DiFranco and Phillips Bridge Folk's Generation Gap
By Beth Winegarner
"Time is an enormous long river," Utah Phillips explains during "Bridges." "My elders were the tributaries... every struggle they went through... and every poem they laid down flows down to me. If I take the time to ask... I can build that bridge between my world and theirs, I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get me through this world."
"Bridges" opens Phillips' latest effort, a collaborative project between the folk legend and his follower, the prolific and feisty Ani DiFranco. It is an appropriate meditation with which to begin their album, the aptly-titled The Past Didn't Go Anywhere, which combines the eclectic guitar strummings, drum tracks and production arms of DiFranco with spoken-word pieces by Phillips, mainly taped from live performances throughout his musical career.
The project was DiFranco's idea. She contacted Phillips and explained that she wanted to do a record with him, but didn't require him to write anything new. "Just send me every live recording of yourself that you have lying around and give me your blessing to mess with um," she explains of her request. But what she messed with wasn't his songs -- which are readily available in any good music store -- but the stuff between songs, the little stories told to pass the time while retuning, the slapstick and ramshackle poems and lessons learned from his experiences with friends and strangers. Then DiFranco curled her own music around the tales, dressing them up in golden threads and barbed-wire crowns so that folks can find out not only what Phillips is all about, but from whence true anarchism comes.
Oh, yes. Phillips is soft-spoken and wise, but he does not mince words. His stories are that of the grandfather, the one who's been to hell and back and ain't afraid to tell you about it. Through his storytelling, Phillips conveys a kind of radicalism more powerful and thought-provoking than any Rage Against the Machine video or Spike Lee movie night. DiFranco operates under the basic tenet that words are tools, and Phillips' words here operate like a jackhammer, breaking up the cobwebbed ideas we have about society and crushing the cultural order to a fine powder, one which can be reshaped but never cemented over.
In "Korea," for instance, Phillips speaks of his duty as an American soldier in the Korean war. "My clothing was rotting on my body... I wanted to swim in the Inijun River. But there was a rule against swimming in the Inijun river. A young Korean... said to me, in what English he had, 'You know, when we get married here, the young couple moves in with the parents... When the first baby is born, the old man goes out with a jug of water and a blanket, sits on the bank of the Inijun river and waits to die. And we'll roll him down the bank and into the river, and the body is carried out to sea. And we don't want you swimming in the river because our elders are floating on [it].'"
The tale works wonderfully as a complement to the segment in "Bridges," the recurring theme of elders flowing with the river -- literally or figuratively. At the same time, Phillips reveals his common ground with the men who were supposed to be his sworn enemies in the war but who respect their elders just as he respects his own. DiFranco's own admiration for Phillips shines through in her accompaniment, a subtle, jazzy bass line and drumbeat like a melancholy heart thumping.
Not every track on The Past Didn't Go Anywhere contains a tale of woe; some are loving reminiscences, especially of homeless men with whom Phillips holed up after returning to the States after the Korean war, and of his children, to whom he is a constant source of bewilderment and embarrassment. For instance, in "Mess with People," Phillips discusses his constant desire to stir things up. "You've got to constantly mess with people. They just kind of sink into a cryonic torpor and they're never seen again..." After "messing with" a couple of parents in a supermarket, he explains, "[My daughter] Morrigan starts punching me in the side and says, 'Why can't you be normal?' And old Miss Brownelle rapped Morrigan on her shin rudely with her cane and said, 'He is normal. What you meant to say is average.'"
While Phillips' stories stand up just fine on their own, DiFranco's musical accents develop what would otherwise be a simple story-time into a thematic tome, a fancied-up version of The Gospel According to Utah. On songs like "Half a Ghost Town" and "Bridges," her acoustic guitar is an instrument of wistfulness, a map to memory lane. The noisy hip-hop interludes throughout "Nevada City, California," a rant about folk music and new age mentality, serve as a comic double to Phillips' lightheartedness. The slow meander of the Wurlitzer piano during "Bum on the Rod" calls to mind the dusty train cars of the "bum on the rod" as well as the upscale lounge music of his evil twin, Phillips' "bum on the plush." DiFranco peppers the songs with her own vocals, though these are rarely more than cries or echoes of Phillips' thematic mantras, as in "Holding On."
It is probably no coincidence that DiFranco included Phillips' diatribe about presidential candidates on an album which was released just as the national elections are about to take place. "Talking to a conservative is like talking to your refrigerator... Working for the Democratic party is kind of like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic," he explains. Within the rap he announces his own intention to run for President. Though he probably suggested the notion years ago, DiFranco's implication is clear: Phillips is a man whose wisdom reaches far beyond that of any politician we have ever known; he has fought wars, spent time among the rich and the poor (and vastly prefers the poor), loves children and old people and has made a livelihood out of turning people's ideas upside down. Utah Phillips for President? I haven't heard such a good idea in years.
This article was originally published in Addicted to Noise.