Skinheads in Albany? Mark Alan’s song is still relevant

I was in the middle of my set last night at Calapooia Brewing in Albany. A fine place to set up in a corner and play original acoustic tunes. I like this gig, I recommend it for my brewery-gig colleagues.

But there was a bit of surprise. In walked a group of 6 or 7 guys, a few of them with shaved heads. Tattoos, leather, patches, black denim, chains and belts, etc. A quite normal assortment of styles that you see in most of the venues I play in. But I love tattoos, and I love patches, and I tend to gawk closely at such adornments. I couldn’t help noticing that these patches and tattoos were SS Lightning Badges, Parteiadler Eagles, and Swastikas. Striking, to say the least.

Normally, when I see this, I am fairly unfazed. A little bit fascinated. I think to myself, do these people really exist anymore? It seems like the tide of history would have swept them away by now. But another thing I couldn’t help noticing was that the next song on my set list was Mark Alan’s “Don’t Pass Montgomery By.”

At that moment, I was playing “Lightning Rod,” a fairly aggressive, funky acousto-rowdy number about televangelists. And Skinheads being music lovers (as I hear), they were paying pretty close attention. As I wound up the outro-vamp of “Lightning Rod,” I begin to wonder what was going to happen when I started singing Mark’s lyrics, which come right out of a Martin Luther King speech. Especially when I get to the part: “They gotta word for a black man/They gotta word for a Brown man…” And the chorus: “Open up your eyes/See the ugly face of hate/They only want to hide/From their ignorance and fear.”

A lot can go through your mind in 10-20 seconds. Here’s what went through mine:

I sort of felt, and hoped, that Mark’s incredible song would someday become obsolete and irrelevant. And that maybe, with the election of Barak Obama, that time is indeed upon us. Great social activist songs often happily end up in anachronistic dotage, like “This Land is Your Land.” So might “Montgomery.” We can only hope that someday we’ll be singing the song more for it’s groove and melody than for its message.

I have kept that song fresh for myself by adding lyrical embellishments in the outro like, “They gotta word for a brown man from the Middle East/They gotta word for black man make to president/They gotta word for a woman on the supreme court.” (This sounds corny in print, but the power of Mark Alan’s music really sets fire under your vocals once you get going.) Still, I can’t help wondering, wherever I play the song, it’s just preaching to the choir like a good liberal should. (An African-American from Arkansas once came up to me and said, “If you live where I came from you would know how necessary songs like this are.” But this was Southwest Portland, and there was no one within miles who didn’t already believe in this message.)

Now here I was in Albany, with a table full of Skinheads right in front of me. Obviously, the song is still relevant. And these guys just sat down. It’s only a coincidence that “Montgomery” was next on my sat list, but if play it exactly right now, it will certainly appear to be a provocation, won’t it? Well, isn’t that what the song is for? And speaking of provocations, aren’t swastikas and SS badges provocation?

I’m not really a brave kind of guy. Kind of a coward actually. I avoid conflict like most Midwesterners of Scandinavian descent do. And no one but me would have known if I had skipped the song. But I would know. And considering how much psychobabble I devote to such things, I would be ashamed of myself if I didn’t sing the most clearly articulated version of “Don’t Pass Montgomery By” possible.

So that’s what I did. I closed my eyes and I sang every line as loudly and clearly as I could. I added all the embellishments, and fully articulated “ignorance and fear.”

I admit that I was scared. In fact, I was shaking. There weren’t a lot of people around. No bouncers. And this bar is in a remote part of Albany.

In a way, I’d love to tell a story of a huge melee that followed, with 6 guys threatening to kill yours truly and take his musical gear. But all that happened was that the 6 or 7 fellows got up and went outside to the beer garden. I guess they avoid conflict too. Either that, or the old axiom is true: People just don’t listen to lyrics! I think I’d rather get beaten up then succumb to the later.

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