The Plaid Adder
plaidder@mindspring.com
I've been meaning to post something on the site about the Indigo Girls for a long time now. Most of what I put up at the Adder's Lair has to do with critiquing or attacking bad things. The Indigo Girls are a good thing. I'm not saying that to be cute. In a world where the range of options so often seems only to stretch from the mediocre to the truly evil, the Indigo Girls are good. They're good songwriters, they're good musicians, they're good singers, and they're good performers. In addition, they are also good people; and most important, they have made a commitment to use their powers for good instead of evil. This is why they are my personal role models. If I work very hard every day for the next 50 years, maybe someday before I die I will be able to say that there was one brief shining moment in my life when I kicked half as much ass as the Indigo Girls.
As many of you know, I work in an environment that is just about the opposite of lesbian space. Some days I find it tolerable; some days I find it toxic. I get through it in part by inoculating myself on the morning commute with the Indigo Girls. As I said in the letter I included with their WOF T-shirts way back when (sob!), when you're driving at 70 mph toward a full day of combating institutionalize homophobia, it's a great comfort to have "Go" blasting out of the CD player while you do it. And when I pop in 1200 Curfews on the way back, and they hit the first two chords of "Closer to Fine," it's like coming home. I know there have got to be many other lesbian fans out there who feel the same way about them, and that in itself is something they can always be proud of. As Honor the Earth shows, however, the IGs are not one-issue voters.
The "Honor the Earth" tour is a quasi-annual benefit tour organized to promote awareness of, and raise money for, Native American issues. All the musicians performing in it donate their time, which is perhaps why none of them had brought their bands with them. The program brochure targets two specific goals: stopping the government-organized slaughter of buffalo outside Yellowstone Park, and preventing several large energy corporations from convincing the government to let them create nuclear waste dumps on Native American land. The Indigo Girls have been working the country for the past 3 weeks, mostly in the Northwest; they've had different artists on the bill with them in different locations. The Chicago show teamed them up with David Crosby and Jackson Browne. We weren't that excited about either of them, but we'd never seen the Indigo Girls before, so we went.
From the way the show was organized you could see what I meant above about them using their powers for good instead of evil. They know, obviously, that most of the people there have come to hear them; but they did what they could to make sure the audience heard everything else too. Emily came on at the beginning to introduce a woman from the Order of the Buffalo Robe who spoke about the environmental issues and who was clearly desperately nervous being on stage in front of a crowd that size. After the speaker made her grateful escape into the shadows, Emily came back and exhorted the people in the at that point very sparsely filled house to "go out into the lobby and get your friends" so they could hear the opening act, a Native American songwriter named Annie Humphrey. Like all the other performers she started out on solo acoustic guitar, and her style is, I have to say, very reminiscient of early Indigo Girls. She was good, although it was clear that she hasn't been doing this for very long and was still learning how to handle the whole stage show thing. Her guitar playing still seemed a shade tentative, and in one of her songs she missed the bridge and had to repeat a verse before getting back to it. She must be learning, though, because the song of hers that I liked best was the one she said was so new that the only people who had heard it before us were her children and their pet rats.
It was during her set that Liza began nourishing her rage and hatred for the four people who were sitting directly in front of us. They were two young, big-haired straight women and their dates, and from the moment they sat down they were talking to each other CONSTANTLY. I do not get that. OK, they don't have to care about the fact that I've paid good money to be here and want to pay attention to the show; but so have they. Does their own economic self-interest mean nothing to these people?
Annie Humphrey closed by saying something that, she says, she always ends her concerts with, which I reproduce here as close to verbatim as I can remember: "Everyone has a gift, and your gift is a weapon that you can use to fight with. And so when you find your gift, you have to go out and find a fight." This was something that resonated with me, particularly given the fact that I was sitting out there wondering whether I was or was not poised at the edge of what might turn into a career as a published writer. If I ever have any money and power I hope that that's exactly what I do with it--find something I can make a difference to and fight for it.
