A guy named Zimmerman is one of my favorite singer songwriters, but it's not the one you think. There is another Zimmerman out there, one who can be just as meaningful as the guy who changed his name to Dylan. And funnier too. Lots funnier!

Roy Zimmerman was the central member of The Foremen in the early 90's. They were a folkie group who would have sounded at home on the soundtrack of A Mighty Wind, except that their songs were pointedly topical and up to date. They recorded two albums for Warner Reprise, Folk Heroes in 1994 and What's Left, in 1996. After the latter album Roy left the group and struck out on his own. He released a solo album in 1997 called Comic Sutra which contained laugh-out-loud gems such as "Let's Get Branded" and the more barbed humor of "Punish The People."

Roy's satire is particularly insightful, but his deft touch on rhyme is nothing short of amazing. He's easily the best lyricist this side of Tom Lehrer at stretching a rhyme across two words and it makes the sarcasm go down easily. Take the lyrics of an early favorite, "My School Prayer:"

Peace on earth, Thy kingdom come,
Into my curriculum,
Make my head a hollow drum,
Strike me dumb,
Except to mum---ble,
My School Prayer.

Outside of occasional play on Dr. Demento, I lost track of Roy for several years. This fall I was able to attend a special event, when George Carlin came down to San Pedro's Warner Grand Theater to receive the Upton Sinclair award from the ACLU. On the bill with George were KPFK's Fowler and Allard (who are singing satirists in their own right), Yippie Founder and satirist Paul Krassner, George Carlin, plus the cast of Uppie!, a musical about the life of Upton Sinclair, and of course Roy Zimmerman. I was thrilled to at last see one of my favorite musicians onstage.

After the performance I sought out Roy for this interview and as it turned out the timing is perfect. He has a new double album coming out in December. One disk is called Homeland and the other one is called Security. Sounds like we are in for more vintage satire from Roy Zimmerman.

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Cosmik: Let's start off with your history, since a lot of people are not that familiar it. The Foremen always sounded a lot like The Kingston Trio to me, what was the sound based on from your perspective?

Roy: Well, you nailed it. I used to raid my uncle's record collection and he had all that stuff - The Limeliters, The Kingston Trio, The Chad Mitchell Trio. On the one hand I absolutely loved it, it really touched me and on the other hand it was really hokey and funny. It had both of those two things going for it. That was the original inception of the band The Foremen and pretty soon after we started I started writing political stuff and that kind of took over as the reason for being.

Cosmik: The original Folk Heroes cassette has some stuff on it that I still love, like "Workin' On An MBA," which always sounded like you had first hand knowledge of the process. Did you ever get an MBA?

Roy: No, but it occurred to me that it would be pretty funny to write a work song about that. I mean obviously the concept of the format was to take that whole folk era thing and mess with it. The cassette came out in '93 and then we got signed to Warner and did a couple for them, leading up to the '96 election, and I left the group shortly after that. They went on without me for about three years or so and had to recast my part.

Cosmik: I thought What's Left was especially great. Songs like "Hidden Agenda" are really meaningful to me. The production values are really excellent on it too, you're mimicking people like Crosby, Stills Nash and Young at one point and the Mamas and Papas at another. Who was the producer on it?

Roy: That was huge fun because we had the major label contract. I was able to indulge in a bit of that. It was produced between Andy Pailey, who's got so many credits, he's produced Jerry Lee Lewis and Jonathan Richman K.D. Lang, and then Jim Ed Norman, who is the President of Warner Records Nashville. He's a guy who did a lot of country stuff, but he's a very socially conscious person too, so he got into what we were talking about.

Cosmik: I got ahold of Comic Sutra only recently. You did that a few years ago?

Roy: It came out like five years ago. It was recorded at Luna Park and it has a little political and social commentary... It's just me solo with a drummer and doing some political material like "Punish The People" and "Defenders Of Marriage," a song about gay marriage and others like "Let's Get Branded."

Cosmik: What's that one about?

Roy: That was actually a trend on beyond piercing and tattooing for frat pledges to actually get branded. I am very proud of that record but I've been working it too long and I've got to get a new record going and that's kind of what I am involved with right now. I've been recording all along and I have like five or six shows in the can now that I'm choosing from.

