Paul Ingles talks with musician/activist Jackson Browne

JB: I was involved in the Civil Rights Movement from a very early age and everybody around me was.

PI: Early age when?

JB: Like when I was 14, I belonged to CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. A meeting for that would devolve into simply a party, a dance. I was in L.A. and the first time I heard “You’re going to get right down to the real nitty gritty” was at a record party after what had been a strategy meeting about a demonstration.

PI: That’s the activism with the let’s dance part.

JB: Yes, the thing is it was all mixed together. Music has always accompanied social movements.

PI: There is a story I read in this book by music exec Joe Smith called Off the Record. I thought I might have seen it on your bookcase in one of your online appearances.

JB: Yes, I have that book.

PI: You have the hardback. I have the paperback. He recorded a couple hundred conversations with musicians. Your conversation in there pursuant to the transcription started with the story of getting busted for pot the summer after high school graduation.

You already had some publishing money coming in from songwriting, so you could pay a lawyer to talk to a judge to keep you from going to jail, but you noted that there were about 200 black and Chicano kids in court that day who couldn’t afford a lawyer who knew the judge and were probably heading to jail. You saw that whoever had the bread was going to be alright.

JB: Well, that’s the way it felt. I don’t know what became of any of them, but I know that their path through that was less assured than mine. It was striking to me.

Also, the time before court being in jail with black and Chicano kids for three days several months before the trial was also unequal. That was incredibly illustrative of the inequities.

Those are the experiences that go into understanding that there is a need for change and a need for justice and a feeling of common cause with those people who carry out of the struggles and the strategies.

PI: Is there any way to explain about your household, your upbringing, your parents or was it something innate that made that something that was early on something that drove your consciousness?

JB: Well, I was raised in a household where we were more or less colorblind. I say “more or less” because at a certain point, my parents had to tell me what prejudice was and how I would encounter it.

The music that my parents listened to, my dad especially, all the deities in our household were jazz musicians who were black like Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Not all of them, of course.

At one point as part of their instruction to us they would say, “You’re going to encounter this. There is this thing called prejudice and people really believe it. You’re going to see it. You’re going to run into it.”

Here’s one way it played out. We were having a discussion about civil rights in a classroom when I was 14 or 15 and I was espousing my belief in racial equality. Another kid, my contemporary said, “That’s all good and fine, but admit it, you would feel differently if it was your sister going with a black guy.” I said, “As a matter of fact, my sister does date a black guy.” He not only did not believe me, he just thought it was the lowest of low strategies to say that like did I have no pride.

I just felt so bad for him. I thought, so you don’t believe me? My sister was dating this great musician named Joe Gilbert and he was a musician we were all crazy about from this duo called Joe and Eddie and they played local clubs. I thought what is the big deal?

I just saw the depth of the problem. The problem is that you don’t know any black people. You’ve never hung with any black people. You haven’t met them on common ground, and you haven’t experienced anything. To them, they’re permanently over there, separate from you. I saw that that was the problem. People don’t have those experiences that illustrate to them common humanity.

We had an institutionalized racism that was based in the money structures of our society that was operating at full speed. The armed forces had only been desegregated like ten years before in the ‘40s. There is a lot that we have not encountered as history that is our most recent history. We have amnesia that comes along with American culture, that comes along with our everyday life in which what happened last week is not really remembered.

PI: I’m wondering as you entered the entertainment segment for real in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s cutting your first album, was the activism spark lit a little bit by seeing John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the late ‘60s or George Harrison’s concert for Bangladesh and Dylan.

JB: Certainly, yes. Bob Dylan was majorly involved in the Civil Rights Movement and wrote songs on the subject like Only a Pawn in their Game and The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. He was very involved and wrote songs on the subjects that accompanied the Civil Rights Era. I’ll call it the Civil Rights Era because the movement continued, and the movement has had to continue.

Also, Buffy Sainte-Marie wrote songs.

PI: Universal Soldier.

JB: Universal Soldier and also a lot of songs about Native American rights. Somehow in the Civil Rights Era you were mostly talking about equal rights for African Americans in our country and we weren’t even talking about Indians, but she was. She’s a fantastic writer.

In the case of all this music, the songs about love and relationships accompanied the themes that we are all encountering, social themes. I’ll say that Billie Holiday had sung Strange Fruit. These songs find their way into popular culture without being completely censored or taken out. What’s Going On too.

PI: Marvin Gaye.

JB: An incredible moment in the ‘60s. Then John Lennon did these concerts for Attica and vocally opposed the Vietnam War. It was all happening at the same time. There are many examples of people who use their voices but also their ingenuity to embrace these subjects in their work.

John Lennon is a great example There they were the Beatles. They were the most popular band on the planet, and they had all this influence, and they were adored by the media and at the same time, they were willing to bring up these issues as they encountered them, John in particular, but George also.

To bring up these issues was not a small thing.

PI: No, totally bucking the threat of backlash to speak their truth, which is to me the link that I’m trying to make to what I’ve seen you do, Harry Chapin do. There was a line crossed about writing the song, performing the song, putting a record out and then getting in the streets going to rallies, giving concerts specifically for this, speaking publicly when you’re not on stage singing a song.