So Annie Humphrey went away, and then Emily came on to introduce David Crosby. This was the first time we saw much of the crowd getting excited. I don't know how old David Crosby actually is, but he sure looks like he's been around the block a few times. With the bald crown, long white hair, moustache, and barrel girth, in his big flannel shirt and jeans, he looked just like an old fart. However, he is an old fart with a sense of humor, and while I think his voice may be past its peak, he can still sing, still play, and still work a crowd. When he exchanged guitars after the first number he told everyone that "this is Emily's guitar, so I have to be very careful. I have put it in a very strange tuning. She has allowed me to do this because she is my friend."
After the first number something went wrong with the sound system and he stopped until they could fix it. Someone yelled out something about how he could do without it, and he put down the guitar, stepped away from the mike, and said, "I'm gonna show you how I don't need the system." He then sang something that I didn't recognize a capella and unmiked, after which he got an enormous round of applause. The harried guitar tech gave him back Emily's guitar, and he went on with the show. Now, I am afraid that I don't know enough about David Crosby to tell you which things were classics and which weren't, except that Emily came on stage toward the end to do a song I did recognize which begins with the words, "If I had ever been here before I would probably know just what to do." Emily teased him about how hard it was and said she had asked him "why he can't just write songs with three chords in them like we do." This, of course, is a lie, which David pointed out immediately; they may have started otu in the three chord stage but they left it behind a way long time ago. Emily took the guitar solo; they claimed never to have rehearsed this, but as Liza says, "I bet she's been practicing that riff alone in her bedroom since she was 12." After that Crosby sang "Guinevere" as his closer--while the two straight chicks in the row ahead of us continued to chatter to each other and their dates obliviously. It was after that that Liza leaned forward and said, "Excuse me--do you mind not talking CONSTANTLY?"
There was an intermission, thankfully, during which we hared down to the ladies' room to answer the call of nature. The second half began with a video montage intercutting images of pristine natural beauty and tribal culture with ruination and despoliation of same by the multinationals, inculding many graphic images of buffalo slaughter, with an overlapping voice over which I thought was very well done although I couldn't always hear over the crowd noise. This was followed by two different Native American speakers--a local college professor who spoke about Lake Michigan and environmental issues specific to it (we live right along the most polluted stretch of it) and Winona Laduke.
Winona is Ralph Nader's running mate; but she's also the program director for Honor the Earth. She never mentioned the election; I guess she felt it wouldn't be appropriate. Instead she spent most of her time talking about environmental pollution. Her delivery is very understated, but she held the crowd with a kind of Morat-esque intimidating stare. When she mentioned Leonard Peltier I heard the two bighaired babes in the row ahead of us asking their dates who he was. Their dates didn't know. My favorite moment was when she referred to Bruce Babbitt as "my great white father." I don't think the big haired babes in the front row were up enough on their early American history to savor the bitterness, however.
Winona introduced Jackson Browne, at which point the big haired babes suddenly began giving the show their rapt attention. Guess we know who they were there for. Jackson Browne is not someone I would set out to listen to--his approach to the political protest song is a little more straightforward and didactic than my taste, and I've in general got little use for straight love songs any more--but he did well with his set and was suitably humble. At some point a bunch of people in the audience yelled for "Cocaine;" he said that he still does it, but the lyrics have been revised somewhat. He then decided what the hell, and sang "the rehab version" of "Cocaine." I don't know the original well enough to know what he changed, except I figure the verses at the end about wishing he still had all his dead brain cells and his dead friends were probably late additions. Crosby joined him for backup vocals on "Blood on the Wire," the only song of his that I recognized. Jackson teased him about how he never remembered the lyrics from one performance to the next. After the show, I imagine, Jackson ate those badly chosen words...but everything in its own good time.
The Indigo Girls came out next, to wild applause and cheering, and launched immediately into "Gone Again." Amy seemed to have gussied herself up since her initial appearance on stage at the beginning of the concert. She was wearing a satiny spangly kind of top (I know you all are imagining Dolly Parton heinousnesses; really, it was much more tasteful) instead of the big slouchy flannel shirt, but they were both still wearing comfortable pants and shoes, and both looked like it had been a few months since anyone cut their hair. In a world where it seems like spandex and silicone are the sine qua non for female performers, it is just so heartwarming to see two women in their late 30s come on stage in casual clothing and proceed to produce music that could eat Madonna for breakfast and still have room left over for Britney and Whitney.
