David Rovics

national | arts and media | news report Wednesday June 16, 2004 23:37 by Robert Allen - An Talamh Glas atgrallen at yahoo dot com

Serenading Bush Irish Tour

Interview-feature with American radical singer-songwriter David Rovics, who is playing in Dublin and Cork on June 21/22.

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, 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."

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)

http://www.davidrovics.com