Our friends picked the entertainment for the evening, and we followed along not knowing what a treat we had coming our way. The Freight and Salvage is representative of the gray haired folks who quietly filed into the performance that evening; I'm pretty sure few were younger than 40 and most were Country Joe McDonald's generation. I bet most folks there had been to a concert with a headband like the one of the singer in a poster, back in the day. Anti war protesting is just a thread of the fabric of life in Berkeley and has been since the days when Country Joe and most of us present milled around People's Park and maybe even faced the "Blue Meanies" as they pushed the people back on Telegraph nudging us along, their helmets secured. But tonight the hall was a lot of quiet murmurs as we got our coffee and hot cider and waited for the show to start.
Joe McDonald walked on stage with a haircut that in no way reflected the long wavy hair of the 60's; his eyes were clear and his message straight. Turns out he has spent a lot of time studying Woody Guthrie. Other than an association with the depression days, grapes of wrath period I knew little about Woody Guthrie. As Country Joe conveyed through Guthrie's writings the life Woody Guthrie led and the people he encountered, shocked oh's and ahs erupted from people involuntairly. To say life was hard during the depression doesn't do it justice and these writings filled in the blanks and cravices having those people and those experiences become a presence to us, just as Woody Guthrie himself did. The depth of this man in his descriptions of the men who took the long hard roads revealed in fact a full on romantic and a gentle person who saw on so many levels everything around him. His songs and his poems were stunning in their impact and the comparison to today and the talk of a depression had to be made as we sat in the darkness as Country Joe strummed his guitar and spoke.
It suddenly seemed ridiculous that our culture, present time, there is a conversation about depression as if it had something to do with the event that happened in the 30's. Cable news personalities rant and rave about the losses and possible losses all day long, throwing around terms that seem to convey that our country is in real trouble because we have all, all lived way too well for too long relying on a bunch of possessions that we couldn't pay for except through credit. Compare Woody Guthrie who spoke about the line around the hardware store where men went in and got JAKE, in the darkest days of the depression. It was supposed to help whatever ailed you and had a content of at least 80% alcohol; poisoning by alcohol was not at all uncommon in the 30's Guthrie reports in his writing. This was where men turned when all was lost and the road was all that lay ahead as they piled up the wagons with everything they could carry in the dust storms of Oklahoma.
And let's see by comparison, what we have to deal is all these entertainers on television telling us how bad it is amped up and hysterical. The truth is right across the board, we're all taking a cut in pay, a reduction in our lifestyle and hopefully having a look see at what is really valuable about our life and where we can contribute what extra we have, be that time or resources to support the community around us.
The highlight of the evening with Country Joe as he gave us Woody Guthrie was an amazingly sensuous poem - describing his profound joy at being a man found who didn't realize he was lost till he found himself in the heart of his woman. A gentle giant who suffered kindness in the face of defeat was who this man seemed to be. We sitting together left the show stunned and appreciative of the impact that man Woody through Country Joe, and Country Joe himself contributed to us. Our cup runneth over.
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