Up Against the Wall Street

David Peel — Street Corner Rant

September 2011. I'm 69 years old. My knees hurt. My back hurts. My voice sounds like I gargled gravel for breakfast, which is about accurate. And there's a thousand people in a park downtown, sleeping on concrete and making signs, and they're calling it Occupy Wall Street.

So I grabbed my guitar and I went down there. They asked me how I got there. I said the same way I always get there — I walked.

You gotta understand something. In 1970, I wrote a song called "Up Against the Wall." It was about the cops. The government. The machine. And here it is, forty-one years later, and the wall is literally Wall Street. I didn't even have to change the title. I just added two words. "Up Against the Wall Street." The revolution keeps writing its own setlist.

I rewrote "Imagine" right there in Zuccotti Park. "Imagine there's no Goldman Sachs — it's easy if you try. No banks corrupted, or evil corporations." John would have loved that. He would have been there. You know he would have been right there with me, guitar in hand, singing to a thousand people sleeping on cardboard.

The lyrics said "David Peel and the Protesters." That was the band name. Whoever showed up. Whoever had a drum, a tambourine, a voice. That's how it always was. The Lower East Side band was just whoever was standing next to me in the park. Forty-five years later, same principle. The band is the people who show up.

The newspapers said I was too old. The internet said I was a relic. Some kid with a blog wrote that I was "an artifact of the sixties." An artifact. Like a pot shard in a museum. I'm not an artifact. I'm a musician who walks to work. I've been walking to work since 1966.

You know what was different about Occupy? Nothing. That's the point. It was Washington Square Park with a different zip code. People gathering. People angry. People playing music. Someone always has a guitar. Someone always has something to say. The park changes, the address changes, the signs change. The thing underneath doesn't change. People want to be heard.

"We are the ninety-nine percenters. Whose street? Our street!" A quarter million people said that. In New York. In Oakland. In Chicago. In London. I'd been saying it since 1968. Nobody was listening then either. But you keep saying it.

They cleared the park eventually. Of course they did. They always clear the park. They cleared Washington Square. They cleared Tompkins Square. They cleared Zuccotti. The park always gets cleared. And the music always comes back.

I was 69 years old and I was playing guitar on a street corner for people who needed to hear it. That's not a career. That's a calling. When you're 69 and your knees hurt and your voice is shot and you're standing in a park at midnight playing for strangers — that's not nostalgia. That's the real thing. The real thing doesn't retire.

See also: We Nominated a Pig — the first time the park was a protest. Washington Square — the park that keeps coming back. Rock and Roll Heaven — 69 and still walking to work. The Nurses — different picket line, same frequency.

David Peel

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