MOVIES : FAMILY : Hey, Kids, Look Who’s Back : The pied piper of children’s music dropped out three years ago, but Raffi has returned with a renewed focus on what he does best

Baby beluga in the deep blue sea,

Swim so wild and you swim so free . . .

Whatever happened to Raffi?

Raffi, the first children’s music superstar, whose gold- and platinum-selling songs about baby beluga whales and global unity--plus some shrewd marketing strategies--earned him such screaming, clapping adulation from small fans that he became known as the Springsteen of the preschool set.

Raffi, the velvet-voiced, neatly bearded troubadour with big, sad brown eyes who found unprecedented success in a nearly invisible market, paving the way for the current boom. A boom that now makes it de rigueur for celebrities from Merle Haggard to Little Richard to record children’s music.

Raffi, the former folk singer, born Raffi Cavoukian in 1948, who began performing for children in the ‘70s at the suggestion of his mother-in-law and was awarded the Order of Canada in 1983 for his contributions to the children of his adopted country. (He has lived there since age 10, when his Armenian family emigrated from Cairo.)

At the end of 1989, at the height of his popularity in both the United States and Canada, Raffi made the surprise announcement that he would no longer perform or record music for children. His farewell concert at Carnegie Hall reportedly earned scalpers $300 a ticket.

Yet there was Raffi headlining on Jan. 19 in the Inaugural Celebration for Children at the Kennedy Center, singing his songs to a wildly enthusiastic crowd of youngsters and their parents. He was joined in his old concert sign-off, “This Little Light of Mine,” by such luminaries as Mister Rogers, Kermit the Frog and President Clinton, who chaffed him about his loud tie.

And now, Raffi’s ambitious 50-city U.S. family concert tour rolls on after beginning earlier this month. Locally, he’ll be appearing at the Spreckels Theatre in San Diego on Thursday and Friday and at the Universal Amphitheatre on Saturday. And he’s got the “songwriting bug again” for a new family album.

The increased competition in a field now rife with big names doesn’t worry him. “I don’t think about it much. I just do what I do,” he said in a recent interview from his Vancouver headquarters.

A spokesman for his label, MCA Records, is clearly happy to see him back on the family circuit. MCA is “absolutely involved” in the concert tour, said Randy Miller, senior vice president of marketing. There will be “retail promotions, point-of-purchase materials and advertising,” and the label is “aggressively marketing his entire catalogue in 1993.”

So where has Raffi been for the last three years?

Working through the kinds of issues confronting many forty-somethings: job burnout, divorce, midlife Angst , a crisis of conscience, fear for the future, a career miscalculation.

“Part of it was exhaustion,” Raffi said. After “12 intense years, it was time for me to take a breather.” Then 41, he was worried about becoming artistically stagnant and saw no way to grow while performing for concert crowds that were increasingly dominated by members of the diaper brigade.

“The show was never really intended for them,” he said. “It was intended to be for children who were at least old enough to clap and sing along.” Yet it was reported that even pregnant women were attending his concerts for the benefit of their fetuses.

His 16-year marriage to Debi Pike, a kindergarten teacher and his closest collaborator, came to an end. He is “very grateful” to his ex-wife and former colleagues for their contributions to his “past achievements--I couldn’t have done without them,” but the breakup was a difficult time, he said. He takes pride in the fact that he got through it “totally clean.”

“I could have turned to drugs or alcohol or any of that kind of stuff,” he said, but he “chose to feel the full weight of what I was going through” and threw himself into environmental activism.

One light, one sun, one sun lighting every one. . . .

*

Raffi’s songs for children reflected his belief in global harmony, but his intense involvement in ecological issues and his desire to galvanize adults to act began, he said, when he was told why the number of beluga whales in the St. Lawrence River had drastically declined.

“Their bodies were so riddled with toxins that they could be classified as hazardous waste sites,” he said. Hearing information like that from around the globe gave him a sense of urgency to do more as an artist and an activist. “I couldn’t not do what I did.”

What he did was to make a career change, spurred by personal turmoil and what he felt to be a righteous anger.

In 1990, after he left A&M; Records to sign with MCA, he recorded “Evergreen, Everblue,” a cautionary album about the endangered Earth. Intended as his crossover to adult music, it was a mix of Raffi-esque soft rock, soft reggae and soft jazz that paid homage to the Earth’s beauty and scolded listeners for allowing its despoliation.

What’s the matter with us? . . . Why are we polluting our children?

Radio stations wouldn’t buy Raffi as an artist for adults, and the songs got no airplay; MTV didn’t run the music videos. Unsuspecting parents who brought the album home were taken aback by the new, angry Raffi.

Another complication arose. When he signed with MCA, Raffi, following his conscience, made headlines for being the first recording artist to stipulate that all his albums be packaged in the more environmentally correct jewel-box format. Most U.S. retailers, however, still firmly wedded to the long box, wouldn’t carry the CD. (Ironically, by April of this year, all CDs in the United States must be packaged in jewel boxes.)

“The album did present some challenges, not just with packaging, but musically as well,” Miller acknowledged. “It was difficult for people to accept a children’s artist’s crossover into adult music.” He added, however, that “Evergreen” has “ended up being as good a selling album as any in his catalogue.”

*

Raffi had yet another rude awakening. He was no longer earning raves from local and national media. Impatience, puzzlement and sarcasm greeted his environmental jeremiads, and he was castigated for turning his back on his youngest fans. Some accused of him of arrogance; others thought he had lost his grip entirely.

