Wink, Wink Michael

Michael Franti Rocks Blue-Grass Crowd
by: Kim Haswell

My favorite thing to do is to mix politics and music....
kids and music....
dinner and music....
and well, .... uh-hum....
other things and music.

I was fortunate enough to get to do all that (well, not all of it... I was sharing a tent with my kids) this past weekend at the Strawberry Music Festival at Camp Mather. The Festival goes on rain or shine Memorial Day and LaborDay weekends from Thursday to Sunday every year.

My third love after family and friends is music. My fourth love is politics. Strange you say? It isn't. Politics is in what we breath, drink, eat, look at, drive on... you get the picture.

The importance of politics doesn't need to be explained to a man named Michael Franti. Franti absolutely rocked the traditionally bluegrass festival Friday to close the night. How do I know he is political? My first exposure to Franti was through his documentary, I Know I'm Not Alone.

This movie is about Michael, his guitar and a few cameras that traveled to Iraq and the hot-bed areas of the the Palestine/Israel conflict. The movie brought him into regular citizens' living rooms and their worlds. He talked to them about their lives and heard things that we would never hope to comprehend. He wanted people to see the side of war that The Administration and the media don't want us to see. He wanted us to see the "Human Cost of War."

As for Michael Franti and the Spearheads' music, I knew the songs from his movie, but, I hadn't listened extensively. My brother-in-law asked what kind of music he did. I said, well, "it is a cross between raggae, rap and rock." Classifying Michael as a musician is similar to trying to classify Robin Williams as an actor.

So, there we were, wrapping up a Dave Alvin set. (Yes, we got to see Dave Alvin and Michael Franti in the same night. Yes, we know what a huge score that is.) My six-year-old daughter, Kennedy wanted to go up to the front to see Franti. She wanted to dance, which is typically not a problem at either side of the large tarps and mass of lawn chairs in the meadow. My husband and I went to take Kennedy and our 3-year-old son, Martin to the front, when we were clearly blocked by a mass of humanity.

9-year old girls were rushing the stage. I observed this along with another woman, who smiled and said, "only at Strawberry." Kennedy got up on her father's shoulders and said, "Daddy, I want to get half-way to the front."

My three-year old son was checking the scene out but then, as if to tell me, "mommy, I'm tired," he stuck his thumb in his mouth and I took him back to our seats. Back at the seats, two different friends said Franti reminded them of Ben Harper. Good call, I thought.

Franti spoke of war, prisons, education, you name it. Franti mixed politics and music. And, judging by the sentiment after the show at camp, many (men & women) would love to have the opportunity to mix music and just about anything with Michael. Wink, wink Michael.

Let the Kids In Too

This is a blog post from Aurther Magazine talking about how kids are being deprived of live music. - This MUST change.

02/15/2007
CHUCK DUKOWSKI on ALL-AGES SHOWS from the pages of ARTHUR MAGAZINE.
Originally published in Arthur Magazine No. 25 (Dec 02006)

Let the Kids In Too: A History of All-Ages, Part II
By Jay Babcock

For whatever reason, it wasn’t until earlier this year that I realized the best music events in Los Angeles were missing something really crucial: people under 21. That is, under-21s—let’s call them ‘kids’—are routinely excluded from seeing of-the-moment bands and old masters, in relatively accessible and human-sized settings, at an affordable price. These kinds of shows almost always happen in over-21 bars; or in tiny clubs, in sketchy environs, late on schoolnights. Occasionally they happen in Clear Channel/Live Nation-managed venues—amphitheatres, sports arenas, football fields—but even there it takes heavy change ($65 to see The Mars Volta open for the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the 18,000-capacity Forum?!?), and most of the time all you get is an accountant’s idea of spectacle. Put simply, kids today are deprived of the formative live music experiences that previous generations of human beings—of almost all cultures, from here back to the cave days—experienced as a matter of routine. Music: intimate, intense, performed as something deeper than mere commerce, and received by the community of listeners in the same way.

If music succeeds in connecting to kids today, it is in spite of the music industry, not because of it. How do we know this? Because that’s what some of us have experienced for ourselves, and, more importantly, because that’s what those who came before us tell us.

More.....

The War We Wanted To Lose?

Yesterday an additional 80 people were killed in Iraq.

Last November, the United States electorate made a clear statement, No More War. This is a stark contrast to the election of 2004 when the nation solidly stood behind America's most famous frat-boy and his fellowship. What makes our citizenry staunchly pro-war and then two years later, not?

People romanticize war. We hadn't had a war of this magnitude since we lost "the war we wanted to lose" as my dad used to call Vietnam, The Original when I was a child. By the way dad, what the hell did that mean? I guess since we decided to pull out and not fight in a dead-end war, we wanted to lose. Touche!

I have friends my senior who talk about protesting Vietnam, The Original in the 60s. They talk about the era with a whimsical nostalgia akin to describing your first boyfriend or a good spring break trip in college. They see the famous frat-boy as their chance to re-capture the era. While I appreciate the good intentions, I would have preferred they remembered why they originally protested and stayed on top of things so that we didn't have to go through Vietnam, The Sequel.

Just like The Original, as time passed, The Sequel left a bad taste in peoples mouths. Death isn't romantic if you are intimately involved. As more time passes, more people become involved.

Being a post-Vietnam era child of the 70s and 80s, I wasn't there, to young to know, but old enough to care. I googled "1960 love peace war music." My intention was to find out why, after such a large movement that my senior friends speak so highly of, we still ended up making the same mistake? Surely at the very least, the music would live on and remind us why this was such a bad idea. That is the intention of music, to live on and to bring emotions to life.

The first Google result listed was a really cheesy children's site that listed the lyrics from 1960s anti-war tunes. Which is fine. Just give me a break with the frenetic keyboard music. They're children, not drunk old men doing the chicken dance at their accountant's wedding. Which, by the way, isn't romantic either.

Here is a protest song my six-year old daughter loves and it doesn't remind me of the old chicken-dancing drunk:

Steve Earl - The Revolution Starts Now

The music lives on and brings her to life. I'm going to make a deal with her. I won't romanticize death and destruction in the name of patriotism and nostalgia, if she keeps listening to the music. I'll make this deal with her when she is old enough to understand why peace, love and understanding is romantic. After school today.

My Morning Cup of Coffee

Sitting here looking at my empty coffee cup wondering what to get my dad and my brother for Christmas. Wondering why I argue with husband over the commercialism that has infected me in the name of Christmas. He is right, but can I not make the pilgrimage to Gottschalks for that cursory sweater for the men? For the women, no problem... a punch bowl, a gourmet cooking gift basket and the critical pilates DVD. Guilt conquers all. Here is a remedy for that wormy virus called consumption:

Springsteen-Vedder Vote for Change Tour 2004

Watch this and think about how you will change the world.