It teases you piquantly, hits you hard, and leaves your head spinning -
Reviewer: SingOut! Magazine- Fall 2003 Vol 47 #3
Review by Rich Warren (WFMT, Midnight Special)

Few in the folk community are unaware of the renegade, radical folk poet Chris Chandler. Since he is not a musician himself he traditionally popped up spewing poetry with a variety of musician accompanists or having their performance provide counterpoint. He finally met his match with the powerful, radical singer-songwriter Anne Feeney. Feeney traditionally focused on political music. To accent Chandler's poetry readings on this recording she frequently entwines pop and folk songs with his raves and rants. Together they fuse like sodium and chlorine into salty substance, and the recording goes down like a strong, salt-encrusted Margarita. It teases you piquantly, hits you hard, and leaves your head spinning. Chandler, who coauthored several of the poems with Phil Rockstroh, uses current events, advertising slogans and wonderful twists of pop phrases as the grist for his rhythmic revolution. As a duo, Chandler and Feeney are highly entertaining. If you agree with, or at least can swallow their politics, this CD is a blast. My favorite is "I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine (Florida)/Swimming to the Other Side" in which Feeney interweaves one line quotes from Pat Humphries' inspiring song and others with Chandler's and co-author Lisa Stolarski's poetry. Chandler possesses a remarkably fertile and inventive mind...Feeney's understanding of Chandler's psyche and skills contributes mightily to this recording. Since the entire CD was recorded live at various venues, sometimes it sounds studio-quality and sometimes it's off-mic. Chandler and Feeney provide a deliciously cynical skewed look at our American Empire, circa 2003.

Order Live from the Wholly Stolen Empire

Duo offers humor, politics and poetry
By NANCY REDWINE
sentinel staff writer
"I’ve seen Jack Kerouac in the back parking lot of a Stop and Go, pouring Wild Turkey into a Slurpee, sitting on the roof of a Yugo."
— from "The United States of Generica"
That’s a taste of the humor of raving performance artist and poet Chris Chandler, who now teams up with famed labor folk singer Anne Feeney.
Their high-energy antics, pyrotechnic poetry and theatrical musicianship will supercharge Henfling’s Monday night with the political and existential electricity just barely captured on their new CD, "Flying Poetry Circus."
Feeney sings political and labor tunes — new ("Have You Been to Jail for Justice?") and old ("Goin’ Down the Road"). Chandler rant-preaches poetry ("Fast Food Confederacy," "Let There Be Prozac") that he wrote with longtime collaborator Phil Rockstroh. Together, the duo deftly weaves lefty activism and literary surrealism.
Their first tour through the Midwest together followed the events of Sept. 11, and Feeney remembers being more than a little nervous about their strong anti-war stance as they pulled into parking lots filled with American flag-decorated cars.
"One piece we did talked about all the T-shirts celebrating the New York Fire Department being made in Bangladesh sweatshops by Muslim children," Feeney said.
"One or two people would walk out, but the other 398 stayed. I think that’s the demographic, but most people are afraid to say what they think."
Far from being afraid to say what he thinks, Chandler had been traveling around the United States for 14 years, performing his vaudevillian revolution with the likes of Pete Seeger, Ani DiFranco, Dan Bern and Allen Ginsberg.
In the chinks of space between his tightly packed touring schedule (265 days a year), Chandler has recorded such treasures as "Hell Toupee," "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Abyss" and "Posthumously Live."
The son of a son of a son of a preacher man, Chandler was born with theatrics and histrionics in the blood.
"I was the guy in high school who wore all black and recited really bad poetry in an even worse English accent," said Chandler, who grew up in Strong Mountain, Ga.
At 16 he met Phil Rockstroh, who had returned to Georgia after writing comedy for television in Los Angeles.
"When I heard he was a writer, I went right out to my car and got the poetry I was writing," Chandler said.
"He was the first person to look at it, and he said it was terrible. He wadded the poems up and threw them on the floor. Then we became good buddies."
After Chandler graduated from the North Carolina School of the Performing Arts — where he wrote his first play, "Your Analysis" — they began collaborating on the high-wire poetic stuff of Chandler’s street, stage and coffee house performances.
While he still performs Rockstroh’s work, he now collaborates with Feeney, the granddaughter of a legendary mine worker union organizer and singer, William Patrick Feeney.
"He really wasn’t much of a singer," Feeney said. "He just learned tunes so that if there was a stool in the room, he could act like he was the evening’s entertainment until it was safe to talk union."
After raising two children and working as a lawyer for 12 years, Feeney recorded her first album in 1987. Her songs have been performed by many politically inclined folkies, including Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul and Mary.
Feeney and Chandler met in 1988, when she was organizing a concert for Pete Seeger and invited Chandler to open for the legendary folk singer.
"I was knocked out by what he did then," she said. "Every time I’d seen him, I’d think he was at his peak — and then the next time he would be beyond that by at least two standard deviations."
In the past two years, the buzz about Feeney and Chandler has filled coffeehouses and festivals with people hungry for a dose of cynical optimism. "The audience changes from act to act," Chandler said. "These days it seems to be gray ponytails and 20-something Ani DeFranco fans. There’s this strange and wonderful alliance between aging hippies and people with a lot of face metal."
Santa Cruz Sentinel
January 16, 2003

