This is one of the most critical elections of my lifetime, certainly since I was a young man," declares Bruce Springsteen. "It's a matter of the preservation and protection of democracy, of having an open and transparent leadership and sustaining the trust of your citizenry. If you blow that, you've blown it all. I believe that's what's happened with this administration.
"Everybody on this tour is here because there is something in this administration that has reached critical mass," he continues, his grainy voice echoing off the tall ceiling and concrete floor of a Manhattan photography studio. "Hey, it's called Vote for Change -- we're trying to change the current administration. There's no need to be coy about it."
That energy and message are flying throughout the entire building. "We're in a state of emergency," Dave Matthews contends in a restaurant downstairs, explaining why he and his band have signed up for Vote for Change. "I cannot justify not standing up and saying, 'I feel this with every bone in my body: that this country is going in the wrong direction.' Agree or disagree with me -- but don't disagree with my right to say it."
"Think how hard it was a year ago, how hard you were come down upon for criticizing this administration," says Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder on an outdoor terrace overrun with reporters and a TV news crew. "Now you have books full of facts, commissions saying, 'Those people who were dissenting -- they were right.' And what is the only institution more powerful than the United States government, that can actually move it in another direction? American voters."
"This is what people fought and died for," insists R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills, taking Vedder's place at the table as the latter moves on to another interview, "the right to go out and say, 'I don't like what you are doing to my country. I want my country back.' "
Springsteen, Matthews, Vedder and Mills -- along with Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard, Dave Matthews Band violinist Boyd Tinsley and two-thirds of the Dixie Chicks, Emily Robison and Martie Maguire -- have taken over the premises to prepare for the official announcement, in twenty-four hours, of Vote for Change, the biggest, boldest tour of the year. Starting on October 1st, all of the above artists, and nearly a dozen more, will hit battleground states with the explicit purpose of asking their fans to join them on November 2nd in electing John Kerry as the next president of the United States.
Vote for Change is a historic undertaking in a number of respects. It is a milestone in grass-roots campaigning, a whistle-stop invasion of the most deadlocked states in the presidential race by the biggest names in music. It is certainly the most logistically complex rock tour ever mounted: six separate bills hitting select cities in one state on the same night. And Vote for Change marks the first time that many of the artists -- including Matthews, R.E.M., Pearl Jam, the Dixie Chicks and, most prominently, Springsteen -- have ever publicly stumped for a presidential candidate. As part of the August 4th media blitz to announce the tour, Matthews and the Dixie Chicks appeared on the Today show; Springsteen gave a rare television interview, on Nightline, and wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times about his reasons for supporting Kerry.
A lifelong Democrat who cast his first vote for George McGovern in the 1972 race, Springsteen never felt the need to throw his celebrity around before. "If you follow my music for a long period of time," he says, "my views have been pretty clear -- unless you have been determinedly not listening." That changed last year with the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
"Like a lot of people," Springsteen says, "on September 12th [2001], I felt a tremendous wave of unity in the country. And you're pulling for the president. You hope the seriousness of the times brings forth strength and leadership, humility and wisdom. But intentionally or not, the country was misled into the war." Even before the first meetings that led to the creation of Vote for Change, Springsteen planned to do a fall solo tour of swing states.
"There is a reasonable part of my audience that this is going to make very angry," admits Springsteen, who will be going out with the E Street Band and special guests R.E.M., John Fogerty and Bright Eyes. And, he points out, "you can't tell people what to think. You can say, 'Let's think about this together.' "
Vote for Change has no formal or financial ties to the Kerry campaign or to the Democratic National Committee. The shows are presented by MoveOn PAC, an arm of the progressive-activist group MoveOn.org, and net proceeds go to the independent political-action committee America Coming Together. Sources estimate the tour will raise more than $10 million for ACT's voter-mobilization drive. Vote for Change comes on the heels of "A Change Is Going to Come," a pair of rock benefit concerts for Kerry held in New York and Los Angeles this summer. Featuring Dave Matthews Band, Barbra Streisand and John Mellencamp, the shows -- organized by Rolling Stone editor and publisher Jann S. Wenner -- raised more than $12 million for Kerry's campaign.
