That's another part
of it: no boss. I make all the creative decisions.
And then, this wonderful glorious movement, the most healthiest one
that's happening in this country, is organized folk music, people
turning off those machines and getting together to sharing music and
food as a holy activity, singer circles, folksong societies,
campouts, things like that, take care of each other's kids, potlucks.
It'syou find that town, town, city for city, all happening below the
level of media notice. And that's where I happen, that's where I want
to happen, below the level of media notice, off of their radar, and
create this world that's apart, but which, as I say, if we're patient
and continue to build and to do our work in place, we will no longer
be the margin. We will no longer be the alternative.
AMY GOODMAN: The late Johnny Cash and you?
UTAH PHILLIPS: Well, John R. Cash once sent me awell, no, he called
me on the phone. There was a fellow named Paul Milosevich, used to
paint a beautiful painting for outlaw country singers down in Austin,
Texas. I discovered the difference between outlaw country music and
Nashville country music was that in outlaw they had dirty hats and in
Nashville they had clean white cowboy hats. And if you wanted to be
an outlaw, you had to take it off and throw it under a truck at a
truck stop and let it run over four or five times, then you can be an
outlaw. I knew that.
Well, Paul Milosevich had taken him a bunch of songs I had made up,
and John R. Cash, Johnny Cash, said, "I'd like to record these
songs." And Paul said, "Well, you'd better talk to Utah first." He
could have demanded a license. You know, that's the way the law is
written, copyright laws. If they had already been recorded once, you
could demand a license. But no, he's a gentleman. He called me up and
said, "I want to record these songs." And I said, "I'd appreciate it
if you didn't do that."
And we talked a good deal about that, you know. I think what I told
him, I said, "I don't want to contribute anything to that industry. I
can't fault you for what you're doing. I admire what you do. But I
can't feed that dragon. I'm not going to feed that dragon." And, of
course, he and other people said, "Well, think of the money that
you'd make. You could put it together in any cause you wanted." And I
said, "Mr. Cash, think about dollars as bullets. And the ragged band
of revolutionaries meet on the field with the general of the army,
and the general says, 'We're going to divide up the bullets. I'll
take seven, and you'll take three. And then we'll fight.' Who's going
to win?" See, soand a lot of people got on me. Melvina Reynolds was
furious with me for not doing that, you know, for not making the
deal. And I was on the edge of doing it, you know, any number of times.
And finally I said I've got to resolve this. I got a call from Santa
Rosa. They were going to open a peace center, and they asked me if
I'd come and sing. And I said, "Well, I think I can get there." And
they said, "By the way, Father Daniel Berrigan will be there." I
said, "OK," and I went over there so I could do the show, but also so
I could ask him, Father Berrigan, say, "What do I do in this
situation? Would you have any advice?" And so, I told him the story
backstage, and Father Berrigan saidall he said was "Oh, yeah.
They'll always tell you how much good you can do with dirty money."
And he walked away. So, OK, you know, I called and said, "No, no.
Don't do that."
What I wound up doing was turning around, since there is mandatory
licensing, is telling people who want to record those songs I make
up, even if you're a little label or you're self-produced, you know,
folk legacy, something like that, go ahead and do it, I just won't
sue you. And if somebody does demand a license, you know, and gets
it, like the industrial-strength performers, I set up a
non-sprinkling trust called the busker's fund. And the money, I don't
even see it, just bypasses me and goes into there for people for
medical relief for over-the-road folkies who can't get health insurance.
I don't want to make money writing songs. There are people who make
money writing songs; I can't fault that. I'm an anarchist. I don't
make rules for other people. I make rules for myself. And it's also a
kind of penance for what I saw and felt when I was in Korea. And
that's where we started, isn't it?
AMY GOODMAN: Utah Phillips, we're talking in an election year,
perhaps one of the most important election years ever. But you once
ran for election.
UTAH PHILLIPS: Onceoh, yeah, well, severalOK, I ran for the US
Senate in 1968 on the Peace and Freedom ticket, took a leave of
absence from state serviceI was a state archivistand ran a full
campaign, twenty-seven counties. We took 6,000 votes in Utah. But
when it was over, my job would vanish, and I couldn't get work
anymore in Utah.
So I hung on for about a year living on a cot in the back of a
warehouse, keeping a little draft resistance center going. And, of
course, by that time, we were dealing with deserters that didn't want
to go back to 'Nam, rather than, you know, the resisters. And I did
some work with the Utah Migrant Council, started the Joe Hill House
again, because Ammon had moved to Phoenix because he was too old to run it.
Finally, I had just run out of moves. I couldn't find work, and
that's when people, friends like Rosalee Sorrels, suggested I leave
Utah and try to make a living telling stories and singing songs,
which seemed criminal or somehow unthinkable in Utah. But that's when
I went out and founddiscovered this whole world.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you were an archivist in Utah?