Anne Feeney: Union Maid - A Clear Bold Call to the Sleeping Giant
by Gabriel Falsetta

Anne Feeney's deep conviction for the working class comes alive through her voice with a great band backing her up.

She breathes new life into some old standards in her unique way by blending reggae, country and folk into one enjoyable CD. Many of the songs are written by Feeney, who is also the lead vocal on all cuts.

This is a must for anyone who works or has ever worked for a living. Uplifting and driving, "We Just Come to Work Here, We Don't Come to Die," is one song that should be piped into executive offices around the world. Anyone who ever considered crossing a picket line sure would abandon the notion upon here Feeney's rendition of "Scabs."

Who ever thought that issues like eight hours of work and healthcare for all could sound so good?

Order Union Maid

People's Weekly World
June 21, 2003

Take Back The Media! Flash Animation "Triumph of the Wimp" Bush: The Missing Years

Troublemaking in Troubled Times: Organizing to Win!
Labor Notes Conference September 12-14, Detroit
When we fight for our rights... they call us 'troublemakers.'

Musicians
* Alejandro Alvarez * Ellis Boal * Chris Chandler * Jacob Estrada * Anne Feeney * Dawn Grattino * Tom Juravich * Vance Lelli * Susan Lewis * Julie McCall * Susan Newell * Jesse Ponce * Janet Stecher * Baldemar Velasquez * Rodney Ward * Ted Warmbrand

What follows is the transcript from NOW,the Bill Moyers PBS Show, where the subject is Walmart's exploitation of their work force ... UFCW has called it "Walmart's War on Workers" and to accentuate their point, they're using my song "War on the Workers" as the theme song for their campaign

ANDREA FLEISCHER, NEW YORK TIMES: It's 6 a.m. and the first shift is arriving at the nation's largest company, and largest private employer. Throughout the day nearly one million people will clock in and begin work at three thousand Wal-Marts and Sam's Clubs nationwide.

Part of the vast Wal-Mart network that will ring-up an estimated 220 billion dollars in sales this year. But some employees say profits have been made unfairly, and even illegally at the workers' expense....

Reviews and Articles: Vancouver Island MusicFest (Steve Harvey)
Union Songs songs articles recordings books song links union links

Vancouver Island MusicFest (2003)
Article by Steve Harvey (July 2003)

Reading Mark Gregory's article on "Laying Siege to Empire" and the National Folk Festival, made me think of the last Vancouver Island MusicFest here in Courtenay, British Columbia.

This festival has grown from a small, locally-oriented festival to a large, and financially successful, festival that can attract some pretty big names (this year, for example, Robert Cray, Richie Havens, Chris Hillman, Pablo Moses and the Revolutionary Dream Band) I should hasten to add that they still make room for the considerable local talent that exists here.

I've been volunteering at the festival for the last five years and I always have a good time. My only complaints would be the amount of commercial advertising and sponsorship, and what has been the lack of a political element. I suppose one could argue about what constitutes 'political' music, but, of course, I'm referring to music where the lyrics contain a pretty "up-front" political element.

This year things changed in a subtle way, I believe. Well, having Anne Feeney and Chris Chandler is hardly subtle, I suppose! They were very well received and represented really the first performers at the festival to have a mainly political focus. Some other performers, however, represented varying degrees of 'political' content.