JB: Well, there had been a bit of a backlash to activism in the political content of songs.

PI: That never stops. It’s cyclical. You keep hearing it.

JB: For a while, it seemed like it was no longer fashionable or no longer cool or no longer appreciated, just the general feeling that politics was bullshit and don’t bring it up, just for a short time in the ‘70s.
But those people who comprised those movements have long lives and are really the same people who were part of the Civil Rights Movement and the movement to end the war who have become part of the environmental movement and who really make up the whole democratic activity of our country.
It’s part of your responsibility as a citizen to speak and to weigh in. I very often have thought isn’t it enough that I vote? Do I also have to give my money to everybody who thinks the same way I think and is willing to do this activism?
Now the question is how many of these people that appeal to me in an email are connected with a movement. They very often raise money just by talking about who we oppose, enemies that they have in common, but I want to know what they do. What are you really going to do with my $20 bucks or my $100 bucks?

PI: I don’t want to impose an interpretation on you but knowing your music and enjoying it the way that I have and then working on a peacemaking program for 18 years now, it’s very easy for me to see your writing, your recording, your touring, your activism, your charitable work through a peacemaking mission lens. Does that resonate with you as a way of seeing it and feeling it as you’re doing it?

JB: I see that there are so many people that are much more committed in terms of their constant time than I am.
I feel a responsibility if I’m able to put something into words or into a song or figure out a way of talking about something that might succeed, then I do, but it’s really up to me. I don’t think I have that much at stake. I’ve got the best job that you can imagine. My job is to talk about life. My job is to relate what I encounter.

My willingness to talk about social issues, just to give it a handle, has been alternately described by some as the reason that I’m not more popular. Some people in the business would say that’s really why I don’t have a larger audience, because I talk about political stuff. I don’t look at it that way at all.

Even those people who have been worried by me embracing political ideas in my songs in the beginning now see them as a necessary part of life and not the whole picture at all. It’s a part of it, an essential part of it, but for an activist, there are responsibilities to the issues and to the people that have aligned with a cause that far outstrips mine. If I can help, I will. I try.
It goes from human rights issues to the environment, which of course the environment is a human rights issue now. You see that it really is environmental justice. Now we use phrases like “frontline communities” or “fence line communities,” people who have to live adjacent to an oil well for example.

You realize that the people who profit from these industries don’t live in the neighborhoods that are impacted most immediately, but they certainly do live on a planet that will be ultimately impacted and their children will live on a planet that is affected by their activities. It’s about information really.

PI: I’ve been watching this It Was the Music documentary that you contributed to and were interviewed for. You said, “You have to have what one might call a healthy dose of narcissism to be an honest song writer, to be curious enough to look inside or at yourself to start a truth telling line to a song.”

That willingness to make that discovery is sort of like put your own oxygen mask on first before you help someone else on the plane. I see anybody who does that kind of work starting with that granular work of peacemaking trying to get what you’re at and then writing about your experience of dealing with that.

It feels like you’ve done all of that. That’s what I’m grateful for and that’s why I think of you as a peacemaker and why I wanted to land you on this program.

JB: Thank you. I think what you say is true that you have to be able to engage and implement these ideas in your own life in order to speak with any kind of honesty or truth. Albert Schweitzer said, “Personal example is not one of the ways you can influence people, it’s the only way.”

In that spirit, by offering a story of your own experience, you have to accept the idea that it has some value and that it might be interesting to somebody else. But really where you’re headed with it is what it means to everybody or what it might matter to another person.

I think the question about what do you think peace would look like, what would a peaceful world look like is a good starting point because it’s not just an absence of war, it’s also the presence of justice.

We grew up thinking that the opposite of peace was war, but we’ve had very few periods of time in the history of our country that our country was not at war. Some of those things can be disputed as to whether we were really at war or whether we were just simply supporting a foreign war that was in our interest. It’s worthy of debate. The majority of years, we’ve been at war somewhere and very often without the majority of people knowing it.

You have to ask yourself what peace would like. The same thing with justice, if we are barricaded in our privilege, we might miss the fact that privilege is part of an injustice and part of an unequal distribution of the wealth, an unequal application of justice in the country.

PI: Well, we ignore Maslow’s pyramid of needs at our peril. When talking about what peace looks like, as we’ve explored on our program, attention to that is paramount to a definitely of peace.

The one time I got to interview Jimmy Carter, he said the same thing. He said, “These countries are pushed to desperation. Lives are in the balance. It’s something that will make them pick up a brick, a rock or a stone.” That’s part of the formula that seems to evade too many politicians or citizens. “Why should I care?” is the thinking about what’s going on in Iraq or wherever.

JB: I showed up at rallies and played places publicly in support of ideas long before I had any songs to sing on the subjects. Eventually, I was able to find a way to speak about these things in songs. When I did, I thought, oh really? I’d look at something the next day and go, “Oh, am I really going to talk about this?” It was what I was reading about. It was what I was thinking about. It was about the ideas that I was encountering in my life. There is no way not to have that enter into your songwriting, otherwise you’re like an arcane practitioner of an art that is no longer connected with present day life.

