Six week concert tour, 1985. Madison, Wisconsin. There is not a great deal of excitement when I pull up in a van with Mary, my tour manager, and Cesar, my accompanist. We have come from Chicago, a three-hour drive. In Chicago, the hotel is the Four Seasons, and courtesy of an assistant manager in the Four Seasons Canada, I’ve been given a tasteful pale blue suite overlooking lakes and cathedrals, bird’s-eye level with a sky full of March clouds. The suite is five hundred dollars a night, and I’m paying one hundred and ten, or I would be down the hall in a modest single room. We have filled the rooms with flowers from last night’s concert: pink tulips, a basket of daffodils, bright pink azaleas, and a mixed bouquet next to my stuffed duck on the table at the entrance (and a card from my mother with a blue iris on black painted by Jan Brueghel). I have decided to make these rooms my home, rather than a “stopover.” A stopover means no flowers, no view, medium to ugly decor, Styrofoam drinking cups, a tiny bathroom, and not enough floor space to do exercises.
The night we got in to Chicago, I said a little prayer of thanks for the accommodations, and then took a shower and hung up some clothes. Then I put some “space music” on my tiny Sony and settled into the half-lotus position to review the events of the day, and to clear my head for tomorrow. After a few minutes of sitting, my body automatically begins a yoga practice which continues anywhere from fifteen to forty minutes. I go into a state of meditation and prayer, stillness and attentiveness, small thanks and small requests. I reopen negotiations for an attempt to discover my purpose on this earth.
Like any meditation, sometimes it is calm and sometimes rattled. I think about where I have been. I’ve done two New York concerts and one at Boston Symphony Hall. I’ve seen my son, gone out dancing till three in the morning, spent the next day in the park throwing Frisbees. I’ve met my father in Boston, my sweet father who has just returned from India and who has started reading the Bhagavad-Gita. He was moved that I closed the concert with “Let Us Break Bread Together on Our Knees,” and said, “That is what you are here for, honey,” meaning that spirituality has a great deal to do with my calling. What comes up to the surface of my soul is love and gratitude for my son and father, and tears over the fresh memory of them: Gabe sitting casually in his multi-colored Grateful Dead T-shirt at an after-concert dinner; and my father, two nights later in Boston, with his thick greying hair and dark face, talking about how we are both growing . . .
Concert day in Madison, Wisconsin: Wet snow coming down on a grey, grey day; coffee at ten-thirty with Mary, and an unexpected Jason Robards film on HBO about a dying grandfather and his daughter and her son. Then exercises on the bike, more stretching, a shower, a long vocal practice, a room service hamburger split with Mary, and time to restring the guitar. One of the three false nails I have glued on to play the guitar chips off and the beauty salon in the hotel schedules me in to glue it back on. Mary has ironed my clothes: a black silk skirt, black top and striking Saint Laurent scarf, red cowboy boots. My carry-on bag is full of apples, granola bars, makeup, tape recorder, extra guitar strings, extra socks, a book on Central America, a Guy de Maupassant paperback of short stories in French, and a small French dictionary, earmuffs, and chocolates.
The van picked us up at one-thirty. Cesar had a cold. The trip to Madison was uneventful. There was no one to greet us when we arrived at the hall at four-thirty, so we followed the signs pointing to “dressing rooms” and ended up in the corridors beneath the old theater. Mary put down the clothing and bags; I put down the guitar and sat on the case and pulled out a copy of Vogue to find the Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein ads. The promoters found us and I was lodged in the same dressing room I had been in eighteen months ago and had no recollection of at all. The stage people were pleasant and helpful, the sound reasonable to good, the atmosphere cozy. There was my stool, the guitar stand, one mike for voice and one for guitar. The piano was also miked. I work with two monitors, Cesar with one. In a good hall with intelligent sound people, sound check takes fifteen minutes. I went into the orchestra pit for a live interview on the local news. They plugged me into remote control, and I had an upbeat interview.
The introduction was quite flattering, all about how I had been around fighting against the war in Vietnam in the sixties, and had always used my music to further political causes. The anchorwoman finished by saying that my latest activity was visiting and bringing to the public eye the plight of the Argentinian mothers whose children had disappeared (a four-year-old story).