War Party, a First Nations (Canadian Indian) hip-hop group from Edmonton, Alberta gave a perspective from the viewpoint of First Nations youth. It was great to see the enthusiastic response that they got from the young people present. Many local young activists could be seen dancing energetically, front and centre. Also, having Andy Everson from the Comox Band give a greeting and blessing from the Comox people ( meaning the First Nations who were here when the Europeans arrived) from the mainstage was well done. Even Dya Singh, whom I suppose many Australians are familiar with, mixed a spiritual message with an ecological one.

Of course, Richie Havens, whom I've never thought of as a particularly political performer,and Pablo Moses and the Revolutionary Dream Band certainly have that aspect to them. As well, local performers such as Gordon Carter, Norbury and Finch, Todd Butler, and Sue Pyper have songs with a political message amongst their repertoires.

So, while there wasn't quite as much of the Feeney/Chandler-type material as I might have liked, there seemed to be a subtle shift in the nature of the festival and a welcoming response from those attending the festival.

While it's a stretch to hail this as the political awakening of the Festival, I certainly could feel a subtle flavour of Arundhati Roy's dictum to lay siege to Empire in all our creative ways possible. It's often in these joyful ways that the seeds of our ability to resist are planted.

Notes
Many thanks to Steve Harvey for permission to use this article on the Union Song web site.

Check out the Vancouver Island MusicFest website: http://www.islandmusicfest.com/

In Iraq, Labor Protest is a Crime August 25, 2003
By DAVID BACON

Iraq's legal code may be in disarray. The streets of Baghdad may be filled with thieves and hijackers who seem to have little fear of being arrested. But US occupation authorities seem to have no trouble identifying one crime, at least. For the four million people out of work in Iraq, protest is against the law.

That’s the night the lights went out in Brooklyn.

By: Chris Chandler
Boston, MA
08 15 03

How `bout this: I’m in a Sheraton hotel. That is because I was flying from our nation’s capitol to Montreal for a well deserved vacation. But due to the power outage in the Northeast – from Cleveland to Ottawa to Augusta to New York City – my connecting flight didn’t meet and I wound up here – in a luxury hotel on Delta’s tab.

The hotel is packed – all sorts of international travelers, most notably a 747 full of folks coming in from Istanbul.

For nearly 24 hours, New Yorkers have been without power. I was thinking: Well, maybe now if their water was cut – and then you interrupted the food supply – and you added foreign, non-English-speaking troops walking up and down every block – perhaps from a completely different culture – maybe wearing a fez, wooden shoes and Liederhosen (an image as foreign to us as that get-up George W was wearing on the deck of that aircraft carrier)… maybe then New Yorkers would start to get a glimpse of what life is like in Baghdad.

It is hard for us to imagine.

USA Today posted a photo of pedestrian commuters crossing the Brooklyn Bridge – and comparing it to 9-11. Everything gets compared to 9-11. Isn’t that why we checked into Motel Iraq? 9-11? Even though it is widely accepted that there is no connection, because Osama knew better than George’s son that Saddam’s secular tendencies did not resonate with his people. The Iraqi population is less likely to embrace the American concept of free-market capitalism than Saddam himself. Saddam always kinda liked the idea – if he could just gas his people into accepting the notion of drive-through windows.

So when Iraqis see how quickly we can get the lights back on in New York City, does it not follow that they should wonder if we are not dragging our feet intentionally in Baghdad? Or did they give Enron a deregulated deal on Baghdad Power and Light? Does anyone remember the rolling blackouts in California?

The Northeast was just slower at accepting deregulation than California. But still… it makes me wonder…

“Give em a few more weeks – then we’ll turn the lights on and they’ll think we are heroes.”

One seems to forget that the lights and water worked just fine before we started bombing.

Is our occupation all part of a coercion tactic to force Iraqis to trade in their turbans for Washington Redskins caps?

Bush guaranteed us that the U.S. – oops, I mean coalition forces – would check out of Motel Iraq when the Iraqis were able to elect a new government. But as it turns out, you can check out any time you like – but you can never leave.

Perhaps, instead of Operation Show Off Our Hi-Tech Weaponry, they should have sent Arnold Schwartzenegger in to “Total Recall” Saddam Hussein – put 672 names on a ballot and let them decide. But maybe that would have been more expensive – and maybe they would have wound up with the Iraqi equivalent of Arnold Schwarztenegger. After all, as Greg Palast has written, “Unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gov. Gray Davis stood alone against the bad guys without using a body double. Davis called Reliant Corp. of Houston a pack of ‘pirates’ – and now he'll walk the plank for daring to stand up to the Texas marauders.”

