I spent the last half of January making an album in Hawai'i, and nine days during the first half of February on tour, mostly in California.
Well, technically only nine days of it might be considered "touring," mostly in California, but the recent spate of time away from home began with a flight to Hawai'i, and what they call the Big Island, which includes the world's biggest active volcano, and is home to the region that produces the legendary Kona coffee.
When a fine musician and engineer named Chet Gardiner invited me to come spend a couple weeks in Hawai'i to make a recording, my first thought was that's a very nice idea, but a long time to be away from home. But I mentioned the notion to some fellow musicians, and they responded with great enthusiasm. Chet said there was room for more people on the farm, and a plan began to form.
Lorna McKinnon, Glasgow choral director who had already done wonders to two of my albums in recent years, enjoyed a brief visit in Portland before we boarded the flight to Kona, which is a similar-length flight to flying across the continental US in the other direction. Looking at a map, Hawai'i is at a similar latitude to Central America. That's what it feels like, too. It took about ten minutes of being off the plane for Lorna and I to agree that it was too damn hot. Two weeks later, we were both looking forward to being back in the freezing rain of Portland, and when we arrived in it, we still loved it.
For a couple days we were joined by violinist extraordinaire Billy Oskay, who came on another, far more circuitous flight from Portland, delayed and rerouted like flights generally seem to be these days, on certain airlines more than others, and Kamala Emanuel, doctor from Australia moonlighting as a musician, who flew in on an even more circuitous route from Brisbane.
During our twelve days on the coffee farm we spent many days recording, and many others taking time off to accompany Chet to one of a variety of farmers markets, where he and one of his two bands are a regular feature. The three of us who made it through the whole adventure also frequently borrowed a car to see the sights or to drive the 45 minutes to the nearest supermarket. The rest of the time, at the farm, there were rehearsals and things like that, but the only really consistent daily phenomenon was watching Lorna get eaten alive by mosquitoes, who seem to especially appreciate the blood of people who come from a place where it's too cold for them to exist.
In years past, I have visited Oahu a couple times, and Maui once. It was my first time on the biggest of the Hawai'ian islands, the one called Hawai'i. At least in the section we spent the lion's share of our two weeks in, anyone fantasizing about sandy beaches and gentle ocean waves will have their hopes quickly dashed, along with other things, if they're not careful. The jagged volcanic rocks are generally the terrain which meets the sea, and it is a rough sea, that tends to knock people over every few seconds, by my observation.
An exception to the jagged rocks are the smoothed-down ones that make up the black pebbles on the section of coastline known on the map as Pebbles Beach, which was recommended to us by a local woman who runs a second-hand clothing shop from a collection of tents on her property by the side of the highway. She was welcoming to us, showed the women to the tents with the clothing in it, and showed me to the hammock, which was apparently the waiting area for guys like me. She was listening to pop music with a mix of English and Hawai'ian lyrics -- notable, I thought, and rare these days for anything to be played on a commercial radio station that doesn't originate in Los Angeles or Nashville.
She talked about how she almost got a real shop in town, but was priced out of some kind of nasty real estate deal, and ended up opening this shop using tents by the side of the road instead. She seemed very nice, and she recommended Pebbles Beach to us, instructing us not to tell the other tourists about it because it's a local secret. A couple days later, we set Google Maps to take us to Pebbles Beach, and proceeded to watch our lives flash in front of our faces on multiple occasions over the perilous next twenty minutes or so, as we descended down the steepest paved roads, or roads of any kind, any of us had ever seen, and certainly the steepest I've ever driven on. These roads were so steep, they were the stuff of nightmares, like the nightmares where the road gets so steep that you wonder if you're going to just fall off of it.
But the brake cables on Chet's old Prius held, and we survived Pebbles Beach. Whether or not the nice Hawai'ian lady was trying to kill the tourists, we may never know.
But certainly, the situation she described about her shop seemed like the same story everywhere, with the working class and those living in little inland houses overwhelmingly being poor and brown, with those living in big houses on the beach, along with the big land owners and most of the tourists being wealthy and white.