It felt fine being a part of the sixties and I’m glad to be out of them and busy trying to find ways to get people to face the realities of the eighties. I have, in fact, been singing a lot over the past seven or eight years, but mostly in Europe.
Why so much time in Europe?
Because I have a broader audience there, and, quite simply, I have gotten spoiled by it, and now it is time to come home and get serious about my work in the U.S.
How does my son feel about my history?
My history is now his history. In fact, he recently told me I was in his history book. I told him I hoped I was portrayed fairly.
Out of all my accomplishments, what one thing could you say you are most proud of?
My son.
I go over to the two people from the student press. The man is deadly serious and takes notes. Madison is a sanctuary town, he tells me. I am delighted. And his newspaper was very outspoken against the war in the seventies. I’d never heard that before. We talk about hope versus optimism, about the swing of the pendulum, about new patriotism, about “the movement.” I tell him the word “optimism” is used to distort the facts in a dangerous and volatile world. The word “hope” seems somehow more modest and less myopic. The pendulum, I venture, had swung off the graph and is still swinging, and therefore it is difficult to do anything but adjust to the shock waves and convulsions it is leaving in its wake. It has brought “new patriotism”—a hysterical response to insulted national pride, either created or intensified by the war in Vietnam. I tell him I like the expression “in movement,” which describes the people and groups which are continuing to organize against armaments, nuclear and otherwise, and who concern themselves with oppression, hunger, torture, and all wars. And how difficult it is to define “a movement” during a time when there is no cohesive element keeping us together. And that there have to be new and inventive recruiting methods developed in the 1980s to woo kids away from their career-oriented computer-dominated lives into anything that has a social purpose.
The hall was big and old and lovely, and I couldn’t help wondering how many of the brown velvet seats would be filled in two and a half hours when the show started. I wandered backstage and munched on the raw vegetables and dips that were requested in the contract. At this juncture, my mood depends almost entirely on whether or not I feel that I have a purpose in life. If the hall is filled and there is excitement in the air, of course, it is easier to feel confident and needed. If the hall is only two-thirds filled, my work is much more difficult.
Tonight is somewhere in between. I have absolutely no anxiety or stage fright. I wonder vaguely who will be out there, and I realize I’d better have a talk with myself. Having a quiet contemplative time before a show is something I started many years ago, only then I did it in order to reduce the size of my ego. To combat the fear that I would lose contact with the order of things, and with the size of me, I would sit quietly by myself and ask for guidance, and ask that the time I spent onstage be spent for the betterment of humankind, in the service of God. Now I go through the same ritual, only the circumstances are reversed. I must remind myself that I do count and that there is a reason that I was given these vocal cords. I remind myself that everyone in that hall counts, and that my job is to move them, to treat them with tenderness and extreme care. My job is to sing my heart out, as though it were my last concert on the face of the earth, because it might be, for all I know, and they must leave the hall having laughed, cried, sung, and found out something new or had a timid suspicion confirmed.
So there in Madison, Wisconsin, over a tray of raw broccoli and dip, I come to terms with myself, my audience, and whatever brown velvet seats will be left empty. Mary comes by and offers me a beer which I accept, and we decide that I won’t bother changing into my stage clothes. Instead, I’ll wear what I have on: a corduroy skirt, plaid shirt, red boots, and bright red leather necktie. I am happy. The audience has more young people in it than usual, and I look forward to informality.
As eight o’clock nears, I am anxious to go out and get started. There is a pleasant buzzing in the hall, and I think the audience will be responsive, which means I will have a good time.
Cesar and I go on at 8:10. The front row is right under my feet, and filled with the refreshing sight of young people. The head usher is in a state because two young women have lost their seats to a group of enthusiasts, two of whom have obviously seated themselves illegally. I love a little distraction, and I horse around with the two front rows hoping things will straighten themselves out. They don’t, and I see that the usher is not going to stop pointing and asking to see tickets, and so I invite the two young women up onto the stage. They are thrilled, the usher is speechless, and the audience is delighted. I nod at Cesar, and we start. The first song is “Please Come to Boston,” with “Madison” substituted for “Denver” in the second verse.