Electing Kerry and putting George W. Bush out of work are about the only things the Vote for Change artists agree on. In fact, the entire troupe is a lot like the electorate it wants to reach: a motley collection of cultural backgrounds, social values and previous political experiences. As Springsteen puts it, quoting the U2 song "One," "We are all one, we are not the same."
R.E.M. have often written and sung in protest of Republican presidents and American foreign policy, but Mills and singer Michael Stipe both grew up in military families. Matthews is a South African immigrant and naturalized citizen whose allegiance, he says, "has often fallen with the Democratic Party." But his road crew includes "lots of Republicans," and Matthews says he spoke with some of them when he decided to join Vote for Change: "Our touring family is very close. But just as we understand their position, they understand it's our prerogative to use the platform we have built to say whatever we want."
Springsteen is one of the few staunch Democrats on the bill. An informal poll of artists on hand the day before the tour announcement revealed that many were registered to vote as Independents, including Matthews, Tinsley, Maguire and singer-guitarist Ben Gibbard of Pearl Jam's opening act, the Seattle indie-rock group Death Cab for Cutie. "I see the divide between Republicans and Democrats as a giant farce," says Gossard, "because people make liberal and conservative decisions all day long." Gossard is a perfect example: Although he generally votes Democratic, "I'm probably the most Republican guy in Pearl Jam."
Three of the headliners actively supported Ralph Nader's third-party candidacy in 2000: Raitt, Vedder (minus the rest of Pearl Jam) and Browne. "I gotta say, I really like Kerry," Browne says. "But when I look at the Democrats, I'm looking to the right -- they're just closer to me than the Republicans." He recalls his first campaign, as a teenager, when his father got him to canvass their neighborhood for the 1964 Democratic ticket: "I was telling people to vote for Lyndon Johnson because [Republican] Barry Goldwater wanted to bomb North Vietnam. Johnson won and did precisely that.
"That was a heavy lesson: that supporting these guys, telling everybody you believe in them, is a dicey proposition," Browne says. "If the votes that come out of these concerts swing the election, it will be a wake-up call for Democrats to have more courage and heart. We can influence Democrats as a progressive voting bloc."
Although heavily weighted with multiplatinum and classic-rock stars, Vote for Change is a cross-generational enterprise. In addition to Gibbard's band, the rap group Jurassic 5, alt-country mystics My Morning Jacket and blues singer Keb' Mo' represent a demographic that Gibbard, 28, believes has been generally frozen with hopelessness. At a huge Vote for Change photo session the previous evening, he says, he noticed that "with the exception of Stone and Eddie, I was twenty-five years younger than everybody else in the room. All these people lived through the Sixties.They saw how dissent could change things. My generation has never had that -- a moment where everybody is like, 'Fuck this, we gotta do something.'
"But I truly believe this is that time," he says. "It's exciting to have hope again."
The seeds for Vote for Change were sown over the phone, in a series of conversations between managers during the Democratic primaries, before Kerry was even the presumptive nominee. "We were getting bombarded with calls about the election," says Kelly Curtis, who looks after Pearl Jam, "and I was feeling overwhelmed. I thought it would be a good idea to talk to other managers to see what they were doing." One of those he rang was Jon Landau, Springsteen's longtime manager. "Jon was going through a similar thing," Curtis says. "So we organized a managers' meeting in New York just to get educated."
That conference, nicknamed Air Traffic Control, was held in April and attended by about fifty artist representatives, including Curtis, Landau, Dixie Chicks manager Simon Renshaw, R.E.M. manager Bertis Downs and Coran Capshaw, who handles Dave Matthews Band. "What was clear about that first day," says Renshaw, "was that making a difference was not about doing big stadium shows in L.A. and New York. To make a difference meant going into the swing states, reaching out in those places."
