Remembering Al Giordano

Sometime late last month I saw a post on an email list that mentioned that Al Giordano had died in July.  It took well over a month since Al's death from lung cancer at the age of 63 on July 10th, 2023, for the news to reach me.  That in itself was the first thing that seemed significant to me.

Not especially surprising, though.  The last time I seem to have had any contact with Al, at least the last time I've got any digital record of it, was in 2010.  So I wouldn't say we were close, but I knew him, loosely followed his work, and saw him at different points along the way.

As anyone who has read any number of different versions of my bio over the decades can attest, Al Giordano was one of my earliest and most profound influences, in his role as a musician and an organizer.  I was 12 when I first met him, and he was 19, in the summer of 1979.  I was a child, and he was an adult, as I looked at it then.

I guess I've been busy since 2010, or at least busy enough that, although I've thought of Al now and then, I've never gotten around to looking him up and seeing what he might be doing or writing about.  If I had looked for him at the last place I associated him with on the web, NarcoNews, I would have found a lot of good but old reporting.

Searching for his name, I come up with a mix of articles he wrote in different publications from ten and twenty years ago, a couple articles about his plan to run against Bernie Sanders for his Senate seat in 2016, several articles about allegations of sexual misconduct that came out in 2018, and several obituaries from people that knew Al from his days as an antinuclear organizer in western Massachusetts in the 80's, or his days writing for the Boston Phoenix in the 90's.

I don't know what I have to say about Al that's any more illuminating than what's been said about him to date.  It's not at all unusual for people to travel in different circles at different times, and Al most certainly did that, with changing geography and evolving politics.

When I heard that he had died, I mostly just thought I'd share my fond recollections of Al from Rowe Jr. High Camp, circa 1979.  But after reading what's been written about Al in recent years, maybe I have a bit more I can add, even if it's nothing more than a few random observations, post-1981.

Rowe Camp and Conference Center is in the northwest corner of Massachusetts, just south of the border with Vermont.  It's a beautiful, forested, mountainous area with former mill towns and, back when I was a camper there, the oldest online nuclear reactor functioning in the country.

Rowe Camp at that time was a hotbed of hippiedom -- the counselors, campers, and others involved as well.  Noted aspects of life for us campers attending a typical 3-week stint involved things like having a protest at the nuclear plant, attending a performance of the Bread and Puppet Theater Company in Vermont, and going to a nude beach.  Traditions I especially remember include having an annual Sex Change Day.

Al, along with a guy I only recall knowing as Waffles, were Rowe Camp institutions, representing the anti-nuclear movement, and doing so in a very musical, theatrical, as well as very tasty way.  They talked, Al sang songs and played the guitar, the kids got old bottles and put stickers on them identifying the contents as radioactive, and then we went to the local creek that was downstream from Yankee Atomic to fill them up.  The next morning, we all made and ate radioactive waffles together.

The whole thing made a huge impression on me, both the theatrical gag with the bottles, and Al's playing and singing.  I remember memorizing one of the songs, with the refrain being something about being six feet underground.

I remember noting, back when I was 12 and Al was 19, that although he was roughly the same age as the counselors, as I looked around me at Rowe, the counselors were all physically and emotionally open, happy people, with clear hippie vibes.  Like Al, they would have been born too late to experience the 1960's as adults.  (Al was actually born the day before the 1960's began, on December 31st, 1959.)

The impact of the 60's was still everywhere at that time, as evidenced in the attitudes, appearance, and language used by most of the counselors, campers, and staff at Rowe in 1979.  Al was, according to my 12-year-old observations, not part of this scene.  

I have no idea if he thought of himself as part of the scene or how he differentiated things in his teenage brain at the time.  But Al had the demeanor of the working-class guy from the Bronx that he was, and did not adopt any of the obvious airs of hippiedom, although he was a fully-committed campaigner against nuclear power at the time.  When the rest of us were growing our hair and taking off our clothes, Al kept his hair short and his clothes on.  At least that's how it looked to me as a middle school kid.

Those summers around 1979-81 represent most of the quality time I ever had with Al, but it would be hard to overstate how formative it all was for me.

According to what I've been reading recently, it was just after that time, in 1981, when Al met Abbie Hoffman, who he apparently worked with in antinuclear movement circles throughout the 1980's, until Abbie's untimely death.

Abbie Hoffman was a theatrically-inclined antiwar organizer and author who faced many hardships, getting frequently beaten by police, but he was also voted the sexiest man in America by readers of a fashion magazine.  He got a lot of media, was right at the center of that whole "make love, not war" phenomenon, and was (and is) deeply loved and appreciated by millions.  Though by the 1980's the media had most definitely moved on, and whatever Abbie did did not result in him or anyone else getting the kind of media attention he was swimming in when he was a young man.

