DATE LINES
Kruth, John & Blitt, And Connie & Bernstein, Dennis & Helmberger, Marshall & Carpenter, Dan
DATE LINES Notes from Underground Eugene Chadbourne says he doesn't play by the rules: 'I do left-wing material and I'm not sexy.' GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA Eugene Chadbourne was a draft dodger...
...Not to be outdone, the State Department's Elliott Abrams made a special trip to Indianapolis to blast Castro and exhort organizers to keep the Games from becoming political...
...The entire hard-core scene couldn't get any more political...
...He seemed on the road to a successful business career...
...He headed for Africa and joined the mercenaries trying to prevent white-ruled Rhodesia from becoming the black nation of Zimbabwe...
...And he noted that Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North's liaison to the contras, Robert Owen, was present...
...Never ones to ignore easy issues, both of Indiana's Republican Senators, Richard G. Lugar and Dan Quayle, chided the locals for "courting Castro...
...He has fought for white Rhodesians and Nic-araguan contras...
...His rollicking rendition of "Der Fiihrer's Face" has been getting a lot of air play in Holland, Switzerland, and Germany...
...I get up and entertain people...
...John Kruth (John Kruth is a poet and musician in Milwaukee...
...I've got lots of strikes against me," he admits with pride...
...But when he was told that food would be available only through the FDN, Terrell realized the Indians would never get it...
...Eventually, he was contacted by Congressional investigators trying to unravel the covert contra supply network...
...Four thousand athletes from thirty-eight nations will compete in thirty sports, augmented by countless social, artistic, cultural, and educational activities...
...Well, yes and no...
...It's just a matter of human conscience, that this is wrong...
...Snarl has followed snarl in this municipality that has only a passing acquaintance with dissent...
...My wife and I were lying in bed and she said you oughta write a song about the ten most wanted list at the post office, except use all the worst people in history...
...According to the Command's own estimates, opponents outnumbered supporters nine to one...
...Although he is one of the finest improvisa-tional guitarists in contemporary music, he is simply too wild and woolly to be pasteurized and packaged for consumption by the MTV generation...
...Minnesota's David Durenberger expressed his opposition, and Wisconsin's Robert Kasten scheduled a Congressional hearing on the matter for June...
...From contra mercenary to contra whistleblower, Terrell has led a life full of paradoxes...
...It was just one of those things...
...The birthplace of the John Birch Society, Indianapolis is so dominated by the Republican Party that elected officials and the business elite are free to conduct the affairs of government in country-club fashion...
...Marshall Helmberger (Marshall Helmberger writes regularly for the Echo in Ely, Minnesota, and for other publications...
...Mercenary with a Cause WASHINGTON, D.C...
...The decisions you are forced to make when you're out of money are really creative...
...It should really make you laugh or cry or have some kind of emotional effect...
...His recent Corpses of Foreign War (Fundamental Records) is perhaps the finest political album of the 1980s...
...Then, at age thirty-three, he encountered marital problems and developed a yearning for adventure...
...F-4D fighters from the Minnesota Air Guard base in Du-luth would have been deployed simultaneously to engage with the bombers in mock dogfights...
...He says his trip was solely to procure food for the Misura...
...Together they have created a dadaist jug-band, fusing elements of folk, punk, ragtime, and jazz...
...Environmentalists focused their attention on the noise levels of the flights, which they said would disturb the area's nesting bald eagles and the recently reintroduced peregrine falcons...
...Chuck Neil, another area resident and a spokesman for the group Northguard, expressed concern over the high cost of such flights, which run $21,000 an hour for a single B-l bomber...
...The Strategic Air Command launched the controversy by proposing to conduct low-altitude bomber-training flights in northeastern Minnesota, an area whose population it originally dismissed as "insignificant...
...I take clippings and turn them into songs...
...Strategic Air Command Bombs Out DULUTH, MINNESOTA For the first time in Air Force history, a proposed flight area of the Strategic Air Command has been put off limits by public opposition...
...The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, which produced a video critical of the proposal, determined the noise level to be "slightly greater than an amplified rock band at twenty feet...
...city in eighteen years to host the Pan American Games...
...There's a pretty lively underground scene in America today," Chadbourne says...
...DATE LINES Notes from Underground Eugene Chadbourne says he doesn't play by the rules: 'I do left-wing material and I'm not sexy.' GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA Eugene Chadbourne was a draft dodger during the Vietnam war...
...Chadbourne refuses to play by the radio and record industry's rules...
...He served eight, and then was pardoned by the governor of Alabama...
...I left with great reluctance, feeling I had been literally sold out by my country," he says...
...It's not to say I'm a born-again liberal or anything like that," he says...
