Sentient Times Aug/Sept 08

The Golden Voice of the Great Southwest

Interview with Legendary Folk Musician, Activist
Utah Phillips

By Amy Goodman

Utah Phillips, the legendary folk musician and peace and labor activist, died at the age of seventy-three last May. 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. 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. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviewed Utah Phillips in January 2004 at the pirate radio station, Freak Radio Santa Cruz, where Utah had come to perform. This is an excerpt from that interview.

Amy Goodman: When did you begin singing, story-telling?
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 left home and went up to work in Yellowstone National Park during high school. I was going to make some summer money. That was 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 music—Johnny 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 Jimmie Rodgers songs, they sang old Gene Autry songs—songs I had never heard, but which were much closer to the way I was living right there at that time, certainly a lot closer than 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.

War has always seemed to play a major role in defining our times and affected your work, as well. You went to Korea?
Yes, I joined the Army. 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 right after the treaty there, the truce. It was life amid the ruins. Children crying—that’s my 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, sex, booze, drugs, what have you—a blueprint for self-destruction. And I knew that if I endured that, I would perish, I would simply perish.

I was up on the Imjin River, and I wanted to swim in it, because I wanted to wash all that away. I was told I couldn’t swim in the Imjin. And it was a young Korean there who explained to me why I couldn’t. He said, “When we marry, we move in with our grandparents—but 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, 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 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.

How did you do it?
Painfully, painfully. It takes a long time to shut up and listen. I decided that the great struggles, the wars that you’re talking about—it 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 matter—the 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 to me for people to understand that and begin to 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.

How did you become a pacifist?
I was in Korea for eighteen months. 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 a 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. Ammon took me in and I was there with him 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 you know, I was a very angry person. “You just act out a lot. 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 you’ve got to look at nonviolence like an alcoholic looks at booze.” Alcohol will kill an alcoholic, unless he has the courage to sit in a circle of people and say, “Hi. My name is Utah. I’m an alcoholic.” But then, once 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 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.” 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 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.” Ammon 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.

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. Could you talk about some of the people who you feel have made important differences in activism, in resisting the wars?
For that, I would have to go back to union brothers and sisters. My union, the Industrial Workers of the World, is the only organization I’ve ever known of that didn’t break faith with its elders. When I went to try to find out who I really was, to reconstruct my life, I found those elders. I never thought I would be able to say this, Amy, but most of my elders, most of my teachers, were born the century before last. 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 one of the effects of the war—and the same thing happened in the Second World War—was to use that super patriotism and 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 terrible oppression and that awful war, we came out with the beginning of the eight-hour day, with mine safety laws, with child labor laws. We were still winning all the time we were losing.

What do you think of the time we’re living in now?
The long memory is the most radical idea in America. That long memory has been taken away from us. Listen young people—that long memory 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. 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 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.

You’re known for telling stories really opposite from the mass media world today, where a sound bite is something like eight or nine seconds. What do you think that has done to the way people learn and understand?
I think that television has had a serious impact—we’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 see the World Series. The frequency of images is so fast that I can’t track it. I don’t have a 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. You’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.

I think that it’s wrong to abandon children to a television set. Children 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. The glory of radio is that it unlocks the imagination, because you create your own images—but television gives you the images, the 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.

What about commercial media and what it’s done?
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 understanding—don’t we, Amy—that 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 system that’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, not the 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 doing too many good things to afford the luxury of being pessimistic. If I look at the world from the top down, from FOX, God help me, or CNN or—there 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?

Talk about the music industry.
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, when 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 the 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.

This wonderful glorious movement, the healthiest one that’s happening in this country, is organized folk music—people getting together to share music and food as a holy activity, singer circles, folksong societies, campouts, things like that, taking care of each other’s kids, potlucks. You find that all over, 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.

Democracy Now! is a national, daily, independent, award-winning TV/radio news program airing on over 700 stations. Hosted by journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez and broadcast on Pacifica, NPR, community, and college radio stations; on public access, PBS, satellite television (DISH network: Free Speech TV ch. 9415 and Link TV ch. 9410; DIRECTV: Link TV ch. 375); and at www.democracynow.org on the internet, Democracy Now! provides access to people and perspectives rarely heard in the corporate-sponsored media with independent and international journalists, ordinary people from around the world, grassroots leaders and peace activists, artists, academics and independent analysts.