David Rovics
by Robert Allen
David Rovics Serenading Bush Irish Tour:
Dublin Monday June 21st The Cobblestones, Stoneybatter, 9pm
(support from Mark Malone, Dublin Grassroots Benefit)
Cork Tuesday June 22nd An Cruiscin Lan, Douglas Street, 9pm
(DJ after)
Rovics Website
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DAVID ROVICS writes songs of social significance. If he had
been observing society, with his guitar slung over his
back, in the 1930s he would have been called a folk singer,
in the 1960s a protest singer, in the 1980s a
singer-songwriter. Now, in these turbulent times, he has
been described as a
"storysinger with a guitar" in the
tradition of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie.
Yet he is closer to Jim Page, Phil Ochs, Billy Bragg and U
Utah Philips than to Bob Dylan, Donovan, Jackson Browne and
Christy Moore. If you listen closely to his lyrics you can
hear the influence of bluegrass, blues and folk. That's
where the comparison with contemporary folk music ends.
Rovics has been told his music is
"inspiring, and inspired", that it is "irresistible", that it gives
"life and hope in the struggle for peace and justice".
Rovics is in Ireland to serenade George W. Bush as part of
a series of protest events leading up to the US President's
visit. It is a task he has got used to during Bush's
presidency, so much that his lyrics could be seen as acts
of treason against the empire.
"I can only hope," he says in response to the possibility.
"In the context of this
struggle, me getting accused of treason by the [US]
government would be the best possible way to publicise my
music, and a lot else. I don't believe they're going to do
that, but it'd be a great blunder for them if they did."
Rovics' tour also co-incides with the release of his ninth
CD, Songs For Mahmud, which continue the themes that have
dominated his lyrics for the past five years with titles
like Song for Big Mountain, Terror in the Skies, Saint
Patrick Battalion, I Remember Warsaw, Reichstag Fire,
Promised Land, Song for Ana Belen Montes, Battle of Blair
Mountain, and Song the Songbird Sings.
"I wrote Song for Big Mountain when I spent two weeks there
several years ago. The more personal familiarity with the
land and people there helped a lot with writing that song,
but I had also read about the situation there beforehand."
"Sometimes," he says,
"it's hard to pin down what the main
thing was in doing a song. Terror in the Skies didn't
require much research, it's not that sort of song. just
the concept of 'terror' and the idea that the air force is
the world's largest and by far the most deadly terrorist
organisation.
"Saint Patrick Battalion I wrote after doing some research
on the web, after hearing about the battalion in a lecture
by the radical historian, Howard Zinn. I was also already
familiar with the international brigades in Spain, so I was
working with a familiar, powerful idea.
"I Remember Warsaw I wrote after reading the book, The
Bravest Battle, but I had been familiar with the rebellion
for many years and had been thinking of trying to write
something about it for a while.
"Reichstag Fire I wrote after becoming more familiar with
what is being called the 9/11 sceptics movement. The song
is based on the idea that every war the US has ever been in
was started with some degree of lie to make the US look
like it was defending itself from aggression, such as the
non-existent attack 'on US soil' that set off the
US-Mexican war, the sinking of the Lusitannia by the
Germans, when it was carrying munitions rather than the
tourist ship it claimed to be, the non-existent Vietnamese
attack in the Gulf of Tonkin, etc., etc. So the song just
posits the idea that this latest war may have been started
on similar grounds.
"I read about the case of Ana Belen Montes in a newspaper,
a very short article, and then looked into it more. She got
very little press, but what she did was both amazing -
reaching the highest level in the defence department for
Caribbean policy while being a spy for Cuba - and really
admirable.
"As for The Battle of Blair Mountain, I heard about (then
read) the book, Thunder in the Mountains and knew that a
song had to be written (perhaps another song?) about this
mass march of armed miners."
