2) Nevada City, California
3) Korea
4) Anarchy
5) Candicy
6) Bum on the rod
7) Enormosly wealthy
8) Mess with people
9) Natural resources
10) Heros
11) half a ghost town
12) holding on
Released in 1996
RBR009
bridges
that's what i do is collect stories and songs and poems. i seek out the elder's and garner
stories and songs and poems. characterized critically as "oh, that's that 60's stuff". like
somebody doing old rock and roll would be doing "that 50's stuff". well, or, this is the 90's,
you know. i have a good friend in the east. a good singer and a good folksinger. good song
collector who comes and listens to my shows and says "you sing a lot about the past, you
always sing about the past. you can't live in the past, you know. and, um, i say to him i can go
outside and pick up a rock that's older than the oldest song you know and drop it on your
foot. now the past didn't go anywhere, did it? it's right here, it's right now. i always thought
that anybody who told me i couldn't live in the past was trying to get me to forget something
that if i remembered it would get them in serious trouble. no it's not that 50's, 60's, 70's, 90's,
that whole idea of decade packages, things don't happen that way. uh, the vietnam war heated
up in 1965 and ended in 1975. well, what's that got to do with decades? um, that packaging
of time is a journalistic convenience that they use to trivialize and to dismiss important events
and important ideas. i defy that. time is an enormous long river and i'm standing in it, just as
you're standing in it. my elders were the tributaries and everything they thought and every
struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to and every song they created
and every poem they laid down flows down to me. and if i take the time to ask and if i take
the time seek, if i take the time to reach out i can build that bridge between my world and
theirs, i can reach out down into that river and take out what i need to get through this world.
bridges from my time to your time, as my elders from their time to my time. and we all put into
the river and we let it go and it flows away from us and away from us until it no longer has our
name, our identity. it has its own utility and it's own use and people would take what they need
and make it part of their lives. sometimes while at length, the past didn't go anywhere, did it?
nevada city, california
at the onset, those of you who may have heard me should probably turn to those who may
have not, and calmly reassure them that this is in fact what happens when i sit on a stage. not
much more. this is about it. you'll notice no sudden or dramatic change in either my either my
instrumental or vocal attack as it were. this is nonetheless an american folk song. did you
recognize it as such? of course you would, you don't hear them much anymore, don't hear
them on your am radio, huh? folksingers hardly ever sing them, that's because they're boring.
folk music is boring. wack fall the di-do, blow ye winds, hi-ho, that's boring. but i am a
folksinger, this is a folk music organization, you are ostensibly the folk, and that's bah. that
means we own this song together, right? we have thereby incurred certain social obligations
which we will faithfully discharge, right? we're going to sing this song together, boring or not. i
was still in nevada city, california, up there in the foothills of the sierra. i call them the
"footh-ills" because it's spelled like that. oh, the old gold mining town, i've talked to some of
you about that. twenty-seven hundred people there, one of the forty-niners towns. and i also
told you about the only social life in town being the books of harmony new age bookstore,
where people go down in the evening and channel dolphins and martians. it's a new age
chrono-synclastic infindibulum, or epicenter as it were, nevada city, california. well, i was gone
for a bit on one of the trips since i saw you last and i got back and my wife had bought the
bookstore. so i am now ostensibly part proprietor of a new age bookstore in nevada city,
california, can you picture that? and i'm open to all those things. if you live in california, you've
got to be open. if you're not, they pry you open. and i read as much as i can because i've got
all the new man's literature in there. most of my men friends belong to men's drumming circles.
do they do that here? it's healthy. they're out there in the wilderness caterwauling and flailing
away at those things and dragging their scrotums through the underbrush. it's healthy i
suppose. we swing in the trees and we steal sheep. we don't have a drumming leader, we
have a grooming order. robert bly came by on one of his workshop trips to teach us how to
drum. we ate him. nevada city, california. anyone know where i'm talking about? good. gonna
get narps. you got narps around here? new age rural professionals. out cruising the backroads
in their old carryalls with their car stereos blaring meditation music out into the wilderness. it's
a caution. tall place lighting struck by the parapathetic ruminations of the tibetan ruling class in
exile. a lot of buddhists around there. meanwhile, this very minute old jesse mcveigh, the well
digger, nobody knows how old he is, lived in that county all of his life, is sitting at the bar of
the national hotel this very minute looking at the freaks out in the street and muttering under his
breath, "no matter how new age you get, old age going to kick your ass."
