Fronted by the nervous guitar and earnest vocals of Richard Barone, the Bongos grabbed the torch from the Talking Heads to light the way into the 1980s for a second generation of eye-opening New York bands that sounded nothing like their predecessors. Dedicated to the proposition that the tired and huddled masses could still find comfort at CBGB (or at Maxwell’s across the Hudson River), the Bongos ruled the greater-NYC roost. A stimulating succession of solo releases, topped by this year’s Glow (Bar/None), leaves no doubt that Barone is still hitting on all cylinders, a vital and imaginative force in today’s music scene when most of his contemporaries have fallen by the wayside. Barone will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.
Barone: I’ve known about Pete Seeger and his music all my life. In the way that you feel you know an artist personally. So, when I was producing a concert at City Winery this past July to benefit the clean-up efforts for the horrendous oil spill in the Gulf, he was the first artist who came to mind. For one thing, Pete Seeger symbolizes both the power of song and the environmental movement itself with his famous clean-up of the Hudson River in the late ’60s, aboard the beautiful Sloop Clearwater. Pete, along with collaborator Lorre Wyatt, had just written a new song referencing the spill, which he sang to me on the phone and then debuted at the concert. The producer in me couldn’t resist asking Pete if we could record the song. I heard the new, gentle, banjo-driven anthem as a wake up call for the ages. The phone rang. “I want to sing it on the Sloop Clearwater,” the 91-year-old voice on the other end proclaimed. “Then that’s where we’ll do it, Pete,” was my quick reply. With my ace collaborator Matthew Billy and brilliant cinematographer Damien Drake we boarded the famous sloop on a beautiful Saturday morning in mid-August, sailing up the Hudson while we recorded and filmed Pete surrounded by his friends as they sang, “What we do now, you and me, will affect eternity/God’s counting on me, God’s counting on you/Hopin’ we’ll all pull through/Me and you.”
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM8QK4oM3Jk
One reply on “Richard Barone’s Got A Secret: Pete Seeger”
Barone states that ..God’s counting… was debuted at the City Winery for the Gulf Oil Spill benefit which is untrue ! Pete actually introduced this song at the Beacon Sloop Club on July 2nd, two days after he and Lorre wrote it and I ,Mark McCarroll, videoed the event which Barone posted on you-tube.Among other venues Pete also performed this song at the’fracking protest’ at the Capital in Albany prior to the City Winery which I drove Pete to and where Barone said he had seen it on the news to me. I had also suggested that the song be recorded on the sloop Clearwater to Barone on August 21 after the Beacon Sloop Club invited me on the sail. My experience with Barone has been unpleasant to the point that Ifeel he ruined a song about God and that he should give agood listen and pratice the lyrics