Actually, the original plan was to send in Arnold as a candidate – Operation Kindergarten Cop they called it. That is, until we discovered that the largely Shiite Iraqis were inclined to choose a theocracy – that did not include any judges from Alabama.

Can one coerce another to be free?

“You’ve now got freedom of speech – you can say anything you want.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, $hit, he said he was going to kill me.”

BANG.

“That’ll teach him.”

Do we have an obligation to coerce Iraqis to live in a very expensive “free” society?

Seems to me, the last thing we really want in our latest colony is democracy.

If a slave does not want any of the things his “massa” keeps from him, does that mean he was never a slave?

But what if he is persuaded by his liberators – at the point of a gun – that he does not want to be a slave anymore – instead he would like to be a busboy in the Hard Rock Cafe? Does that make him free – or just a slave to his new owner?

America has always worn stripes, plaid, and polka dots simultaneously when sitting down at the table with a totalitarian dictator dressed in olive drab and wearing more medals than Michael Jackson.

I mean, we accept Salvadoran, Bangladeshi, or even Saudi exploitation of human rights while damning Cuban, North Korean, or Iranian abuses….

Usually, (as was the case with Saddam) the despots we support are more “like us” than the people over whom they reign.

When we colonize, we really want one of two things: a society with a gross national product large enough for us to expand our own marketplace so that they too should pay at the pump – or one so desperate they are willing to work for nothing to make sure we can keep our Washington Redskins caps on the rack at 7-Eleven for $3.49, and have no idea what “pay at the pump” is – for they have never seen a pump, let alone owned a car.

If elections were held in most Arab monarchies, the result would be a society that differs even further from our own than it did before the election – I mean, “Hey, they had an election! – How much different do you want them to be?”

Despots may want capitalism without democracy while their subjects may want democracy without capitalism. Hmmmm… Which scenario most resembles our own?

We have big business buying the “resignation” of California’s governor – or spending more than the gross national product of the entire Third World’s population to impeach a president for getting a blow job. (Won’t somebody give George a blow job – he needs one so.) We have Texas legislators crossing state lines to be out of reach of their own sergeant at arms to prevent the redrawing of political boundaries. Does anyone remember Florida?

Not to mention that over half the eligible population never votes – but you would be hard pressed to find a single American who has never been to a McDonald’s.

As Louis Menand points out in the New Yorker, those citizens living under Saddam Hussein were not “happy slaves” – it does not follow that the things he and his deck of cards prevented Joe Iraqi from having were Wal-Marts, Bob’s Big Boys, and the Colonel’s Original Recipe. But they’re gonna get em.

So as New Yorkers stumble in the dark for one night – trying to eat all the ice cream in Manhattan before it melts and swapping anecdotes about fish in aquariums that died when the pump was turned off – remember, the shortest route to power is to keep the power on – and not let a would-be leader – elected or not – say, “Look what they have done to our country.”

It worked wonders for Rudolph Giuliani. I wonder how it is working for Saddam Hussein.

MfD OpenForum : Anne Feeney, The Newest MFD Member But back to the point of this thread; Ann is a true real life working person's hero. She has traveled North America writing and singing songs about and for workers. She is the grandaughter of a Union organizer who worked in the steel mills of Pennsylvania. The struggles and values she learned early in life have stayed with her, and she has carried that message wherever she has performed.

I like to think of Ann as slightly irreverent. We were returning from the rally in Jefferson WI in April, and it was a long tiring drive. I had bought her CD Have You Been To Jail For Justice, and it was playing in the background din of a car full of people. I heard a tune that i absolutely love (the Woody Guthrie ballad Deportee), being played. Parodied is a better definition, given the change in lyrics. It was entitled CEO's (The Plane Wreck At Tuzla). In it, she lampoons the death of Ron Brown, and the fact the CEO's were over shopping for cheap labor. While it is sharp and controversial, it is also the kind of music Ann has the courage to sing.

The battle for worker justice is never easily fought, nor won. Singing songs, motivating and inspiring workers thru music is an old and proven meathod of creating activism. Ann is a master at it. If you doubt my word, take in one of Ann's performances, and you will quickly see why her appearance on MFD is such a breakthrough.

[ 08-07-2003, 07:43 AM: edited by: Bill Pearson ]