korea
since the kids have been little, they've always known that i've vanished from their lives
periodically. and they've never really had any idea what it is that i do. what do i do? if i don't
know, why should they? we never traveled together at all, you know. brandon, the
fourteen-year-old, he got to travel with me during the summer. but we got a chance to talk to
each other as adults. you know, well, as adults, instead of just father and son. we left boston,
we were headed up to the left bay cafe in blue hill, maine, and brandon, just about
marblehead, turned to me and he said, "how did you get to be like that?" it's a fair question. i
knew what he meant, but he didn't have all the language to say exactly what he meant. what he
meant to say was, "why is it that you are fundamentally alienated from the institutional structure
of society?" and i said, "well, i've never been asked that, you know? now don't listen to the
radio and don't talk to me for half an hour while i think about it. so we drove and talked. we
were on highway 1 because it was pretty and close to the water. got up toward the maine
border, and there was a picnic area, off to the side some picnic tables. it was a bright, clear
day. so i pulled into their parking lot, we sat down at the picnic tables and i said, "now, sit
down, i want to tell you a story, cause i've thought about it." i said, "you know, i was over in
korea. and he said, "yeah, i've always wondered about that, did you shoot anybody?" and i
said, as honestly as i could, "i don't know. but that's not the story," i said, "listen to what i'm
telling you. i was up at the khumer rhea gap by the imjin river. there were about 75,000
chinese soldiers on the other side and they all wanted me out of there with every righteous
reason that you could think of. i had long since figured out that i was the wrong person in the
wrong place at the wrong time for the most specious of reasons. but there i was, my clothing
was rotting on my body. every exotic mold in the world was attacking my clothing and my
person. my boots had big holes in them from the rot. i wanted to swim in the imjin river and
get that feeling of death, that feeling of rot off of me. the chinese soldiers were on the other
side, they were swimming, they were having a wonderful time. but there was a rule, a
regulation against swimming in the imjin river. i thought that was foolish, but then a young
korean, a carpenter for us by the name of yin sukon, all of his family had been killed off in the
war. well, he said to me in what english he had, "you know when we get married here, the
young married couple moves in with the elders. they move in with the grandparents. but there's
nothing growing, everything's been destroyed, there's no food. so the first baby that's born, the
oldest, the old man goes out with a jug of water and a blanket and sits out on the bank of the
imjin river and waits to die. he sits there until he dies and then will roll down the bank and into
the river and his body will be carried out to the sea. and we don't want you to swim out in the
imjin river because of our elders are floating out to sea. that's when it began to crumble for
me, you know. that's when i, well i ran away. not just from that, i ran away from the blueprint
for self-destruction i had been handed as a man, for violence in excess, for sexual excess, for
racial excess. we had a commanding officer who said of the gi babies, fathered by gis and
korean mothers, that the korean government wouldn't care for, so they were in these
orphanages, and he said "well, as sad as that is, someday this will really help the korean
people because it will raise the intelligence level." that's what we were dealing with, you know.