PI: Of course, Bruce has talked about the conversation or continuing the conversation and to me, in conversation, it’s always driven, particularly if you feel like you’re making an intimate connection, you’re experiencing something, and you can’t wait to tell people to check it out or “Let me bounce this off of you.” That’s what you just described to me is that process. If you can get to that and feel safe in your art to do that, then it is a really good place to land.

JB: Recently, an album or so ago, I had a song called Which Side Are You On? It was in different forms for a while. I really resisted going all the way into describing the two sides. Eventually I thought, you’re going to have to do it. It became a part of the song.

I thought the only way to really pull this off is to talk to people the way you would talk to them if you were in a bar having a drink with them where it’s okay to disagree. It really is. If you’re with your friends and you have a difference of opinion and you’re having a drink together, it should not come to blows. Your common interests should be enough.

Not that people don’t fight in bars, but generally, if you’re there talking about stuff, you’re entitled to rant. You have an opinion, and you should be able to express it. That unabashed strength of your opinion should speak for itself. Make your argument. Don’t hold back.

There is nothing sacrosanct about the idea that you’re a recording artist. For so many years you’ve been told by people who didn’t agree with you thinking that you were misusing your privilege or misusing your position and you shouldn’t take up the airwaves with your personal opinion. In the words of Little Steven when people say your personal songs are better than your political songs, he would say, “What’s more personal than your political opinion?”

PI: I’m not going to ask you tell our listeners how to be in the pursuit of truth and peace, but when you are living your daily life and not the well-known music figure life, what are elements of the formula that are working for you to be a peacemaker in your daily life that might give people ideas that they can also do this?

JB: Well, to be willing to listen or to just be in the habit of hearing people and listening and trying to get outside of your own privilege to put yourself in other people’s position. That is something that is a struggle for me. My privilege looks a certain way. It has to do with how many guitars I get to draw on in order to find the perfect way of playing a song. I wind up having way more guitars than anybody should be allowed to have.

More to the point, I have a studio that makes me very comfortable in my work. It’s good that I can have it set up the way that I want it and the way that it is run serves my work. I have a lot of privilege, but that can make you blind to other people’s experiences.

It’s a wonderful thing to find your own gratitude for what you have and also try to put what you have and what you’re grateful for aside and look at what other people have and what they have to work with. I see it more and more that people have nothing. People in this country are starting to have so little everywhere.

There’s a great song written by my good friend Don Heffington who just passed called Everywhere I Look. “Everywhere I look, everywhere I go, everyone I see, everyone I know, people going down slow. Little tent cities. People begging for change. Praying for rain.” It’s such a beautiful song in that it is so not judgmental. It’s empathetic in the very best ways.
To encounter your empathy for others and to feel gratitude for what you have without feeling afraid you’re going to lose it, afraid to consider, afraid to throw your lot in with those who don’t have what you have. I think that’s the thing that I have to remind myself of at various points along the way.

You’re driving along and you find a whole bunch of people living under a bridge. They weren’t there when I was there last year. It’s an escalating number of Americans who are living in poverty.

On the other hand, you’re in a car on your way someplace and you can’t stop right now, but when will we stop and deal with this? For them the questions of the environment or the questions of peace cannot be dealt with if you’re hungry or if you have no shelter.

We’re losing fellow citizens at a very, very steady rate to poverty and the inequality of opportunity. Our country is in a pivotal place. You can’t pass laws that dictates people’s awareness or willingness to be empathetic. We have deep problems in this country. There is a divide here.

PI: Again, that sounds like the attention to Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs. If more people would look through that lens, that would help.

Paul Ingles Interviews Hannah Grantham and Birgitta Johnson

HG: So before jumping into what immediately impacted Marvin Gaye as he came into the creation of What’s Going On?, I want to take a step back really quickly just to paint the picture of Marvin’s life growing up. It was a very unstable time in this nation, in this world. But in particular, I think he struggled as a black man to figure out how to behave, how to act like a responsible adult in this crumbling society that he was seeing.

During his late teens to adulthood to the time in his early 30s when he produced What’s Going On?, he had witnessed countless attacks, countless riots, year after year of unrest and turmoil, protests, outright violence through wars, imperialism. He is seeing all of this compound.

BJ: Definitely. When we look back in the ‘60s right before What’s Going On? is happening, there is a context of another explosion of a genre we now call soul. Soul music is popping out and soul is not really sonically distinctive from some of the other things that were happening, but it starts to become the steel. It’s almost like a more core aesthetic black sound.

People are digging deeper into the blues sound, deeper into the gospel sounds and bringing them into secular types of realms for another kind of rhythm and blues that is now more ethnically conscious of the black experience.

When we think about Sam Cooke coming out with “A Change is Going to Come,” he also was being influenced by what was happening in the folk realm where you had Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” touching people. When you think about Bob Dylan putting out “Blowin’ in the Wind” and Sam Cooke saying, “I want to write something like that,” it’s speaking to our times.

