Solidarity
Little Steven
Winter 1999

There are two kinds of people in the world.

Those who believe there is a force that exists that is greater than the individual, and those who don't.

I do, and that would be part of what I would talk about on my fifth solo album.

I've had a few tough troubled artistic gestations in my life but nothing quite like this. "Freedom" felt like a long pregnancy. "Revolution" was perhaps a bit premature. This one was 10 years from conception to birth. That beats the shit out of whales and elephants.

This is the last of the five political albums I outlined many lifetimes ago. The tabloid headline would be: Politics! Religion! Sex! Little Steven Returns from the Desert, Figures Out What's Going On, Confirms the Significance of the Spirit, and Gets Laid!

The less melodramatic theme of the album is actually the political consequence of spiritual bankruptcy. But that will never sell.

At least that's what my record company told me in 1989 when I played them the demos. Not that they were concerned about the subject matter. They told me rock music was over. Of course then Metallica got huge and Guns and Roses , the Black Crowes , Nirvana , Pearl Jam , Soundgarden , Alice in Chains , Green Day , the Offspring , etc. happened, so they were right but a bit ahead of the game. Now it's ten years later and rock is officially dead again and I figure it's a good time to put the record out.

By the time I first got to a recording studio I was already 24 years old. That's pretty late in life and I had been playing every kind of rock music for 10 years by then. I was used to a different incredible and miraculously unique band emerging every couple of months in the 60's and couldn't have known that wasn't ever going to happen again. By 1972, I felt that every great thing possible in traditional rock (guitars, bass, and drums) had already been done. Of course looking back now almost 30 years later I was pretty much right. So when I started recording in 1975 with Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes , I felt the music had to be, at the very least, a new synthesis of elements to justify the music's existence. In our case it was 60's R&B based rock with horns. That's how I found my identity. From then on I continued exploring and combining various things and pretty much used my rock background as a subtext for my work.

Then in 1989, after seven years of following the road of creativity wherever it led me, I had a revelation. I missed rock music. I wasn't hearing any and maybe that's because my mind was elsewhere, but I missed it. Was I seriously considering making a rock record? How could I justify such a thing? It contradicted everything that led me away from rock in the first place. Redundancy. What could I possibly do that hasn't been done before? How could I limit the instruments to guitars, bass, and drums and still communicate my own identity? I thought long and hard on this shocking development and finally came to a simple conclusion. Rock music is redundant by definition. It was in the details and subtleties and personalities of the artists that made each rock group different.

This was the equivalent of Buddha's Enlightenment to me, my sixth epiphany, and a complete turnaround of my previous deeply held philosophy on the subject. That is the problem with deeply held beliefs. Sometimes you change your mind. Just as you start to feel comfortable with ideas and opinions that after all are a big part of one's identity, you go and do what life is actually all about but human nature resists with all its strength. You change. This is the quickest way to an identity crisis. But the foundation of your true identity, I believe, is something deeper. And as painful and disorienting as change can be, it keeps you alive.

So continuing to be as honest with myself as possible, I accepted this new challenge. For the first time in my adult life (whatever that means) I was going to write a rock record.

In a burst of creativity that presaged what I'm sure would have been my most productive decade had I been able to find a creative outlet, I wrote two complete rock albums in four months. To be accurate, "Savage" didn't start out as a rock record (more about this later) but after my most recent epiphany, it became one.

I would write and record three of my favorite kinds of rock music over the next couple of years. Late 60's hard rock would be covered by "Savage." The other record I wrote in '89 (let's call it the other one) would be more traditional, mid-60's rootsy rock music and I planned on it serving as my first post-political record with a possible movie written around it. The only other kind of rock music that really got to me since the 60's was the Ramones / Sex Pistols style punk music. I would get a chance to do that in a couple of years with a band called Demolition 23 and it remains one of my favorite records that nobody ever heard.

It felt like a good plan but then "Savage" got rejected so I decided I would put out the other one first under a band name and come back to my last political solo record after it. I spent the next few years looking for a singer for a post-political band that would make my first post-political album. I really couldn't picture myself singing love songs at that point. After looking at about 400 guys I gave up and came back to "Savage."