well, i ran away. i ran down to seoul city, down toward ascomb, not to the army. i ran away
to a place called the korea house. it was korean civilians reaching out to gis to give them some
better vision of who they were than what we were getting up of the divisions. and they hid me
for three weeks. late one night, because they didn't have any clothes that would fit me. late
one night, it was a stormy, stormy night, rain falling in sheets, i could go out because i figured
that nobody would see me, we walked through the mud and rain. seoul city was devastated,
and they took me to a concert at the awol women's university. a large auditorium with shell
holes in the ceiling and the rain pouring through the holes and clyde lights on the stage hooked
up to car batteries. this wasn't the uso, this was the korean students association. the person
that they had invited to sing, i was the only white person there, the person that they had invited
to sing was marian anderson, the great black operatic soprano who had been on tour in japan,
you see. there she was singing "oh, freedom" and "nobody knows the trouble i've seen." and i
watched her through the rain coming through the ceiling and thought back to salt lake, to my
father, sid, who ran the capital theatre. it was a movie house, but it had been an old vaudeville
house and he wanted to bring live performances back to the capital. in 1948, he had invited
marian anderson to come and sing there. and i remembered we went to the train station to
pick her up and take her to the biggest hotel in town, the hotel utah. they wouldn't let her stay
there because she was black. and i remember my father's humiliation, and her humiliation, as i
saw her singing there through the rain. and i realized there, right then, brandon, right then i
knew that it was all wrong. that it all had to change and that change had to start with me."
anarchy
i learned in korea that i would never again, in my life, abdicate to somebody else my right and
my ability to decide who the enemy is. got back from korea, i was so mad at what i'd seen
and done, i wasn't sure i could live in the country again. i got on the freight trains up in everett,
north of seattle, and kind of cruised the country for two years, making up songs, but i was
drunk most of the time, and forgot most of those. i had heard that there was a house in salt
lake city by the roper yards of the denver grand and western where there was a clothing
barrel and free food, so i got off the train there. i was headed for salt lake anyway. i found that
house, right where they said it was, but most of all i found this wiry old man, sixty-nine years
old, tougher than nails, heart of gold, a fellow by the name of ammon hennacy. anybody know
that name, ammon hennacy? one of dorothy day's people, the catholic workers, during the
30's they started houses of hospitality all over the country, there are about eighty of them now.
ammon hennacy was one of those, he'd come west to start this house i'd found called the joe
hill house of hospitality. ammon hennacy was a catholic anarchist, pacifist, draft dodger of two
world wars, tax refuser, vegetarian, one man revolution in america, i think that about covers it.
it was pure hell. the first thing he did was he said, after he got to know me, he said "you know
you love the country. you love it. you come in and out of town on these trains and singing
songs about different places and beautiful people. you know you love the country, you just
can't stand the government, get it straight." he quoted mark twain to me, "loyalty to the country
always, loyalty to the government when it deserves it." it was an essential distinction i had been
neglecting. and then he had to reach out and grapple with the violence, but he did that with all
the people around him. second world war vets and all, on medical disabilities and all drunked
up. the house was filled with violence, which ammon as a pacifist dealt with every moment,
every day of his life. he said, "you've got to be a pacifist." i said, "why?" he said, "it will save
your life." and my behavior was very violent then and i said "what is it?" and he said, "i couldn't
give you a book by gandhi, you wouldn't understand it. i can't give you a list of rules that if you
sign it, you're a pacifist." he said, "you look at it like booze. you know alcoholism will kill
somebody until they finally get the courage to sit in a circle of people like that and say, "hi, my
name's utah, i'm an alcoholic" and then you can begin to deal with your behavior. see, and
have the people define it for you whose lives you've destroyed." he said, "it's the same with
violence. you know an alcoholic, they can be dry for twenty years, they're never going to sit in
that circle and put their hand up and say, "well, i'm not an alcoholic anymore." no they're still
going put up their hand and say, "hi, my name's utah, i'm an alcoholic." it's the same with
violence. you've got to be able to put your hand in the air and acknowledge your capacity for
violence and then deal with the behavior, and have the people whose lives you've messed with
define that behavior for you, you see. and it's not going to go away, you're going to be dealing
with it in every moment and every situation for the rest of your life." i said, "okay, i'll try that."
and ammon said, "it's not enough." and i said, "oh." he said, "you were born a white man in
20th century industrial america, you came into the world armed to the teeth with an arsenal of
weapons. the weapons of privilege, racial privilege, sexual privilege, economic privilege. if you
want to be a pacifist, it's not just giving up guns and knives and clubs and fists and angry
words, but giving up the weapons of privilege and going into the world completely disarmed.
