 Again, it's normally for technical reasons, normally you would not have the band and the singers in the studio at the same time, because you want to, again, if you're wanting to get this real polished perfect sound, you wouldn't want the piano being played in the same room with the singers as we had, but we decided pretty early on that there were definitely going to be some emotional advantages to having it all happening live. We felt that the performance would probably be a lot more real if the singers were actually singing along with the band right while they were putting their tracks down, and I think it proved to be true. Now in comparison, the We Are The World recording was actually done in pieces. The drums were done in fact at an entirely different studio, and they brought in a tape that was virtually done except for the chorus going down into a big studio where they could get the chorus and all the media in, and they did the chorus tracks really as an overdub. So to get, you know, I think they might, it was a beautiful recording of course, but I think they might have gotten even a little more energy out of it had the whole thing been going on live, but they, you know, there must have been technical reasons for choosing to do it the way they did, but it was a great feeling. I mean just an amazing feeling. I mean the power of 20 vocalists is quite extraordinary, and especially in this case, because these aren't 20 singers that are used to, you know, singing in a group. It wouldn't be like bringing in a chorus or a choir from a local church that's used to singing together. These were 20 individual vocalists, you know, who are notable in their own right as individual singers and to put them all together. We didn't really have time to, you know, work out elaborate harmony arrangements or anything. We just sort of said, well, those who can grab a harmony on the fly, go for it, you know, just do it. Let's see what happens. So it really worked out nicely. I mean, we ended up with I think just the right number of people who are sort of doing scat in the background and so forth, you know. I mean, there's so many things that are out of your control. You really don't, you don't know what's going to happen until you've done it, you know. And then of course you can't do it five times. You have to get it on the first or the second take. I think the one we used was actually the second and the energy tends to build to the second or third take. And then, and then it's a diminishing situation after that. So you have to have your technical stuff together pretty early. And then you, then you can, you know, hopefully get what you want on tape at that point. Okay. And one thing that I think I understand what we're trying to do here is deal with feelings and ideas. This is not supposed to be glittery and it's not supposed to be fancy. It's pretty basic, down home stuff that says something that's real. So it's not, let's make it real about people. But we're doing something I think reasonably historic. So let's do it good and thanks very much for being here. I'll be isolated in there. You'll hear me and I'll hear you. If you want to take an audio feed off us, the Maltbox is right over there on the floor where he's plugging in right now. That's a feed right off the console. Takes us, takes a standard mic. We'll get this thing so we can have a sense of where the melody is. And then just get that, you know, Joanne, anybody else who wants to get those things to just, you know, in the chorus. You know, you can't do that. Freedom. That's what it's about. I need very light. Sharp. I want to get it. Let's try one. Oh, I'm so excited. I'll be buried. I'll be buried. I'll be buried. I'll be buried. I'll be buried in my grave. And no home to my Lord. And he's free. I'll be a slave. I'll be buried in my grave. And no home to my Lord. And he's free. How many go? How many go there? How many verses should we do? Well, we've got two to play with. Well, I think that's okay. How many verses should we repeat? We'll just try it out in the band. Let's see what happens. 25 verses? No. Is there a one more to proceed this? Yeah. Okay. Are you going to end it just like... End B3. Are you going to have a retard at the end? Are you just going to... Going over it too much. Of the many aspects of this thing which are very exciting, I think not the least of it, is that we've assembled in one room many of the best musicians in the state of Vermont. And that in itself, to me, is one of the important products of this whole project. The fellow who is... Don, what is your official title? Are they the music director of sorts? Okay. The bubble machine broke, but we're dealing with that now. Don, what's your feeling about the project? When Todd initially came out to me, he stopped me on Pine Street one morning and said, I want to talk to you about doing something later on this summer or whenever it was. And he said, I want to do a record with Bernie. And I said, okay, just let me know when and we'll do it. And then later on, I got a tape from him of... Mark Greenberg put together a tape of the tunes that you asked for. And I sat and listened to him and listened to him in the car a bunch and kept listening to him, got to know him. I mean, I knew most of them, a couple I wasn't real familiar with. And then Mark Ransom, Jeff Salisbury, and I came in here and did a rough of the tunes, trying to get the feels that we're going to use over the past two days. And then we waited for you to get freed up. This is hard work. We were here at 1 o'clock in the morning. We were here at 2. You were here at 2 o'clock in the morning? Yeah, you were here at 2. And then... We were here at 2 again today, too. We were