UTAH PHILLIPS: I was an archivist, yeah. I handled 75,000 cubic feet
of public records. For an information junkie, that's heaven. Yeah, I
loved studying archival science, and I still have a library in my
home that I curate, my own little research library of popular
antiquities. And that's where my mind lives when I'm at home.
AMY GOODMAN: I've been speaking with librarians who are very
concerned that the country's archives are now being transferred to
the internet, and they're afraid from there that they will then be
vacuumed, that the internet can then be changed, as we've seen
President Bush, you know, purging words like "global warming" from
government websites.
UTAH PHILLIPS: Archival science is in a seriousa serious crisis, and
that's because of electronic media, electronic storage and retrieval.
A lot of hotshot, fancy, high-tech salesmen have gone to a lot of
archives and archivists and sold them some bogus hardware and
software. How many books has the Library of Congress lost? Millions
of books, because the images have vanished, whatever the storage
system is, electronic storage system is. It's degraded to the point
where the stuff is no longer usable.
In the Utah state archives, the best and most durable records are on
paper, from the 1800s, the old Mormon Governor Brigham Young's
papers. Why? Because there was potassium in the water they used to
make the paper in their own mill, and that's a natural paper
preservative, you know. And that's true, I think, of any archive in
the country. You talk to the archivists; they'll say the most durable
resource they have is still on paper.
Well, what's the shelf life of a CD? Is it about ten years, ten,
twelve years? Congress won't accept tape for archival purposes,
because after about ten, fifteen years, it bleeds through, you see?
That itpaper. You know, LPs, I have, what, over 150 John McCormack
78s from the early 1900smy favorite singer, John McCormackand I can
play those and listen to those. Same with my LPs. The whole
information is becoming more and more temporary. And you're
absolutely right. You know, it is terribly threatening to every
archive to be bullied by technocrats into going that route.
AMY GOODMAN: So, are you going to be voting this year? Are you going
to be endorsing anyone? What do you think is the most important form
of participation these days?
UTAH PHILLIPS: Well, now, you've got me boxed in. Amy, you know, you
makeyou ever made of vow? You know, like Catholics make vows, don't
they? You make a vow of celibacy or a vow of poverty. I made a vow to
Ammon Hennacy shortly before his death, that, you know, he would
neverhe was an anarchist, a great anarchist. And he would never
speak when I was running for the Senate. He would never talk, you
know, for me. Another you learn things the hard way, don't you? He
made me promise that I wouldn't engage in systemic politics ever
again, that there was another way I had to do this.
Ammon never went to the polls, but you couldn't tell him you hadn't
voted. He did vote. Ammon's body was his ballot. And he cast it in
behalf of the poor around him every day of his life. And he paid a
terrible price for that. You couldn't tell him you hadn't voted. You
said, "Yes, I did vote. I just didn't assign responsibility to other
people to do things. I accept responsibility and saw to it that
something got done." It's a different way of looking at voting, isn't
it? And you can do that all the time. You could have your life in
this way. I lived my life. My body is my ballot. It's a lesson I
learned from Ammon. That's my way. That's the vow I took, and I'm not
going to break it. Right?
Given that, I can't, of course, ask people to do something that I
wouldn't do, you know, but it does appear to me that these fascists
that have taken over have got to getwe've got to get rid of them.
They're not Republicans, and they're not Democrats up there. You
know, they're something else. They're corporate fascists. And they
got to be out off there. And the only organized force on the
planetin the country that I know of that can do that is the
Democratic Party. God help us all. You know, it's like buying a seat
on the Titanic, the Democratic Party, but they're the only force,
organized force, that has the ability to do it. So it's imperative
that the entire progressive movement come together, like they did in
the Great Depression at the time of the CIO.
Every progressive force in the country came together, gave them the
window of opportunity, Roosevelt's second term, and put their
differences on the shelves, stopped hammering on each other. In the
Great Depression. And we came out of that with Social Security and
workmen's compensation and a minimum wage, you understand? The whole
progressive movement, from animal rights to the feminist movement to
anti-nuclearI don't care what permutationhave got to saying, "This
is my issue, this is my issue," and join forces and once again create
the united front, total united front, and take over the Democratic
Party, and that's the only way we're going to be able to do this, to
pull this off. We can't do thatthen, when we've done it, go back and
hammer on each other, OK, but for right now, all the difference has
got to be pushed aside. I am absolutely appalled at these Democratic
candidates hammering on each other, you know, not recognizing the
direness of our situation.
It is long since, since those people should have sat down in a room
together and decided which one could be elected and put everything
they had into that person. Time has long since passed. They've got to
do it. And otherwise, we're in for very much serious, more serious
times we've got now. It's not that time has run out. It's going to
make it a lot harder on everybody else to try to make it better.
AMY GOODMAN: Legendary folk musician Utah Phillips in 2004. He died
this weekend in Nevada City, California. The memorial service will be
held on Sunday. The family requests donations go to Hospitality House
in Grass Valley,hospitalityhouseshelter.org. I'll be speaking in
Grass Valley Friday night.
.
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