I'll never know whether "Savage" would have ever been recorded if it hadn't been for the encouragement I received from Adam Clayton.

I had never really been a part of the "music business" but I would visit occasionally. By the mid-nineties I started to feel my estrangement was permanent. I could feel the industry moving away from artists and rock music in general in spite of the fact that there were millions of rock fans out there and it was the artistry of rock that had turned trivial teenage pop into a massive money making institution. And oh yeah it was the main reason most of the assholes running the industry into the ground had a job in the first place.

With the rock era in its death throes and rock artists about to become lepers, I knew I was now in a different business. I was rock, they were about to become exclusively pop. They wanted to sell millions of records and make a lot of money, I wanted to sell a couple hundred thousand records, break even, and tell the truth. It's not personal. I have no bitterness or anger about my own work not fitting in. In fact I have a lot of friends at record companies and a few who run record companies. The fact that those friends showed no interest in signing me for ten years means they felt I could not possibly do any business for them and that's totally cool. What I do get angry about is everybody's laissez-faire attitude about watching an important art form go down the drain without a fight.

While I was looking for singers for that other post-political record, I produced four records. A punk record for my friend Michael Monroe's new band "Demolition 23"; the "Arc Angels" a Texas blues/rock record for my friend Charlie Sexton ; a Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes reunion record called "Better Days" ; and an African/Reggae/Rock record for a Nigerian artist named Majek Fashek called "The Spirit of Love."

They were all different, all great, and they all bombed.

I'd finally become comfortable enough as a producer to not worry about the pressure of constant artistic innovation. Relax and just make good records. But nobody knew how to market good records that didn't fit neatly into categories any more, I found out. I decided I could not continue to put my heart and soul into my work and get nothing back. I wouldn't produce again until I had my own company.

So there I was, out of the business, no outlet for the work I loved, a used-to-be semi-somebody out of time and out of work. Walking my dog and wondering how stupid could a man be to be in this position.

And along comes Adam. We'd been friends since U2 first came over in the early 80's and our agent, and one of my best friends, Frank Barsalona, introduced us. I'm telling him how I got these songs and I don't know what the hell to do with them and he says let's record them. There's no way to measure how much that dose of enthusiasm meant at the time but I can tell you it meant a lot and I'll never forget it.

Now we need a drummer. Since the record was designed to be a modern version of 60's hard rock I needed somebody who really understood that older style. Jason Bonham's name came up and I thought he'd be perfect. I didn't know him but we found him and he was equally enthusiastic, which again meant a lot to me, and he came right over and we did it. It turned out to be a great band if I do say so myself.

In spite of the less than ideal creative environment of the previous chaotic seven years, I was feeling, I don't know, not exactly comfortable, and not exactly satisfied, but alright with the evolution I'd gone through. Pretty much everything I know about myself and the world around me I'd learned in those seven years. And after reading hundreds of books and studying and researching and really working at it every day, I was really sure about one thing. I didn't know very much. For every book I read there were ten more I wanted to read. Every subject I got into was connected to another. Philosophy to literature to poetry to history to politics to economics to media to religion and on and on.

I know it sounds ridiculous but knowing you don't know very much - I mean really knowing that - makes you somehow feel like you've made progress.

Somewhere in 1989 everything I had been looking at for seven years merged. Politics, philosophy, social conditions, religion, the arts, all became interrelated. What made sense to me in one discipline would translate easily and obviously to another. Within these integrated disciplines two magnetic poles formed. Political fascism, media manipulation, philosophical and religious extremism, prejudice, imperialism, short-term thinking, panic, ignorance, fear, lies, inflexibility, oppression, suppression, repression, and apathy all formed one pole. At the same time justice, solidarity, equality, freedom, open-mindedness, education, balance, love, forgiveness, discipline, truth, long-term thinking, patience, flexibility, consciousness, and enlightenment formed the other.

As far as I can tell at this moment, I believe all human behavior results from four things, maybe five. Genetic inclination, early environment, circumstance, and a very limited amount of free will. (The fifth would involve karma/reincarnation which I would not rule out but have no way of confirming the existence or measuring the impact of these things at this time.) The end product is a combination of positive and negative inclinations in all of us. The two poles. Negative action comes from some combination of these four or five elements resulting in a denial or an alienation from the life force. We all have a desperate need to prove we are alive. If we are lacking or deficient in the positive qualities that prove it -- love, friendship, family, trust, loyalty, education, a sense of history, hope, communication, pride, sex, productive work, etc. -- our desperation finds its proof of existence in destruction, hate, violence, fear, alienation, etc.