I remember Mavis Staples talking about when she heard “Blowin’ in the Wind” for the first time. It was a white man speaking to what was going on in a particular way. We need to be doing this as well.

You see Aretha Franklin, same thing, where she is the legitimate queen of soul talking about and speaking from what’s going on in the African American community, in African American relationships between men and women as well as the broader context of the world, you see soul music taking an identity.

You have James Brown, “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.” All these black artists specifically identifying outwardly as black artists.

You had the Black Awareness Movement, people wearing afros and this idea of - as opposed to trying to assimilate into mainstream society and going into blending in - you have more people saying, “We shouldn’t be blending in. We should be ourselves. Black is beautiful.” You have all these things happening.

You think about how the Vietnam War starts to impact the black community specifically because of the draft. You have so many African American men from communities being taken into this war and many not coming back or many coming back with drug problems or many coming back with mental problems. This is another layer.

When you think about prior to this in the previous war, WWII, African Americans saw that as a chance to maybe have a double victory. If people proved their patriotism in WWII and have this double victory, we can fight segregation and Jim Crow on one hand and prove that we are great Americans on the other hand.

Of course, post-WWII that didn’t happen, so we see the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. Then we get into the 1960s where, as the Civil Rights Movement was beginning, people are saying, “I want this freedom, I want this liberation on my terms - not making myself into something else that white society may think is respectable or pleasing or comfortable.”

You see as you go towards the late part of the ‘60s as the Black Awareness Movement starts to take the forefront and center, people are questioning the assimilationist types of tactics. You see that outwardly with the appearance of afros and afro names and dashiki’s.

Then you see people like Marvin Gaye also looking at this and saying, “What is this going to sound like? Who is going to be our voice in these types of songs and conversations?” You see him definitely taking that same wave of a type of protest where it speaks to these issues, speaks to, in some cases, the spirituality of the black community as you see on the very end of “What’s Going On?” where you’re questioning things, even what you’ve been taught as far as religion and spirituality.

“Where is God in all of this?”

You start seeing him doing that stuff where most often people wouldn’t do that in public. You see him exploring these aspects of the black experience, even through this underlying look at the world.

Of course, What’s Going On? covers ecology, it covers war, it covers how man treats man, but at the same time the core question is how America is teaching black people. It has this universal appeal, but at the same time, very specifically can be drawn to a black experience where you get to the 1960s, one hundred years removed from the Emancipation Proclamation and people are still trying to fight for humanity. You see that flowering in this album just as you see it in other albums that were coming out by a lot of African American artist, particularly ones who are aligning themselves with the soul aesthetic.

HG: In addition to those external issues, he also had some personal struggles. He’s always had personal struggles. Mental health is a thing that many of us struggle with, and he wasn’t exempt from those struggles.

I think that they all come to a head at the turn of the decade in the 1970s as we see this Civil Rights Movement come to somewhat of an end, but also a huge question mark because there really aren’t any clear movements forward.

You see so many of the leaders killed. When he comes into 1971 when the album was released, within the last decade you had lost Civil Rights leaders like Malcolm X, like Martin Luther King, Jr., like Fred Hamilton who was the leader of the Black Panther Party in Chicago. You saw presidential candidates assassinated on the campaign trail.

Those are just the noteworthy names. Those don’t account for all the smaller people that he encountered in his day-to-day life who were no longer with him which also included his singing partners like Tammi Terrell who had died in 1970.

I think a lot of that despair was on his mind as he comes into this, but also, he is a human. He’s still trying to make his way out of what seems like no way. I think he found that through this album.

BJ: Definitely. When we start thinking about what is happening on the eve of What’s Going On? which was released in 1971, a lot has happened in this one decade for Marvin Gaye. We have of course his career has taken off, he’s more of an out-front solo artist.

He’s had this wonderful career of duets however his favorite duet partner, Tammi Terrell has died prematurely from a brain tumor, a very aggressive brain tumor. He took that really, really hard.

Also, creatively speaking, as we see in the ‘60s, some of the top artists are now thinking about - do I need to stay with Motown? I want to have more control over my music. I want to write the songs. I’m a song writer. I want to write songs that I want to write, how I want to write them. I want to produce my songs. You have a type of creative power struggle already happening around Motown, but definitely with top artists like Marvin Gaye.

Of course, the Vietnam War is happening. You’ve had the Civil Rights Movement. There have been several assassinations. A lot of things are happening in the country and also Marvin’s life as an artist, trying to figure out where am I going to fit in and how am I going to get my voice.

You see all kinds of artists of this era rising up helping to give people their voice and helping to champion these causes, but as an actual individual, Marvin Gaye is also saying, “What is going to be my next move and how am I going to do it?” The idea of continually being micromanaged on things was no longer appealing.

Of course, you add, as I mentioned before the Vietnam War where his brother is coming back and you have vets coming back, particularly African American veterans coming back and talking about what was going on in the war and the horrors of war. What we now call PTSD was emergent in a lot of people.

He’s thinking about writing about this and trying to do this, but of course he was at Motown, and they were about hits and pop tunes and dance tunes and not really getting into message music as much and really not dealing with outwardly protest-type music.