"Gone Again," I have to say, is not my favorite. But that's all right, because their set was all about building to a climax. By the time they got to "Love's Recovery" I was just holding onto Liza and trying not to explode with delight. Of all their songs, that one probably has the most personal associations for me, especially after living through the Bad Year. Liza also remembers listening to it during the year we lived apart while I was finishing college. I didn't notice the one wrong chord that Emily hit at the end, although Liza did, and Amy certainly did, as she seized the opportunity to taunt Emily about it. "Emily played a wrong chord! She never ever does that! So I have to tease her about it...it's her one great shot at mediocrity."
I don't actually think either of them has much of a shot at mediocrity. Emily is obviously ahead of Amy in terms of guitar craft; but they can both sing anyone else into the ground. (David Crosby evidently shares this opinion, as he informed the audience as the end.) They don't need no steenkin' remix. And what Amy may lack in finesse she sure makes up for in attack. When they struck the opening chords of "Chicken Man" you could hear the entire audience sitting up and getting ready for the ride, because despite however we may have felt about the song itself (I personally have never liked it as much as a lot of Amy's other songs), we could all tell that the performance was going to kick everything's ass. And we were not wrong. Talking about it afterwards, Liza and I agreed that if Amy had actually been having sex, she could not have been any more into it than she was into performing that number. And I guess that's what makes the magic happen--both of them throwing everything they've got into what they do, all the time. Just watching someone love what they do that much gives you hope for humanity.
We had observed at the beginning that the crowd included a significant college-age contingent; this is hopeful in that it shows that the IGs will continue to be followed by the next generation. I think we saw evidence of this in the fact that it wasn't until they got into the stuff off *Shaming of the Sun* that the dancing started. Once they busted out "Shame On You" people started getting up and dancing in the aisles. I had planned to resist, but Liza wanted to go, so we got out there and boogied along with all the young'uns. They followed up with "Get Out The Map," a song that had particular resonance for us after coming back from our semiannual Get The Hell Away From Our Jobs And Heterosexism vacation. After that Amy did a ballad she wrote for the women of Chiapas, which caused everyone to go and sit down contemplatively again. (This is apparently an old song but I didn't recognize it; Amy said they don't perform it much. She thanked us for listening to it afterward, as if we were doing her a favor.)
They did two new songs which are appearing on their new retrospective, one by Amy and one by Emily. Amy's was faster so I couldn't understand the words that well, although the chorus appears to end with "I should write you a song of devotion/ That's what I should do." Overall my impression was that it was sort of a love song, in a backhanded kind of way. Emily's was a continuiation of her career-long "Language or the Kiss" dilemma, but it made me worry about whether everything's all right at home. Somehow the fact that the refrain is "Honey, all I know to do is go" seemed somewhat ominous. I know it's obnoxious to make everything autobiographical...it's just that I so much want them both to be happy. *snif*
People were yelling for "Galileo" all night, and they eventually gave it to us, but they made us wait for it. It was a great closer--they dropped out at various points and had the audience sing. It was impressive. I mean here we all are, a bunch of randomly assembled and unrelated Chicagoland dwellers, and all of us know all the words to "Galileo." Well, maybe not all. But when they dropped out at the bridge, the crowd picked it up with no hesitation of any kind. "I'm not making a joke/You know me, I take everything so seriously..." I don't often have the experience any more of being surrounded by likeminded people. So it was a great thing being able to sing along with everyone else in that auditorium, the two big-haired babes in the front being, of course, the exceptions.
They went away then, but came back fairly soon with Annie Humphrey, David Crosby, and Jackson Browne in tow. I will give you all three guesses as to what they did for an encore.
