Reverend Billy's holy crusade against corporate greed
Scroll down to continueReverend Billy isn’t interested in talking about himself. He wants to preach. He wants to shout out the truth.
“Earthalujah!” as Reverend Billy proclaims.
On the phone from Brooklyn, New York, the reverend starts talking about where he was raised…for a moment. But then he suddenly veers into declamatory statements: “Part of what we do is we’re just in recovery from fundamentalism, this 40-voice choir and myself.
“We’re identifying consumerism and militarism as the main fundamentalist faith in our benighted country!”
Sing it, brother!
The reverend is just getting warmed up before his performance with another radical artist, Neil Young, in Canada.
In the 15 years since William Talen formed Reverend Billy and the 50-member Stop Shopping Choir, the performance artist-slash-activist-slash-preacher has become the stuff of legend and notoriety.
On his website, Talen describes Reverend Billy & The Stop Shopping Choir as a “radical performance community,” and “wild anti-consumerist gospel and Earth-loving urban activists who have worked with communities all over the world defending community, life and imagination.”
Vancouver will get to see first-hand what the reverend is all about when he rolls into town, October 5 to open up at the West Coast city’s Rogers Arena for Young.
Talen blasts everything from naked consumerism, to GMOs, racist politics, and fights for environmental and human justice.
Think of Greenpeace crossed with a holy roller and you begin to get the measure of Reverend Billy.
In October, Talen will release his fourth record, Resist Extinction, and in 2016 City Lights – the San Francisco publisher of record for most of the Beat Generation – will release his book, The Earth Wants You.
He has his own radio show and performs widely, not just in theatres, but also at activist-driven events. Four years ago, he did a tour of the Occupy camps; more recently, he and the choir went to Ferguson to show solidarity with black residents facing discrimination.
The reverend finds himself in a spot of trouble
Scroll down to continueAlong the way he and the troupe have staged impromptu events in such unlikely venues as Grand Central Station and the lobby of the JP Morgan Chase bank in Manhattan.
The latter two go a long way to explaining Talen’s arrest record: 50 times and counting.
After the JP Morgan Chase performance in 2013, where Talen showed up with members of his choir outfitted as extinct Central American Golden Toads, he was threatened with a year in jail. The Grand Central Station sermon, part of a larger protest over police brutality, resulted in an arrest after Talen reportedly shoved a police officer when the latter tried to seize a protestor’s sign.
“As I get older, each arrest gets harder,” Talen says. “It used to be just every time I’d get out there and start preaching, I’d end up in at least the local precinct house and sometimes shipped down to the tombs into the system.”
In the past 12 months, Talen has been arrested twice more at Black Lives Matter rallies.
He compares the police to Monsanto and other giant, industrial agricultural companies. “You look at the militaristic police and it looks very much like industrial agricultural companies, weeding out what they think of as invasive species.”
Still, in recollection, Talen laughs about the bank incident. “We had a banker in our choir at the same time we were arrested for invading banks.”
The banker attests to the many different backgrounds of individuals in the choir. They range from middle-class people to unemployed, musicians to Broadway actors, Talen says.
“Consumerism is America. You can object to the direction of society from many different backgrounds. I think that’s the reason we have such a variety of people here is that we’ve identified such a basic devil.”
The roots of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping
Scroll down to continueTalen was born to fundamentalist, Calvinist parents in Minnesota. According to an extensive Business Insider profile on Talen earlier this year, after college he traveled the East Coast as a “vagabond poet” before heading to California to hang out in the Beat scene. There, he became a theatre producer, writer, actor and radio host.
In the early ‘90s Talen moved back to New York. In the intervening years, he’d been working on his persona of a reverend, but it took off in the late ‘90s when in the Disney Store in Times Square, Talen – upset over the sheer crass commercialism of it all – grabbed a Micky Mouse doll and began preaching, according to Business Insider. His first arrest resulted.
By 2000, a loose confederation of stragglers, who Talen dubbed The Church of Stop Shopping solidified and the reverend met his partner and troupe director, Savitri Durkee, and Reverend Billy was on his way to, if not televangelical fame, then at least a living as a fervent activist.
Talen calls the right-wing apocalyptic preacher a feature of the cultural landscape in the U.S. and says they have large followings and impact both foreign and domestic policies.
Talen begins to preach: “Consumerism does not create prosperity and if course a lynchpin in climate change and the earth’s crisis…Now it’s cross into sentimental patriotism. Now we’re supposed to go to Disneyland to fight terrorism, spend money we don’t have to fight people we can’t find.”
His character consists of right-wing threads and a left-wing mouth, according to Talen.
Equally, Reverend Billy seamlessly mixes satire and seriousness, a testament to Talen’s background as a monologist. Throughout the interview, he shifts gears, acting as his own straight man before launching another outrageous volley.
When Talen lands in Vancouver, it will be with 15 members of the troupe, the maximum number he could afford to bring on tour. “We’d love to travel on a veggie-powered jet with 40 people,” he says. “Wasn’t that Richard Branson? Didn’t he promise a veggie-powered jet? Basically, I just want him to read your article and say, ‘Yes! I’m going to give the Church of Stop Shopping a veggie powered jet.’ Amen! We could just tour the world.”
Redemption!
Scroll down to continueIn some ways, the Talen-Young show is like a match made in heaven. Both artists are elder statesmen, and have passionately criticized corporate greed through their songs.
Both artists bring a magnetic energy to their shows. Talen marvels of Young: “He’s an older man who has a three-hour rock and roll show.”
And both bring the same strong sense of social justice to their work. Young’s latest recording with the band, The Promise of the Real (which includes Willie Nelson’s son, Lukas) The Monsanto Years is a screed against GMOs, and large corporations.
“We were starting to get phone calls from people: ‘My God, Reverend, he’s talking about Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Monsanto – these are your devils!’
“Then I started becoming upset because, of course, you’ve got this row boat and there’s an aircraft carrier.”
All joking aside, Talen says he’s grateful to be working with Young; in fact, he says he’s grateful for Young. He points out that Young took $100,000 from box office receipts from his tour and donated to the legal team representing the State of Vermont in its legal battle against Starbucks and Monsanto over GMO labelling.
“So he’s got some songs about Monsanto, but he’s also got resources going straight to the legal team. We’re just very grateful for this man and his particular journey.”