To rub the salt in the wounds of conquest, the tourist industry doesn't just advertise the warm weather, the waves and the volcanoes, but also the "Aloha spirit," which seems to mean the locals are supposed to smile while you rob them of their land and sovereignty and turn them into your servants.
For the one Scottish member of our party, the only one of us who was not raised in a settler-colonial country, the obvious contradictions of life in Hawai'i were the hardest to stomach, I think it's fair to say. The rest of us have somehow learned to live with it, although even for Kamala and I, it was easy to see how recently-conquered this place was. If you've lived on both the east and the west coast of North America as I have, the differences are observable there, too, with the ranks of the disenfranchised and the sizes of the reservations they have been forced to live on growing in visibility, in number, and in size, the further west you go -- all the way to Hawai'i, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
The stark reality of the situation wasn't lost on so many of the people we talked to, but I was surprised by how many of the white people I met who grew up somewhere on these Hawai'ian islands, often because their fathers were in the military. In other words, they may see how messed up the situation is, but it's what they've mainly known, and either way, they learn to live with it. Some find ways to actively be in solidarity with the indigenous people of the islands. Others convince themselves it's OK that the islands were conquered by the US Navy, it was a long time ago, and anyway, they like to repeat, the former king who united the islands of Hawai'i into the nation that it was did so using force. Two wrongs make a right.
Those supporting the Hawai'ian sovereignty movement to one degree or another often can be seen sporting the old flags of the nation of Hawai'i, which oddly enough contains a bit of the Union Jack in it. The most noticeable representation of the sovereignty movement and use of this flag to me is when someone has a really big one trailing behind their motorcycle, which is a fairly common sight around Kona.
Before going to Hawai'i I had taken account of the impossibly high prices for hotels and rental cars, and we initially intended on avoiding both of those things, staying on Chet's coffee farm and borrowing his old Prius for the occasional local drive somewhere. What I had no idea about until we got there was how much more expensive everything else is in Hawai'i, such as essential items like food.
While things like oranges, coconuts, and avocadoes grow in large quantities all over the area and can often just be picked off of the trees, anything you might buy in a supermarket is two or three times the price that you'd find on the continental US. Prices had evidently been rising recently. In every grocery store or supermarket we went into, it was pretty much all anyone was talking about. The stunned and sometimes despondent conversations could be heard wherever there were two or more people gathered in any aisle.
For our last 48 hours on the island we decided to splurge and stay in a hotel for two nights in downtown Kona (thanks, mom!). Unsurprisingly, the local/tourist divide was especially stark there, with a collection of homeless men taking it upon themselves to get into regular collisions with tourists at every opportunity, via bicycle or skateboard, weaving in and out of car and pedestrian traffic, narrowing missing people and vehicles, including me and mine on at least two different occasions.
For our very last 24 hours on the island we rented a car, so we could drive to the other side of the island and visit the big volcano, see some lava in the real world, not just on Minecraft. It was one of those special car rental deals, though a very expensive one, where you didn't know what kind of car you might end up with. Our choices turned out to be a little sportscar or a Ford F-150 pickup truck. Given the options, we went with the most popular vehicle in the United States, the F-150.
The truck was so far off the ground and so hard to drive safely, given that you couldn't see most of what was around you since it was beneath you, I was very glad when we brought it back to the rental car agency and were done with it. In the meantime, seeing the volcano was indeed impressive, even though the actual lava was quite a distance away.
It was chilly on top of the mountain there, as I might have anticipated, but didn't. I hadn't brought a long sleeved shirt of any kind with me. When the young man at the gift shop told me the hoodies were $50 each, he gave me a look that said yes, I know it's ridiculous. Not dissuaded, too cold to care, I bought one. I wonder if most of the hoodie purchases in that gift store involve people who showed up with nothing but a t-shirt on, got out of their cars, and realized they were on the top of a mountain?