here at 2 today and going... Let me ask everybody while you're here. Well, we have happy musicians in the state of Vermont assembled in one room. Let me ask you guys a question and you tell me if you think I'm paranoid or not. I think that there is an extraordinary amount of self-centorship in a sense which goes on among serious writers and serious musicians in the sense that it's not that you produce something that's rejected, but you don't even write it because you know it's not going to be done. All right, who wants to talk to that? You're absolutely right. Take the mic. I'm sure other people... Okay, well, yeah. What happens is that if you want to stay viable as a commercial entity, you don't do stuff that you don't think will... you know, if it won't sell, you don't touch it. And therefore, you do write what you think is going to work, what people will listen to. But then again, your audience sometimes... they're funny, too. They don't necessarily want to hear what's right. They just want to hear what they want to hear. So you get caught in a bind. Am I right in thinking... I mean, what gets me excited about this project and what I love about music, and I have to tell you I'm not a musician, is when music or poetry comes from people. It doesn't matter whether it's good or bad. When you see kids, you know, we go into the schools and we see kids writing their feelings and their perception of the world, I think almost by definition that's good. And it seems to me that we have very, very little of that that goes on in the mass media today. Basically it's canned. There's a mechanism, there's a style, there's an approach, and you fill in the blanks. They've already determined what's going to be in it. What astounds me is if you look at the world, just with the problems, some of the songs, with the content of the songs that we're dealing with today, the literal fact is that we've doubled the number of billionaires in America in the last year. You've got some people... One guy's wealth grew by four billion dollars. One guy is now worth eight billion dollars. And you get people sleeping out all over the streets, all over America. How come musicians aren't writing about that? And I think the answer is not the fault with musicians. I think there are thousands of serious and good writers. But I think they say, why the hell should I write that? Where's it going to go anyhow? Is that true? There is an underground. There's an underground of musicians in the folk world. There's folk festivals that just don't get media attention, but there is an underground network. And just in the recent travels that I've made, I've found that there are people writing those songs, but they're just not getting put out there. There's another interesting thing about that, too. You can hear message music as it were. You can turn into that show Top of the Pops. And they'll put on a group that has a great message song. And then they'll follow it with a complete bubble gum. That's the British show. Well, it's from London in Los Angeles. And it kind of dulls the message. One band is playing pablum, and the other is playing this hard-hitting stuff, and then somebody is doing something. If you don't contain your message in a meaningful medium, as it were, in other words, if it isn't enclosed in a space that has meaning, then it loses its meaning. Let me ask you a question. I bet somebody ten bucks on this, so we can see if I'm right or not. I think that the song The Banks of Marble, the way we recorded it, is about the radio stations. I don't think commercial radio stations will put on a song which talks about the fact that some people are making millions off the exploitation of other people. I think Louis Mann overplayed it. I wouldn't bet on it. No. Well, we'll see. I mean, it'll be interesting. Now, what makes it unique, obviously, is that we are known in the state of Vermont. Will they not? I mean, you have three television stations here tonight. Will they not play it? I'll be interested. I don't think you heard it yet. It came out really nice. It was where all the flour was gone. I think that song will be allowed on the air because peace is, okay, you're allowed to talk about peace. Most people in one way or another are sympathetic to peace. But class struggle. You see, the fact that some people are exploiting other people. Some people have billions, other people have nothing. It is such an absurd proposition that people are allowed to have billions when others are starving. No one can give a rational defense for that. It will not be played very much. They'll play it. I'm not saying that some stations will not, but I don't think it will make the general mass media or the commercial media. They don't want people thinking about these things. And it's unbelievable the degree to which self-centorship exists. We talked about Russia and all that stuff. I mean, that's something I... I was telling you about this guy, Billy Bragg, from London who was at Newport this summer. They wedged him between Bonnie Ray, you know, really popular, who did a lot of stuff for the nuclear war. Her movement stuff was kind of a homogenized political thing. She's got her own convictions and stuff. They put him in between Bonnie Ray and Judy Collins. And Judy Collins' thing was so... like Vegas, it was really strange. You know, she was going, I'd like to talk about my newest American hero, Senator Daniel Inouye. And everybody was going like, what? And I was like, what is this about? And she started singing like, God Bless America. And it was really weird. But before that was Billy Bragg, who came out with his combat boots on. Black, you know, a T-shirt, a guitar with an amplifier cranked right up, singing