So what we do with our very limited amount of free will is extraordinarily important. We are all fighting whatever negative qualities we have throughout our lifetimes. For some of us the balance is tipped toward the positive and life is a wonderful adventure. For others the negatives are so great, there is no chance for our small amount of free will to overcome them. The extreme results of that negativity are serial killers, child molesters, religious fanatics, people who work for the I.R.S., and lawyers (kidding). For most of us the balance is close enough that our free will can make a difference. That is the constant struggle of life. And that is what this record, and most of my work, is about. Using that little bit of free will to realize our most positive potential.

Anyway I'd gotten to the point where I was comfortable enough on this record to open with a joke. No more comic relief somewhere in the middle. The very title this time was a bit tongue in cheek and, like most good comedy, it represented the truth of what I was trying to say. It was the best way I could think of to express my spiritual philosophy in a phrase that would resonate in the present cultural context. Actually I didn't think of it. I stole it from the only Native American comedian (professional anyway) that I've ever seen, Charlie Hill . It kind of makes you feel all warm and fuzzy in your traditional American soul, stealing from Indians.

An album title is extremely important to me since it has to sum up what the album is about. Oddly enough on this one I had two perfect titles, "Born Again Savage" and, "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," a title from Joseph Campbell's work. With a record this complex, finding one perfect title is a miracle but two is really weird. I liked having a title that didn't have a corresponding song but down the stretch it was "Savage" by a nose.

We're brought up in the West with a very condescending attitude toward what anthropologists and historians call the "Primal," or "Ancient," or (the outright epithet) "Savage" religions. They include Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto, Zoroastrianism, Animist, Pagan, any Native peoples' religion, basically anything but the Semitic trifecta - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And even Islam gets slammed pretty good.

Now I was born Catholic and brought up Baptist so I'll always have the old white man with the long beard in the sky that I occasionally talk to, argue with, pray to, curse, thank - you know. But what eventually would dominate the intellectual part of my spiritual consciousness started in high school with the school librarian.

She was from the Beat Generation of the 50's and must have sensed a common spirit with my burgeoning early hippie status. She recommended I read a poem called "Howl" by a guy named Allen Ginsberg. She said there was a direct connection between Ginsberg and Bob Dylan and that sold me. Now the poem was not only incredibly significant and influential to me, but it turns out Ginsberg was a Buddhist, the first I ever heard of.

So I started looking into Buddhism and then the Hindu religion and eventually Taoism. I would end up using large pieces of these three and adding them to others to eventually discover my eternally evolving spiritual philosophy.

I got very religious as a kid around the age of 10, 11, or 12. In the Baptist religion you have to voluntarily decide to accept Jesus Christ as your personal saviour and be baptized, which I did. It was my first epiphany. It was my first experience with surrendering to a higher power. Letting go. I remember looking forward to the Easter Sunrise service every year. Waking up when it was still night and gathering at the mountain top was a rare mystical experience that seemed to connect to some dark, mysterious, long-past ritual in my subconscious.

Around that same age I began to get interested in rock and roll and started buying singles (albums wouldn't become part of the teenage culture until the Beatles in 1964). "Tears on my Pillow" by Little Anthony and the Imperials , "Duke of Earl" by Gene Chandler , "Twist and Shout" by the Isley Brothers , "Sherry" by the Four Seasons . And "Pretty Little Angel Eyes" by Curtis Lee . As I mentioned in the first essay, one day as I was listening to "Pretty Little Angel Eyes" for the 100th time, a strange feeling came over me. I remember the moment like it was five minutes ago. A feeling of pure bliss flooded my body. It was my second epiphany in as many years and this one was even stronger than the first.

It wouldn't become my life until two or three years later when the Beatles and the Rolling Stones would reveal my future, but from that moment on what would dominate the emotional part of my spiritual consciousness would be rock and roll. In other words, at that moment, rock and roll became my religion.