DO TELL : Utah Phillips Puts His Tales to Music and His Audience’s Character to the Test

“You know, this is sort of a New Age epicenter up here,” says U. Utah Phillips of the Sierra-nestled Nevada City where he lives. “God, either that can break your heart or be the funniest thing you ever ran into. I always liked Robert Bly’s poetry, but when I read the title to ‘Iron John,’ I originally thought it meant that in order to have a real man’s movement, you need an iron john.

“Me, I’m not in a drum circle yet--you know, where the men get in a circle, beat drums and howl. I’ve been working with a real early man’s book by Charles Darwin called ‘Nurturing the Monkey Within.’ Instead of drumming we get a lot earlier than that: We howl and jump up and down and sit in trees and pick fleas off of each other that our grooming leader brings in a vacuum cleaner bag.

“Then did I tell you about the visiting Tibetan lama who came to town in his saffron robes and all? You know what I saw him ask the fellow at the hot dog stand? ‘Make me one with everything.’ ”

Every word the 57-year-old says is true; at least words like the and of are. He can spin a yarn or tall tale with the best of them, and since the best of them mostly worked in the last century, he may be America’s greatest traveling storyteller. Not that he cares.

A songwriter, one-time hobo, card-carrying Wobbly (Industrial Workers of the World member), self-described “primitive newspaper,” “one-man workers paradise” and commentator on “the absurdity of the general dilapidated appearance of reality,” Phillips--who looks like an apt cross between Santa Claus and Karl Marx--isn’t looking for accolades or success on any terms but his own. Those terms include turning down spots on the “Today” show and “The Tonight Show” to travel from town to town playing tiny folk venues such as Laguna Niguel’s Shade Tree Stringed Instruments, where he will be on Monday.

“I do not need fame, I do not need money and I do not need power. What I need is friends , and that’s what this trade affords me,” Phillips said by phone last week from his hillside home.

He travels to some 120 cities and towns a year, and he says those travels are the source of his art. “I beat the streets a lot, and I listen to people talk. I’d be a fool to not take the chance to get out and talk to people. It’s like being paid to go to school. That’s where my songs come from, talking to people, from stories that I hear. Nothing happens inside your head but for something happening outside of it first.”

He sings wildly inventive children’s songs, train songs, baseball songs, love songs, hobo songs and union songs from the volatile history of the IWW. Some aren’t so much songs as diving platforms for wild, convoluted digressions so rich you forget there was even a song involved until he comes back to it 15 minutes later.

The song that makes him happiest is “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” a tune he’s loved since his hoboing days in the ‘50s. The saddest is one he wrote himself, after he was in a restaurant in Rochester, N.Y., in which the parents of a 5-year-old girl took her into a restroom to discipline her and hit her so hard against a wall that she later died.

“As I was traveling through the Northeast, I kept calling the hospital to see how she was doing and found out she had passed away. And so I wrote a song for her, and sang it when it seemed something needed to be said about that. But it’s a hard song for me to get through. I feel very, very badly about the way kids are treated, at all levels. I really regard using television as a baby-sitter as a form of child abuse.”

Among the song’s lyrics: “I wish I could send you to some little island/Where Daddy always listens and Mama’s always smiling/And no matter what they do/They can’t take it out on you/Fly away little bird, there’s no one left to scold you . “

Phillips has a warm, folksy, comedically timed voice that a listener immediately trusts--which makes him an exception among this year’s presidential candidates. As he has in past elections, Phillips is running on the Sloth and Indolence ticket.

“I’m running as an anarchist candidate, and as a do-nothing. I guarantee that if I’m elected, I will take over the White House and not do anything , just hang out and scratch my butt and shoot pool; which is to say if people want things done, they’ve got to get together and figure out how to do it themselves.”

Born Bruce Duncan Phillips--for King Duncan and Robert the Bruce, betraying his Scottish ancestry--he was the child of labor activists and free-thinkers. His parents were the first to integrate movie theaters in Salt Lake City. Phillips got the nickname Utah while serving with the 8th Army in Korea, an experience that also made him a pacifist. (The U. was added as a reflection of his affection for country singer T. Texas Tyler.)