about the workers in London and all the socialist things that were going on over there. It was just people in their lawn chairs kind of squirming around and going, well, what's this about? Whereas like Newport, the whole basis of Newport was folk music. I mean, that was where Dylan got stuff throwing at him. And now it's like, it was just a great moment. The police came up. It was really strange because all day long people were able to come up to the fence right up front and kind of check everything out. When Billy Bragg came on the road out and state police kind of just got real uptight and it was this real weird vibe and just had to kind of cool that out. He got out there and was like talking about Nicaragua, talking about all the corporate stuff going on. It was pretty amazing and a lot of people were it was a real big moment there. It's funny, obviously, I'm in public life a lot and I hear a lot of things and there are certain things, messages which are allowed to get out and there are certain messages which are not. And the class issue, you can talk about the environment, you can talk about the desire for peace, you can talk about opposition to contra-aid but if you get on the air and you say I'm sympathetic, I don't know if you get on the air but if you're a public official, I'm sympathetic to the Sandinista government. I think it was right I think. No good. There are probably three people in the entire United States Congress who would hold that view. You can be against contra-aid, that's legitimate. But you can't be pro-Sandinista and you can't, but the real bottom line of all these things is the class issue. That's the one that they're very, very sensitive about. Wealth and power, who controls the world, who owns the world. There was an interesting article of course it doesn't make the mass meter either was a study that came out that shows one half of 1% of the American population now owns 45% of the wealth. 10% own 83% of the wealth. Now you're not going to hear that talked about. What it means, after all of a sudden, on a few got it all. They own every goddamn thing. The meteor is becoming tighter and tighter. Gannett owns now 91 daily newspapers. They own cable television. And those issues you're basically not allowed to talk about. Now and then they'll put it on. But basically those are themes that they don't really want to hear about. I hope this, having you in here and having people, everybody's been around, we all know it's great having everybody in one place. I haven't seen a lot of these folks for a while and we've all getting together on this great thing is really nice. I hope Todd kind of gets the idea that we can do a little more of this kind of thing. Todd, you listening? There's a lot of, you can put any three or four or five of these people together in one room and come up with a great piece of music. It just takes a while for that to sink in. It'd be a great thing to have. Without trying to be, what's the word, maudlin about this or overly sentimental, if out of this night comes the confidence on all of our parts, more in yours than in mine, that you can do serious things. Whatever it is, your own feelings and you can fight to get it out that we can, your music can get out the way you want it to rather than shaping your music to fit other people's desires and bringing that about, I think that would be fantastic. And the fact, as Don mentioned, the fact that we brought so many, Christ, I don't know that we've ever had so many good Vermont musicians in one room at one time, and that in itself is fantastic. Who knows, maybe, I don't know. We'll get your gig inactive. Yeah, right. We're going to tour now. Now we're down to just about that. I mean, to work in this state, I mean, just, I haven't played out, you know, like, trying to support myself by playing out for a while now, but I know from Danny and Mark and Joanne and, you know, Mike, I mean, everybody in this room is wrecking, everybody here is still, you know, knocking their head trying to get a gig around here. I mean, it's really narrowed down. When the mud season comes, there's no work. After the foliage season, there's no work, you know. You've got to wait for the snow to fly and then you're dealing with some real dangerous shit on the highway, you know. I mean, you're literally, that's right. Nectars is the only place that you can play original music in town. Is that right? I mean, you have your bigger acts come in, come through Hans Biflin and everything, but Nectars has kind of become the place where you can sing your own songs as opposed to the, you know, the coverage of the material. It's hard to get, it's hard to get work. But outside of your own time, it's like, you know, what gigs are there? I mean, if you think, where are you working? Well, then you're playing the circuit, you know. What circuit? There's no circuit. There used to be a circuit 10 years ago, man. There's no circuit anymore. Well, but you're still doing the top 40, you know, pop tunes. Yeah. And you might be getting paid more, but your opportunity to play original music is still just as nil. Yeah. Well, remember that gig we did up at Smuggler at that one time when they had, you know, Brian Curry. There's a band, and then this guy starts wheeling in these huge speakers, man. It was like, what are these things? Oh, this is the DJ. So after the band was now playing, this guy was up there spinning records, we're going, no, this is really great. You know, that was really... And the guy, his DJ thing was louder than the band. It was pretty loud. It's interesting to see what happens when the classes start to break down. And you'll be able to pull out to see what happens to people if they're going