After our last show, at the Hollywood Bowl, Neil and I gazed out at the empty seats. The 18,000 people who’d sat there just a few moments earlier were now on their way back to their homes and hotels. We had a moment to breathe and look back.
This had been Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir’s 32nd performance as openers for Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts’ Love Earth Tour. Over the past two years, we gradually evolved from openers to more like circus barkers with a beat.
Neil’s songs and the Chrome Hearts band — and the whole community of concert-workers — operate in an efficient kind of love. We, in turn, wanted to find a new kind of more impactful activism in the “Love Earth.” Night after night we preached that “Love is the force that the Earth gives us to make change. Change-a-lujah!”
And looking out at the still-warm seats, we wondered: Where are our Earth messages now? Our songs and shouts in this time of catastrophic crisis…. What have we put into the hundreds of thousands of souls who we faced? What is still in the hearts and minds of the people who just minutes ago were shouting to us, here in the famous Hollywood Bowl?
At each of the 18 shows, local Earth activists were invited to greet ticket-buyers at the door in a gathering of big green tents. We called it the “Eco-Village.” Neil and Daryl Hannah’s friend Mr. Charris Ford invites the 15 or 20,000 folks streaming in to pause and face their own local activists… future farmers, veterans for peace, quakers, activists against pipeline, opponents of toxins, women against war… Our director Savitri D kept going back to the village to record conversations for our Earth Riot Radio show.
But after the Stop Shoppers belted out their Earth songs, the Eco-Villagers took down the green tents. Did these gently forced conversations make a difference?
On one of the longest bus trips this year — Milwaukee to Denver, following the sound system’s Kenilworth trucks over the horizon, following the buses full of musicians, grips, piano and guitar tuners, sound engineers, filmmakers, cooks, the masseuse and the nurse — we took a break in eastern Colorado. Our bus driver pulled over and then went past the rest area to a more permanent rest area: a cemetery, where Johnny the driver took us to the grave of Philip K. Dick. Johnny must have seen our fabulist books around the bus or heard us talking about Daryl’s star turn in Blade Runner.
The truth echoes like a song.
The Love Earth Tour demonstrated a science fiction-like break into the future. Yes, sometimes what we thought was in the past, the performance of a message with our bodies, singing without media, is in fact the most daring experiment and waits for us in the future.
During the tour we moved past pixels, mass mailings, Zooms… We found ourselves directly addressing, face-to-face, those hundreds of thousands of people, talking about catastrophic climate change. The Earth we see is offering us these fantastic dreams that power our singing. Every Silicon Valley invention seeks to put our relationship to the natural world deeper into the past. But can a virtual superstorm ever match an actual one? Leonard Peltier told us that “Superstorms are communications from Mother Earth.” The Earth is telling us to say it straight.
We are part of the Earth’s struggle with humans. Our tour is now concluded, but at the same time it’s continuous through the months, the songs echoing like the Earth’s fires and floods and flowers returning in the Spring. The rock concert for the Earth never stops but will keep going until the balance of life is restored, the emissions abated, the love enduring.
Previously in The Revelator:
An Earth Activist Talks to the Trees
