The Long Memory

Loafer's Glory was originally broadcast from KVMR in Nevada City, Ca. These broadcasts are a collage of rants, poetry, tales, and reminiscences mixed in with little known music and talk from over 1,000 tapes of everything under the sun, from tramping and labor (historic and contemporary ) to baseball and old friends... from unreleased Lord Buckley to animals, children, tall tales, Paul Robeson, and most of what you need to know about life on the open road... and always music.

Our hope is that The Long Memory Project will be the building block towards establishing a permanent, non-profit archive for the works of Bruce "Utah" Phillips that will be easily accessible to the public. Some of the projects currently underway are the republication of Utah's original song book "Starlight On The Rails", making the one hundred episodes of "Loafer's Glory" available for download and rebroadcast, and a tribute CD from the artisans and organizers influenced by Utah from the state that Bruce always considered home, Utah. All the proceeds from these ongoing projects as well as donations will be used for this sole purpose. A portion will also go towards the day to day operations of Utah's place

The new 246 page songbook contains eighty four songs as well as the stories, in Utah's own words, that accompany most of the songs. The book also includes a collection of thirty or so photographs of Uath over the years.

For the better part of fourty years Utah Phillips tramped the country, singing folk songs and telling stories. I know from personal experience that from coast to coast there are folks with thier own stories about Bruce "Utah " Phillips. Now it's your turn to do the story telling. Send in or e-mail me your stories and I'll do my best to add them to collection.

I met Bruce Phillips in November of 1969. At the time I was the kitchen boy, lighting and sound man, and permanent third act on the bill at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village. All for 5 bucks a night and the privilege of sleeping on the Persian rug in the lobby when I couldn't find a place to sleep for the night when the bars closed. He had come in to do a guest set, having just left Salt Lake City after having been blacklisted after running for US Senate on the Peace & Freedom Party ticket as an anti-war candidate.

He got 6000 votes and split the Democratic vote
so badly that he couldn't get his job back as a state archivist (Imagine Utah Phillips, anarchist, wobbly organizer, and radical songwriter, working for the state!).

He was a larger-than-life vision out of the Old West; leather hat and vest, cowboy boots, gold watch chain, and mustache and mutton chop whiskers. We introduced ourselves and I found out what he needed on stage to do a set, and then started to argue about the relative merits of Guild and Martin guitars.
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