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Ian recording some of the Zomba prisoners A
nd so he took a more direct approach to “constructive cul- tural contribution” by “organ- ising modest benefits for local charities and political causes,
eventually graduating from local bands to people like Fugazi, Green Day, Merle Hag- gard and Kris Kristofferson”. He now reg- ularly promotes gigs with film-maker John Waters, whom he met in 2001 when pro- ducing a benefit with him and Tammy Faye Bakker. Brennan remains committed to charity work and continues to raise money for various projects including pro- viding musical equipment for the Malawi Mouse Boys, medical care in Rwanda and Tanzania and funding legal cases for some of the Zomba prisoners, who may never before have had any legal representation. As a direct result of this three of the women involved in the Project have been released and currently the cases of three others are under review.
He tells me that going into Zomba Prison was an experience that in some ways was “Not alien at all. It was familiar to me to see people talking to themselves and who were being aggressive to you in a facility.” For around the same time Brennan had begun releasing his solo records he’d landed a job working in a locked teenage psychiatric unit in his hometown of Oakland, California. Getting the job because he said he’d work every weekend, he says “I was with teenagers who were trying to hurt me physi- cally and telling me ‘fuck you!’ every second. I had no formal training and it was sink or swim. I was 20. Only two years older than some of them so they were confrontational with me when I had the least skills to deal with it.” He then landed a job as counsellor in Oakland’s psychiatric emergency room and
his work with Vietnam vets there planted the seed of the Hanoi Masters recording as he took to thinking about the ‘other side’ and the experience of the Vietnamese veterans.
Brennan’s success as a counsellor has led
to his parallel career in violence prevention. “In 1993 they asked me to try to train some of my co-workers in conflict resolution and verbal de-escalation. Through word of mouth, I became an ‘expert’ and started lec- turing around the area, then the state, then the country, and eventually the world (Europe, Asia, Middle East, Africa). It was because of this that the head of prisons in Malawi allowed Brennan and Delli access for the Zomba Project, which was granted in exchange for Brennan delivering classes on violence prevention to inmates and guards.
His book Anger Antidotes came out in
2011. Writing was not new to Brennan, who’d had poetry published as a teenager. For Brennan, songwriting was really a means of getting his poetry heard. But while music is a language both he and his sister shared, and both his grandfathers were fine Irish tenors, neither parent was particularly musical, though he may have inherited his talent for writing from his father, a railway engineer who published books of poetry and “is still a great writer and speaker”.
It was thanks to a re-run of an Elvis film
that Brennan was bitten by the music bug. He bought a double vinyl record of the King’s greatest hits, played it until it was unplayable and picked up the guitar. He was just six years old. While his musical tal- ent was acknowledged and he was put into a music programme at school, Brennan remained mostly self-taught on the guitar. Describing his relationship with it as
“obsessive compulsive” he reckons that if he’d been a kid today he’d probably have been medicated.
Growing up in the suburbs of the Bay Area in the 1970s and ’80s he got into a sta- ple diet of classic rock, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, then Springsteen and American roots music, with San Francisco punk, courtesy of bands such as the Dead Kennedys thrown in.
Whilst writing for a rock music maga- zine and hosting a local radio show, frustra- tion with his own music led to the begin- ning of his field recording career in the local launderette. “Disillusioned in the mid- 1990s, I started a residency once a week in a working laundromat in San Francisco. I hosted a different local artist each week for five years. These recordings resulted in three Unscrubbed compilations (Toy Gun Murder Records)
He says “I purposely made an effort to record people I didn’t like but other people did. I felt that there must be something there. I looked for what’s unique about their music. There’d be one song that would have a texture or an element, just some- thing that didn’t sound like everything else. And this is still a guiding principle in choos- ing the music to record.
Brennan’s growing frustration with the increasingly homogenised output of a rapidly globalising music business, its cele- bration of dull mediocrity, its focus on a few artists and their promotion as brands fanned the flames of his interest in ‘interna- tional music’. As human beings we crave the excitement of the new. Variety, musically speaking anyway, is quite simply, “good for us neurologically”, but “the music business would have us believe that on a planet of seven-billion-plus people a few select
Photo: Marilena Delli
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