In a world of conformists, Phillips does a fearless job of being himself. He says he never had to give it a second thought.

“A couple of months ago I dug out the letters I’d sent home to my mother from Korea in the early ‘50s. I was curiously moved by those letters. It forced me to realize that of all the people I know--and this sounds like I’m beating my own drum--I really have been consistent through all of those years.

“The Korean population was being bombed into oblivion, but some of them took me up these muddy streets to the auditorium of this women’s university, which had big bomb holes in the roof. I sat up there in the remains of the balcony and listened to Marion Anderson, the great black operatic soprano, singing ‘Oh Freedom’ and ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.’ I was the only white person there.

“In the letter I wrote to my mother I was remembering how mortified my father was when he invited Marion Anderson to sing at the Capitol Theater in Salt Lake City and she couldn’t stay in the best hotel, that was owned by the Mormons, and how my parents decided then that this had to change. So I know what my inheritance is. I’m real sure of it. The person I am has always been there, I’m pleased to say.”

That many people are not so confident of themselves, he said, “is a pretty frightening idea, isn’t it? Doesn’t part of it have to do with being forced to live and work outside of your virtue, never having the opportunity to figure out what that is? I mean ‘virtue’ not in the moral sense, but like ‘a knife cuts by virtue of its edge,’ ‘a ball bounces by virtue of its elasticity.’

“Everything possesses a unique virtue that animates it, and most people--because of the situation they were born into, or the situation they wind up having to work in--are not exercising that virtue. There are great poets who are probably running hydraulic lifts, painters who are sweeping floors. At the same time there are people who would be really good at running heavy equipment who are running government agencies,” he said with a laugh.

Phillips might liken taxes to muggings, but lest he be confused with the Libertarians, he likes public works, and, moreover, “I don’t like capitalism, make no mistake about that. I think capitalism is anti-democratic, that it destroys lives, and I don’t want anything to do with it. I’m a tradesman.”

To him, capitalism means “alienation from the means of production, where all you’re selling is your labor energy. You don’t really own any of what you’re working at. You don’t own, or even see, the final fruits of your labor. That’s all owned by an employing class, or a boss class, who have figured out ways to get other people to do the work, and then they walk away with the money. I don’t have any time for that.”

Unsettled by his war experience, Phillips became a train tramp for two years following his discharge, meeting many of the story-laden Depression-era hobos. Then, “I did a lot of different dumb jobs, where it was really very stressful. I felt I didn’t belong there, didn’t know what people’s expectations were or why I was doing it.”

His last such job was as an archivist for the State of Utah. He took a leave of absence to run for the U.S. Senate in 1968 on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket, which that year also included Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver as its presidential candidate. Then, as now, the State of Utah was scarcely known for its drive-thru daiquiri stands, and that rambunctious political effort ended up in Phillips being unelected and unemployed.

“I got kind of blacklisted in Utah after that, and I couldn’t get work there. That was great, wonderful! I had to leave, and that’s when I encountered this wonderful folk music family all across the country, committed to sharing songs and folk-dancing together as live, flesh-and-blood people. It was like being born again.

“At that point I decided: ‘I’m never going to let this happen to me again, where I don’t own what I do. I’m going to own the means of my production, which is my guitar and my voice and the songs I’ve made up. I’m going to become a one-man workers’ paradise. Whether we’re able to build it collectively or not, I’m just not going to wait.’

“So, I make a living but not a killing. I wound up as a tradesperson at a sub-industrial level, with nothing to do with the music industry, but a whole lot to do with the trade of going about and singing songs and telling stories as a live person in front of live people in small places. It works fine.”

He sees himself as a “primitive newspaper” in the tradition of the ancient troubadours and skalds. He uses his travels to share the ways people in different towns keep folk scenes vital and ideas on how to make changes in a community without waiting for the government. One thing he strongly supports is the idea of community gardens, which turn unused plots of land into food-bearing acreage.

