PITTSBURGH — There's an echo of 9/11 in just about every show by The Clarks, whether people realize it or not.
In September 2001, the Pittsburgh band was in pre-production for its sixth album, "Another Happy Ending," with a Nashville producer who was in town to work with them at the Clark house in Highland Park.
On Sept. 11, singer Scott Blasey woke up to an unusually early call, on his flip phone, from a friend he had beers with the night before. When he didn't answer, his friend called back a second time.
"So I picked up the phone, and all he said to me was, 'Dude, turn on the TV. I'll talk to you later.'"
Blasey saw what we all were watching that morning. First, smoke and flames from a plane hitting the North Tower of New York's World Trade Center. Then, 15 minutes later, the horror of a second plane hitting the South Tower.
"The guys started trickling in between 9:30 and 10," Blasey recalls, "and we all just sat there, you know, kind of speechless."
Wanting to get home to his wife, producer Justin Niebank took off in a rental car and the rest of the band left to be with their wives and girlfriends.
"About 3 or 4 in the afternoon," Blasey says, " I just couldn't watch TV anymore. I had to get out of the house. It was a beautiful day, so I actually went rollerblading downtown on the Jail Trail and it was the most surreal experience, being downtown, on Grant Street, and it's just empty — 4:30 in the afternoon, nobody around. A couple of fighter jets fly over and a guy is standing on the corner of Grant and 6th selling newspapers, to no one really, like 'Hey, get your afternoon news!'"
After having dinner and watching more coverage on TV, Blasey picked up his guitar with no intention of writing a song, he says.
"I put a capo on the second fret and, immediately, the chords and the melody just started coming out of me. I wrote the song in like half an hour."
Pink Floyd had already used the title "Hey You," but that was OK. This was a very different song, a poignant, simmering mid-tempo ballad with the opening verse:
"If you're gonna jump, hey you, hang on,
If you feel like giving up, hey you, hang on,
Won't forget today, sun is bright, sky is blue,
The pain will go away, in another year or two"
By the end of the song, it becomes "a hundred years or two" and then "a thousand years or two."
"A lot of musicians talk about how with the best songs, you feel like they're already out there in the air, the ether, and you're just channeling it," Blasey says.
Two days later, Blasey performed the song for the first time at an intimate gathering of fellow songwriters at Club Cafe. Ten days later, The Clarks debuted it at "Music Unites," a benefit concert at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall for the American Red Cross with Rusted Root, Bill Deasy and other notable bands and musicians.
Just before the first anniversary of 9/11, the song went out to all of America when The Clarks performed it in Times Square as part of the Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon.
"Hey You" has remained one of the band's most popular radio hits, a staple in its concerts, and a song that Blasey has never separated from that emotional day.
"I totally associate it with that day. There's no separation for me," he says. "I generally don't introduce the song and what it's about. Sometimes, if it's around 9/11, I might give a little back story, and when I do solo shows I might give the story a little bit more often. But when I'm singing it, when I'm playing it and I close my eyes, I am right back there in my bedroom at the Clark house."
Anti-Flag: What's in a name
Within three days of 9/11, Walmart and Kmart had sold a combined 650,000 flags, a number that would have been much higher if they could have kept them in stock.
With a feeling of American unity and patriotism hitting levels unseen perhaps since World War II, flags were not only flying from homes, they became the trendy new ornament on cars.
It was a lonely feeling being Anti-Flag.
The punk band, established in 1992 with a vehemently anti-war stance, had explained on its 1999 album "A New Kind of Army" that "Anti-Flag does not mean Anti-American. Anti-Flag means anti-war.... Anti-Flag means to fight against mindless nationalism. Anti-Flag means unity."
It was a sentiment not easily explained to TV anchors, suburban moms and guys with flags on their Ford F-150s.
Nonetheless, in the spring of 2001, Anti-Flag was surging. Having met NOFX frontman Fat Mike on the Warped Tour, the band was touring behind "The Underground Network," an album released on his respected punk label, Fat Wreck Chords.
On 9/11, singer Justin Geever, aka Justin Sane, got up prepared to go to the studio to work on a split EP with Bouncing Souls. He was stopped in his tracks by the spectacle on TV.
"When the first tower collapsed," he says, "I knew I wouldn't be going to the studio that day. There was clearly something going on, something much bigger happening than me wanting to go to the recording studio."
He and his bandmates felt the same shock, horror and sadness that every American did watching the attacks. Guitarist Chris Head's father was even outside the Twin Towers when it happened. Geever says he had a close friend who went to funerals for months
But in the aftermath, Anti-Flag became a dirty word.
"We couldn't get booked," Geever says. "Nobody would take us. Any tour dates that we had were canceled. Even if a club wanted us, they said the backlash against us just being advertised at their club would be too big of a problem for them. We had T-shirts sent back, records sent back with letters that said, '[Expletive] you guys. I used to look up to your band.'"