“I would talk for a long time about the stuff that I was actually doing and excited about,” Raffi complained, “and they would hark back to my former glory and contrast that with my current challenges.”

The perception stuck, however. “It kind of shook people up that he appeared to be falling apart,” said Jill Jarnow, author of “All Ears,” a parent-teacher guide to children’s music. “People like to think of him as solid and reliable. It was an unfortunate lapse.” Nonetheless, Jarnow is sympathetic about the singer’s need for “personal introspection” and welcomes his return.

“I thought he had too much of himself invested in children’s music. And he was so determined to prove that it was satisfying I couldn’t believe he was going to leave it all behind. It makes sense to me that he is coming back to what he did so well.”

Many never knew that he had given it up in the first place, of course. Barbara Breslow, a Long Island, N.Y., pre-kindergarten teacher who uses Raffi’s old songs in her classroom, said that although she had been disappointed with the singer’s decision to drop out of the children’s market, “it wasn’t as if he was missing. At this point he has so many records out that as far as the children are concerned he was still with them.”

The turning point for Raffi was his visit to the Earth Summit in Rio last summer with teens from Canada’s Environmental Children’s Organization. After an impassioned speech given by one 12-year-old before summit delegates, he said, “I was reminded that children have a way of speaking their truth that has a power all its own. I thought, ‘I need to support this.’ ”

“I think he’s realized how effective he can be with young people,” said Patrick Davidson, the executive producer for the Inaugural Celebrations for Children and Youth. Davidson, who had previously worked with Raffi at the Disney Channel, was responsible for inviting him to perform in the January children’s celebration. Raffi readily agreed.

“I think that’s his best opportunity for getting his message across. ‘Baby Beluga’ is as powerful and important an environmental song as songs that are much more blatant.”

Raffi agrees that the youth market may be, after all, the best place for his activism and art, and he is no longer fighting the “children’s entertainer” label. “I’ve worked all that through,” he said.

“Anger is a fuel, not a place to be stuck in. How can we live in harmony with the Earth,” he added obliquely, “if we can’t live in harmony with each other? And how can we live with each other unless we can live with ourselves?”

*

Of his perceived defection three years ago, Raffi says now that he “understood people’s negative reaction--they felt so strongly about the friend that they had that when the relationship seemed to change arbitrarily, quite a few people didn’t know what to make of it.”

Still, today’s Raffi, relaxed and quick to laugh, makes no apologies for his ecological concerns.

“We don’t have a minute to lose,” he said. It’s not just the destruction of rain forests and pollution of the oceans either. There is an “interconnectedness” to our “home environment, psychic environment, emotional environment, to a woman’s ability to walk down the street in a degree of safety--it’s all of that. The ‘environment’ is ourselves. It’s what binds us together.”

In November, Raffi was appointed goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Environment Programme, and he is a member of the Orion Center for Children’s Environmental Literature. His renewed contract with Random House requires that his songbooks be published on “high-quality recycled paper that has not been bleached with chlorine.”

Those kinds of messages, softened and sweetened, are interwoven into his new concerts. The old “shake my sillies out, wiggle my waggles away” ditties are there, but so are public appeals, some call them preachments, for ecological responsibility.

He has linked the concerts with Kids for Saving Earth, an international grass-roots environmental youth organization started in 1989 by 11-year-old Clinton Hill of Minnesota, who died later that year as a result of a brain tumor. At each tour stop, Raffi is joined by local members of the group for a sing-along; the first performance of his weeklong run in April at the Gershwin Theatre in New York will be a benefit for the organization.

“I feel we are witnessing a new generation of kids; I call them the Earth generation,” he said. “They’re the first ones to know that their planet is being endangered and that they are integral to the healing of the planet.”

He wishes that his music would “shake the politicians’ sillies out and get us to reprioritize for the generations to come.”

Raffi’s new concerts are scheduled for evenings for a broader appeal and are not “specifically geared to the very young child,” he said. There’s a feeling, he said, of “celebration, humor, corny jokes--that plays as well for the 10-year-old as it does for the 5, and of course for the 80-year-old and the 50-year-old.”

Under age 3 is too young, he said, for a show that depends on audience participation: “Eighteen months old (in) a theater with 2,000 or 3,000 people in it--that’s not the place for that child. If the show doesn’t work for them, then it doesn’t work for anybody (around them).”

Norma Feshbach, a UCLA professor specializing in child development, agrees: “I’m going further. I think it’s probably too overwhelming an experience for children even at 3 and 4.” It’s not the presentation itself, she said; it’s “the array of stimulation, the clapping, the intensity. Even though they may seem responsive . . . there’s a real question as to how they’re assimilating and interpreting it.”

Author Jarnow thinks Raffi’s targeting of the older child is “very important. Children seem to grow up so fast in our culture that people think that they’ve outgrown his music before they really have.”

*

Raffi, who talks of wanting to combat “soul erosion” in the young, said that he is “energized” by the positive feeling in his concerts now. And personally, he said, “my life is very full. I don’t have one special person in my life, but I have so much love right now that I feel very blessed. . . .”

He joked about wanting to get the word out, however, that he’s “as handsome as ever.”

Can children count on Raffi’s change of heart to last?

Producer Davidson believes so. “I spent time (with him) through the whole odyssey,” he said, “and I think he’s very much at peace with himself now, and as a consequence is even more powerful. He feels such a responsibility for his music and his message. He got away from that magical place, and now he’s come back.”