HG: This album, which again to circle back to a point I made earlier was a collaborative effort. As much as this was Marvin’s creative vision, it also relied on the conversations, dialogue and experimentation that he was doing with people throughout his life, people like Obie Benson of the Four Tops who helped cowrite the lead single on the album What’s Going On? to his brother Frankie Gaye who had just returned from deployment to Vietnam.

I think Vietnam is obviously a central point to this album. It’s the through line of this whole album, this crisis of what happens when a country engages in a war for seemingly wrong reasons and one that people in the United States, American citizens were openly opposing and protesting against.

You see politicians or other powers try to obscure what’s happening on the ground to fit this favorable image of what could be happening in Vietnam as the United States engages in this romantic battle against communism and against anti-democratic values but they’re very distorted because we’re in this Third World country.

There is a lot of colonialism and imperialism embedded in this war that people like Marvin and plenty of Americans were seeing and calling out explicitly. I think all of that is fed into this album.

PI: Right. Can you relate the story of Obie from the Four Tops collaborating musically on this one?

HG: Yes, so actually, Obie Benson was the one that came up with the first lyrics to “What’s Going On?” He had witnessed what is called “Bloody Thursday” which was in Berkeley, California. He saw anti-Vietnam protestors attacked by a police unit in Berkeley, California while he was on tour with the Four Tops. He jotted down some words that struck him in the moment.

He decided that the song was not the right fit for the Four Tops. He came back to Detroit and Marvin was in a stage where he was trying to look for the next message that he could produce. He definitely wanted his music to have this significance that he thought was more relevant to the community.

He took Obie’s words and figured out a way to put it within his own style and his own perspective. He worked with Obie Benson and few other Motown staff and creative members and created that song.

Obie also worked with him on a few other songs including “Save the Children” on that album as well, which I think is particularly powerful because that song was composed by three or four men while their children played on a playground just outside of the window where they were writing the song in real time.

BJ: He’s taking some of these conversations and looking at the world and asking these broader questions, but not just doing that lyrically, but also how to do that sonically.

When I think about the first track of “What’s Going On?” it reminds me oddly enough of marching bands with the flags coming out in front of them. It reminds me of that aesthetic. With a marching band, the flag corps comes out and their waiving the banner of the band in front of everybody in the parade.

When I think about that song lyrically, it has some very rich, deep, conscious stuff going on, but also sonically, you hear this wonderful saxophone solo. You have congas in the background. You have this vocal background singing “ohs and ahs” in the background. You have almost a doubling of his lead vocals, this echo effect that sets you up for the whole album. Even the groove that’s set down in “What’s Going On?” continues on in various variations for the first six tracks. It’s almost like it sets you up for the master groove of the album.

If I play this for a class, I would literally say, “How many parts can you name?” There’s so much going on, but it doesn’t sound cluttered. It sounds very calm, almost like air. But there’s so much happening. If you write down and list what’s in this track, it’s very, very dense, but it sounds like just walking outside on a busy street where you have strings flying on the top and wonderful baselines on the bottom. This wonderful soundscape is happening that sets you up. It’s almost like you’re walking down the street. It sets you up for the whole album.

PI: Well, and I love that image and I as I think about that song and the rest of the album, which does get a little bit more specific on topics, it’s almost like if you imagine a flag for the experience of that album, “What’s Going On?” emblazoned on it, like the old “Don’t Tread on Me” flag. is really a powerful introduction.

Also, just a really powerful technic in so-call protest music. Dylan used it over and over and over again. Even “Blowin in the Wind,” it’s all questions. “How many roads must a man walk down?” Is to put in the form of a question. It’s a little less aggressive than a statement.

I was thinking about the tone of it compared to something that was just as important or effective like Edwin Starr’s “War.” “What’s it good for? Absolutely nothing!” The tone in that is effective in a different way.

I wonder if you agree or can expand on part of the genius of that song on this album. It IS the tone. The idea of opening up with a party sound, conversation going that leads to questions? It’s like, man, what is going on? That’s the kind of thing that would happen when people are talking in their group.

BJ: I think when we talk about one of the techniques he uses by asking the questions, “What’s going on? What’s happening brother?” This is something that we see happening in message music as well as folk music, this idea of, as opposed to a literal protest and pointing something out and accusing someone, you pose this question and set it up for conversation basically. That’s a great technique.

It’s almost another side of coding messaging you see in a lot of African American music. You have coded messages by using symbols or innuendos or double entendre.

You also have this idea of throwing questions out there even though you know you’re signifying the answers in the first place. You know the answers, but you’re going to throw questions out there to get people thinking about what the possibilities could be.
I believe one of the first message songs that Aretha Franklin did was in 1967 “Take a Look.” The same thing, she asks questions in the song. This idea of posing a question, specifically getting very pointed about asking what’s happening.

Of course, on the track, you have people just talking, so it sounds very much like a conversational thing when people are talking at a party or when you’re walking down the street and people are having conversations. He’s literally asking those questions as people are talking on the track.