Cosmik: The new record's all live then?

Roy: Yeah, I'm going to do another live record because it's primarily comedy and so it's important to hear laughter on there and hear it being done live. The great thing about that San Pedro show for me was meeting George Carlin which I had never done before. We were chatting backstage for quite awhile. Obviously his stuff has been a great influence on me. Particularly his records, just the way they are recorded with the audience so present like that, that's what I'm trying to get at in these records, too.

Cosmik: What did you and George talk about?

Roy: It was George Carlin, Paul Krassner and I. Paul's been a buddy for a long time. So, you know, we just sat backstage and we talked about just odd stuff. I mean, nothing earth shattering, not politics certainly, but we talked about memory, the function of memory and how certain songs get stuck in your head and what you do to get them out of there. The two of them were recalling, like Paul was saying that when he used to get a song stuck in his head that he didn't like he would sing a song, "My Little Rhode Island" or "Oh You Little Rhode Island," something like that. It was an old novelty song, and as soon as he mentioned the title Carlin burst into song and started singing it like it was a big fond favorite of his! I had never heard the song before; it was some goofy hokey little song from back when there were only 48 states because that was one of the rhymes, "The greatest state in the 48." Very funny!

They talked about a Catholic upbringing versus a sort of Jewish-Atheist upbringing. When men get together in general, they don't talk about stuff like that. I mean in general men talk about NASCAR or whatever the hell... The thing about talking about those two guys especially and conversing of things of substance is that satirists often get pegged with one political point of view or whatever, right? Obviously Krassner comes from the Yippie far left kind of point of view and Carlin has certainly been associated with lefty causes and concerns over the years too, but the thing that's more important, and I wear my lefty stripes rather prominently too, but the thing that's more important is just absurdity.

If you think about what's going to make something funny to a general audience, you know, you can't really start just blasting the right or whatever because you're going to lose half of them. It's not even practical as a comic to get up there and do that. But if you get up there and talk about absurdity or hypocrisy, then you've got an audience, and you can talk about Rush Limbaugh's pill popping. [Snickers] Even people who are deep-seated Rush Limbaugh fans can recognize the hypocrisy in that and laugh at that. Right? There's a human quality about it that supercedes politics. Now if I only choose the hypocrisy of the right to talk about, well that's my choice I suppose! [Laughs] That's my preference. Even in "Do The Clinton" I didn't take him to task for his major peccadilloes.

Cosmik: That was way before Monica Lewinsky wasn't it?

Roy: We knew about Gennifer Flowers back then, but no, we didn't know about Monica, certainly.

Cosmik: A lot of people say the right wing has no sense of humor when it comes to their people, but left wing people are still critical of their own members quite a lot. The right just seems to march in lock step. Anything Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh says is just swallowed hook, line and sinker. Do you agree with that assessment?

Roy: They are a formidable enemy when it comes to rhetoric because there are certain things that you will not hear. I think that's to the Left's detriment in some ways. As Lefties we take away people's guns and shoot ourselves in the nuts! We do that all the time! It's never good enough for us. You're standing next to the Leftiest-of-the-Lefties and you're saying, "Put that cigarette out!" We're kind of arguing amongst ourselves all the time. Until recently, I'll say the Right has had it together, but in this last gubernatorial election it started to happen, it started to unravel. The Right is infighting more.

Cosmik: I agree we saw some of that in the recall election. What got Schwarzenegger elected was pure notoriety, not adherence to standard Republican themes, and I think it scared them a little. So have you got a song for Schwarzenegger yet?

Roy: Oh yeah, there's a song that you can download off of Roysongs.com, the fan site that a beautiful person by the name of Joan Manners put up for me. There is a song called, "Pumping Irony" that you can download there... I like his campaign slogan, "Win one for the Zipper!" But he's not going to be that bad of a governor; this is my prediction. And that's not what bothers me about him, how he's going to do as governor, because he is going to surround himself with kind of a broad palette of advisers and things will get done and other things will be bad like usual. It's what it represents to people, that we have this sweaty ectomorph occupying the state house and the testosterone can flow like rivers now... There is no real shift in people's thinking, I don't think, but it represents this media shift of thinking to kind of a more macho base, right? That's the thing that bothers me. Not that I'm not macho!