While we were on the farm in Hawai'i there were two horrible massacres in California, and I got word from various old friends that another old friend, Robert Hoyt, was dying of cancer in Indiana. Robert died the day we got back, on February 1st, and I spent my free time back at home writing about him. Then an earthquake destroyed much of Turkey and Syria, while Biden flipped out over a Chinese weather balloon, a train full of toxic chemicals derailed and leaked its toxins all over the watershed on the impoverished, post-industrial Ohio-Pennsylvania border area near Youngstown, the US and Germany agreed to send state-of-the-art tanks to Ukraine, and Microsoft released an initial iteration of its AI chatbot, which will soon be leading to mass unemployment and new vistas for the possibilities of disinformation. And in very local news, Chet sent various mixes of songs for me to listen to from Hawai'i as our album project progressed, and my kids were happy to see me back at home. Unusually for me, I had a social engagement in Portland, having been given a free ticket to an annual shindig called Winterfolk on Alberta Street. Billy was playing with Jim Page, and predictably enough, they were great, and everybody was telling Jim how much they were enjoying his new album, which I still need to check out. The main musical revelation for me that evening, though, was hearing Kate Powers sing. What a voice.
After those six short days reunited with my family, it was time for the travels to continue, in the form of nine days on the road south of Portland, mostly up and down the state of California.
The tour that was otherwise all gigs in California began in Eugene, Oregon, with a house concert for the dedicated few who wanted to come hear a second concert from me in the course of two months, as I was just there in December. It was filmed very nicely, however!
We stopped for a walk at Lithia Park in downtown Ashland, an easy place to get to from the highway. As with the last time I walked around in that park, a couple months ago, there was a group of a couple dozen kids and several adults all wrapped up appropriately for the cold weather, playing by the creek. I didn't want to bother the adults and ask them questions while they're paying attention to the kids, but I'm pretty sure this is an outdoor school we were witnessing. Kamala and I readily agreed that we wished we had gone to a school like that.
Driving past the snowcapped peak of Mt Shasta and eventually into the Chico area, we passed signs for Paradise, the town largely burned down a few years ago with woefully insufficient warning to boot, leading to scores killed in their homes or cars. In the Chico area, many of the folks still living in their vehicles today are from Paradise, people tell me at the community radio station. The station, KZFR, is a thriving local institution that takes up most of the third floor of a sizeable building in the center of town, which is where that night's concert took place.
In Chico, over breakfast, I learned about how a local peace group had declined and then fallen apart under the strain of the familiar tropes we hear in the current era, about how the old and white should step aside and make room for whoever it is that's going to take their place running the local peace group, which of course is generally no one, after the dust settles. Such a strikingly familiar story.
In Chico I also learned that someone I first met almost two decades ago, fellow PM Press author and my one-time album promoter, Jen Angel, had been robbed in Oakland, and in the course of pursuing the robber, had somehow gotten caught in the door of his car and dragged fifty feet down the road. The next day I learned that her brain had swelled in the hospital, and she had been pronounced dead.
Everywhere we went in California, the stress of the class divide, and the stress of either living in cars and tents or just being in a city where so many people are forced to live that way, was palpable. It was always just hanging in the air. I counted five times that I got yelled at while driving my nondescript little rental car. Each time, I struggled to come up with anything I might have done that could have provoked such a reaction. None of the times did I understand what the person was yelling about, who was driving another car, looking at my face and shouting. The last time this happened, just south of San Francisco, the red-faced white man behind the wheel stopped and started his car in a way designed to make me stop behind him, so he could get out of his vehicle and do what, I didn't want to find out, so I turned into a parking lot to avoid him.
In Santa Rosa the Sonoma County Peace and Justice Center was fairly well packed. A woman from Mendocino talked about the fight there, now going on for years, so far successful, to save a forest around there. They want to give it back to the tribe from whom it was taken, who are apparently in the lead on this initiative.
