music:: May 11, 2005

The original ‘U-2’ returns to the Ten Pound Fiddle

By LAWRENCE COSENTINO

It might seem hard at first blush for the average person to relate to folk legend U. Utah Phillips.

Anybody around here ever had his hands frozen to the iron underbelly of a

Utah Phillips’ most recent release is 2005’s 4-disc set, ‘Starlight on the Rails: A Songbook.’

flatcar while riding the rails in Montana? Picked up any Navajo songs from a priest in San Juan lately? How many of you have run for U.S. Senate on the Poor People's Party ticket? Oh yeah, how'd your last record with Ani DiFranco do?

And here's the clincher — who around here has picked up, or even seen, a ukelele? (Put your hand down, sir, you're undermining the oratorical effect.)

Yes, U. Utah Phillips has lived more lives than twin cats, and seen more than

most of us will ever see. But, as the Ten Pound Fiddle Coffeehouse audience will find out Saturday, May 14, his far-flung songs and stories fall fine and familiar on the ears. Part of it is Phillips' warm, reassuring voice, the gentle yin to Burl Ives' snarly yang. And never fear — he's long ago dropped the ukelele in favor of the guitar.

"My job is to remember, and I live by my memories," said Phillips by phone from

his home in Nevada City, Calif. "I always have something on the driver's seat, or taped to the mirror in the bathroom, that I'm memorizing."

Phillips remembers stories the way Homer — the Greek poet, not the cartoon — did it 2,000 years ago. Find a great yarn, breathe your own rhyme and cadence into it, then throw it out into the world and hope it finds its own food and water.

"I make up songs in my head, and stories, and I know when I'm done," he said. "But if I write 'em down, they'll vanish and I'll have to painfully relearn 'em."

The subjects of his stories are sifted from dust, salt and sugar: the face of a used-up old man in a flophouse window; a coal miner taking morphine into the mines in case of a cave-in; a deadly war between cattle ranchers in the Southwest in the 1890s. It could even be an acerbic rant over the corporate inanity of NPR ("I got tired of being treated like a veg/So I called up the station and canceled my pledge").

"These songs are made out of the substance of people's lives that they shared with me," Phillips said. "They belong to all of us. I don't lay any real strong claim to these songs for that reason."

Sometimes, art and exploitation are as hard to tell apart as cougars and mountain lions (hint: They're the same animal). Doesn't it matter whether a dead miner might have minded morphing into another Utah yarn? "You honor the people in the stories you're giving," he answered. "The object isn't to turn them into money. The object is — I don't know, how would you put it...." He pauses, then starts rolling again in that low, 1930s Philco-radio baritone. "Rather than living in an age of information, I would rather live in a community of sentiment," he declares. "And when you make songs, when you make poems, stories, you help to create that community of sentiment."

Phillips refers to traveling and singing as his "trade" of 36 years, and wears the workingman's badge proudly. "Toil is what you do for somebody else; work is what you do for yourself," he explained. "One of the struggles of life is finding your own work, and you've got to do a lot of different kinds of toil to do that. But sooner or later, once you've understood and found what your work is, you pick up the phone and call in well."

Unfortunately, such wisdom makes Phillips even more of an anomaly in a disillusioned and fragmented age. "Yes, I feel that all around me," he said. "In these conservative times, it's becoming increasingly apparent that the portion of our government that's set up to look after people in need is getting smaller and smaller. We simply have to learn how to look after each other a lot better than we have been.

"If I would sum it up in one word, way down at the bottom of what people are feeling, it's a sense of abandonment — which would become all too real if we abandon each other."

But Phillips calls pessimism a "terrible operating hypothesis," instead recommending Nelson Mandela's advice to become a "prisoner of optimism."

"It's so easy to become frightened, disillusioned," he said. "I have no patience for people in my little town here, Nevada City, who say, 'Oh Hell, I'm gonna move to Canada,' and they're serious about it! They're already making plans.

"And I think back to those great struggles of the past: the Lawrence [Massachusetts] textile strike of 1912, when all those young immigrant women went out on strike. They were dying at an average age of 26 in the weave rooms, but they didn’t go to Canada. They didn't go back to where they came from.

"They dug in their heels, joined together, and armed only with a sense of degradation of themselves as human beings, they changed their lives and broke the back of the sweatshop system in the Northeast."

"We are given these gifts, these opportunities, that open up before us to change our reality. We need to come together and take care of each other."

Besides yarning and singing, Phillips will no doubt regale the Ten Pound Fiddle audience with reminiscences of his earliest Lansing appearances in the early '70s, when he bedded at the Rivendell cooperative and hung out with WKAR's "Folk Sampler" stalwart Bob Blackman. After the concert, he'll stay and schmooze with exiting audience members, who'll have plenty of warm wishes for him on the eve of his 70th birthday, May 15.

"I don't like green rooms," Phillips said. "The difference between pop music and folk music is accessibility. I like to stand in the lobby, like a Unitarian minister, and say goodnight to everybody when they leave."

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