Making a Living, Not a Killing

Utah Phillips talks to Democracy Now's Amy Goodman about his career in folk music. Utah was one of our greatest songwriters and storytellers and a great teacher. I met Utah a couple of times at a little folk club in Leucadia, California where I used to hang out back in the mid eighties, and attended a couple of workshops that he gave at the short lived San Diego Folk Festival. He was a genuinely good man, a fine performer and a real philosopher. At different times in his life he had been a soldier, a historian, a hobo and a politician. He knew everything there was to know about the American labor movement and all the songs that had ever been written about the struggle for social justice and workplace equality. Utah passed away two years ago and it left a big hole in the folk music community and in the lives of everyone who had met him. He lives on though, through his songs and his writings, the recordings of his radio show, and the humor and wisdom that he spread around while he was here.

In this video he tells us all how important it is to own your own work. Utah made his living performing and recording music, and he worked real hard to do that, but he also worked real hard to remain independent. In the video he tells how Johnny Cash called him up one day and asked for permission to record a whole album of his songs, and why he decided to say "no." There's a lot of food for thought in this interview for independent musicians. Record companies, and managers and world tours aren't all they're cracked up to be. Money isn't all it's cracked up to be, either. Woody Guthrie turned down the best paying gigs he was ever offered, too. Making a living is one thing. Making a killing is another...

In May of 1956, New Jersey cops busted a wiry little man for vagrancy. He was headed West out of New York City, on a Greyhound, and he didn’t have any money for the fare. He told the cops he was sick, and not drunk, and requested to be taken to a hospital. The psychiatrist who examined him thought he was delusional because he claimed to have written a thousand songs, a novel, and to have recorded for the Smithsonian. He was Woody Guthrie, the man Allen Lomax had called, “America’s greatest ballad writer,” and he was on his last downhill slide. He would live for another eleven years, but his ramblin’ days were over, cut short by a rare neurological disease that he had inherited from his mother, who used to sing him to sleep with traditional American folk songs.

By the time Woody passed away a cultural phenomenon called the Folk Revival had hit, and the folks who had known him the best, and been touched by him the deepest, were hard at work turning him into an American legend. Allen Lomax and Irwin Silber were turning out songbooks top heavy with Guthrie compositions, Pete Seeger was travelling the country singing his songs and telling stories about him, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was recording whole albums of his songs, and his wife, Marjorie, had established a foundation to secure his legacy for his children. Bob Dylan had already emerged on the scene, visited Woody in the hospital, and was singing his songs, and his praises, to anyone who would listen. Dylan played his first big gig at Gerde’s Folk City wearing one of Woody’s old suits and recorded Song To Woody for his first album.

The Folk Revival didn’t last long, but the spirit of Woody Guthrie was at the heart and soul of it from the beginning. Woody Guthrie showed you that there was something more to folk music than just playing Sally Goodin. With three chords and a borrowed tune you could make up your own song. You could write about what you saw around you, you could write about your own life, you could comment on what was happening in the news, you could tell a story that could break someone’s heart, and maybe you could change the world. Young songwriters, stoked on Woody Guthrie’s legend, became influential in all fields of music, folk, country, blues, rock, pop, rap and punk. It’s not hard to call Woody Guthrie the world’s most influential songwriter. What’s hard is to try to find a serious songwriter anywhere that does not cite Woody as a primary influence.

The influence of Woody Guthrie on modern music endures because of the content and quality of the songs themselves. Although most of his best songs were written in the depression era, they remain relevant to each generation because of their humanity. Woody’s songs celebrate the dignity of the working class while shining a light on the greed and hypocrisy of the rich. In Woody’s songs, the outlaws are always good guys and the bankers, cops, lawyers, politicians and preachers are the bad guys. His songs say to the overworked, dispossessed, abused and downtrodden, “You’re not alone, you didn’t do anything wrong, you don’t deserve to be treated this way, and you don’t have to take it.” He wrote most of his songs to traditional tunes that the common people already knew, giving them the almost biblical power of folk music, a power that still resonates with people today, even if they can’t name the tune.

Woody’s legend will endure, and his songs will continue to be influential as long as there is injustice in the world and as long as people have the will and the spirit to stand up to it. As long as young people have the idealism to see what’s wrong in their world and to imagine that they could set things right with a couple of chords and the fire in their soul, they will find Woody’s music and be inspired by it. Woody’s guitar said ”This Machine Kills Fascists,” and that’s what it was all about, a young man headed West with a notebook full of rhymes, a heart full of songs, and a lonesome whistle blowin’ in the distance…

Archie Logsdon

Ramsay Midwood and Randy Weeks at the Cinema Bar

Ramsay Midwood and Randy Weeks, Live at the Cinema Bar in Los Angeles

November 6th and 7th, 2009

Is the Cinema Bar the coolest live music venue in Los Angeles? Erin and I like it a lot, and we always like to see who's playing there whenever I make it down to LA. It's a funky old dive in Culver City that books the hippest Americana (whatever that is) acts in Los Angeles. No cover charge. Beers are 6 dollars. Dinky stage. Terrible sound system. Great crowd of good people. Coolest place in LA, according to Lost Hills.....