try that. that old man's been gone now twenty years, and i'm still at it, but i figure if there's a
worthwhile struggle in my own life, that's probably the one. think about it. i'd always wanted to
write a song for that old man. he'd never wanted one about him. he was that way, but
something mulched up out of his thought, his anarchist thought. anarchist in the best sense of
the word. oh, so many times he stood up in front of federal district judge ritter, that old fart,
and he'd been picked up for picketing illegally. and he'd never plead innocent or guilty, he
plead anarchy. and ritter would say, "what's an anarchist, hennacy?" and ammon would say,
"why, an anarchist is anybody who doesn't need a cop to tell him what to do." kind of a
fundamentalist / anarchist, huh? and ritter would say, "but ammon, you broke the law, what do
you have to say about that?" and ammon would say, "aw judge, your damn laws, the good
people don't need them, and the bad people don't obey them, so what use are they?" well, i
had lived there for eight years, and i watched him, mainly watched him, and i discovered
watching him that anarchy is not a noun, but an adjective. it describes the tension between
moral autonomy and political authority, especially in the area of combinations, whether they're
going to be voluntary or coercive. the most destructive, coercive combinations are arrived at
through force. like ammon said, force is the weapon of the weak.
candidacy
mark twain said those of you who are inclined to worry have the largest selection in history.
why complain? try to do something about it. you know it's going on nine months now since i
decided i was going to declare that i am a candidate for the president of the united states. oh
yes, i'm going to run. shopped around for a party. well i looked at the republicans. decided
that talking to a conservative is like talking to your refrigerator. you know, the light goes on,
the light goes off, it's not going to do anything that isn't built into it. and i'm not going to talk to
a conservative any more than i talk to my damn refrigerator. working for the democratic party
now, that's kind of like rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. so i created my own party,
it's called the sloth and indolence party. and i am running as an anarchist candidate in the best
sense of that word. i have studied the presidency carefully. i have seen that our best presidents
were the do-nothing presidents. millard fillmore, warren g. harding. when you have a president
who does things, we are all in serious trouble. if he does anything at all. if he gets up at night to
go to the bathroom, somehow mystically trouble will ensue. i guarantee that if i am elected, i
will take over the white house, hang out, shoot pool, scratch my ass, and no do a damn thing.
which is to say, if you want something done, don't come to me to do it for you. you've got to
get together and figure out how to do it yourselves. is that a deal?
bum on the road
well, i'd sing one for frying pan jack, who's alive, and the oldest of the old, out there in albany,
oregon. frypan jack settled out off of the trains as a great tramp. he got scared. he always told
me that if i get afraid to walk into a railroad yard, a makeup yard, it will be time to quit. he
used to carry a spike ball handle in the end of his bed roll. balloon he called it to fend off the
ne'er do wells, but you know the way it's gotten to be on the skids now, young mean drunks
and drug money, and so they prey off the old poor down under the railroad bridges. and so
they tend to settle out and stay in one place where they feel safe you see. he feels safe in this
bar over in albany, oregon. if you want to find frying pan jack, that's where you look for him.