That's right: Buffy Sainte-Marie's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee." Amy and Emily dropped out to give each of the later verses to one of the others. Annie Humphrey, who seemed to be struggling to keep her bearings in the midst of amplificatory mayhem (I think she probably is used to performing solo), let some of her verse get lost in the shuffle. Jackson Browne had the verse that ends with, "They say, 'Honey, don't be so uptight, you can still be an Indian down at the Y on Saturday night.'" Unfortunately, he went, "They tell me, 'Honey, don't be so uptight, you can still go down to the Y on Saturday night...uh, and be an Indian down there." Nice save, I guess. You could see Emily giving him a Look as they went into the chorus. David Crosby, on the other hand, remembered all the words to his verse, so he got some satisfaction out of triumphing over the whippersnappers.
Flubs and all, "Bury My Heart" is a great concert song and it was absolutely the right thing to close with. Knowing a little about the history of Wounded Knee (before the AIM occupation that ended with the shootings for which Leonard Peltier was convicted, it was the scene of one of the more horrific and better-documented massacres during the 19th-century Indian wars; it's represented in Another Country as the Day of the Bloody Snow, which Theamh sees images of in Last One Standing's mind), I looked up front to see if the big-haired babes were finding the song enlightening at all. They had, of course, left early to beat the traffic. So I guess they still don't know who Leonard Peltier is.
I, however, now know slightly more about Leonard Peltier than I did before, because I went and looked him up on the web when I got home, right after I sent in my action cards about the buffalo and the nuclear waste. The details of Peltier's framing, despite being for the most part new to me, are depressingly familiar. They remind me forcibly of something that happened much later with the Nigerian movement MOSOP in the early 1990s, when they began agitating to stop environmental destruction in the Niger delta. As with Peltier, the government first mobilized a military response that could only result in provoking violent confrontation, then turned around and framed the most visible and active leaders of the movement for the resulting deaths, convicting them in a trial which most observers admit was unfair. While Shell Oil looked on with a benevolent smile, the Nigerian government executed writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and his eight colleagues; Peltier is still alive and in prison. In both cases the activists who were targeted got in the way, not just of the ruling government, but of the multinational corporations with whose operations they were interfering. This is why I don't fill up at Shell stations any more. And yet, the fact remains that I have to get myself out to work somehow, and I highly doubt that it is possible to fill the tank without contributing to the rape of someone's environment and the corresponding oppression of someone's community. This is one of the reasons that Native American issues still don't get the attention in this country that they by rights ought to: our crimes against them are absolutely foundational to our society, and there is no way to really address them without fundamentally changing the way America works. For one thing, we would have to do something about the pollution and exploitation of native lands (which, as the first speaker pointed out, is the entire continent), and we will never do that as long as the big corporations own our politicians. And even if through some miracle we were able to accomplish that, there's the larger question of how you make up for 500 years of genocide. The answer, I think, is that you don't; you can't. What we destroyed is lost. Protecting what's left is a start. For us to get to the point where we were talking about where to go from there would be a major victory; but it would just be the beginning of a very, very long struggle.
But this is the thing about the Indigo Girls. They understand that the fact that a goal is impossible is not a valid reason for not fighting for it. And that working for justice is not about trying to wipe out your own white guilt. With something like this the only thing to do is to accept the sin and its consequences, accept that forgiveness is beyond reach and that remedy is impossible, and content yourself with trying to do what's right. *Honor the Earth* has raised, Winona said, over $500,000 this year for the Native American organizations it benefits. It's not a solution, but it's something. It's something good. And in a world like this, we all have to be grateful whenever we see something good. I am, anyhow.
Liza said, after we left, "They're going to do such a good soundtrack for WOF!" I said, "I'm not worthy." And I'm not. But a girl can dream, and if I ever do get to see this world realized on film, I want Theamh and everyone else going out there with their music behind them. Not having apparently worked their way through the pile of fan mail to the T-shirts yet (snif!), Amy and Emily don't know from Idair. But they know a lot about fighting for the right and what they love. And till I grow up to be them, I'll just keep popping *Come On Now Social* into the CD player as I head out onto the toll road.