It was sometime after the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico in 1994 that Al resurfaced for me.  I don't know which year it was, but sometime in the 90's, when he was starting to do news stories out of Mexico.

It would be hard to overstate the impact of the Zapatistas on left-oriented sorts around the world.  Some folks like me just wrote a song about them and read a lot of reportage.  Others, like Al, packed their things and went to southern Mexico.

For many years, NarcoNews had the feel of a very well-run Indymedia site, with a really solid feed of material.  Its heyday was during the heyday of Indymedia websites, and centers, around the world, just looking at the archives attests.  People involved did lots of great reporting on all kinds of nefarious goings-on that a lot of other media was afraid to touch.

Connected with NarcoNews was Al's School of Authentic Journalism, which he was telling me about when he asked me to come to Rowe to sing at a little conference he was hosting there.  By this time it was the GW Bush years.

Roughly twenty years ago now, so it's all a bit vague.  I always love having any excuse to visit Rowe, and I was happy to be back, and happy to see Al, though he did not seem healthy.  He always had the grey pallor of someone who smoked and drank too much, even when he was much younger, but now, as an adult, I recognized it as such.

I remember being under the impression that I was being invited to do a concert at this conference, and then discovering there was only a handful of people, and it was going to be more like an open mic than a concert, with Al singing some songs as well, but that was fine.

In the intervening years since I had seen Al, he had become a great journalist and I had become a pretty good singer/songwriter.  His musical skills had not been improving in particular since last I saw him, but I enjoyed hearing him play.  He had been, after all, the first person doing this sort of thing -- singing protest songs around a campfire -- that got me on this road.

Al was telling me I should come to Mexico for one of his School of Authentic Journalism events.  He wasn't offering to fly me there or anything, nor did he have that kind of budget.  I remember asking him the same question I would ask anyone talking to me about performing somewhere where I was seriously thinking about going.  If they have no budget for paying me or for getting me there, and if I came anyway, on my own dime, would I need to line up my own lodging, too, or would they at least have a room for me to stay in?

I had at this point been on the road as a full-time performer for a number of years.  In terms of fame and size of audiences I was playing for, in retrospect, it was the height of my career thus far, the beginning of it.  (I'm much better now than I was then, but these things are about timing much more than talent.)  I had learned early on that if you don't tell gig organizers with great specificity the kind of lodging you require -- like, a private room, with a bed (and bedding) in it, a door that closes, access to a nearby bathroom with hot and cold running water, things like that -- then you never know where you might end up sleeping, at least in some cases.

I don't remember Al's exact response to my private room question, but it wasn't "yes," and it included a cryptic comment about sleeping arrangements that gave me chills, and made me wonder what was going on at these journalism retreats.  I never developed enough enthusiasm in seeing what was happening at his school to make the trip to Mexico for one of the sessions.

In 2010 I seem to have resurfaced in Al's world when I wrote an article that got widely circulated, including on websites that were evidently within his radar.  In the article I was criticizing "diversity of tactics" and what in the 60's they called "trashing," these days a tactic summed up in the image of a burning dumpster.  The first paragraph of the article could have given the impression I was instead praising this sort of tactic, which I believe is how far Al got into the article before sending me an angry message.

I responded that he hadn't really read the article, and that he shouldn't talk to old friends like that.  He became more contrite, and we had a fairly lengthy conversation on Google chat about the state of the world and the state of the US left (which Al told me had died in 1980).

The main point at that time in 2010 that he wanted to convey to me was that summit-hopping was dead, and he had written an article to that effect.  I agreed with him that there may not be much of a point in protesting a meeting of the G20, given how different some of those countries are from each other in so many ways.  But I had just been hired by the Teacher's Union to sing at that rally, I explained.  He seemed to think I should be doing something else, but he didn't say what.  Probably learn Spanish and apply my skills somewhere where the left isn't dead, like he did.  (Which, for the record, indeed seems like a fine idea, in principle.)

Anything I've learned about what Al has been up to since that conversation comes from what I've read in the past few days.  Most notably a plan for a not-very-serious run against Bernie Sanders for Senate in Vermont, interrupted by getting cancer; a plan to write a book; and allegations of manipulative and vindictive behavior from a bunch of different women, who all have the same sorts of stories -- of being devastated to learn that whether Al liked their journalism often seemed to depend on whether they wanted to be his lover, and if or when they didn't, the consequences could involve being cut off from the rest of the group for ostensibly unrelated reasons, and other devastating things.