we shared a camp down there in oroville, at the foot of the feather river canyon comin' out of
keddie on the western pacific--keddie, up at the top of the canyon, still has a wooden water
tower--it's never been torn down, and you can still camp under it--anybody ever been there,
up in the high sierra? well it's beautiful. jack & i were in that camp, that's where he said to
me--y'know he'd been trampin' since 1927--he said: "i told myself in '27 'if i cannot dictate the
conditions of my labor i will henceforth cease to work.'" ha! you don't have to go to college to
figure these
things out, no sir. he said: "i learned when i was young that the only true life i had was the life
of my brain. but if it's true that the only real life i had is the life of my brain, what sense does it
make to hand that brain over to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the
presumption that at the end of the day they'll will give it back in an unmutilated condition?" fat
chance! so he built that big montana bed roll, started piping the stem... panhandlin? you
know... head full of words and songs. he didn't write songs and poems, he found them, and
scattered them abroad, for people like me to find and put to work again. he was old enough
to remember the sway rods under the box cars, ridin? the rods. fry pan jack, "the two bums":
the bum on the rods is hunted down as an enemy of mankind. the other is driven around to his
club, is feted, wined, and dined. and they who curse the bum on the rods as the essence of all
that?s bad, will greet the other with a winning smile and extend the hand so glad. the bum on
the rods is a social flea, who gets an occasional bite.the bum on the plush is a social leech,
blood-sucking day and night. the bum on the rods has a load so light that his wing we can
scarcely feel. but it takes the labor of dozens of folks to furnish the other a meal. as long as we
sanction the bum on the plush the other will always be there. but rid ourselves of the bum on
the plush and the other will disappear.
make an intelligent, organized kick; get rid of the wasted crutch. don?t worry about the bum
on the rods, get rid of the bum on the
plush.
enormously wealthy
we, the american people are enormously wealthy, you know that? who owns all those trees in
the national forests? this is not a rhetorical question. we do. who owns all of that offshore oil
you read about in the newspaper, huh? we do. who owns all of those minerals under the
federal lands? we do, it's public property and all. but we elect people to go to washington,
who are those assholes? what have we gotten ourselves into now? they go to washington, they
lease off what we own, public property, to private companies to sell us back our own stuff for
the sake of a greasy buck. that's dumb.
mess with people
i brought my daughter, moragan belle, she was 11 years old. i brought her back east during
the summer. we traveled around a good bit, here and there. and again, it was the sort of thing
where she had never traveled with me and all. it was quite different, she's quiet. lighthearted,
but she doesn't need to be entertained all the time, she can really take care of herself. i wanted
her particularly to meet her god-mother, dorthea brownell of saratoga springs, whom she and
harriet, her sister. elegant victorian women who befriended me many years ago in saratoga
and always gave me a place to stay. they were antiquarians of the first order. antique women
of the first order. and it was delightful going to greenwich, connecticut while dorthea was in the
country because they had to give up the big house when harriet died. looking out the window,
seeing dorthea, who was 83 and moragan, my daughter, on the bench there, and watch
dorthea there start teaching her how to make lace, she's a wonderful artist who makes
beautiful lace. well, dorthea's in the hospital right now, i'm going to visit her on wednesday
before i go over to amherst, the pioneer valley. a fine, fine teacher. now you see, i'm a
constant source of embarrassment to my daughter. why are teenage kids so conservative? i
don't do that to them, we don't do that to them, do we? i mean, i act out a lot you see, and i
mortify her in public places and i don't mean to, but she sure gets mad at me. i carry things
around with me to kind of rag people. well, i wouldn't leave home without my cockroach. i
always have my roach with me. there's a rubber cockroach. it's a tramp roach. frypan jack
calls that a tramp roach. he gave that to me. he says, if you're poor and you haven't got any
money, you're out on the street and you're hungry, you go into a restaurant with this and you
put it in the bottom of a bowl of soup and then you eat down to it and you say, "aahck, what's
that!". and then you storm out and say, "i'm not going to pay for that!", and you leave. it'll save
you a lot of money. that little jewel will save you a lot of money. little feelers sticking out the
side of a sandwich. goll, you eat half of it, and say "look at that!" and leave it. in the hands of
an unscrupulous child, can you imagine what you could do with that in the lunchroom at your
school. you could put that in your jell-o mold. god, you know, and some monitor or teacher is
going to come by and say "aahck, look at that, what is that?". you can look at it and say,
"well, it's a cockroach". you've got to mess with people, day and night, you have to mess with
people. they just kind of sink into a chryonic torpor and they're never seen again. i have my
dice for people i don't like, gypsy fortune telling dice. i like everybody. those people who
knew me will tell you i try to get along with everybody, you know. but over the summer i had
some fairly serious heart problems, so i decided i couldn't afford to like everybody anymore,
you know. i went on a low social cholesterol diet. no more fatheads. and so i run into one of
them, somebody i don't like and i tell them i'm going to tell your fortune, get these gypsy
fortune telling dice. and i roll the dice and they're blank, there's no spots on them. and i say,
"goll, i hate to tell you this, but you don't have any fortune, no future. that's it for you." we
were in the grand union supermarket, getting some food over by greenwich or cambridge, one
or the other, with old dorthea brownell, moragan's godmother. now this is education. a little
kid was fussing at the checkout counter stuck in one of those baskets. it's the lights in those
places, make kids crazy. we all know that, don't we? well, and the kid was fussy and the
parents were ragging on the kid. and i've always nosing kids, and i get them to laugh and the
parents laugh and the checkout person laughs, and everybody's feeling marginally better about
the whole proposition. so i put on my nose. moragan started punching me in the sides, yelling
at me, "why can't you be normal?" and old miss brownell rapped moragan on her shin rudely
with her cane and said, "he is normal, what you meant to say is average." yeah, that's
education.
