David Hilliard and Narada Michael Walden on the spirit of West Fest
BY JOHNNY RAY HUSTON
October 21, 2009
MUSIC Golden Gate Park has once again become a nexus for huge music
concerts. The massive scope of events such as Outside Lands can't
help but evoke the legacy of San Francisco in the 1960s, when musical
gatherings were not only abundant, but a definite inspiration behind
concerts elsewhere especially Woodstock. With West Fest, organizer
Boots Hughston and an extensive lineup of musicians and participants
are paying tribute to Woodstock's 40th anniversary. But they're also
bringing a sense of living history to a place where new generations
of music lovers some of whom knowingly or unknowingly admire
contemporary acts influenced by the Woodstock era regularly congregate.
Politically speaking, it's especially important to bridge a sense of
then and now. One person who will be doing exactly that is David
Hilliard, former chief of staff in the Black Panther Party, author of
many books, and current-day teacher. "Our purpose was always to
ensure that art was part of our revolutionary political process,"
says Hilliard.
"I dispatched members of our chapter to Woodstock '69 as a gesture of
solidarity to the counterculture movement. We were the comrades of
the hippies and yippies and Peace and Freedom Party. We had the
support of people like John Lennon that was our constituency. It
makes sense that we should be included in a celebration of this
momentous event."
Hilliard has no problem connecting his message to the present
especially because the present includes some tell-tale problems. "I
have to talk about the contemporary issue of millions of people who
have lost their homes to foreclosure," he says, when asked about the
subjects of his West Fest speech. "And isn't it ironic that universal
health care is the chief issue of the day, because we were devoted to
free health care it was central to our program."
Hilliard isn't especially inspired by contemporary hip-hop, aside
from Talib Kweli and a few other conscious artists. When asked
whether the music of the moment approaches the political intensity of
hip-hop's Public Enemy era, he answers with a "hell no" that is as
strong as it is quick, adding, "The whole industry has been reduced
to a few artists who make it because they come up with songs about
the latest dance."
This doesn't mean that Hilliard and his contemporaries don't have a
hand in politicizing popular culture and youth culture in ways big
and small. Black Panther Minister of Culture Emory Douglas currently
has a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los
Angeles, and Hilliard takes part in projects like the South L.A. Road
to College, which teaches South Central L.A. youth about the Panthers
and their history while preparing them for college. HBO is developing
a six-hour series on the Panthers based on Hilliard's 1993 book This
Side of Glory and Elaine Brown's 1992 autobiography A Taste of Power:
A Black Woman's Story. "We are proud to be working with Carl
Franklin," Hilliard says, referring to the series' director, whose
undersung 1992 classic One False Move renders in truly disturbing
human terms the kind of drug violence that 1994's Pulp Fiction treats
as entertainment. "We need a year to tell this story [in a series],
but we'll take six hours and hope that it will inspire people to tell
the story more often."
West Fest's wildest musical element has to be an attempt to outdo the
Guinness World Book of Records' current entry for Largest Guitar
Ensemble via a 3,000-or-more-guitar rendition of Jimi Hendrix's
"Purple Haze." A chief force leading this effort, the producer and
musician Narada Michael Walden, is also performing a set in honor of
Hendrix later in the day. "Jimi Hendrix was the highest-paid
performer at Woodstock, the most sought-after at the time," Walden
points out from his base at Tarpan Studios in San Rafael. "A lot of
the music he played at the festival "Jam Back at the House,"
"Villanova Junction," "Isabella," "Fire" is in obscurity because we
only hear "Purple Haze" and "Foxy Lady." I wanted a chance to play
some of the songs Jimi played at Woodstock that we don't get to hear."
Moreover, working with musicians such as Vernon Ice Black, Hendrix's
bassist Billy Cox, and some special guests, Walden hopes to tap into
the political subtext of Hendrix's music at West Fest.
"He didn't just want white fans or black fans, he wanted to reach
everybody," Walden says. "He tried his hardest by doing "The
Star-Spangled Banner" in a way in which you heard the bombs
exploding. He'd been a paratrooper jumping out of airplanes, and he
wanted our nation to wake up to what we were doing, all the needless
killing in Vietnam."
If anyone can corral 3,000-plus guitarists into making something
musical, it's the energetic Walden. He's the producer behind the hits
that made Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey into stars, and before
that, the gorgeous pop R&B songs by teenage Stacey Lattisaw ("Let Me
Be Your Angel," "My Love") that no doubt inspired those divas-to-be
to work with him. "My first solo album [Garden of Love Light] in 1976
was produced with Tommy [Tom] Dowd," he remembers, when another
legendary musical force who turned away from the U.S. military is
mentioned. "I spent months and months recording with him and learned
first-hand from him. He was really here to do what he did only a
few people understood how to compress music for radio in a way that
it could still live and breathe. He knew how to take the queen of
soul, Aretha, and give her a Southern sound with a vibrancy that
allowed all people everywhere to feel it. That's the genius not
just the musical side but the scientific side of Tom Dowd."
The life stories of men such as Hendrix and Dowd who abandoned
atomic work on the Manhattan Project for the studios of Atlantic
Records are still applicable today. After all, this is an era in
which Barack Obama calls for more troops in Afghanistan and wins the
Nobel Peace Prize. Amid the potential and contradictions invoked by
such a circumstance, Walden's Hendrix-inspired endeavors and
Hilliard's speech at West Fest are worth hearing.
--
WEST FEST, 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF WOODSTOCK
Sun/25, 9 a.m.6 p.m., free
Golden Gate Park, SF
www.2b1records.com/woodstock40sf
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