The center seemed to be a hotbed of activity around there, emerging from the pandemic, so it was sad to hear that it apparently needs a new roof, and no one has the money for that, so it's facing some kind of existential risk of closing.
The Mission District in San Francisco was in the most desperate state I had ever seen, reminiscent of the way downtown Portland, or downtown Oakland is these days as well. Like a big ball of stress, mixed with the strong scent of urine, along with expensive restaurants and people lying on the sidewalks and decaying in public view.
Desolation aside, when we parked and looked up, we were met with a lovely vision of Francisco Herrera, the musician and recently also political candidate who would be singing with us that evening. The Redstone Building, where that night's show in the Mission District of San Francisco was taking place, is being sold, and the new landlord plans to rent most of it out at market rate. The future of all the left groups that populate much of the building is unknown, such as the Living Wage Coalition that hosted the concert.
A few blocks from where we played that night is 23rd and Shotwell, where my dear friend and housemate was shot to death on May 1st, 1993, almost thirty years ago now. Kamala and I visited the site where he was killed. There still appears to be blood or other bodily fluids staining the wall that received much of the blast from the shotgun that blew Eric's head off that night, but there is otherwise no indication at all that a man was murdered here.
A couple blocks away there's a yard with some great artwork in it, related to the subject of gun violence. Do they know someone was killed on the street two blocks from them one night in 1993? Probably not. Probably someone they know was shot nearby on another night. If there were a plaque on the sidewalk or on a nearby building to mark each killing that took place in cities across the US, that would be really something to see, it would be powerful, they would be everywhere, even more so than the ghost bikes.
A couple friends were at the show all the way from Boston, but many members of the small crowd that came to the show in San Francisco were local friends of Jen Angel's, and the mood was fairly somber. Of course, there's a high death toll in most of my songs, too, so somber works much better than many other possibilities, like a beautiful night beneath the stars by the seashore in Mendocino, for example.
Over dinner after the show it was a nice gathering. Turned out Karen Pickett of Earth First! is very involved with saving that forest up in Mendocino, too, that the woman in Santa Rosa had talked about -- Jackson Demonstration State Forest, as it's awkwardly known. Most notably over dinner I heard from a local organizer about what had become of the antiwar demonstration coming up in DC and San Francisco on February 19th, and all the various groups who had tragically pulled out of the thing because of political differences of the sort that sounded all too familiar in the 2020's.
Before we left San Francisco to head to southern California we had the pleasure of joining David Giesen on part of one of his walking tours of the city. We met him and a small group of travelers from a youth hostel, and followed him around the Tenderloin area. David made reference to nearby buildings where a couple of members of the Black Panther Party lived in the mid-Sixties, or where the Diggers ran one of their programs, and painted a picture of San Francisco in the Sixties that was educational as well as entertaining.
After the guided tour, we joined the monthly musical rally that Steve Zeltser and others have been putting on in front of Twitter Headquarters on Market Street, just a couple blocks from the BART station where I used to busk over three decades ago. A fabulous band called Angry Tired Teachers have worked out kick-ass versions of classic rock hits with the lyrics adapted to be all about billionaire industrialist and new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk.
The cancellation campaigners of the modern left had not left Topanga unscathed, as I soon learned. I hadn't been to this adorable hippie canyon largely surrounded by Los Angeles since the pandemic hit. At the heart of Topanga are the descendants of a group of blacklisted actors, Will Geer and friends, who built the beautiful, big Shakespearean theater that has long been run by Will's daughter, the actor, Ellen Geer, who, along with her husband, singer/songwriter Peter Alsop, were hosting us.
Ellen was involved with putting on a play that featured an entirely Black cast and Black director, but because she herself was still involved with the production and she isn't Black, a group of disgruntled actors actually and apparently unironically calling itself the Blacklist began an email campaign to get Ellen to remove herself from any involvement in putting on this play at her theater. Stunning behavior, and so divisive, like what often passes for "activism" these days, treating someone like Ellen Geer like she represents the Hollywood establishment or something.
