Somewhere in the mid-’60s, the blues part of the folk scare split off and took on a role separate from that of artists like Woody Guthrie, Utah Phillips and Dave Van Ronk. Willi Carlisle is an angry third generation descendent of the folk side of that split. He covers Guthrie, Phillips and Van Ronk in his repertoire. His best-known song is “Cheap Cocaine,” an atypical ode to bad drugs, but much of his repertoire bursts out of his anger at today’s society in general.
“I’m angry that the kind of mandate we’ve created to live in the United States involves so much toil. I’m angry at the destruction of collective bargaining for people. I’m angry that we haven’t been able to handle an immigration crisis that gives people a pathway to American citizenship. I’m angry at the destruction of the social safety net that the disenchanted social workers have created during the Great Society. I’m angry that we have a listless generation of the sort of doomsters amongst us. Being in academia (graduating in 2008) made me so furious that I kind of quit and started living in the car and writing folk songs.”
I asked him if Woody Guthrie had lived in the era of social media, does he think his writing would be different. And does he identify with him?
“Sure. I identify with Guthrie massively. I’m sure his writing would be different. I’m sure he’d be an avid user of it in his way. If you imagine that he was somebody who grew up at a time when there was such proliferation of newspapers, it makes sense for him to publish the amount of work that he did even though he probably didn’t fancy himself as a writer first.
“It’s sort of my understanding he fancied himself a songwriter. So, yeah, I think he probably would have used it pretty prolifically. I wonder what trouble he would have had. Then again, he didn’t spend as much time being as self-critical, I think, as people with the folk movement have done.”
“Cheap Cocaine” went viral on the internet and now accounts for the same number of listens as all the other songs in Willi’s catalog.
I been up all night on the cheap cocaine Trynna make it better but it's always the same I been up all night, I been starin' at the sky And I'm still lonely but I couldn't tell you Why
“Because of Spotify and those streaming services, that’s the first song that pops up anytime you Google my name. Would I like that to be the case? No! Can I ever remove it? Absolutely not.
“What do we have to do? We have to rename it, or it becomes a permanent part of a story of who you are without your permission. I think what Utah Phillips had to do with ‘Rock Salt and Nails,’ still probably his biggest legacy is amongst people who don’t know the rest of his work, right? Your choice is either to abandon it entirely, and I think someone should have choice words for me and my lifestyle in general. I really do. I’m not an anarchist, but I wouldn’t want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member.”
So, who is Willi Carlisle? “This is just the music economy I was born into. I know it no other way. At least I can say this. Instead of any record executive telling me or an A & R person telling me this is a good song and you should play this, someone uploaded it onto YouTube and a million people watched. At least it’s in the public domain.”
Willi has a liberal arts college degree. “Those institutions haven’t caught up with a place like equity, inclusion – or even realize that especially higher education as evidence of the protests that are being beaten down at universities right now don’t have the kindness, equality and goodness as a kind of mandate.
“They’re gatekeepers, too, and if you grew up in the age of the internet, you’ve seen so much of that information gatekeeping fall away by the instantaneous availability of all information.
“So, that combined with the sort of ennui that comes with the very thing that gives you your information – the vortex of the internet also being built by corporations that feel like a lot of machines instead of a library – I think has kind of made me who am.”
So, who is this guy? And why am I writing about him? Is he a creative genius ready to shake up the status quo of genres like folk and blues? Or is he a scab that won’t heal?
Yes!
“I would say I’m a writer with strong roots in the folk tradition. I learned in a pretty vernacular tradition, of which there aren’t that many left around right now. A combination of old-time music, revisionists and true originals from around the Ozarks, but that’s also blended with a fair amount of reading. So, somewhere between the contemporary Americana scene and the hardcore traditional scene is I guess where I’d put myself.
“Add a couple of American lit classes and an obsession with Whitman, and Melville, and you might get something similar to what I do. I’ve been making a living at this in various capacities for about a decade, but I’ve also in that time written plays and kind of performance pieces, monologues, and one-man plays for myself and others. Am I pinning myself down?”
Willi Carlislie’s latest album is Critterland, and his current tour includes a stop at Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs, New York on Wednesday, May 22nd. “Caffe Lena has been on my bucket list for about as long as I’ve been looking. What I’m gonna try to do at Caffe Lena is not play a lot of songs by people who’ve played there that I admire. It’s gonna be what I want to do.”
