Arlo and I are, indeed, two musicians who were making protest music during the Vietnam War, and now speak truth to power during our even more disastrous misadventure in Iraq. If you run across him, give him "dap" and solidarity from me!
In your bio it says that it took a near fatal heart attack to get you to return to the music business. How did one lead to the other? Most people have a heart attack and settle down to a more sedate life but you went the opposite route and chose to start working at one of the most demanding jobs, a touring musician. Doesn't that ever strike you as perhaps a little odd?
I had already released my 2001 self-release, Fried Okra Jones, and my first (2002) Southern Records release, Big Shoes to Fill, by the time I had my heart attack in November of 2002. I was a full-time trucker, and continued to do that into 2004, but I was already working on my current phase of career development. So I would say, rather than changing my path, it just made me focus. It's not a bit odd, for a person who, though well educated, has always used his extraordinary physical endurance as a main calling card.
We must all die, and I just finally got the idea that it might be any time now. My songs "Immortal", on Big Shoes to Fill, and "The Last Blues" and "Got My Will Made
Out" from Up Close And Personal, most directly reflect this development in my consciousness.
I actually asked this question to Arlo Guthrie, but both of you are in the unique position of having been singers during the Vietnam war and now during the occupation of Iraq. What are the major differences that you see between the United States then and now? For example what have been reactions like to the line about spending a son on a war you don't see a reason for?
As I tell people, when I came back from Vietnam, it became my hope that what I had done as a soldier, and afterwards as one of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW; I'm a proud Life Member, and Oklahoma VVAW contact person), would save some others from subsequent generations from fighting and dying in other useless and misdirected foreign wars.
It didn't work out that way. My generation — some of us, anyway — wanted to "..change the world, rearrange the world," as CSNY sang. But America mostly didn't listen.
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