You as a listener says, “What’s going on?” because you hear all this murmuring in the background, but you also have him ask you “What’s going on?” It’s a wonderful meta moment where you’re sonically in the space where conversations are happening already. Now you’re being invited to go on into the conversation to answer his questions as he goes through the lyrics.

I think about the second track, which is even more personal, “What’s Happening Brother?” It’s more of the same concept of bringing the conversation deeper and deeper as you get into the album. You may move away from some of the questions and get into reflections.

We get into the whole “Who really cares?” line that happened on the third track. Maybe even “Holy Holy” has those same ideas where you’re having questions now moving into more meditative type reflections. You’re getting away from being compelled to answer, but also now, you’re compelled to think about what he’s talking about and what he is singing about.

PI: The other thing that I’m thinking about is that, even to this day, even to the George Floyd trial, there was all this business about trying to label and identify anger.

When I think about “Inner City Blues” and the 20/20 hindsight genius of it, you go through this whole orchestrated litany of the state of the world. Then at the end, there is this very elegant but honest, somewhat restrained expression of the emotion that it should all be leading up to.

He could have done that vocal like Edwin Starr if he wanted to, but it really “makes me wanna holler and throw up both my hands”, the restrain is actually in that sentence now that I think about it because it makes me want to holler. It doesn’t say that I am doing it in fact, which can be taken on so many levels. It makes me want to holler, but what’s going to happen to me if I do holler?

Now my mind is spinning. That’s what’s so great about these great songs, you can revisit them 50 years later and either history or your own maturity brings so much more to it if there is anything more to say about the emotion and empathy that that particular track stirs up for someone who is listening carefully.

BJ: Yes, when we think about “makes me wanna holler,” of course “Inner City Blues” is the title, but you know it as “Makes Me Wanna Holler.” It goes back to as we think about the emotion. We think about what’s happening now in current day cases with George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and what he says.

I don’t want to say it’s prophetic because this has been going on for a long time. It was happening in his time and it’s still happening in our time. When he says, “Makes me wanna holler the way to do my life,” it’s literally him. That sentiment, he’s not really hollering, it makes him want to.

There are two things happening in that one quick line that you feel a particular way, you feel a particular anger, frustration and outrage. You’re also acknowledging how that is being surveilled. It’s being watched. It’s being policed “the way they do my life.” You think you’re your own person, you have your life and you control your own destiny, but when you say, “the way they do my life” you’re acknowledging that in this particular social construct, someone else has control to the point where you can’t really express your anger in a particular way because, “the way they do my life,” the way it could be perceived or thought about or if someone is going to have a reaction to it where it could actually end your life.

This idea resonates even to today because of that sentiment. We have people who are immediately asked to channel or to clamp down on their anger when they’ve been horribly abused.

We saw that with the massacre in Charleston where someone shot up a church. That day, news media was asking the victims families, “Do you forgive the shooter?” The shooter had not been in custody for 24 hours and they’re asking people to not be angry that their family members had been massacred in the church.

You see society having a particular relationship with the anger of the oppressed when they are duly, rightful due that anger, that frustration. In this particular song, he captures that kind of prison where you can’t have that full range of your humanity and your emotions around being oppressed and how they do your life, so it “makes you wanna holler.”

We are now living in the time where people are getting beyond that unction and saying whatever, I cannot live in this particular situation where even my anger to my oppression, even my speaking out is being turned into a criminal act. You see that happening now where people are going beyond that next step as opposed to just saying, “It makes me wanna holler,” they are hollering and they’re out in the street.

You have a right to this anger because now we see – it’s more of a “now we see” moment rather than a “now we know” moment. We see it now. I think that’s definitely a big part of how this song, this album becomes almost eternal because we’re still in the same situations. We’re still facing the same kind of oppressions and even the stifling of speaking out against those oppressions are still among us unfortunately.

Chapin Panel Including Jason Chapin, Paul Ingles, Bill Ayres & Rick Korn

JC: So many of the songs are really about people who are not having the time of their life. These are people who are struggling on a daily basis. He is able to channel that because he had a lot of his own struggles and he brings them to life and helps them understand through his songs that we all struggle, but we can get through these struggles and there is a lot to appreciate in life.

This is the most divided time in my lifetime and our country is one country. My father’s message was always, “Let’s find ways to bring people together. Let’s find ways to understand what we have in common.” I think he would have been jumping up and down saying, “We can’t be fighting against ourselves. We can’t be at war with ourselves. We have to be part of one community, a part of one country and help realize our full potential.”

It just tells me that what we’re going through now is not going to work. We can’t end up with a divided country trying to achieve two different objectives. We have to realize that if we work together, we’re helping each other and we’re helping to realize our ultimate destiny which is fulfilling our potential.

PI: Right. That’s Jason Chapin. He is Harry’s stepson and one of the coproducers of the documentary Harry Chapin: When in Doubt, Do Something. It came out in 2020. Rick Horn, the director of the film is with us as well as Bill Ayres, Harry’s great friend and co-conspirator in trying to stop world hunger and address social issues.