natural resources
i was invited to the state young writers conference out at cheeney which was eastern
washington university, and i didn't want to embarrass my son, you know. and i was going to
behave myself because i had to live there then, a chore. but i got on the stage, it was an
enormous auditorium. there were 2700 young faces out there, none of them with any
prospects anybody could detect. and off to the side of the stage was the suit and tie crowd of
people from the school district and the principals, and the main speaker following me was
from the chamber of commerce. well, something inside of me snapped and i got to the
microphone and i looked out over that multitude of faces and i said something to the effect of,
"you're about to be told one more time that you're america's most valuable natural resource.
have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources? have you seen a strip mine, have
you seen a clear-cut in the forest, have you seen a polluted river? don't ever let them call you a
valuable natural resource. they're going to strip mine your soul, they're going to clear-cut your
best thoughts for the sake of profit, unless you learn to resist, because the profit system
follows the path of least resistance, and following the path of least resistance is what makes
the river crooked." well, there was great gnashing of teeth and rending of garments... mine. i
was borne to the door screaming epitaphs over my shoulder. something to the effect of, "make
a break for it kids! flee to the wilderness!" the one within if you can find it. well, i wrote them a
nice letter though as i oozed out of the state, headed for nevada city. i sent it to their little
literary magazine. i respect kids. i love especially little kids. little kids are assholes, but they're
their own assholes, you see. when you grow up, you can be somebody else's asshole. we're
all in trouble...
heroes
ask a kid, "who are your heroes?" chances are they'll give you the names of made-up people,
huh. he-man, barbie. i don't understand it about heroes, it really bothers. what happened to
the time when heroes were flesh and blood people? you know, people like emma goldman, or
elizabeth gurley flynn, or mother jones, or big bill haywood, or babe ruth, joe dimaggio, great
boxers, you know, joe louis. grandparents, what's wrong with your grandparents being
heroes? see, my mother, she worked for the cio, she was a labor organizer, and she made
sure that we had appropriate heroes, flesh and blood people. she would clip columns out of
the cleveland plain dealer, a good labor paper in its day, and paste them in scrapbooks so we
could take it to school to share with our kids at the equivalent of show and tell. scrapbooks
are mainly full of clippings about bank robbers. she seemed to favor bank robbers. called
them class heroes. didn't understand at the time what she meant. i do now.
half a ghost town
i headed up the mountains i was going to take some backroads over to a ghost town called
jerome, arizona. well, it was half a ghost town, you know, i had gone up there to find
somebody very important to folk music in an odd way, an woman by the name of katie lee.
you know the name katie lee? well, she was a folksinger in the 1950's. you might recall an old
record called songs of couch and consultation. it was satirical songs about the psychiatric
profession. and she sang, wearing a tight dress, for the playboy clubs. she sang folk songs.
