John Carle
Ani DiFranco and Utah Phillips play it again
Fellow Workers
Righteous Babe Records
1999
A few years ago I interviewed Utah Phillips by phone about the history and current state of labor music. This was just after the first DiFranco/Phillips CD, The Past Didn't Go Anywhere, was released and Phillips had just gotten back from playing a folk festival in the northwest. He spoke at some length about the impact that the collaboration had had on his audience and was pleased at the interest among the members of a younger generation in the progressive union message he's been singing for decades.
Now, I'm not too proud to admit that The Past was my introduction to Phillips' stories and renditions of IWW classics, but I had to go and spoil myself - I bought a bunch of his own CDs, most notably We Have Fed You All A Thousand Years. This CD, recorded in 1981 before crowds of labor activists in British Columbia, is made up of material from the Little Red Songbook. It's hysterically funny at times, bracing - and informative for those of us who grew up in Ronald Reagan's America.
The thing about The Past was that it stayed true to the spirit of Phillips' music and monologues. DiFranco - admittedly as gifted a musician and songwriter as has been seen in many a moon - gathered tapes from Phillips' years of live performance and added backing tracks, but throughout had the wisdom to know when to step aside and let the point come through the background. Alternately funny, serious and poignant, The Past Didn't Go Anywhere is a living, beautiful thing.
Alas, they should have left it alone after that. With Fellow Workers, we get a single live performance, a "show", which seems to have been scripted to someone's idea of labor-as-history. The band, which is billed as Phillips' "Mensabilly Band" but which bears striking resemblance to DiFranco's new touring lineup, takes precedence this time without any seeming regard to Phillips' singing, with the unsettling effect of having a crazy old uncle singing about the old country while the youngsters learn to riff. Phillips is out of his element in this staging and it shows in the flowery track "pie in the sky", better known on We Have Fed... as "The Preacher and the Slave". On the earlier version Phillips and the crowd roar the chorus; this version replaces guts with irony.
But the main problem is that these are two strong, progressive personalities that can't share center stage without someone losing. I love Ani DiFranco's solo work, but on Fellow Workers Utah Phillips gets the short end without cause.
(Not surprisingly, any CDs by Ani or Utah can be ordered through Rainy Day Records.)
John Carle writes in Atlanta.