to be open to what is truly happening, or it'll probably split right down the middle. There'll be those who will be open, and there'll be those who just want to take off for a vacation. Some kind of music will happen. All we're trying to do is to find a few people that don't sit in front of a TV set 28 hours a day. Those are the very few people who are still listening to music. There's Cobra, very popular, very strong messages. But the people who need to hear those messages aren't hearing them. I mean, a lot of young people are getting the message, but they probably are attuned to it anyway. But the people sitting in front of the TVs watching pro football, drinking beer, are not hearing those messages. So that's the big problem. There's such a cultural gap between those who are attuned with the power of the true music that's happening and those who aren't. We have to set up a viable commercial network, somehow sort of radio network. Let me tell you something. One of the things that we in Berlin are spending a lot of time on is that thing. Now, at this point, I'm not going to tell you that it competes with Channel 3. But I think we're getting a bigger viewing audience and the degree that we can produce good local stuff that people are going to watch locally, and they're going to watch each other. I mean, going from local football games to local music. We take that access business very seriously. We're going to put money into it and energy into it. Okay, I suppose we've got to get... We musicians have got to get back to work with something to say. There's something about this project that I think has to be said, and that's that when you put out a project that has a purpose that's bigger than just promoting the personalities involved in it. When you put out something that has a message going out to the world about these issues that Bernie's concerned about and he has presented them in a way that I think has certainly reached all the people involved in the project who maybe hadn't, some of them perhaps hadn't connected their medium of music to some of these issues. In other words, you get caught up in playing nightclubs and stuff five days a week and you start to lose sight of the big picture. You know, of the power that a person who is in the performing arts has. The potential power that they have to change the world that they don't really acknowledge a lot of the time. Not that we all have to be running around trying to improve things, but the point is that if you're going to be on stage and you're going to be singing about something, you might as well make it something that's going to make the world a better place. And that's really kind of the fuel that has really accelerated the project. In my own mind, the project started as somewhat of a whimsical idea. I didn't really plan that it was going to turn into a political or social statement. That was really Bernie's energy being infused into it. Quite frankly, my original concept was quite a whimsical one that, you know, let's get this mayor who we all know is deadly serious about most things in this life who doesn't crack jokes very often in public places. Let's get him in the studio with a band and have him do ... his favorite music would be at that point. I thought, you know, maybe he's into Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby or something and let's have him do some crooning. That really was the level that it was on originally and it seemed for a while so ridiculous that I thought we can't ask Bernie to do this. This is absurd. And eventually the idea thought, well maybe there's some music out of the 60s or something that he would be into that would in some way relate to his thinking and of course as soon as we approached him with the idea then a whole list of songs came right up bum bum bum, you know, the Pete Seeger material and the Woody Guthrie material. These were ideas that I would not have directly connected Bernie to right off but in fact once he mentioned them it made perfect sense. So that really was that initial contact with Bernie that really gave the project some shape and it was also at his suggestion that we brought in so many Vermont artists. I was thinking originally you know, let's just put a five piece band behind him. The idea of the big chorus was really something that Bernie inspired. You know, he started thinking in terms of, well let's make this into a Vermont Musicians thing, you know, not just Bernie's album. Obviously Bernie's name being on it helps give it an identity and it helps, you know, it helps make the thing marketable of course but it's also a chance for all these artists who are somewhat disconnected from each other in a lot of ways and even competing with each other for the little bit of work there is up here for a band. It was an opportunity to bring all those people together and have them you know, do something that really had a big big reason to you know, to be done. Spartacus believed that when he and his followers took on an entire Roman army rather than to submit once again to enslavement and Harriet Tubman believed it on those dark and lonely nights when she risked her life over and over again leading her brothers and sisters out of bondage on the underground railroad and the workers in our country knew it when they stood up to the bosses of the government and fought to create the unions that would provide them with decent wages and decent working conditions freedom dignity the willingness to stand up against the mighty and the powerful the human spirit resilient alive like a torch from one person to another from one generation to another from one nation to another from one another the human spirit may it never be extinguished