Rovics' songs also look at different perspectives in the
"war against terror", such as Palestine -
"the story of a
woman who was a little girl when her mother was raped and
hacked to pieces by eighteen men under orders from Ariel
Sharon on the floor of her home in the Shatila refugee camp
while she hid under the bed and watched"; or Promised Land
-
"a song from the perspective of Mohammed Atta" (one of
the 9/11 bombers); or Operation Iraqi Liberation -
"OIL is,
in fact, the acronym first (briefly) used to name the
invasion of Iraq, which was later changed to Operation
Iraqi Freedom"; or Song the Songbird Sings -
"in memory of Mahmud al-Qayyed, age 10, killed by Israeli occupation
forces for the crime of catching songbirds in the Gaza
Strip".
Rovics doesn't apologise for his anti-war stance.
"Lots of
people are outraged by the situation, of course. In spite
of the ridiculous accusations of self-hatred, etc., the
anti-war movement is quickly growing. Teach-ins, rallies
and other forms of protest are happening in cities and
towns across north America and the rest of the world.
Because of the Orwellian craziness of the current
situation, lots of people are getting involved with
activism who had never been involved with it before," he
says.
"I don't claim to know much, but it seems to me that the
time is ripe for a massive campaign of public education.
Not necessarily to the exclusion of other tactics, but it
seems to me that the people need to know what's going on
before much else can happen, and they're not going to get
this information from easy sources like the nightly news on
TV," he says.
"What I think would be great is if at every concert, a
representative of a local activist group would speak in
between sets about the war and what's happening locally to
resist it (and what's happening with regards to
transforming society in general, and whatever else they
want to talk about)".
As he travels the western world playing music to a variety
of audiences he feels a sense of optimism.
"We've had way
too much success over the past few thousand years to start
being pessimistic now. My biggest fear is not that we can
succeed in radically transforming society and governing
structures world-wide. Of that I have absolutely no doubt.
I can't imagine anyone with a knowledge of history being a
pessimist," he says.
"My biggest fear is whether we can transform the world
quickly enough to avoid ecological holocaust, nuclear war,
or some other kind of eventuality that would really put a
damper on the future of humanity and thus, the potential
for society to change (our species has to survive in order
for change to happen) but even in this race against time, I
have hope. There's always the 'simple twist of fate'
possibility. We can never really know the future," he says.
"So yes let's be optimistic about the potential of peoples'
movements around the world to radically change everything."
His lyrics bring his audience closer to the reality in the
world from his perspective, which is based on
"living life,
knowing people, having relationships, travelling around the
world, reading books, newspapers, magazines, listening to
the radio".
In the prelude to his song Who Will Tell the People on the
2001 release Living In These Times, he says:
"The struggle
for the airwaves is one of the most important things going
on today because it really presents the struggle for the
hearts and minds of the people, if we can't communicate
we're not going to be able to reach them." This also
defines one of the messages he carries to his audiences,
that control of the media is a major issue in the war
against globalisation.
"The mainstream media certainly has a hell of a lot of
access to most people," he says.
"It seems to me that where
word of mouth and community exists, we tend to be winning
the war - like in many cities. In the suburbs we're mostly
losing, due I think mainly to the atomisation of the
community, but where we're winning and to whatever extent
we may be winning, I think it's always a combination of
person-to-person communication and alternative media. In
the US, the rampant spread of the Pacifica Foundation's
radio program, Democracy Now!, has been a significant
factor, as have random things like Howard Zinn's A People's
History of the United States sort of catching on from
person to person until it became a best-seller".
Music is a tradition he was born to, yet it is a vocation
he did not take to until the street murder of a close
friend, Eric Mark, in the wee hours of May Day 1993.
"It was Eric's death that got me into songwriting,
essentially," he explains in the sleeve notes of his Live
at Club Passim session in April, 2000.
"I had dabbled in it before that, and had been involved in
various activist circles as well. In a way nothing changed
for me; my thinking, my life, my music more or less
continued along some kind of similar trajectory, I suppose.
But it was as if the world suddenly went from black and
white to colour, and so full of blood as well as beauty,"
he says.
Song for Eric goes a long way to explain why Rovics is
among the most popular 'folk' singers of this age. There is
a passion and vitality to his performance that, in the
triumphant words of Gerald Colby, marks Rovics as
"one of
the most thoughtful singers in progressive America".