I was curious about the women who spoke out against the behavior they experienced working with Al.  Curious for a lot of reasons, but especially to see if they all fit the profile of undercover agents of the Mexican government assigned to disrupt Al's work there, which some people might naturally wonder.  Many of them were easy to find on X/Twitter, and are working as journalists in one form or another today.  If they're agents, it's deep cover.  At least a couple of them are folks I've met along the line, because it's a small left.  None of them seem to make a habit of slinging such allegations at other men, it's not like the MO for any of them as far as my brief investigation revealed.

As it happened, I guess they were taking down a journalist who was nearing the end of his life, and thus his career, suffering from chronic health problems that led to his death a few years later.  Which is sad.  Sadder still if Al had had a long life in front of him, and might have encountered the kinds of problems getting published that he apparently made sure some of these women had to encounter.  

You only need to follow the archived links on the NarcoNews website that aren't broken to see that Al and his team did a lot of great journalism, along with all the necessary self-promotion inherent in keeping an operation like that going.

All of this good work Al did stands on its own two feet, in my book.  It's good work, whoever did it.  For that matter, whoever is responsible for getting the Yankee Atomic nuclear reactor in Rowe shut down -- and Al played a significant role there -- that work stands on its own two feet as well.  Shutting down a reactor is shutting down a reactor.  Blowing the whistle on government corruption is blowing the whistle on government corruption, whoever takes credit for the investigation, whatever their shortcomings as individuals.

It's a world full of people with shortcomings, sometimes really big ones.  Perhaps it's sometimes necessary to publicly denounce those who engage in behavior that adversely affects the lives of so many young, aspiring journalists -- even at the risk of ruining the career of someone with such a track record as a journalist.  I don't know.  

And then I wonder if those targeted for denunciation keep getting published, do the publications sharing their work get implicated as facilitating abuse?  Here we encounter the slippery slope involved with such callouts.  They say they resorted to the public callout tactic after less public efforts at accountability had failed.  Given his declining state of health by the time of the callout, I guess we don't need to wonder about these things, with concern to Al.

Al was not that well-known, but he certainly was a minor celebrity in leftwing journalism circles.  The fact that there are so few remembrances of Al out there online, the fact that it took me over a month before I even heard that he had died, speaks volumes.  It's easier to be silent, when faced with the complex death of someone who lived a complex life.  Like when people kill themselves, you often figure out that's how they died because nobody is talking about how they died, or even that they died at all.

It feels wrong to be silent, for me, even though I didn't know Al particularly well.  He had a profound -- and profoundly positive -- impact on me, my life, my career path, my music, and my politics.  Especially when I was 12 and he was 19.  I have no idea what direction my life would have taken, had I not met Al Giordano, and caught that "protest singer" bug from him. 

But along with the many positives Al brought to the world, and into the lives of people like me, there seem to have been some notably troubling things as well, which certainly for now dominate his legacy as far as anything newsworthy involving Al over the last five years of his life goes.  

We all probably have relationships that end in conflict and bitterness, and we all probably have people out there who don't have nice feelings about us as a result of such history.  We all probably also know people who can't seem to ever end a relationship without lots of conflict and bitterness and lashing out.  We all know people who seem like nice adults, until they get into an intimate relationship with someone and suddenly adopt the emotional maturity of a toddler.  There are many among us who are deeply wounded people, who have been robbed at an early age by their circumstances of the ability to do intimacy without acting like a small child having a tantrum, for whom something happened early on that ended their emotional development.

When I was 12 and Al was 19, I saw a passionate organizer and entertaining performer, and I also saw a very wounded guy, who was already on a sort of path in life, with the sorts of influences he embraced, that would involve a lot of self-medicating and not many therapy sessions -- and coming out of a society where falling back on your childhood training with regards to social norms and how to do relationships was a very bad idea.  It might not have helped any that his mentor throughout his twenties was a guy who had not long before been voted the sexiest man in America, who had recently been accustomed to regularly meeting women who were ready to fornicate with him at the drop of a hat.  Fame, and proximity to it, can twist people in many ways as well.

We've all got to deal with the influences that created us, some of which are good, some bad; some of which we overcome, others of which we don't.  For me, the bottom line here, if there is one, is that multiple truths can exist at the same time.  A person can be a great journalist, contribute in important ways to the history of several countries, be a profoundly positive influence for many people, and also be the same guy who caused a lot of pain to a lot of people who never should have been treated the way they were.  Such is the complexity of the human experience.