reflections after opening for Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts, the ‘love earth tour’ with Daryl Hannah presiding
After our go at the Hollywood Bowl, we gazed out at the empty seats, with the 18,000 who sat there now back in their homes and hotels. This was “Reverend Billy & the Stop Shopping Choir’s 32nd performance, as openers for ‘love earth tour’ – going back the last two years. Gradually we evolved from ‘opener’ to more like circus barkers. We wanted to share with the thousands of folks out there our take on the phrase “Love Earth”. Neil’s songs and the Chrome Hearts band and the whole community of concert-workers operate in an efficient kind of love.
And looking out at the empty seats, still warm from the 18,000 butts…. we had a moment to breathe and look back. Where are our Earth messages now? Our songs and shouts in this time of catastrophic crisis…. What have we put into the hundreds of thousands of souls that we have faced? What is still in the hearts and minds of the people who just minutes ago were shouting to us, here in the famous Hollywood Bowl?
At each of the 32 shows, local earth activists were invited to greet ticket-buyers at the door, in a gathering of big green tents. We call it “The Eco-Village”. Neil and Daryl’s friend Mr. Charris Ford invites the 15 or 20,000 folks streaming in, to pause and face their own local activists…. future farmers, veterans for peace, quakers, activists against pipeline, toxins, women against war…. After the Stop Shoppers have belted out their earth songs – the Eco-villagers are take down the green tents. Did these gently forced conversations make a difference? Our director Savitri kept going back to the village to record conversations for our Earth Riot Radio show.
On one of the longest bus trips this year, Milwaukee to Denver, following the sound system’s Kenilworth trucks over the horizon, following the busses full of musicians, grips, piano and guitar tuners, sound engineers, film-makers, cooks, the masseuse and the nurse… We took a break in eastern Colorado and our busdriver pulled over and then went past the rest area to a very permanant rest area – a cemetery. And then Johnny the driver took us to the grave of Philip K Dick. Johnny must have seen our fabulist books laying around the bus or heard us talking about Daryl’s star turn in Bladerunner.
As I’m writing this, we are concluding “Climate Week” in New York. Lots of meetings and marches…. But there is a feeling this year that we are in a late stage of Environmentalism. With the EPA and the Paris Climate Agreement compromised, we sense that we have to do more, go farther into real power. The ‘love earth tour’ demonstrates a science fiction-like break into the future. Yes, sometimes what we thought was in the past, the performance of a message with our bodies, is in fact the most daring experiment and waits for us in the future.
In the ‘love earth tour’ we have moved past pixels, mass mailings, Zooms…. We are directly addressing face-to-face those hundreds of thousands of people, talking about catastrophic climate change. The Earth we see is offering us these fantastic dreams that power our singing. Every Silicon Valley invention seeks to put our relationship to the natural world deeper into the past. But can a virtual superstorm ever match an actual one? Leonard Peltier told us that “Superstorms are communications from Mother Earth.” The Earth is telling us to say it straight.
We are part of the Earth’s struggle with humans. Our tour is continuous through the months like the Earth’s fires and floods and flowers returning in the Spring. The rock concert for the Earth, it never stops, it will keep going until the balance of life is restored, the emissions abated, the Love enduring.
Rev. Billy