We've seen Randy there before. He's been a key player on the LA country rock scene for years, with his former band, the Lonesome Strangers, and as a solo artist. He's moved on to Austin now, so it's a treat to catch him at the Cinema, one of his old hangouts. Ramsay has been on my radar for a couple of years now. He's an enigmatic songwriter who sounds like an old hillbilly spinning tales of a life gone weirdly awry. They were doing two nights together right before my birthday, and I was going to be in town building Erin a laundry room, so went both nights. Hell, why not? It's the coolest place in LA.

You could think of them as the odd couple. They met at open mics when Ramsay was coming up and Randy's band had split up. Randy's the ultimate professional, and Ramsay's a shambling dude that looks like an unlicensed house painter or a shade tree mechanic, with a couple beat to shit pawn shop prize guitars. Ramsay is one of those rustic American roots performers that tours Europe but no one you know has ever heard of. They're missing out on a unique American artist with depth and vision. He's got a rootsy finger picking style that makes you want to get up and boogy while you're listening to twisted tales of Jesus, 450 pound hounds, prison gangs and rednecks with monster trucks. The band could not have been better. Kip Boardman on bass, Danny McGough on Keyboards and Don Heffington (Lone Justice, Emmylou Harris's Hot Band) on drums. Randy Weeks threw down smokin' hot lead guitar on Ramsay's songs, and tossed in a bunch of his own best country rockers as well. All of these guys played on Ramsay's album, Popular Delusions & the Madness of Cows (produced by Don Heffington,) and they were both tight and loose in the best sense of both terms. Randy's lead guitar playing was a real eye opener for me. I knew he was a great guitar player, but the last time I saw him at the Cinema he had Tony Gilkyson playing lead guitar in his band. In these two shows, he was the lead guitarist and his guitar playing was one of the major highlights of the whole deal.

These guys had a lot of fun, and so did the audience. Ramsay's songs have a way of being dark and humorous at the same time, and they are all steeped in traditional folk, country and blues. One of the things I really dug was the way Ramsay would weave lyrics from gospel and bluegrass classics in and out of his songs. He even found a way to work verses from BTOs Takin' Care Of Business into two of his songs the first night. He's a guy that can throw a Woody Guthrie song into his set, and it fits seamlessly. He's the real shit, my friends.

Well, Erin and I were already Randy Weeks fans, and now we're Ramsay Midwood fans as well. Somewhere in the night I turned 56. The next day I stopped somewhere along the road and got a haircut, and the beautician was tripping out that I don't have grey hair yet. I told her she should see my beard..... I drive out of LA and out toward the mountains and I have a new saying that I can plug into most any conversation, "If you don't like it you can kiss my ass, 'cause I drive a monster truck." Lookin' forward to my next pilgrimage to the Cinema Bar, the oldest bar in Culver City.

Randy Weeks

Ramsay Midwood

The Cinema Bar

A Trip to Weedpatch Camp

On the trail of Woody Guthrie, Erin and I visited Weedpatch Camp, in Lamont, the other day. I believe it's the last existing migrant camp that was set up under the New Deal, in the 1930s, to house the dust bowl refugees. I had heard that Woody Guthrie played there for the migrants, and I've been wanting to check it out for some time. Displaced farmers, fleeing the dust bowl, came to California by the thousands in the 1930s seeking employment. There was always more workers than there was work, and wages were abysmally low, and they wound up living in ramshackle camps on the edges of the fields enduring hunger, disease, discrimination and abuse, until the government set up "clean" camps to house them safely and humanely. This is the story told by John Steinbeck's, The Grapes Of Wrath, and Woody Guthrie's great Dust Bowl Ballads. The Weedpatch Camp was the first of the government camps and it's still here, still in use by migrant farmworkers, and some of the original buildings have been preserved.

You can drive out there any time and see the old buildings. A couple of them can also be seen in the 1939 film version of The Grapes Of Wrath, with Henry Fonda. They're adjacent to the Arvin Migrant Housing Center on Sunset Road, between Weedpatch Highway and Comanche Road. If you make an appointment with the folks who take care of it they'll have a docent open it up for you and give you a guided tour. We were given a very authoritative presentation by researcher, Doris Weddell, and treated to the personal reminiscences of Earl Shelton, who actually lived in the camp in the 1940s and worked in the fields for much of his life. I highly recommend taking the tour. All you have to do is call them, or send them an email, and they're happy to do it. There's a public celebration called Dust Bowl Days that is held there every year in October. I've been meaning to go to Dust Bowl Days for a couple years now, but it seems that I'm always busy on that weekend, so I was glad for the opportunity to check it out in this way. I've been a Woody Guthrie scholar for years, and I'm working on a Woody Guthrie show, so it was inspiring and illuminating to walk around the grounds and stand on the fine old stage, there. I had an idea of recording a music video there, and I had my guitar with me, but it was just too doggone hot at this time of year. Maybe in the Fall... Erin did get some video of Mr. Shelton telling his great old stories, though, and maybe she'll share some of that with us. It represents an important page from our local history and is well worth a visit. Check out a copy of The Grapes Of Wrath before you go to put your visit in the proper context.

For more information about Dust Bowl Days, and to book a private tour, check out the Dust Bowl Days Website.

Here's a link to a slideshow of our trip:

http://s303.photobucket.com/albums/nn133/losthillsmusic/Weedpatch%20Camp/?action=view&current=0ab48f89.pbw