Who the hell are these kids? I wonder. What a break for me. The house is over eighty percent full, and I have a bunch of lively fans up front. There is an appreciative response to the first song, and then I chat a little, about how this is my twenty-sixth year of giving concerts, and how the next two hours will be traversing those years with some old songs and some new. I tell them that I will spend part of the evening trying to help them forget about the problems of the world, and the other part trying to get them to remember. They laugh. And just when they are wishing I’d quit talking and sing something they came to hear, I do “Farewell, Angelina.” This audience is not sophisticated. Their reaction time is not especially fast. But they are not dumb. And I don’t hold anything back from them just because they are not New York City. After “Farewell, Angelina” comes a song with words I stole from Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty, and from the Bible. The song became part of the score for the film Sacco and Vanzetti. I dedicate it to the refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala, and to the Sanctuary movement, the churches and people who harbor, feed, clothe, and hide the refugees until it is safe for them to return home where most of them want to be.
Give to me your tired and your poor,
Your huddled masses longing to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these the homeless, tempest tossed to me.
Blessed are the persecuted,
And blessed are the pure in heart,
Blessed are the merciful,
And blessed are the ones who mourn.
The step is hard that tears away the roots,
And says goodbye to friends and family.
The fathers and the mothers weep,
The children cannot comprehend.
But when there is a promised land
The brave will go and others follow.
The beauty of the human spirit
Is the will to try our dreams.
And so the masses teemed across the ocean
To a land of peace and hope,
But no one heard a voice or saw a face
As they were tumbled onto shore,
And no one heard the echo of the phrase,
“I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
I feel the expectation in the audience. There is a great thirst for something that has meaning. So I sing “There But For Fortune,” a Phil Ochs song from the sixties about compassion. The response tells me there are old-timers in the audience. With the overwhelming enthusiasm of the front rows, which are the only rows I can really see, it’s difficult to tell who is out there. It doesn’t matter. I joke around and tell stories and make them laugh and then sing “Children of the Eighties” for the young people:
We’re the children of the eighties and haven’t we grown?
We’re tender as a lotus and tougher than stone,
And the age of our innocence is somewhere in the
garden ...
We like the music of the sixties
We think that era must have been nifty,
The Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and the Doors,
Flower children, Woodstock, and the war,
Dirty scandals, cover-ups, and more,
Ah, but it’s getting harder to deceive us,
We don’t care if Dylan’s gone to Jesus.
Jimi Hendrix is playing on.
We know Janis Joplin was The Rose,
And we also know that that’s the way it goes,
With all the stuff that she put in her arm,
We’re not alarmed . . .
We are the children of the eighties . . .
The evening has developed its own rhythm. I am not working. I am just singing and chatting. It passes through my mind that what I will remember of Madison is that the seats are brown velvet and there were two women on the stage and two full rows of young fans.
I am overdosing them on material I’ve written in the last five years, but they seem eager to be trusted. “Moscow on Hollywood Boulevard,” about Natasha and Volodya, two Russian children who have lived their short lives preparing for the Olympics, and what dreams they have when they find out that the Olympics will be held in California. I see Natasha as I am singing. I made her up, of course. She’s like Nadia Comaneci, only blond, and not as skinny. Volodya is a little taller than Natasha, and his hair is straight. I always see them in line to get a hot dog, whispering in Russian, pointing out T-shirts and little flags and plaster of paris bric-a-brac. And I think of the great dark mystery that is Russia, and the wealth of brilliance, talent, intellect, humor, satire, that continuously bustles in her underground networks, dodging the shadows of the KGB, and I wonder if the face of that land wouldn’t burst into profusions of color and art and gaiety if the politburo crumbled and the tunnels opened into the sun. As I sing tonight, I think of my Russian immigrant friends who are to the right of Reagan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Nixon, Kissinger, and Attila the Hun. They are the boldest people I’ve ever met, and I love them, but I despise their patronizing attitude toward me because I think that torture in El Salvador and the circumstances which have brought it about in this decade are as destructive as Soviet expansionism.