Stores took their records off the shelves. Rolling Stone magazine canceled a planned feature on the band hanging with Jesse Jackson at a rally for Mumia Abu-Jamal.
"It was a hard time. It was a sad time," Geever says. "I felt bad for the country and what people were going through. You would see people crying because they lost somebody in the World Trade Center, and having the visions of people jumping from the fire, that was really devastating. I didn't want to go on tour and play political music. I wasn't really excited for that."
Over time, though, he saw the country revert to "its most base instincts" of jingoism and nationalism, he says.
Anti-Flag's first strike was "911 for Peace," an anti-war anthem released a few months later that pleaded, "We are all human/ It's time to prove it."
It became the lead track of "Mobilize." Later, In the wake of the War on Iraq, Anti-Flag came out blazing against President George W. Bush, declaring him a "turncoat, killer, liar, thief" on the opening track of "The Terror State."
By then, enough people had begun to embrace Anti-Flag's message. That album led to the fiery political punk band making a surprise move: signing a major-label contract with RCA.
Jimmy Roach: Country culture war
Working at a country radio station, Jimmy Roach had an inside look at the drama happening in a genre that tended to wear patriotism on its sleeve. On 9/11, the now-retired DJ famed for his days at WDVE was working his morning shift on Froggy, then based in California, Pennsylvania.
"I was shocked," he says, "and I'm sure that shock was apparent in my voice. I stayed on the air for another hour or so doing my best to describe the indescribable."
In the immediate aftermath, he remembers having to spin "God Bless the USA," Lee Greenwood's treacly old anthem, almost hourly. In November, Alan Jackson came to the rescue with "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)," a "well-written song" that captured the sentiment of the day, Roach says.
In May 2002, six months after the invasion of Afghanistan, Toby Keith took the whole conversation up 10 notches when he unleashed "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)," with its rallying cry of "We'll put a boot in your ass/ It's the American way."
The big, strapping Okie did it right here that September, appearing back-to-back nights at Star Lake, first at Farm Aid, where he also unveiled a comical little number called "The Taliban Song." Then he did his own headlining show, playing to the venue's biggest crowd of the season and one of the biggest in its history.
Prior to the show, he told the Post-Gazette that while he struggled with the notion of putting "The Angry American" out, "it was written for our military" and, to his mind, "it was a positive way that I could serve."
On that note, the country music community was not a united front.
"Don't get me started," Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks (now The Chicks) told the Los Angeles Daily News in August 2002. "I hate it. It's ignorant, and it makes country music sound ignorant." She added that she preferred the response of Bruce Springsteen, who had just released his 9/11-themed album "The Rising."
Ten days before the invasion of Iraq, in March 2003, with the country whipped into a fervor about weapons of mass destruction, Maines dropped a bombshell during a concert in London, declaring she was "ashamed" that the president was from her home state of Texas.
"Nobody reported the fact that as soon as Natalie said it, one of the Chicks stepped up and said, 'But we support our soldiers 100%,'" Roach says. "It just exploded, and it became kind of like when [John] Lennon said [the Beatles] were bigger than God."
The backlash was swift, ranging from death threats to Dixie Chicks songs being blackballed by country stations all over the country.
At Froggy, Roach says, "I'd say half the staff was horrified by what they said and wanted to eviscerate them, and the other half thought, 'Well, yeah, that makes sense.' But it didn't matter because none of those viewpoints were going to be put on the air. Occasionally, a comment would slip from the conservative side. Well, it wouldn't slip, they would just put it out there. But never from the side that was more liberal, because it would have been suicide."
On Keith's return visit here in '03 on his Shock'n Y'All Tour, he flashed a photoshopped image of Maines with Saddam Hussein. "A cheap shot," Roach says.
Maines would apologize, un-apologize and then win five Grammys, including album of the year, for "Taking the Long Way," the 2006 album featuring the defiant single "Not Ready to Make Nice."
Within a few years, Keith would express regret over his feud with Maines; declare that he did not actually support the Iraq War; and say he was tired of politics, and that whether you're blue or red, it had nothing to do with being a patriot.
"It was a tough time for people like me," Roach says, "because I basically agreed with [the Chicks], but I couldn't say anything on the air. Throughout my career, I tried to go right down the middle. I never did the endorse-drugs thing. I never pretended I got high all the time. I tried to just be careful about what I was and I never mentioned any of my political leanings at all. I never even hinted at it."
Meanwhile, as a DJ, he was having to play songs by Keith, Darryl Worley and others that didn't represent his point of view.
"The artists who would have put out tunes that I would have agreed with, they weren't willing to risk their careers, and I can understand that," Roach says. "They just turtled up and went about their business, so it took guts to say something. The Dixie Chicks may have gone to the extreme with their comment in the eyes of a lot of people, but at least they said something. And the way things have happened in the last 20 years, you need to say something. Silence is acceptance."
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