...Flights would have occurred at altitudes of only 300 feet several times a day and would have included mock bombing runs on small towns in the area...
...In Washington, Terrell joined up with Robert White, former U.S...
...The reason: Cuba would be given special recognition as the host country for the 1991 Games, and many Legionnaires dislike Cuba's system of government...
...Even Republican senators began to feel the heat...
...For his outspokenness, Terrell has paid a price...
...Wanna buy a visor...
...You could look a campesino fighter in the FDN camp in his eyes, and it was a blank expression," he says...
...Dan Carpenter (Dan Carpenter is a Columnist for The Indianapolis Star...
...There's nearly one every day...
...Thus far, Chadbourne has successfully avoided the mainstream...
...They knew you can't pick your neighbors in the Americas any more than you can pick your relatives...
...In the midst of a failed mission to blow up a Sandinista bridge, Terrell made an abrupt departure for Washington...
...When it's just some kind of political diatribe, it loses me...
...But in the last year, he has been instrumental in unveiling much of the covert contra supply network that has become the Iran-arms scandal...
...A political song should create some kind of relief," says Chadbourne...
...Along with such other original songs as "KKKremlin," and "Sex with the Sheriff," Chadbourne has breathed new life into old tunes by 1960s rabble-rousers Phil Ochs, Ed Sanders, and Country Joe McDonald...
...You could write a song about Reagan just about every day, but at this point why give him the publicity...
...embassy...
...Chadbourne has updated the lyrics of the old Oliver Wallace, Spike Jones song to include the misadventures of Caspar Weinberger and George Shultz...
...He also performs some unusual interpretations of compositions by jazzmen Charles Mingus and Pharaoh Sanders...
...North-guard and several of the other groups that organized against it are now hoping to halt the Minnesota Air Guard's F-4 flights that still traverse the Boundary Waters...
...Millions of dollars' worth of T-shirts, key chains, visors, marshmal-low pies, and other official souvenirs have had to be licensed...
...In fact, opponents of a multimillion-dollar bond issue designed to cover some of the cost of the Games gathered enough signatures in a petition drive to derail it, forcing the city to improvise another funding method...
...He's been called a communist and a traitor, his offices have been raided and his files rifled, and he's been interviewed by the FBI...
...He fears that he will be indicted for breaking the Neutrality Act...
...I really like that...
...But after he joined the largest contra group, the FDN, in late 1984, he began to feel a strong sense of commitment to the anti-Sandinista Miskito Indians of Central America...
...Terrell told investigators he had participated in a meeting in which the assassination of contra commander Eden Pas-tora was plotted...
...The first shot was fired by the American Legion, whose national headquarters is in a state-owned building on state-owned ground...
...The pressure evidently became too great, and so the Strategic Air Command shelved its proposal...
...Terrell has retreated to the Philippines, where he is writing a book about his experiences with the contras...
...Sometimes someone will come up and say, 'I heard your record and it changed my life!' I know what they mean by that...
...One thousand people crowded into Mora, Minnesota (population 2,500), which sits in the middle of the "racetrack," to express their concerns to representatives of the Strategic Air Command...
...Ambassador to El Salvador, at the International Center for Development Policy...
...Hundreds of units of housing have had to be built...
...His position pitted him against his former allies in the FDN who were trying to take control of the Misura...
...They were not mollified by assurances that Fidel Castro himself would not be coming...
...Now Chadbourne is making his own music—folksy, unconventional, and unmistakably political...
...By age thirty, he was chief of security for the prisons in northern Alabama and toured the South speaking at Jaycee conventions and colleges as the first former felon to become a law-enforcement officer...
...This government can make your life be extremely miserable...
...Taxpayers fork over $600,000 a year for maintenance of the building, while the Legion, a private organization, pays $ 1 a year in rent...
...Logistically and politically, Indy never has tried anything like this...
...He fled to Calgary, Alberta, where he worked as a music critic for a daily newspaper until he was granted amnesty by the Carter Administration...
...As a professional warrior, Terrell was used to seeing combatants as "uniforms with no faces on them...
...In response, he sponsored two fiery public meetings...
...Chad-bourne's list includes John F. Kennedy, who Americans thought "was some kind of saint," Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and "our new number-one criminal," Ronald Reagan...
...The proposal had two parts: The first involved B-52 and B-l bomber flights at the 4,000-foot level over large portions of the Boundary Waters Wilderness...
...I like playing music," he says...
...I found out it's not popular to speak out in the United States...
...They knew what they were getting into," Quayle's press aide, Peter Lincoln, said of the Pan Am organizers...
...That's when I came to Washington to begin telling my story, and I've been trashed ever since," he laughs...