There is the social activist side of Harry Chapin which we started to talk about. I would say only a small percentage of all the people who know his great songs like Taxi or Cats in the Cradle even know about it. Who can tell us a little bit more about the earliest seeds for Harry’s determined social justice efforts? Bill, is that something you can speak to do you think?

BA: Well, I think part of it came from his family. A big part of it came from his family. Even though it was a family of famous people, they weren’t rich. He said that there were times when there wasn’t much there. He experienced a kind of poverty, not social poverty in the sense of being deprived of great literature, music and art because that was all there, but the rest of it wasn’t always there.

The other thing of course is that he recognized well before he met me that there was tremendous injustice in the world. One of the people who I think was very, very influential on his whole development as a social activist was his brother Jim. Now unfortunately, Jim died many years ago, but I have to tell you, Jim was a genius, an absolutely genius. He was his older brother, and he was very much involved in politics.

He talked to Harry well before I did. Those seeds were there that came largely from Jim, Jim Chapin, a great man, a great genius. He had a 178 IQ and he was very much involved in democratic socialism. He had a big effect on Harry.

PI: Bill, before I forget, when and how did you meet Harry Chapin for the first time?

BA: I met Harry because his brother Tom was on my show. I was starting a show called On this Rock. It was a network radio show for the ABC Radio Network. It was all over the country.

Pete Fornatale, who was one of my really close friends, a great disc jockey, said to me, “You should do a show with Tom Chapin.” I said, “Sure.” So, Tom came on. At the end he said, “Boy, that was really good. You should talk to my brother. He loves to talk.” That was of course an understatement. He did love to talk.

I called up Harry and we got together. We did several shows together.

Then I had some crazy ideas. One of them was to do something that I called the “Hunger-thon.” He thought that was a great idea. We’ve done those. Without the hunger-thons, WHY HUMGER would not have existed in the way that it did. We raised millions and millions of dollars. Harry thought that was a great idea. We did the first one in New York City on WNEW and then we did them all over the country. We did a couple in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Detroit and all over the place. That’s how we got started.

The other thing that I had that was a big, crazy idea was to do a Bangladesh type of concert. Bangladesh had happened a year or two before. Harry said, “Sure, let’s do it. Let’s go to the UN. I know a guy.” So, we did, we went to the United Nations. They thought it was a wonderful idea. They wanted to do it. We had many, many meetings including with the Secretary General and all kinds of people.

They hired a guy to work who turned out to be not an honest man, so it never happened. It was very, very disappointing.
Then President Carter asked us to come to the White House and meet with all of the record company heads to put together a concert. We thought wow, this is finally going to happen now, but it never did because they could never get themselves together as to who it was going to be and how they would do it. The big concert never happened.

Except Harry did a million concerts that were more important than the one concert. The hunger-thons happened, and we reached tens of millions of people with the hunger-thons and continue to do it.

After Harry died, a guy who was my boss at WPLJ said, “I want you to meet with some of the other general managers.” I did. I talked to them, and I didn’t think anything was going to happen, but one of them came up to me afterwards and said, “I want to do the hunger-thons again. Let’s do them live at the United Nations. You would have to split it with UNICEF, but we’ll do it from the United Nations.” And we did. We did a live concert with Crosby, Stills and Nash.

We did all kinds of thing that Harry would have loved. He would absolutely have loved that. As many times as we went around the country, we would stay up all night and do these hunger-thons in all of these places. Harry would do anything to get the job done.

PI: Harry Chapin, “When in Doubt, Do Something.” We have the films’ director Rick Korn, one of Harry’s kids, his son, Jason Chapin and Bill Ayres who with Harry helped create “Why Hunger?” the still going non-profit trying to end poverty and hunger by connecting people in need with good food sources.

Bill Ayres, at some point, Harry goes all in on charity concert efforts saying at some point in the film that out of 250 concert dates that he’d play in a given year, 100 were for some charitable cause. Harry was using his celebrity for charity and had a soft spot for that kind of thing in the mid-1970s.

I was thinking of George Harrison’s concern for Bangladesh in 1971. Then in the late 1970s and 1980s, you had efforts like the No Nukes anti-nuclear concerts, and We Are the World and Live Aid in the 1980s, but there wasn’t a lot that I recall going on in the mid-1970s.

This film really shows Harry’s active commitment to making his music work for good causes in the mid-1970s, doesn’t it Bill Ayres?

BA: Oh, absolutely, but there is a key person here and that’s Ken Kragen. Ken was Harry’s manager and he’s the one who put together We Are the World and created USA for Africa, then Hands Across America. Ken is still a good friend of ours now. He picked up the ball from Harry and made it all happen in ways that Harry would have been thrilled about.
Once he told me that he was walking down the street one day in New York, and he had a strange feeling. It was like Harry’s spirit was inside of him saying, “You’ve got to do this.” He said to me, “I’m not a spiritual guy so much, but I swear this was happening. I knew I had to do it. Harry was making me do it.”

PI: Jason and Rick, do you have any thoughts about this role that Harry Chapin seemed to play to me? I might be forgetting some things. It’s not like there wasn’t any social activism going on among musicians, but it seems like he was a real bridge builder.

