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Taken from The Burlington Free Press (July 1, 2008)
Michael Franti and Spearhead rock the Shelburne Museum
by Brent Hallenbeck Free Press Staff Writer
 SHELBURNE -- When was the last time the grounds of the Shelburne Museum played host to a freeform troupe of political rabble-rousers or a tattooed, socially conscious party boy whose funky beats are so heavy they could shatter the museum's prized collection of decorative glass at 20 paces?
"Never" would be a good answer. Friday's concert on the Shelburne Museum lawn, the first this season of the Concerts on the Green series, was different than anything the elegant, refined, respected museum has ever seen.
Normally you'll find people silently browsing through the museum's historic homes or wandering among the duck-decoy collection or clambering aboard the dry-docked vessel Ticonderoga. Even after the Concerts on the Green series began five years ago, you might catch someone like Willie Nelson, who's something of a counter-culture figure but from a musical perspective little or no threat to the status quo.
Friday's concert with the music of the Bay Area's Michael Franti and Spearhead, preceded by a touch of agitprop from the Bread and Puppet Theater of Glover, presented a couple of things not normally found at the Shelburne Museum -- noise and controversy.
I joined Bread and Puppet in progress, around the time several people in unconvincingly fake angel wings and weird hats with distorted horn-like appendages were, in honor of George W. Bush's impending departure from office Jan. 20, offering presidential pardons for everything from perjury to leaving dirty dishes in the sink.
"You are pardoned, you are pardoned, we forgive you," the actors chanted. I wasn't sure if they were mock-pardoning President Bush or those of us in the audience, but I assumed the latter, which made me feel better about the load of dirty dishes I created earlier in the day and the fact that I would now be able to lie about the existence of those dishes if called to testify about them in court.
Franti and Spearhead come from the same school of thought as Bread and Puppet, but while Bread and Puppet decorates serious issues with a fun, occasionally musical spin, Franti puts fun and music first and flows the socio-political commentary in among the funkified beats. Then again, the band was rocking in front of a backdrop depicting fingers splayed in a peace sign in front of a bullet-ridden red-and-white bulls-eye, so the socio-political reminder was always there, especially when Franti dropped the lyric "The war on terror is a war on peace."
But for every line like "How many people did they drop the bomb on?" Franti had a merrier rejoinder along the lines of "Put your hands up high, y'all!" "Don't let your mind be so judgmental" begat "Make some nooo-iiiii-se!" "With the Patriot Act they took all your rights" segued into something a little less heavy, such as "Do we have any freaky people in the place?," a rhetorical question considering the guy with the fluorescent yellow-green Mohawk in the crowd just a few feet in front of Franti.
The crowd seemed to dig the political references, but mostly folks were just diggin' the heavy, heavy beats, which merge reggae, hip-hop, rock and funk into an automatic groove machine. At one point I pictured the museum's late founder, that pearl-bedecked collector of collections, Electra Havemeyer Webb, singing the Phish lyric "a thousand barefoot children outside dancing on my lawn."
That doesn't fit with the staid image of the Shelburne Museum, does it? There's nothing especially rebellious about quilts or weathervanes or any of the Shelburne Museum's other collections, right?
But over the hill from the lawn where Franti's fans were frolicking sits a neoclassic building housing the museum's collection of Impressionist paintings. Manet and Monet and Degas and Cassatt and their ilk were rebels, don't forget, the first artists to demonstrate that beauty didn't have to be so literal. Without them, the imagination of modern art might not exist.
Some revolutions are loud. Some are as quiet as a brush.
Michael Franti's revolution is loud, and fun. If Havemeyer Webb were still around today and saw that bull's-eye with the bullet holes and the peace sign hanging behind Franti and his band, she would have added it to her folk-art collection faster than you can say, "Put your hands up high, y'all!"
Contact Brent Hallenbeck at 660-1844 or bhallenb@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com.
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