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The Past Didn't Go Anywhere

By Michael Wolcott

"I always thought that anybody who tol me I 'couldn't live in the past' was trying to get me to forget something that, if I remembered it, would get them in serious trouble."

- Utah Phillips

A few miles east of Flagstaff, on an island of ponderosa pines bounded by Interstate 40 and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad, sits an old hobo camp. There, amid the moldy carpeting and sun-bleached Thunderbird bottles, someone has placed the bench seat of an abandoned pickup truck. It faces north toward the San Francisco Peaks.
I visit this place once or twice a year to stare at the mountains, watch trains creep up the grade, and imagine the anonymous souls who have wandered through. For all I know, the Joads stopped there when they fled the Dust Bowl.
Later this month I'll walk out from town to perform a bit of ritual by the tracks. That rotting truck seat will be christened the "Utah Phillips Memorial Sofa." Its namesake, Bruce Duncan Phillips, died last spring at age 73. He would have liked the spot. He might have even camped there.
A folksinger, railroad tramp and storyteller, "Utah" Phillips was a political radical of the old school. He bummed and strummed across the country for decades, soaking up America and serving it back to us the way Woody Guthrie did, showing us our great Western lands and our flawed but hopeful society through an open boxcar door.
He billed himself jokingly as "the Golden Voice of the Great Southwest," but "national treasure" would have been more accurate. Phillips was a white-bearded ambassador from a mythic past, a walking archive of outsider western Americana. His concerts were equal parts music, comedy, folklore, political agitation, and history lesson.
A self-described anarchist, Phillips was a lifelong member of the INDUSTRIAL Workers of the World - the "Wobblies." The early 20th-century radical labor movement inspired much of his best work. He invariably peppered his shows with old Wobbly songs like "Solidarity Forever" and "Dump the Bosses off Your Back."
Did that make him an anachronism? Phillips didn't care. He once put it this way: "It's nice to know there are some things in early 21st-century post-industrial culture that don't change very fast. I am one of those."
Today's injustices, he knew, are rooted in the deep soil of history. "I've always thought," he would say, "that anybody who told me I ?couldn't live in the past' was trying to get me to forget something that, if I remembered it, would get them in serious trouble."
So he made it his job to not forget. His own songs - often hilarious, but always serious - celebrated the nation's beauty and skewered its stupidities and cruelty. He liked to quote Mark Twain: "Loyalty to my country, always; loyalty to my government when it deserves it."
He took audiences to windy passes along the Great Divide and make-up yards on the Denver-Rio Grande, to alleys and flophouses haunted by broken-down cowboys and pension-less, used-up laborers on the skids.
His life's work drew from that bottom rung. The grizzled hobos and aging union organizers of his songs were his best teachers. He called them "the elders."
Born to radical unionists in 1935, Phillips's life could have been invented by John Steinbeck. He came of age in Salt Lake City (hence the stage name) then hit the road, collecting stories, songs, and poems. Later, there was a stint as an Army private in Korea, one of two great turning points in his life:
"I went into the Army hoping to learn a trade," he said. "Instead, I learned to be a pacifist."
Messed up by war, he returned to the States in the late '50s and rode the rails, drunk most of the time. Eventually, he settled out in Salt Lake at the Joe Hill House, a homeless shelter run by Ammon Hennacy, a "Catholic-anarchist pacifist draft-dodger in two world wars; a tax refuser, vegetarian one-man revolutionary."
This was the second watershed. Phillips stayed for eight years to work at Joe Hill House. Hennacy - another "elder" - would become his mentor.
Schools, Phillips learned, teach "the history of the people who owned the wealth of the country, but none of the history of the people who created it." The elders' forgotten stories offered a necessary corrective: lessons "more powerful, more passionate - and ultimately more useful - than the best damn history book I ever read."
As new generations are finding out, you could say the same thing about the work of Utah Phillips. So long, buddy, it's been good to know ya.

Michael Wolcott is a writer, ex-Forest Service wilderness ranger, and former gifted child who lives in Flagstaff.