The highlight of Air Traffic Control was a motivational speech by liberal wit Al Franken. He told the managers, "If your artists don't participate in this election, you should fire your artists." Then he pulled out a hand-drawn map of the United States and said, "Here's my idea. It's called the Love Train. It starts in the Midwest, and it goes from here to here. . . ." He sang the O'Jays song "Love Train" for added effect.
Franken's concept never left the station. But the Swing State Tour, as it was provisionally dubbed, took shape through the spring and early summer. Landau met with Eli Pariser, the twenty-three-year-old executive director of MoveOn.org, and Ellen Malcolm, the president of America Coming Together, to determine those states where the tour could have the most significant impact.
The rest, Landau says, grinning, "was logistics" - routing, pairing acts, throwing personal schedules out the window (R.E.M. postponed the first two weeks of their own fall tour to open for Springsteen), shaving costs to maximize the proceeds to ACT. Ticket prices were not set at press time, but Landau promises, "We're not going to lose money." The acts and their managers, agents and lawyers "are doing this one hundred percent pro bono."
Country songbirds the Dixie Chicks are both the most surprising and obvious group on the tour. "We've never been a political band, and what was said was so off the cuff," says Robison, referring to the firestorm that erupted in March 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war, after Texas-born member Natalie Maines said during a London show that she was "ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas."
"It was justifiable, the feelings she had that night," says Robison. But privately, Robison was still smarting from the blowback -- the howls for blood in the right-wing media, the banning of the group's records from country-station playlists -- when the idea of touring to defeat Bush came up. "Personally, I waffled back and forth," Robison concedes. "You stick your neck out, it might get chopped off. But we decided it was important enough to take that chance. We'd already been dragged through the fire."
"If you say anything -- if you talk about these issues in a positive fashion -- somehow they will find it reprehensible," says Vedder, who knows what he's talking about. He became a conservative bull's-eye last year for performing the damning character study "Bushleaguer" onstage in a Bush mask. "It's predictable, and it's survivable. This is a long tradition, nothing new -- artists speaking out, reflecting society and its view, expressing them in art or around a tour of that art."
As to what they plan to play and say onstage during their respective Vote for Change shows -- for Kerry, against Bush, about the state of the nation -- most of the artists on hand for the tour's New York publicity assault insist they need to say very little. The name of the tour is doctrine enough. "We get up there to play, not to speak," Tinsley declares, "and to rock everyone. Democrats, Republicans, everybody gets rocked that night."
Mills expects that R.E.M.'s one-hour set will feature "some of the more politically charged stuff," such as "Final Straw," which the band posted on its Web site at the time of the Iraq invasion and has included on its new album, Around the Sun.
Pearl Jam know they have to play "Bushleaguer." Asked if he'll pull out his Bush mask, or something new, for the occasion, Vedder strokes his chin thoughtfully. "You can see the wheels starting to turn," Gossard says, laughing.
"Perhaps we should do something over the Internet," Vedder muses. "A request line. We could have people vote for the set list - to get them practicing for November."
"Onstage, you're there to entertain," Springsteen asserts. "We are trying to rally progressive voters, but I don't think that includes a lot of speechifying. On the last tour, we'd play about two and a half hours. And I would take two and a half minutes [to talk]. That's all that's necessary." He pauses. "Maybe this time a little longer."
Springsteen knows it's not just talk that riles the faithful. He vividly remembers "the famous New Jersey salute," as he puts it, that he received during his New York shows in 2000 when he played "American Skin (41 Shots)" -- a song he wrote in contemplative mourning, not accusation, after the killing of Amadou Diallo by four New York policemen in 1999.
"Before we went out," he recalls, "I said to the band, 'Whatever happens, this is the inner heart of our group and the ideas that we want it to be about.' You don't get there without a lot of heartbreak and looking into a lot of ugly truths.
"We're gonna take heat," he says of Vote for Change. "There's no two ways about it. And that's OK. This is a defining moment for me and the country. And hopefully we can make a difference."