The Page Front

Probably one of the best albums of the '80s is the Moving Hearts debut, Moving Hearts. Two songs on that album - 'Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Russian Roulette, and 'Landlord' - come from the pen of Californian-born folk-singer, Jim Page.

Jim Page grew up in a, "real straight-line white people's community. Neat lawns, two cars, colour TV sets, everything." His father was a NASA engineer, who taught his son a Pentagon-inspired version of the American Dream. His son rebelled and headed off the New York in 1970, hoping to get California out of his blood and to get to the centre of the American folk world - Greenwich Village.

About a year later he headed to Seattle with some friends and remained there until 1977. That year he did his first overseas gig at the Cambridge Folk Festival. His first tour of Ireland was in 1979, supporting Planxty.

He explains how Moving Hearts came to use his songs. "Well, Christy first heard 'Hiroshima' at Ballisodare in 1979. There was a strong anti-nuclear movement here, focused around Carnsore Point and the proposed uranium mining up in Donegal. Christy heard the song and liked it and thought it would be a good thing to do for the movement. Which was basically what I had written it for, which was for people to have. So, he learned it, and I think he did it a few times with Planxty. And he did it a few times on his own, and with Donal. And then when the Hearts were formed it became part of their repertoire. And then there was a new law being proposed which would make it better for landlords and worse for tenants. So, Christy wanted to do my 'Landlord' song."

The success of Moving Hearts and the use of his songs, made him a popular figure on the folk circuit. However, as he puts it, "Things were going real well but I didn't have any personal life. My family back in the States had fallen apart. I needed to drop out for my own mental state. So I did. I went back home. And I basically laid real low, just in Seattle. Played a few gigs here and there. Travelled just a little bit. And I rekindled contacts with people that I'd known over the years, so that I could find myself again. So that I could recreate my roots, so to speak."

It would be nine years - September 1991 to be exact - until Jim Page would be back on Irish soil again. However, as this article goes to press, he is just completing a successful 20-gig tour of the country. (He plays Whelans, Dublin on the 10th October.)

The Sun Of Bob Dylan

Like many folk singers, Page's early influences were to be found in the Blues. "My first inspiration was Lightnin' Hopkins," he explains "It was amazing what he did. His guitar and his voice were one unit. Then I discovered Woodie Guthrie."

Of course, to be a folk singer in the '60s, was to live under the sun of Bob Dylan. Jim Page remembers the first time he heard him. "I was riding in the car with my brother. And 'Desolation Row' came on the radio. And I had never heard him before. I had never heard of him. And my brother pulled the car over to the side of the road and said, you have to hear this. And we sat there listening to the whole song. It was like my mind was blown. Because it was a song that was not written for anybody's approval at all. That was amazing! This guy didn't care. He would stick his head right out on the chopping block and say, this is it. Go ahead and cut off my head if you want. It was amazing!"

Dylan exploded the '60s, and it is unlikely his like will be seen again. However, this is the corporate '90s, and many would say that the age of the protest/political singer - although Dylan was much, much more than that - is, like the '60s, well and truly gone. Jim Page would not agree. "If you want to call it the corporate '90s," he states, "I would say that protest/ political song writing has more relevance than ever. Because it's the corporations who are killing us. It's the corporations who have fouled the waters; that have created a nice, alarming ozone hole; that have de-forested large parts of the world. You could go on and on."

Maybe the singers are still here. But is anyone listening? "They are," he states enthusiastically. "And they do listen. And we're not going to have another Bob Dylan because that was 1962; those times are gone. It's going to be something else. It'll probably be a woman this time. It's not going to be the same; it never is. People are very willing to listen, and listen all the time. And a lot of people are talking. The way I look at it is that history makes demands and people rise to the occasion, either intentionally or unintentionally. We have to hold our culture accountable to us. We can't let it get away from us. The various corporate moguls of the world can do what they want, but we have to take our culture back."

In many ways, it is artists like Sinéad O'Connor who carry on the torch. On his 1993 album More Than Anything Else In The World, he wrote a song for her - 'Sinéad'. "She first got my attention when she did a concert in the east coast somewhere, a few years ago," he explains. "And they put this enormous American flag on the back of the stage. And she demanded they take it down. And certain right wingers got all upset: 'How dare you come to our country and take our flag down!' And her comment was: 'I come here to do music, not to support anybody's nationalism. Take the flag down. And then she does the thing on Saturday Night Live, where there is the picture ripped in half."

He goes on to explain how it was such an irony that the $80 per seat, old-age hippies/new-age yuppies, booed her at the Dylan gig. "They bought Dylan's radicalness, which is safe now because it's old," he explains. "And now this new, radical person comes up . . . It just exposes the lie. I think it was wonderful what she did because she put her entire career on the line. And I don't know of very many people who would do that. She has a lot to lose."

Another artist who Jim Page admires at the moment is Native American, John Trudell. However, the musical genre which excites him most is Rap, and particularly rappers like Paris and Public Enemy. (Paris' 1992 album, Sleeping With The Enemy, (Scarface/Flying Records), is well worth checking out.) "Paris considers himself a Black Panther," Page explains. "But he also considers himself a Muslim. And the Panthers were communists; they were Marxist/Leninist. So it's like a different amalgam of things coming on in the '90s. It's like extremely interesting.

"The thing that fascinates me most about rap," he elaborates, "is you've got Public Enemy doing things like Fear Of A Black Planet, which is wow! That's excellent, that's fucking excellent! A lot of those CDs go platinum without getting any airplay. So it is authentic. That is authentic. That gets passed around from hand to hand, party to party, automobile to automobile. You don't have to worry about a melody. They get together and they make these really clever… They're like radio plays. Like you're talking about Paris' 'Bush Killa'; you've got all the sound effects in there. You hear the police sirens and the people yelling and screaming and you have the gun shots. It's a radio play. It's poetry. It's talk. It's politics. And it's a play.

"Oh god, it's wonderful! And it's danceable! All at the same time! It's brilliant. I'd love to do it. It's not my culture… But then I heard Marxman, and I thought maybe something like this could be done? I'd love to do a rap thing one of these days, I really would. You know, I could tell myself that rap is not my cultural roots, and therefore I couldn't do it. But that's like hiding. Because it's popular, whether the status quo wants it to be or not, means that the door is open for all of us, whether we do rap or not, to stick our necks out and sing and talk and write about reality. It has to be done; the door is open now."

Mussolini with a crucifix

It's a funny thing, but for many people, if they can't change the world, then they don't want to change anything. Only a few people per century 'change the world' and even their achievements have invariably been based on the work of what countless other people did before them. When someone tells you that you 'can't change the world', what they're probably trying to tell you is: don't embarrass me by trying to change anything, because if you do succeed - even in some small way - then you'll expose my apathy. Jim Page's music may not have changed the world, but he believes that one of his songs just might have changed somebody's mind.

"I was playing with my band, Zero Tolerance, a couple of years ago," he tells me "And my guitar player's mother was a Christian fundamentalist. In the States that's a different thing; it can be quite dangerous." (Has he heard of Youth Defence!?) "And his sister is also a fundamentalist. And his sister had come to see the gig. And she was going to vote for Pat Robertson. Pat Robertson is an extreme right winger, a very dangerous man - Mussolini with a crucifix. Anyway, I had a song called 'Fundamental Frenzy', which is about how they operate. And we did that song, and when the gig was over, she came up to me and actually told me that it made her think. And she said that she wanted to go off and think about it because she didn't know if she was going to vote for Pat Robertson anymore."

Although Jim Page sees an American right wing which is growing stronger by the day and baying for power, he believes, that overall the arrival of Clinton into the White House has been a good thing. "The Republicans talk good in terms of banks and international currency exchange," he explains. "The Democrats talk good in terms of civil liberties and freedom. Which gives people ideas. The Republican lid has been on the country for 12 years, tightening everything down. The Democrats come in, loosen a few screws, and people go wild. They come out. The country's going wild now. People are talking and demonstrating and doing all this wild stuff. And if anything happens and the right wing comes back in, there's going to be hell to pay. Because all these people are going to be out in the public eye."

Whatever happens, Jim Page is optimistic that the lid will be kept off. As far as he's concerned, "There's a mood of change in the country. The focus seems to be on autonomy and self-reliance." Let's hope that he's right.