May Day 2

The story begins with the principle characters, Lucy Parsons and her husband Albert. He was a civil war veteran who had become a union printer. He met Lucy Gonzalez in Waco, Texas. She was a seamstress and a thinker in common with Albert's views of social and political structures. Gonzalez was of varied ancestry, not only was she a mixed-blood African-American in the south but her other lineages were Mexican and indigenous. The bi-racial couple stood out already and on top of that they began publishing subversive literature. They moved away from Texas to Chicago in the early 1870s and found an environment no more welcoming, however they were not so isolated in their views and activism in the large city with its population of working class German immigrants. Once again, the text of this song comes, in part, from the writings and speeches of Albert Parsons and other Chicago anarchists.


CENTER OF THE STORM

up from Waco, where we're not welcome
up from Waco to Chicago
to the center of the storm
to the center of the storm
I said I still see slaves with longer chains
they said leave town or you will hang

you can vote for bread clothes and shelter
you can vote but they won't give you these things
leaders make the laws and live real comfortable
live off you workers like foreign kings

what you produce is no guarantee
toil and pray your time is gold
your time is gold and when you have no means
that's what gets sold, that's what gets sold

I said I still see slaves with longer chains
they said leave town or you will hang

May Day 1

This is the official overture of the May Day Orchestra's first folk opera, musically and lyrically. The title refers to The Alarm, a newspaper published by Albert Parsons and Lucy Parsons, the main inspiration behind the whole piece.
I added the first couplet during the last edit of the whole composition, actually after the initial performance. The opening lines are shared by another song of mine but I thought it also fit into this whole set of songs quite well. The first line originally came from a Kenyan folk song lamenting that there were no young people left to take over the planting when Nairobi started to attract them away from their rural homes. The second (or third) folk opera will be set in Kenya. Anyway, I added the second line to bring it back to midwestern America, the rust belt and Chicago. The refrain, "this land has no wealth", was taken from the collected writings and speeches of Micahael Schwab. He was one of the Haymarket Eight and he eventually made it out of prison alive with a pardon from Illinois Governor Altgeld.
Some exposition in the verse where the horns come in gets repeated in the next song. I added the last set of lines because it is the godless anarchists who are the heroes of this story. Their opponents, in part, are the unthinking masses, indirectly controlled by the police and the christians, and convinced by the media that the anarchist cause was unpatriotic and harmful. We pull no punches here in the May Day Orchestra.



CAUSE FOR ALARM

no one on the farm
they've all gone to town
no one in the factory
the factory's been shut down

fields will lie fallow
machines will lie broken
this land has no wealth
without the workers
this land has no wealth

toil and pray
when you have no means
when what you produce is no guarantee
when they don't pay enough to buy bread
strikes across the country
the railway runs across the country
the policeman's club is brought down
on six days of the week
the preacher's bible is seven
brought down on the meek

Dostoevsky broke my left knee

"Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker are posting a series of poems relating in their own ways to Obama's first 100 days in office (one written for each day)and yesterday was my day". So writes my friend BJ Soloy from Des Moines last week.
Check out his poem (day 17) at http://100dayspoems.blogspot.com/ "Also,if you happen to be in yr local big box book retailer for some reason, look for Court Green 6, which I also snuck in".
I'm curious as to what Obama's reaction to the poem would be if he ever read it. I stole Mr. Soloy's words for this blog, I've borrowed quite a few lines from him over the years and given him a couple co-writing credits when I remembered where I stole them. It would be nice to have him around Saint Louis again for that and the fact that he's a fine guitar picker, a drummer and a clawhammer banjo player. I should have figured he'd end up in poetry journals back when we were in school together. He'd leave haikus and such under the windshield wipers of cars he knew. At least I suspect it was him. He came up with the rhyme "Dostoevsky / broke my left knee" which I've never been able to use, as long as it's been kicking around in my head. He said that one day that we skipped high school to go see Neil Gaiman give a talk at the Washington University art school. Gaiman said when you sit down at a desk, you can either write or continue to sit there doing nothing. I'm not sure where I fall in since I'm standing on the clock at the library counter while I'm typing this.

The Folk Opera as form

The May Day Orchestra will soon release a vinyl LP called "May Day - Songs For Lucy Parsons". This is the first in a projected series of "folk operas". You may have heard of "poetry scores" and their combination of various art forms to make a new one. This is sort of the same idea. Ours may be unconsciously related to traditional opera (a word that literally means a "work"). Classical composers took poetry and set it to music. Tchaikovsky's took on Pushkin and
Shostakovich took works from Garcia Lorca, Yevtushenko and many others. In the next few posts, I'll be putting out the lyrics to the May Day record, derived not from poetry but pamphlets, trials and speeches from the historical record.

Also, Bad Folk's record "Part Of The Problem" is now available for download at www.lala.com

groundhog day

Wear corduroy and go bowling - no, really, these are the traditions of Groundhog Day as celebrated in many mid-western American towns and cities. Both corduroy pants and shirts are acceptable. Bowling is also highly encouraged on this day, though the origins of the traditions are obscure, like most holidays celebrated in many mid-western American towns and cities.
Ideally, one will spend the evening if not the entirety of the day of the groundhog in a bowling alley, drinking some kind of beer and wearing corduroy. It is amusing to bowl while wearing corduroy pants and a 10-pin handicap is allowed.
Groundhog Day, featuring Bill Murray, is also a very funny film. My favorite trivial information about this is that it was filmed not in Pennsylvania but in Woodstock, Illinois, fairly close to Chicago. You can see the mansion where the bed and breakfast was located as well as the town square and the church that Bill Murray jumps from to kill himself on one particular day.

"the way of the dodo"

Bad Folk's second full length effort "Part Of The Problem" was recorded in February 2008 and mixed over the following two months. It was eventually mastered late that summer. The record has not seen any proper release as it's makers disbanded in late October of that year.
Yer Bird Records hosted the album for a year on their digital label, The Aviary.
This site has been taken down as of the beginning of 2010.

-updated 2010 from original post

mayday mayday

That's May Day, two words, as in the Worker's Holiday, celebrated nearly everywhere in the world except the United States. An international labor day intended to unite the working class and rid the planet of nationalism, capitalism and imperialism.

The May Day Orchestra, named for the holiday, is a collective band formed in April of 2008 to write and play compositions in the "folk opera" style. The first of these pieces is a set of songs which revolve around Lucy Parsons, her husband Albert Parsons, and a host of other anarchists involved in the labor movement in Chicago from the 1870s through the creation of the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World) in 1905.

The May Day Orchestra is Tim Rakel and Joey Gavin, formerly of the band Bad Folk, Matt Pace and Brien Seyle of the band The Rats & People Motion Picture Ochestra and JJ Hamon of the band Theodore. We recorded these songs in November with Kevin Buckley engineering.

Thanks to Nick Acquisto of KDHX radio's The Space Parlour, we will be playing this set of songs on the air Thursday night, January 8, 2009. 88.1 FM in St Louis, MO. You can stream the show for two weeks after it airs live on the website http://www.kdhx.org/