POP MUSIC REVIEW : The Fine State of Utah : Phillips Blends Tall Tales, Songs, Poems, Ruminations and Jests Into Rich, Emotional Show

Opening the first of two shows Monday at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments, U. Utah Phillips related that earlier in the day, when the store’s owners were readying the sound system, he had remarked, “Hell, this is like my living room. I don’t need a sound system in my living room.”

For the next 70 minutes, the unamplified 57-year-old singer/storyteller proceeded to treat the tiny 50-seat music shop as if it were his home. Like a visiting grandfather, he shared tales of his times and travels with a familial ease and intimacy that belied the often-challenging notions within.

Though he’d never performed in Orange County before, Phillips was greeted with a warm ovation as he ambled onto the barely elevated stage, prompting him to invoke a saying of his friend and mentor Amnon Hennessey of the Catholic Workers Movement: “If you’ve got to have heroes, make sure they’re dead, so they can’t blow it.”

Phillips was scarcely less than perfect, though, in blending his songs, tall tales, poems, ruminations and jests into a rich, emotional performance. He accompanied himself on acoustic guitar, though he and the instrument parted company frequently so he could “blather on.” At such times he’d step off the small stage to stride among the folks seated on the floor in front, politely asking first, “You don’t mind if I loom, do you?”

His opening sing-along “Railroading on the Great Divide” spanned some 20 minutes, not because it had that many verses but because of his many digressions. Those included: a remarkable baseball poem about the solitude of right field; the state of his Northern California hometown of Nevada City, which he says is being overrun by NARPS--New Age Rural Professionals; and a tale about Solvang, where, he claimed, they have “reinstituted an old Danish custom of burying people on their stomachs with their butts sticking up out of the ground, because the city has a shortage of bicycle racks.”

He spoke of tramps such as Roadmaster (“who taught me to put rubber pockets in my pants so I could steal soup”) and Frying Pan Jack, who had declared in 1927, “If I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work.” He told of Jack’s recent suicide: “He laid himself down on the Amtrak line . . . starved to death.”

Phillips himself spent a couple of years riding the rails, where he collected many of his songs and tales. He learns most of the stories that inform his songs from people he meets in his travels rather than from books, giving them a vibrancy and deeply grained quality. Perhaps the best of the lot was his hauntingly beautiful cowboy ballad “The Goodnight Trail on the Loving Train.” The richly detailed song spoke with humor and compassion of played-out cowboys, looking like “an old torn-out page,” relegated to serving as chuck-wagon cooks:

With your snake oil and herbs and your liniment, too

You can do anything that a doctor can do

Except find a cure for your own goddamn stew

It’s the Goodnight Trail on the Loving Train

Our old woman’s lonesome tonight

His French harp blows like a low-bawling calf

It’s a wonder the wind don’t tear off your skin

And get in there and blow out the light”

Phillips’ untrained, craggy voice is the ideal conduit for such songs, becoming only more naked and immediate when he sang a cappella on the anti-war “Yellow Ribbon.”

“I do wander off into deep water now and and again,” Phillips said, acknowledging the serious content in his work. Some of that content was served with humor, such as his retelling of a speech he gave, immediately preceding that of a business leader, to a group of college students:

“You are about to be told one more time that you are America’s most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources? . . . . They’re going to strip-mine your soul, they’re going to clear-cut your thoughts for the sake of profit, unless you learn to resist, because the profit system follows the path of least resistance, and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked!. . . . Make a break for it, kids! Flee to the wilderness. There’s one inside you if you can find it.”

The challenging core of Phillips’ performance came when he told of returning from the Korean War bitter and enraged. He became a drunk and a tramp for two years before meeting Amnon Hennessey, who persuaded him to become a pacifist. He said he’s still wrestling with the difficult definition of the term Hennessey gave him:

“You come into the world armed to the teeth with an arsenal of weapons, the weapons of privilege--sexual privilege, racial privilege, economic privilege. If you want to be a pacifist, you have to give up not just guns and clubs and knives and hard angry words, but you’re going to have to lay down the weapons of privilege and go into the world completely disarmed.”

As he does with all his shows, Phillips closed with a sing-along version of “Hallelujah I’m a Bum,” which he has taken to calling the new national anthem.