Garbage!

One of the many wonderful things about being a folk and family music performer is singing ‘sing-alongs’ with our audiences. It’s definitely a requirement for playing songs with kids, ... less so for a folk-singer, ... but still, there’s nothing quite as fun and dear as a room full of humans lifting our voices together. This video is from 1977 when I opened a show for Kenny Loggins at UC San Diego. I closed my set with Bill Steele’s song about ‘garbage’. It’s way fun to sing because my version of it is what I call ‘a scream-along’! Feel free to scream along with us! GARBAGE Mr. Thompson calls the waiter, F#m Orders steak and baked po-tater, Then he leaves the bone and gristle, And he never eats the skin. C#7 The busboy comes and takes it, With a cough contaminates it, Then he throws it in a can with coffee Grinds and sardine tins. F#m A truck comes by on Friday C#7 And carts it all away. D7 And a thousand trucks just like it, G#7 Are converging on the bay! C#7 Cho: Garbage! (GARBAGE!), Garbage! (GARBAGE!) F#m We’re filling up the sea with garbage! (GARBAGE!) F#m-C#7 Garbage! (GARBAGE!), Garbage! (GARBAGE!) C#7 What will we do when there’s C#7 No place left to put all of the garbage? (GARBAGE!) C#7-F#m Mr. Johnson starts his Cadillac, Winds it up the freeway track Leaving friends and neighbors in a ‘Hydro-carbon’ haze. He’s joined by lots of smaller cars, All sending gases to the stars There to form a seething cloud That hangs for thirty days While the sun licks down upon it With its ultra-violet tongues It turns to smog and settles down Right inside your lungs! Cho: Garbage! (GARBAGE!), Garbage! (GARBAGE!) We’re filling up our lungs with garbage! (GARBAGE!) Garbage, (GARBAGE!), Garbage, (GARBAGE!) What will we do when there’s Nothing left to breathe but garbage? (GARBAGE!) Getting home and taking off his shoes, He settles down with the evening news While the kids do homework , With the T.V. in one ear. While Superman for the thousandth time, Sells talking dolls and conquers crime, They dutifully learn the date of Birth of Paul Revere. In the paper there’s a piece About the mayor’s middle name, And he gets it done in time to watch The all-star Bingo Game! Cho: Garbage! (GARBAGE!), Garbage! (GARBAGE!) We’re filling up our minds with garbage! (GARBAGE!) Garbage, (GARBAGE!)Garbage, (GARBAGE!) What will we do when there’s Nothing left to sing about, nothing left to talk about Nothing left to look like, and nothing left to smell like, Nothing left to be, … but garbage?! (GARBAGE!) Written by Bill Steele, ©1973, Chinga Music Ltd On ‘Peter Alsop’ – www.peteralsop.com This concert happened 50 year ago, and since then, ... we’ve been overrun and overloaded with excess packaging for our food, our plastic bottles and individually wrapped apples, extra-large bulk store quantity boxes. We didn’t have many recycling bins back then, and now they’re being phased out because we have too much plastic waste in the US that companies no longer value it as a recycle-able resource. Alana Semuels wrote an article in 2019 in The Atlantic Magazine entitled “Is This The End of Recycling?” We’re consuming more and more stuff, and now that other countries won’t take our papers and plastics anymore, all our discarded stuff ends up in the trash, or the ocean and our water. Our municipalities face two choices: pay higher rates to get rid of our recycling overflow, or throw it all away. Most choose the latter, because we can’t afford to be environmentally responsible. And maybe you’ve heard, ... there’s an area in the middle of the Pacific ocean, between California/Mexico and Hawaii where there’s a high concentration of plastic waste. Last time I heard, the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ was 1.6 million square kilometers and growing. Fortunately, there are young activists trying to reduce the amount of plastic waste produced, so it won’t end up in our oceans or as micro-plastics in our bodies! Many of our weather reports include something called the AQI or Air Quality Index. Some days our AQI numbers are healthy for us, but increasingly we face numbers that are unhealthy for sensitive groups, or very unhealthy for everyone! Recently this has included smoke from the plethora of wild fires blazing in the West and dust generated by drought. Perhaps the most powerful verse of Bill Steele’s song, .is the one about ‘filling our minds with garbage’! If that could be heeded, ... we could actually focus on what’s going on in our world; then, instead of teaching children in schools ‘what to think’ so they can past a test, we could be teaching them ‘HOW’ to think!’ We need their new little brains to address some of our most critical issues facing us today! Instead of buying and swallowing corporate propaganda about our, need for any kind of jobs (regardless of what’s being produced), ... we could give people jobs making solar and wind power more available so that everyone could benefit from renewable energies. We could unglue from our cel phones and get out on the land to support our indigenous water-defenders, our youth climate activists, and find ways to slow down the huge increase in our human population that puts such demands on our finite resources. So yes, ... my audience and I had a great time screaming along together, and building community like that creates opportunities for us to get other people’s attention! We have an election coming up soon. ... and we need to organize with each other to go out and make sure our votes count! There is some genius to the art of putting deep ideas into a fun, musical format. We listen, we think, we stir the pot, we chew on ideas, and then we make an effort to see what we can come up with! Let’s find the missing puzzle-pieces, ... so we can make caring about others, ... important again! Bye for now! Thanks for subscribing! It’s public so feel free to ‘re-stack’ it or share it with anyone who might find my posts helpful. Check out my audio podcasts here: Peter Alsop’s SONGS TO CHEW And you can find my CDs, DVDs & Songbooks at: Bandcamp.com. I’d love to hear from you! Send a comment, or ask questions, and if you're not a Subscriber please click the Subscribe button. It’s free! And you can always reach me at [email protected]. You don’t have to be a ‘paid’ subscriber to get my posts. Everyone gets ‘em, … some folks send in money to support my work, which I appreciate. In either case, I’m glad you’re here! Thanks for spreading the word and sharing with your friends. Bye for now Get full access to Peter Alsop’s Substack at peteralsop.substack.com/subscribe