After a long and beautiful drive back to the north, we arrived in Santa Cruz and parked in the parking lot of the Resource Center for Nonviolence, where that evening's show would be happening, sponsored by the local Veterans for Peace chapter. Unlike some of the other centers of local activity I've mentioned, the Resource Center in Santa Cruz is bigger than it used to be -- growing rather than shrinking.
We walked past the Starbucks that has no bathrooms, even for customers, and no seats, since they adapted it to the reality that any semi-public space with seats and tables might be taken over by folks with nowhere to live, so, get rid of them, along with the bathrooms.
Walking down the main street with all the cafes and clothing stores and such in the rebuilt center of the city, I heard my name, and looked over to see Keith McHenry hanging out with a few other folks. The founder of Food Not Bombs is once again under attack by local authorities, who are trying bizarrely to charge him with felonies for spending tens of thousands of dollars of his own money to put hundreds of homeless people up in hotels at the beginning of the pandemic. In December, during my last visit to Santa Cruz, Food Not Bombs was celebrating their 1,000th day feeding free hot meals to people during the pandemic, the only people in town doing that. Now they're facing felony charges in appreciation for their herculean efforts. The "progressive" and impossibly gentrified city of Santa Cruz, right there in a nutshell.
Just before we started our show in Santa Cruz I heard from Niels in London, the Danish videographer who spends most of his time documenting the efforts of Stella Assange and others to call for Julian Assange to be freed from prison in London, where he awaits extradition to the US for exposing US war crimes. Niels had finished the little music video we were working on together last summer, "When Julian Met Stella," and was preparing to release it online in time for Valentine's Day, the following morning.
I played this over the phone to Julian for #ValentinesDay.
— Stella Assange #FreeAssangeNOW (@Stella_Assange) February 14, 2023
Thank you @drovics.#FreeAssangeNOW pic.twitter.com/30D9vMMdrg
As soon as the video was up on Twitter it started getting lots of retweets and views, and it also attracted an immediate and protracted attack on Stella's character by a group of trolls -- be they freelance wingnuts, agents, or bots -- accusing her of somehow or other preventing her husband from speaking to the public from his prison cell, an attack campaign reminiscent of those who go after survivors of massacres to inform them that they are actually "crisis actors" making stuff up.
After a beautiful morning walk in a redwood forest with friends, I dropped Kamala off at the airport for her to begin her journey back to Australia, and I headed further north, to the enchantingly beautiful historic village of Mendocino.
Mendocino is where all the rich people hang out, along with those who moved up there and bought houses decades ago, when the houses were mostly shacks, and very affordable ones. The town is an interesting mix of these elements, plus the next generation of them. I remember other nearby villages as being smaller and funkier, but the only one I had a chance to visit around there this time was the one I was doing a little concert in, facing the crashing waves of the Pacific, on the second floor of a two-story town, so you can really see them.
The food at Flow Restaurant and Lounge was amazing, even more so for me because it was free. The show was kind of what you might expect of a benefit for the local arts center at a restaurant where people easily spend $50 on dinner, without the wine. There were loyal fans, such as the former mayor of Ukiah and his wife, a couple of folks who drove in from Chico, a couple of other folks related by marriage to David Solnit. And then there were the well-to-do supporters of the arts who might have been wondering what they were doing in a room with a guy who was singing excitedly about the time when "Iceland told the bankers to fuck off." There might have been a banker in the room, quite possibly.
The drive home to Portland the next day was a ten-hour affair, without traffic or making any stops, so really it was twelve hours. I spent most of it listening to the audiobook rendition of George Lakey's book, Viking Economics. It's really a great introduction to what everybody needs to know about the history of Scandinavia and how the Scandinavian economic model functions. After seeing the gaping divide between the haves and the have-nots all over Hawai'i and California, and feeling the misery in the air that this causes for, it seems, most people, I couldn't have been listening to a more relevant audiobook than that one.
Onward through the fog.
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