'I think of those four boys who drove up to say -
give us your money, and they blew you away,
with one pull of a trigger your sweet life was through
and everytime I see that street I think of you',
he sings, a wistful mandolin adding poignancy to his lyrics.
Born in Manhattan on April 10, 1967, and brought up in the
suburbs of Connecticut from the age of two, Rovics was
exposed to music and protest politics at a young age. His
parents, classical musicians and college professors,
encouraged him to learn classical cello and did not
discourage him from getting involved in progressive
politics. Awareness of his local environment accentuated
this combination.
"Growing up in a very woodsy environment, and seeing much
of that environment destroyed by the coming of the highways
and strip malls had a profound impact on my environmental
awareness," he says,
"and that of many members of my social
class and generation - the suburban white middle and upper
classes, where much of the American environmental movement
gets its converts.
"I was also exposed to protest music through the
anti-nuclear movement, and at a camp I went to run by a
Unitarian minister, but I didn't get into singing and
playing the guitar until I was older, like 19," he says.
"By the time I was 21 or so I developed a renewed interest
in political activism, so moving from the folk-rock kind of
stuff I had been singing into political stuff, and
eventually writing songs of that nature, was sort of a
natural progression".
A Jewish father, an Irish great-grandmother, a poor white
grandmother from Alabama, and playing the game of Risk as a
child, Rovics believes influenced his global awareness.
"I
grew up learning about the holocaust in Europe, so from
that angle I was aware of the existence of countries
outside of the US from an early age, mainly through my
grandmother", he says, adding that reading 1960s new left
thinkers
"such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and Jeremy
Brecher" also influenced his thinking about the world.
"I guess I've always been into the big picture, making
connections. I've always been fascinated by history, where
the connections are made. Reading about radical labour
history in the US, for example, it begs an international
perspective - where did all these people come from?"
This is his fifth tour of Ireland.
"My travels have been
mainly limited to western Europe and north America, but out
of the places I've been, Ireland is a real favourite", he
says.
"I imagine this is really self-evident to people
here, but it's abundantly obvious visiting here that the
history of struggle has had a profound and mostly very
positive influence on the Irish psyche - and the
appreciation for music here is astounding".
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David Rovics interviewed by Robert Allen
Robert Allen is the author of Dioxin War: Truth & Lies About A Perfect Poison, Pluto Press, London/Ann Arbor/Dublin and University of Michigan, US, published in July 2004. Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com.
Book Description
This is a book about Dioxin, one of the most poisonous chemicals known to humanity. It was the toxic component of Agent Orange, used by the US military to defoliate huge tracts of Vietnam during the war in the 60s and 70s.
It can be found in pesticides, plastics, solvents, detergents and cosmetics. Dioxin has been revealed as a human carcinogen, and has been associated with heart disease, liver damage, hormonal disruption, reproductive disorders, developmental destruction and neurological impairment.
The Dioxin War is the story of the people who fought to reveal the truth about dioxin. Huge multinationals Dow and Monsanto both manufactured Agent Orange. Robert Allen reveals the attempts by the chemical industry, in collusion with regulatory and health authorities, to cover up the true impact of dioxin on human health. He tells the remarkable story of how a small, dedicated group of people managed to bring the truth about dioxin into the public domain and into the courts - and win.
Robert Allen is the author of No Global: The People of Ireland versus the Multinationals, Pluto Press, London/Ann Arbor/Dublin, published in April 2004. Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com.
Book Description
Ireland's economy has seen phenomenal growth since the 1990s, as a result of an earlier decision by the state to chase foreign investment, largely from US corporates. As a result, manufacturers of raw chemicals, pharmaceuticals and highly dangerous substances came to Ireland, where they could make toxic products free from the strict controls imposed by other nations.
Robert Allen's book reveals the consequences to human health and the environment of the Irish state's love affair with the multinational chemical industry. The cost to Irish society was a series of ecological and social outrages, starting in the 1970s and continuing into the 2000s.
No Global is a lesson for countries who seek to encourage multinationals at the expense of the health their population and the delicate nature of their ecosystems. It is also a heart-warming record of the successful campaigns fought by local people to protect themselves and their environment from polluting industry
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