He’s not unaware of the doom and gloom in world news, and he’s not without a bit in his own life. He had to relearn the guitar a few years ago after losing the use of a thumb, and he says he needs operations on both his “worn out” hands, placing some doubt on future as a performer. “Maybe I should start looking at what else I know how to do--which, it turns out, heh heh, is nothin’.”

But he prefers to point out all the things going right: “Everyplace I go, I find all those community-held infrastructures--food banks, gardens, all of the battered women and rape crisis centers, organic food stores, and community organizations--none of which existed a couple of decades ago. Taken together, that’s a colossal amount of energy. It’s faintly possible we could be winning and not know it.”

Rather than newspapers or radio, his main source of news is what he hears from the people he meets. “There’s a lot of heartache and hardship in that, but a lot of good news too--more than I’m getting off the radio. With the radio, all I can do is harvest the remorse, the anguish, the anger, with no place to put it as I sail off into my day. Why would I want to do that to myself?

“It’s a bad operating hypothesis, to despair. It paralyzes you, you know. So I force myself to be an optimist. I think we are going to awaken into a time where we will all feel that we individually have the power to do these things, to sing our own song, to tell our own tale, to dance our own dance instead of somebody else’s.

“A woman like Dorothy Day,” the radical founder of the soup kitchen-running Catholic Worker movement and a friend of Phillips, “her body was her ballot, and she cast it on behalf of the people around her every day of her life. You could never tell that she hadn’t voted. She didn’t assign the responsibility for doing things to other people. She accepted the responsibility.

“Now that just doesn’t mean for changing the reality around you. It’s to say: ‘I can accept responsibility to sing my own song. I’ve got a good enough story that I can tell it. I’ve got a good enough leg that I can get out and shake it with other people, at these folk dancing parties. I can do it instead of consuming it.’ ”

One of the greatest enemies of this liberation is television, he says. He’s become involved in a group called TV Anonymous, based on the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous.

“I don’t do commercial television or commercial radio. Those are my rules. Television is an addiction: Get it out of your house! It is consciousness-altering.

“I’m able to tell the difference between an audience that is television-raised and one which isn’t. I play small western New York state colleges which are sort of holding tanks for the obviously unemployed, where I have to acknowledge halfway through a performance that the majority of the behavior that’s being exhibited by the people in front of me is the product of mass-market phenomenology and motivation analysis.

“The young people I’m singing to are not reflecting a culture, but a mass-marketing scam. Culture is made up of things like kinship, custom and craft--the ability to do something. And yet I find myself surrounded by people who have neither craft nor custom, and experience kinship in only the most limited way. I feel terrible about that.

“At that point what I do is stop and then describe what I think has happened--that they’ve been cast in the roles of consumers of music. I describe a place like Nicaragua or other Third World countries where everybody, everybody routinely makes up songs. And I ask them, ‘How much have you given up of what you’re able to do to be cast in the role of consumer of all this stuff that you can do yourself? And now we’re going to sing a song,” and everybody gets really embarrassed.

“It might take half an hour to get them all singing something simple like ‘Good Night, Irene,’ but I demand that that happen. I’m not a belligerent person. I try to do it with humor, with love and with compassion.”

He draws hope that man will prevail over machine from a story told to him by an American Indian friend who had been in the Peace Corps.

“He’d been over in Botswana, and the last thing that the Peace Corps did there was to leave a television with the village they’d been in. He got a letter from one of the villagers: They’d watched it for about six weeks all the time, and then a missionary came by and noticed they weren’t watching it anymore. He asked why they weren’t watching it, and the head of the village said, ‘Because we have a storyteller here.’

“And the missionary said, ‘But the television knows more stories than your storyteller,’ and the head man said, ‘Yeah, but the storyteller knows me .’ That makes all the difference.”

Who: U. Utah Phillips.

When: Monday, March 9, at 8 p.m.

Where: Shade Tree Stringed Instruments, 28062 Forbes Road, Laguna Niguel.

Whereabouts: San Diego Freeway to Crown Valley Parkway west. Go left on Forbes Road. Turn left into the parking lot at the end of the street.

Wherewithal: Admission is $12.

Where to call: (714) 364-5270.