...I wasn't really cause-oriented," he says...
...Whereas, if you looked into the eyes of the Indians, there was this burning desire to retake their land, and it wasn't a democ-racy-versus-communism type thing, they just wanted people to leave them the hell alone, not only the Sandinistas, but the FDN, and the Americans, and everyone else...
...Phil Ochs did the same to me...
...Terrell became a military adviser to the Indians and, he claims, war chief of the Mis-ura, an anti-Sandinista fighting force composed of Miskito, Suma, and Rama tribesmen...
...It was a duck shoot...
...Make them feel a little better, get them talking...
...Part two of the proposal featured a 100-mile-long "racetrack" running from the northwestern tip of Wisconsin into east-central Minnesota...
...Thousands of volunteers have had to be recruited...
...Popular enthusiasm for this cosmopolitan challenge has never reached groundswell proportions...
...Jack Terrell is a forty-five-year-old mercenary...
...They took us to the embassy, held us in the basement, canceled our passports, put us on a jet plane, told us to keep a low profile and keep our mouths shut...
...Republicans outnumber Democrats on the city-county council twenty-three to six, and Republican mayor William H. Hudnut won his third term in 1983 with 67 per cent of the vote...
...I've been treated in ways you wouldn't believe because I have spoken out on an issue that is not ideological to me but one of principle," he says...
...Among those speaking was Will Steger, who led a 1986 expedition to the North Pole...
...Chadbourne has developed a devoted following in the United States and Europe...
...But they probably figured, until recently, that they'd done a good job of picking their stateside friends...
...The chief obstacle has turned out to be not money but politics...
...Chadbourne goes out of his way to desecrate the image of the decadent, leather-clad, hip-shaking rock star...
...Steger called the proposed bomber flights "totally unacceptable...
...With that much power, the handful of men who decide upon such ventures as building a football stadium with public funds or holding the Pan Am Games do so without bothering to consult the rest of us...
...It was just one of many local scandals in the South involving corrupt sheriffs," Chadbourne recalls...
...No matter...
...At the second meeting, in Duluth, more than 200 people jammed the city council chambers to voice their opposition...
...It usually comes out better than the guys who have three weeks to record one vocal...
...Gracias, amigos...
...Three days before Attorney General Edwin Meese revealed the contra diversion, Terrell and White had begun telling journalists of the diversion...
...The lyrics are political, combined with really loud and fast music, and the appearance is as objectionable to society as possible...
...I do left-wing material, and I'm not sexy...
...After stealing a car with his brother at age fourteen,, he received an exceptionally harsh sentence of eighteen years in prison...
...One of his first orders as war chief, Terrell says, was to put out a shoot-to-kill order targeting both Sandinistas and members of the FDN...
...Terrell did just that for a year, living in New Orleans "discouraged and depressed...
...Politics Snarl the Pan Am Games INDIANAPOLIS In August, Indianapolis will become the first U.S...
...And many of his records and tapes were recorded at home on a cheap boom box...
...It's not the way you're supposed to record albums," Chadbourne says...
...Still, he continues to record and perform at a frenetic pace...
...They were conscripted by force to be in those camps, they had no will to fight...
...I decided to live in another country because I was very, very confused and frustrated and fed up with this system," he says...
...None of the names have been changed 'cause no one is innocent," Chadbourne says in a deadpan voice when discussing "Ten Most Wanted List," a feature song on Corpses...
...From there, Terrell created a network of rural ambulance and rescue squads that operated throughout the South...
...Music that's too serious is boring...
...The inspiration for such songs as "Sex with the Sheriff' comes from scouring his hometown paper, The Greensboro Daily News...
...This time, they've been stung by their friends...
...The area's member of Congress, Jim Oberstar, himself an opponent of the plan, was inundated with complaints...
...Even before that rebuff, it was unclear whether the task of holding the Games would be too tall for this town, which used to be called a racetrack in a cornfield...
...In April, the Legion announced its opposition to holding the closing ceremonies for the Games on its huge lawn in the center of town...
...Connie Blitt and Dennis Bernstein (Connie Blitt and Dennis Bernstein are co-producers of "Contragate: A Daily Investigative Radio Report" on WBAI 99.5 FM New York City...
...He returned to Honduras, and soon was apprehended by Honduran guards who escorted him at machine-gun point to the U.S...
...Chadbourne's band for the album includes three members from the Violent Femmes, a Milwaukee-based group known for eclectic music and radical politics...
...Not surprisingly, the insignificant population rebelled...
...It means a lot to me but I try not to blow it out of proportion...
...All the classic blues records were the worst recordings ever heard...
Vol. 51 • August 1987 • No. 8