JC: Yes, I think it’s important to recognize some other people who are part of this. Bill was obviously critically important in all the things that they did together. Ken Kragen is also key.

My mother was also the one who was having all these conversations that led to other conversations and meetings. She and Bill and my father often met together and tried to strategize on different things. They brainstormed and came up with some great ideas. I think she is also a critical link.

Ken Kragen is a critical link. It’s interesting that Ken Kragen also managed Kenny Rogers and Kenny Rogers was incredibly supportive. While my father was alive, they did a couple benefit concerts together and he was also there after my father died to help Why Hunger continue on and also establish the Harry Chapin Foundation.

My mother likes to call my father the pied piper, the convener or the connector. There were other people who were willing to listen and were also willing to do something. They wanted to also help out and get involved. It’s that collective effort that really makes it special. One person can do an incredible amount, but when you can get other people to join forces with you, so much more is possible. So much more gets done.

RK: John Denver was another one that your dad brought into the fold and really got active.
There is an interesting part in the film that sums up your question. We used a lot of the radio shows that Bill referenced, “On the Rock” radio shows. I think we had 30 or 40 of them. He actually in these tapes was concerned about the direction of music.

The ‘70s became this very type of greedy industry. He was worried about what would happen in the ‘80s and what would happen after that, after Crosby, Stills and Nash and after Dylan and Pete Seeger and all these incredible people who used their fame to do good. He was really concerned about that.

There is one exception. He mentions Bruce Springsteen. Bill, you had just interviewed Bruce, right? It was his first national radio show.

BA: The first network radio show. I was friendly with the great John Hammond, the man who discovered everybody from Count Basie to Aretha Franklin. John was great. He was an older man at the time, not as old as I am now, but he was extraordinary.

He said to me, “I want you to do the first network radio show. He’s been on local stations but never on network radio.” That’s how I met Bruce Springsteen. He became a good friend and supporter of Why Hunger and he’s still doing it. He’s done concerts for us. He’s done all kinds of things.

Harry tried to get him to do more, of course. He was always trying to get him to do more. Bruce talks about that. You couldn’t get Bruce to do what he didn’t want to do, but he’s been involved with us, and he’s helped us raise millions of dollars over the years. He’s been a great partner for us.

PI: Springsteen has mentioned food banks at every concert that I ever saw and I’m sure it’s every concert. In concert, it seems to be his most often referenced issue.

BA: Yes, absolutely.

PI: Rick, do you want to continue?

RK: Harry was really concerned especially after Carter loses to Reagan. He kinda sees the writing on the wall.

I’d love to ask Bill actually, because we didn’t talk about it much in the film, it seems to me that after Reagan won, you and Harry were obviously devastated by that, but it seemed like he kinda doubled up on everything to make up for the loss. Is that accurate? It seems that way from following his story.

BA: Sure, remember, we had just finished with the Presidential Hunger Commission. Harry was at every meeting. I think he was the only one who was at every meeting. We got a very good report coming out of that to work on hunger and poverty all over the world. We thought in the second term of Carter that this would be a big deal and Harry would be a major player.

He and I sat after the elections and said to ourselves, “This is awful.” We could see that the Presidential Hunger Commissions Report was going to go nowhere. Reagan wasn’t going to be interested in it. We started figuring out what we could do to make things happen in this new world of 1981.

RK: The really amazing thing about Harry is his ability to bring conservative Republicans together with liberals and make it work. You see that in the film. You see him with Senator Bob Dole. Those are rare things these days.

PI: Jason, how old were you when your father died in the car accident?

JC: Seventeen.

PI: I know it’s hard to be asked about it, but what do you recall about dealing with that news those days and the loss at that time?

JC: Well, obviously to the immediate family, it was a devastating loss, but he was also very involved with the extended family, so whenever we got together for Thanksgiving or Christmas or some of the other big family events, there was just a collective loss. That was really a big hole that was very hard to fill.

At the same time, what I look back at and appreciate so much is it wasn’t as though everybody said, “We’re not going to do anything about this.” Everybody tried to figure out what role they could play in order to keep his legacy going and what things that they wanted to do individually that they thought were worthwhile.

To have WHY HUNGER not only continue to survive but also grow and become a much more dynamic organization because of so many family members, friends and others getting behind it and starting the Long Island Cares Foodbank in 1980 and to see that organization grow in so many ways.

Also, my father was very involved in other cultural institutions on Long Island, the Performing Arts Center. He was involved with the Long Island Philharmonic, the Eglevsky Ballet and Community Arts Program. They all continued on. They didn’t all survive, but just to know that he helped to get things going and helped to get them to the next level, they continued on without him is a tribute to him and what he was able to get other people to support.

The important lesson for me is that a lot of times it takes just one person to get things started but it takes a whole hell of a lot of other people to keep it going and to help it grow to levels that were unimaginable when it was first started.

I look to him and always think of him as somebody who was instrumental in so many ways. He was able to convince other people to get involved and do something. That’s what’s made so many things that he has started continue.