Cosmik: Speaking of voting and Carlin and things like that, one of the things that Carlin has said repeatedly is that he doesn't vote, ever. That's too apathetic for me; how do you feel about that?

Roy: I've heard him say that too, and I don't find him to be an apathetic person; I think he cares deeply about things. He may be mistrustful of the electoral process, but I won't defend his choice. I vote every single time and I do it because it feels good. If I come out of there a loser, I've fought the good fight. If I come out of there a winner, well that feels even better. Hey people are with me! But I have engaged in a public act, so to speak, one that I won't get arrested for. [Laughs]

Cosmik: At least not this year.

Roy: [Laughs] Yeah! That's important to me, engaging in a societal act and admitting out loud that we are in fact a group of people committed to represent the government. There's no punch line in there, that's just where I stand on it. I really love voting.

Cosmik: I feel very strongly about it too. I got Citizenship in the Community and Nation merit badges in Boy Scouts and I have always voted, even when I had a pony tail halfway down my back. I've been trying to get that into my kids, too, so in spite of my misgivings about the Boy Scouts' leadership, my son is in a troop.

Roy: I have two sons in there, 11 and 13. The Boy Scout troop that my sons belong to takes a yearly trip to Camp Pendleton [a Marine base near San Diego], and they actually camp on the grounds. They go to the firing range, sort of like laser retrofit firing range, pick up an actual M-16 equipped with a laser and fire at targets. There's a lot of indoctrination going on there, so I'm very vocal about that.

Cosmik: So you permit that and then just try to debrief them when they come back?

Roy: I encourage it in a sense because if we try and talk about it openly, then we are taking it on and we're saying, "Look, since we were here last year 91 recruits from Camp Pendleton are dead!" It's not fun and games. It's not like an obstacle course challenge, right? ... Give them a real human sense of that and I think that might increase the already natural misinformation, to support war to support the right wing agenda.

Cosmik: This segues into the big subject of this year - How do you feel about the war?

Roy: It's a travesty. It's an absurdity. It would be funny if it wasn't really happening. It's like what I said about satire; it's getting harder and harder to do satire when reality is so absurd. To do satire now you just read the headlines out loud, and say, "Get it?" [Laughs] Bush asks for $87 Billion for nation building, something that he campaigned on that he would never do. I wish he would engage in a little nation building here at home. It's absolutely absurd and it's going to catch up with him too. It's starting to, what with Condoleeza Rice and all that stuff, it's tremors of what's gonna be a major shakeup.

Cosmik: I have this recurring nightmare of those guys finding Saddam Hussein a few weeks before the election. I would love to see the killing of soldiers stop but I fear the American people would have a very short memory and they will all say, "See, it was all worth it," and Bush will be re-elected.

Roy: You're fighting two different battles there. One of them is the day-to-day political battle and sure, they are going to spring an October Surprise, whatever it's going to be. You know that's true! So that's one battle, but it's a winnable one because there are people like Howard Dean and even Wesley Clark and certainly Dennis Kucinich who are articulating very well the progressive alternative to that. Now it's not showing up on the radar much, but it's gonna. There's another battle that you are fighting that's a tough one. You are battling against Western History. Western Human History, in which we love war. In which we... really it's about rape. It's about our absolute allegiance to rape. I mean that in a larger sense how we as a culture took this country from the Indians, right? You're basing it off a winning and losing strategy where to win means to have raped. That's what our corporations have built their boards on. That's what our state constitutions have had to deal with and there's law books written on that. That's a harder battle to win; people are hard pressed to listen to that message.

Cosmik: I think you are entirely correct about that; I can see why people from old cultures see us as such a threat. Hell, even our own fundamentalists see our free-wheeling, hedonistic culture as a threat. There are reasons why people around the world hate us.

Roy: Everywhere in America they ask "why do they hate us, why do they hate us?" and the official answer is [turning up the sarcasm] "They hate us because we are a Free People." That's absurd! If you put that in a comic people would laugh! You could put a laugh track to the State Of The Union address and you'd have a good comedy record, I think.

(C) 2003 - Rusty Pipes