well, she had retired, disappeared into jerome, arizona and went to work, she was one of the
founders of earth first and wrote a lot of songs about saving the colorado river, a powerful
woman. well, i was driving through prescott, arizona on my way to jerome, driving down the
street and i saw a sign, a street sign that said gale i. gardner avenue. well, i stopped and i said,
"i know that man." i had met him 25 years earlier in montreal, canada. teradezon and i were up
there. teradezon with the smithsonian festival, and gale gardner was invited up to tell poems
and songs that he had made up years and years ago as a cowboy. well, i went to the museum
there, the charlotte hall, and i said to the woman behind the counter, "now mr. gardner
wouldn't happen to be alive still?" and she said, "oh yeah, he's 95 years old now, but he's in
the hospital and ailing, probably isn't going to come out." so i went over to the hospital and i
spent the afternoon with him. shrunk down in his wheelchair. well, he had been a small man
when he was alive. i knew him as a small man with a enormous white (?) and a silver-headed
cane. there he was, shrunk down in his wheelchair with his great domed head covered with
the big liver spots and his glasses, one sided blanked out, so he could barely see through it,
and the other lens magnifying a empty socket in a grotesque sort of way. the high desert sun
had given him over the years many small cancers on his nose and on his ears that had to be cut
away. he was visibly diminishing, right before your eyes, but there was still that pillar of youth
and energy inside trying to burst out in any way that it could still find. i sat on the floor in front
of his wheelchair, so that i could see his face, because he couldn't lift his head.
holding on
i was in chicago some years ago. i was invited to play at a nightclub. at a nightclub, can you
imagine that? can you see me at a nightclub? the old quiet night up on belmont street, across
from cliff raven's tattoo parlor. well, i went up there at three o'clock in the afternoon to the
quiet night because i was scared. i fought my way past the guard dogs, got up there, the
janitor had taken the garbage out. he was in the big hall by himself, just sitting under the
nightlight up on the stage. an older man, he was sitting there playing the moonlight sonata,
beautifully. quietly i stood in the shadows, he didn't know i was there. a great shock of white
hair standing back on his head. deeply inside the lines on his face. i looked closely and saw he
was just playing with the one hand, the other was a stump, off to about here. well, he began to
pound the piano with the one good hand, and in a rumbling baritone voice started to sing
"freiheit freedom" a song of the tileman brigade during the spanish civil war, the war that if
we'd gotten involved in, there might not have been a second world war. he sang "los cuatros
generales", the herama valley, white cliffs of vendeza, powerful music of the spanish civil war.
well, that was eddie belchowski. eddie belchowski had been a concert pianist, a brilliant
pianist as a young man, but he went and joined the abraham lincoln brigade and went to spain
to fight against franco and the fascists. crossing the eberal river, he got his arm blown off. well,
they put him in the field hospital on morphine, which turned him into a junkie for the next thirty
years of his life. he haunted the alleys of chicago, a mad poet, derelict, a drug addict,
alcoholic. he began to put himself back together, got the job with the quiet night so he could
practice the piano. richard harding was good about that. and not just to learn the songs of the
civil war, but he learned heiden and licht variations. he could play the bach shukan with one
hand, it was beautiful. his daughter, reina, just sent me recordings, tapes that he'd made for
her, that i'd never heard of him playing a whole classical reporitre on the piano with one hand.
chopin, that was his favorite. well, he taught me powerful things about endurance, about
holding on. i left chicago, a week later i got a call, it said eddie belchowski had died. so i sat
down and made him up a death song. a week later, i got a call from eddie. the first thing i
asked him was, "hey ed, where are you calling from?" well, he said he was calling from
chicago. i said, "hell, dead, or in chicago, it's all the same to me, fella." and a week after that, i
was back in the quiet night, sitting on a bar stool with eddie belchowski himself sitting across
from me. i had a chance to sing him his death song. he was amused. but it was just a while ago
that ed belchowski, at the age of 74 was found on the subway tracks in chicago. they just had
a museum show of his art and poetry and music and recollections from old comrades all over
the country and then i sang his death song.