There is my stool, with its water glass, and my songs scribbled out on a piece of yellow crumpled paper. How familiar. How very simple. I have a sip of water and introduce “Warriors of the Sun,” a song of images which came to my head a few years ago while I was listening to the taped speeches of Martin Luther King. I tell the audience that this song is to encourage people who might have become discouraged in the 1980s—and, by the way, if anyone has not gotten a little discouraged, then they are cuckoo. They listen intently. I try to keep it light. We are dealing with the survival of the planet, and I think the human race is faring badly at the moment. I criticize the current American elixir called “feeling good about myself,” which is totally egocentric and shallow. I take a few potshots at the Reagan administration’s “myopic optimism,” mentioning that the world is in a state of moral and spiritual decay and on the verge of terminating itself, and it does not seem like the appropriate time to encourage a false sense of invulnerability and optimism. And I urge the people not to give up their hopes and dreams; admittedly, I may be off my rocker, but I have held onto mine and it has been worth the effort.
We are the warriors of the sun.
We’re fighting post-war battles that somehow never got won.
May be crazy, and it may be the final run,
But, we are the warriors of the sun.
The concert is gliding along, so my daydreams can glide as well. Maybe I am crazy, and maybe this is the final run. It probably is, in fact. How foolish to think that we can clean up the air and the water and the barrels of waste, and bring back the creatures we have made extinct. In fact, how pompous to think that in this great universe that we would be the only earth! And perhaps one or two of them, or even one or two thousand, are rolling around the heavens doing quite nicely because their form of animal life didn’t evolve into our kind of greedy race. I wish I could see farther back into the room.
If it’s true ’bout no more water but the fire next time,
Will the children of the eighties be ashes or live to their prime?
If we don’t heed the Nobel laureates warning of things to come
We’ll all be incinerated warriors of the sun.
I ask for requests. There is a chorus of “Joe Hill”s, “Diamonds and Rust”s, “Forever Young”s; a smattering of old ballads, and few pleas for songs I’ve long forgotten, or ones impossible to sing without a band. I do “Forever Young.” Then I introduce a song I learned off of an Odetta album when I was sixteen years old, telling about the time I sang it to Martin Luther King, and how ten years later, I sang it from the balcony of the Hoa Binh hotel in Hanoi during a bomb raid. I am trying to tell them something about fear and faith, and, in a joking way, about courage. I sing “Oh, Freedom,” and it gets the strongest response so far. This song soars, makes real use of the voice, and sometimes, like tonight, my spirit soars with it.
The first half of the concert ends with a silly introduction and “Long Black Veil.” In the chorus of “Long Black Veil,” my finger misses the string in the same place twice in a row. What a nuisance. The same chord and finger pattern will come up again at the end of the song. If I concentrate, I will make sense of it. I take everyone in the entire room into my heart, and put my tiny problem into God’s hands. It seems a very small favor to be making a special request of God. My fingers find their place. The song ends, the crowd applauds vigorously and happily, and I go off the stage for the many hundredth intermission of my life.
Madison was an average concert in the U.S. in 1985. There were other concerts where I had only to fly with the crowd and with the passing minutes. One of them was in Montpelier, Vermont, two weeks earlier on the same tour. A first concert in an area can work either way: like a phantom of the past which doesn’t stir up the local population more than a regular visit from the mailman, or like Montpelier. The hall was in the local civic center, with room for only twelve hundred people. The weather was freezing cold outside, and not too warm inside. Mary and I prowled around the building looking for a cozy spot to call a dressing room and found one in the police headquarters, the little room where they book the local drunks, attached to the town’s only holding cell. I didn’t dress up as the building was too cold.
The crowd was so quick and responsive that I was surprised at first. I started right off telling jokes and stories, saying everything that came to my head, and the public responded with enthusiastic applause and laughter after every other sentence. The songs were the same as they were on other nights, but felt newer. Mary was beaming when I left the stage at the end, and I could only hug her to express my pleasure. When I went back out, we sang “Amazing Grace.” Their singing was so strong and beautiful I thought I was in Alabama in 1963 in that tiny packed church. My skin got prickly and I concentrated on the door at the back of the hall so I wouldn’t see the soul of little Montpelier on the faces of her people. I remembered the line in “America the Beautiful” about the amber waves of grain. That’s what this gathering of people was like. A marvelous field of waving grain whistling and singing in the wind. Every word of the song was once again alive and vital and meaningful and healing, and nothing mattered except for that moment of song and union.