LICK BUSH, THE HALLIBURTON(S)! IN IRELAND!!!!

anarchy1999

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Wed Jun-30-04 05:30 AM
Original message

LICK BUSH, THE HALLIBURTON(S)! IN IRELAND!!!!

Edited on Wed Jun-30-04 05:38 AM by anarchy1999

Most recently in Ireland, now in Berlin, back home in Dallas the end of July. www.halliburtons.com

There is a CDBABY link for us:
http://www.cdbaby.com/halliburtons

here are just a few of many about our shows in Ireland
http://www.cpu-records.com/site/modules/agendax/index.php?op=cal&month=6
&year=2004
http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=65331

here is what ran in Monday's irish times (THE major newspaper in
Ireland)

Irish Times
Out to lick Bush.
1,001 words
21 June 2004
Irish Times
10
English
(c) 2004, The Irish Times.
By day Nathan Berg teaches economics. By night he and the
Halliburton(s)campaign against the US president, writes Brian Boyd
The agitprop band Halliburton(s) take their name from the Houston-based
oil-services company run by Dick Cheney before he became George W.
Bush's vice-president. After Saddam Hussein was overthrown last year the
company was controversially awarded contracts worth billions of dollars
to help rebuild Iraq. "We're waiting for a lawsuit any day now," says
Nathan Berg, the main mover behind Halliburton(s). "We don't think
putting the 's' in brackets after the name is enough to distance
ourselves from them."
Berg is in Dublin for a three-date Irish tour, snappily called Lick
Bush, just ahead of the US president's visit. His music is a dizzying
mix of garage-rock riffs with lyrics straight out of a Noam Chomsky
book. Berg is intent on showing the Irish that political dissent, US
style, is alive and well and rocking out.
There's a twist in this tale, though: Berg is not your average polemical
rock 'n' roller: he's also a respected assistant professor of economics
at the University of Texas at Dallas and, in a previous life, a jazz
prodigy. "I used to be an acoustic bassist, and I was spotted at the age
of 12 in my native Kansas," he says. "I suppose I was a bit of a big
splash in the jazz world when I was younger: I played with the Maynard
Ferguson Big Bop Nouveau, toured the world, played at Ronnie Scott's and
did the same music programme as Norah Jones."
At 17 Berg made his début as a composer, releasing Fish With No Fins, a
work cited in the Penguin guide to jazz - a much bigger deal than it
sounds. A year later the influential critic Leonard Feather called him
"a bass phenomenon", and jazz-press headlines regularly referred to him
as a prodigy.
The jazz world was dismayed when Berg left jazz for rock music and
politics. "What you have to understand about the jazz scene," he
explains, "is that they see themselves as a persecuted minority.
Suddenly, this 'bright light' turns his back on them and they all flip.
The word disappointment would be an understatement.
"What happened is I got concerned with issues of here and now. Looking
around, I saw no real ideological content in jazz. It's all abstract and
indirect. I think there's a lot of musical museum restoration work going
on: it's all stasis."
It is safe to say that the Gulf War of 1991 politicised Berg. "It was
just at that time that I started reading newspapers as opposed to the
jazz press. I was on tour at the time, and I'd get very restless: there
was no one on the tour bus that I could talk to about this war and its
geopolitical consequences. There was no meaningful political dialogue
going on. It was then that I decided to leave the jazz world and go back
to university to study."
His decision had surprising consequences. "What was really strange was
that I had people saying to me, 'Don't go to college; stay in bars,
playing music,' which was a real reversal," he says, "but I went ahead
and studied maths and economics. I always felt there is a perception
that people on the left aren't strong on economics, which isn't actually
true.
"While all this was going on I also wanted to explore politics through
music, so naturally I turned to rock. The first band I was in was very
much a Frank Zappa-inspired outfit. That led on to Halliburton(s), which
is a straightforward political protest band. People sometimes find it
funny that I'm playing in a different musical genre now, and while it is
true that jazz musicians are more technically developed than rock
musicians, there's a whole lot of other skills that rock musicians can
bring to the music - and particularly the sort of garage-rock music that
we're doing now. They are different music worlds in a way."
Berg is concentrating his efforts on bringing Halliburton(s)' message to
as many people as possible between now and the US presidential election,
in November. The band, whose début album, Gravity's In, is on their own
label, Corporate Sleaze Productions, are part of a broad coalition of
artists and musicians determined to sweep Bush from office.
They have built a sizeable following in their base of Dallas - the
heartland of Bush neoconservatism - and were recently on US television,
filmed playing a protest show outside the headquarters of the
Halliburton company.
Among the musical and artistic anti-Bush vote in the US a clear divide
has emerged between those who advocate supporting the Democratic Party
and those who support the more left-leaning, ecologically driven Ralph
Nader. Berg has made his choice. "The fact is there is only a two-party
system. I would like a bigger menu, but you have to deal with what is
there, and for me the best way to ditch Bush is to vote Democrat."
Although he confesses to being a fan of his fellow activist Michael
Moore, Berg's strong economics background means he has reservations.
"Michael Moore makes me cringe a little bit sometimes. I think he's very
good at showing up certain aspects of US political life, but he doesn't
really explain what we need to do about it."
He displays no regrets about leaving the jazz world and seems very
content that his work in economics helps him confront issues about
foreign affairs and the global economy, and his work in rock music
allows him to express lyrical ideas that he feels couldn't be aired
within the jazz genre.
And after November? "Well, presuming John Kerry gets elected, we then
turn our critical attention on to him."
www.halliburtons.com

Permission granted, thanks Mods.