http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/11/PKO919ICCL.DTL
Joel Selvin, Chronicle Senior Pop Music Correspondent
September 13, 2009
Pete Seeger, card-carrying Communist, enemy of the state and
blacklisted folksinging pariah, performing at the inauguration of the
president of the United States? Now 90 years old, he lived to see it.
He says he never thought it would happen.
"I absolutely didn't. Even after I did get a Kennedy Award and an
award where I had to go to the White House and shake the hand of the
president. Although there were very serious things I wanted to say to
him, I couldn't say it on that occasion," Seeger says on the phone
from his home in the Hudson River Valley.
This is award season for the old banjo player. After appearing with
Bruce Springsteen at the Lincoln Memorial before the Obama
inauguration, Seeger was feted to a birthday party at Madison Square
Garden featuring performances by Springsteen, Joan Baez, John
Mellencamp, Dave Matthews, Emmylou Harris and others, a gala event
filmed and broadcast on PBS.
He was the subject of a recent documentary film, "The Power of Song,"
profiled in the New Yorker, and performed as a headline attraction at
this year's New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fair and the 50th
anniversary edition of the Newport Folk Festival. On Labor Day
weekend, he received the prestigious Gish Award - previous recipients
include Robert Redford, Bob Dylan, Arthur Miller and Frank Gehry -
which comes with $200,000. He appears Friday at the Masonic
Auditorium with children and grandchildren of his old pal Woody
Guthrie and plays Saturday at the Monterey Jazz Festival.
Seeger is not impressed. He tends to view these accolades as
impositions. He is more cranky old man than kindly old granddad.
"It's the most difficult time my wife and I have ever had," he says.
"The mail comes in, like, a bushel at a time. The phone rings every
five minutes. I knew it would be a problem, but I didn't know how big
a problem. We have no free time. I'm now sending out form letters.
'Dear dash' - and I give their name - 'Thanks for your letter, but,
the form letter goes on, I don't have time to listen to the CD you
sent me, the book to read, the DVD to watch, the invitation to come
and receive an award.' It's really kind of crazy."
"He hates it," says Tao Rodriguez, his 37-year-old grandson, who has
traveled and performed with his grandfather since he was 14. "I try
and keep him from as many of them as possible. Someone wants to give
him an honorary degree, he says, 'Oh please, I've got enough honorary
degrees - what do I need one more for?' He's mediaphobic."
At his appearance in San Francisco, Seeger joins the Guthrie Family
Tour, a musical event that brings together more than a dozen members
of three generations of Guthries, singing the songs of the family
patriarch, Woody Guthrie. "It's the first time we've done it since
1984," says his youngest grandchild, Sarah Lee Guthrie, from her home
in Western Massachusetts. "I was just 5 years old, and I'll never
forget it. When Dad (Arlo) went on the road in the '70s and '80s, it
was always no women or children on the road. Or dogs."
No short answers
With Pete Seeger, even a question like "How are you doing?" gets
fully explored.
"Most days my memory is no good anymore," he says, "so I'm forgetting
things all the time. On the other hand, life is still fascinating and
I think the struggle to see if there's going to be a human race here
in the next hundred years is the most important struggle in the
world. It's a 50-50 chance, you know. Although I confess I'm a little
more optimistic than I was after Hiroshima. There I said we have a
50-50 chance, but that was mainly to encourage people that their
little grain of sand might be enough to tip the scale in the right
direction. I guess I still say that for the same reason. Sixty years
ago, I thought within 20 or 30 years some fool would drop one of
those big bombs and more would be dropped. If we weren't killed, we'd
be poisoned by the fallout. But one good thing has happened after
another. The civil rights movement took place. The women's liberation
movement is in full swing and going a lot further. The most important
thing is that there are not thousands but literally millions of good
little things going on all over our country, often local. One of my
slogans is, to repeat what the great biologist René Dubos says: Think
globally, act locally."
It's nice that you're feeling optimistic, I say.
A lot of mistakes
"It's true that people my age have made so many mistakes you're
usually pessimistic," he says. "I have made a lot of mistakes, huge
number of them. I'd be out singing somewhere and I'd leave my wife
taking care of three little babies all by herself on a mountainside.
If the dog barks, she didn't know if it was some man to cause
trouble. Until we could afford to dig a well, she would walk 150
yards down a ravine to a little brook with one baby on her hip and
the other tugging at her skirt, and she's got a pail of water to cook
and wash with. She's an absolute heroine. There's many mistakes I've
made, a whole lot of them.
"On the other hand, I've tried to stay in good health. I learned an
Arab proverb when I was in Lebanon once. Arabs are proud that the
whole world uses Arabic numerals. We don't use Roman numerals, or
Chinese numerals. We use Arabic numerals. If you have good health,
put down a number one. If you have a family, put down a zero. How
lucky you are. If you have land, put down another zero. Family, land
- what more could you want? Well, if you've got a good reputation,
put down another zero. You got it all. But take away the one, what
have you got? Three zeroes. Good story for people to know. I tell it
everywhere.
"If it wasn't for my brain going, I'm in better condition than most
people 90 years old because I get lots of exercise. We heat our house
with wood, so I'm out sawing wood and splitting it. My idea of a nice
few minutes is to look out my window and see a few logs to split and
I go out and split 'em. It's within our DNA to like to go 'whack.'
Two or 3 million years we've been walking on two feet. That's when we
started swinging clubs, killing animals and killing our enemies. It's
no accident that sports like golf and baseball are popular all around
the world."
Seeger doesn't care to savor the irony of having gone from the
blacklist to the A-list. "I was blacklisted for most of the '50s and
much of the '60s. In a certain sense, I'm blacklisted still. I don't
get offered television jobs, things like that," he says. "To what
extent, I don't know. Back in what I call the frightened '50s, it was
common. But the funny thing is it didn't matter to me at all. I don't
like singing in nightclubs. I don't like singing on radio and TV
'cause they usually tell me what they want me to sing."
He tells a story about appearing on the "Today" show when Barbara
Walters was still on. He prepared what he called "a happy little
banjo piece," and he had a second song he wanted to sing, "Garbage,"
a 1969 protest song by songwriter Bill Steele. The song pokes fun at
environmental issues, but Seeger added a fourth verse in the '70s
that extends the song premise into a fierce denunciation of
corporations and capitalist greed in general. He recalled the
exchange with the producer during the rundown after he sang "Garbage."
" 'Pete, it's a little early in the morning for that. You got
something else?' "
Pete sings, "When the revolution comes to my country ..."
" 'Pete, do you have something else?' "
"Walking down death row ..."
" 'Well, Pete, I guess we'll stick with 'Garbage.' The whole studio
broke up. The cameramen, they said, 'Yes, we'll stick with 'Garbage.' "
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment