From ANDRAS JONES: JIM PAGE has known DAVID ROVICS since he was just a pup (songwriter-wise). Jim’s also a veteran of the Radio8Ball show and you can hear one of the songs he recorded for us at the end of this episode. Those outside of the northwestern activist circles may say what so many people say when I tell them Jim’s been a guest…”You mean the guy from Led Zeppelin?”. No, I explain, Jim’s been around just as long as the guitar wielding Crowleyian from the UK, but while Jimmy made his bones as six string sideman to bands like The Who and The Kinks before attaining international stardom as a legendary plagiarist and groupie abuser, Jim Page has been writing mind blowing songs of conscience and rebuke while helping to make street performing legal in his home of Seattle and encouraging a generation of activist songwriters who have had the good fortune to share a song circle, a stage or street corner with him to walk the righteous path of the activist troubadour. Unfortunately, as David Rovics addresses in the most recent episode of his own podcast (below) the economy for troubadours, not just of the righteous activist variety but even for the most pop minded among us, has been dwindled and diminished practically to the point of non-existence for those outside the inner circle of the record industry bubble. This, as David points out, mirrors the degradation of other industries that once nourished our citizenry and communities. I highly recommend checking out his podcast below, subscribing to it, and following along.

The obvious sync surrounding today’s randomly chosen Pop Oracle song from the R8B app performed by the band AMELIA is that this band is from Portland, the city where David currently lives. The band appeared on Radio8Ball on KAOS back in 2006 and we were heartbroken to learn of the passing in 2011 of singer Teisha Helgerson from chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Their song, “The Last Pariah” is a song about the solidarity of suffering. Let’s sing it together, shall we?

“I guess I learned how it feels”.

POP ORACLE Song of The Day (February 3, 2019): AMELIA “The Last Pariah”

East Kilbride

Jet fighters bombed the palace, we all watched it on TV
The 11th of September, 1973
All across the world people cried in vain
As we heard stories of the people being tortured and slain
Stories of the workers, shop stewards and the rest
Being slaughtered at the new dictator’s behest
Labor groups condemned it, said we were on the workers’ side
Including all the engineers of East Kilbride
People organized a boycott of General Pinochet
Who had overthrown Allende with a Hawker Hunter jet
Then a few months later, March of ’74
Bob Fulton came to work at the Rolls Royce factory floor
He looked at the orders that had come in that day
And found crates with jet engines from Chile
Jet engines from the Air Force across the ocean wide
Sent to be repaired in East Kilbride
It didn’t take a minute for Fulton and his mates
To come to the decision that they would not touch these crates
Soon four thousand Rolls Royce workers voted they agreed
To stand with the Chileans in their hour of need
Management decried them, the Tories screamed and cussed
But the Hawker Hunter engines were left to sit and rust
Nowhere else on Earth were workers qualified
To repair the engines sitting there in East Kilbride
It’s often hard to know if you’ve changed anything a whit
But decades later a Chilean general would admit
For a time in Santiago there were no fighters in the sky
Because the whole Chilean Air Force had not one jet that could fly
They may not have changed the world, this group of union engineers
But these crates of metal sat corroding for four years
So here’s to British labor, how for four years it tried
To do what could be done from East Kilbride.

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