Interview with Bill Harley

Bill Harley: That’s so great. This is really right up my alley because there’s something that happens when you see live music that you can’t replace. A video or CD is a vicarious experience compared to what happens on stage.

BH: It really is a fine art. If you have a big band up on stage you have a lot of sound that can carry the day, but when it’s just you it’s much more vulnerable.

I try to talk seriously about being a kid—I don’t mean not humorously—but seriously. Let them know that their experiences are valid. I think if you do that, the parents appreciate that their kids are enjoying themselves and the adults remember that stuff too. The adults get to relive their childhood and the story is touching a part of them.

Bill Cosby was able to do that. I loved his comedy as a kid, but as an adult I still think it’s funny, just in a different way. So I think a really good story or song can work on a couple of different levels.

BH: With older kids I tell longer stories and when there are younger kids in the audience I know I’m going to have to do things with more repetition.

I have actually written a piece just about that: How do you entertain a family audience? There has to be repetition and an understandable plot line for younger kids, it has to be animated, but there also has to be enough there to appeal to adults.

And kids don’t mind if you’re shooting something over their heads now and then as long as they know you’re respecting them. Kids learn mostly by stretching and trying to figure things out in context. What they’re doing is taking words or concepts in context and trying to make sense out of them so if they don’t understand everything, it doesn’t bother them, they don’t mind that at all.

As for the kids in the middle, I love talking to upper elementary school kids, but I do begin to lose them to pop culture. So there needs to be a lot of material with irony, sibling stuff is really important, and the difference between the adult world and the kid world is really important for those nine to twelve year olds.

BH: Well, this is more about performance than content, but I had one kid come up to me who was about six years old say, “Thanks for the movies!” And I had told a lot of stories during that performance and I thought that was just so incredible because what I was doing was making a movie in his head. It was a really great comment.

And this one isn’t actually a great compliment for me, but it really made me think. This kid said to me, “You’re a really good storyteller, but you’re not as good as my dad.” And he’s right, because his dad knows which stories to tell him and is going to tell them at the moment they need to be told.

BH: There’s a kind of hierarchy of what you can get people to do during a long show. In the first or second song you don’t ask them to do anything that involves putting their arms outside of their body frame and you don’t teach them a song or chorus that has 100 words. A song like “Is Not, Is Too” is a good one to start with or “I Like to Sing” where all they have to sing is “La, la, la, la,” that’s all they have to do.

So once I’ve got them to do that I can ask them some questions so everybody has to raise their hands. And now there’s some participation. But if you start right off and say, “Okay, now I want everybody to stand up and pretend they’re a rabbit,” they’d just want to crawl under their chair. So there’s kind of an art to it.

BH: I’ll be quite honest with you. Some of the stuff I want to do doesn’t work well with three and four year olds. And the major marketing of kids music is to those younger kids.

Since I’m dealing with story and language it’s always a challenge and the younger ones are almost always the ones who determine the length of the show. About fifteen minutes before the end of the show I start watching them and thinking, “Are we done yet.” If I feel I can push them a little bit farther, I will, but there has to be a lot of repetition or something physical for them to do. It always is a challenge.

BH: Yeah, and that gets back to the whole thing about live performance. One of the things that I want to have happen is for the audience to be aware that they are part of the show too, that their listening and participation are essential to the success of the show. And so a piece like “Bear’s All-Night Party” is actually a very simple arrangement, but audiences don’t usually get involved in the song like that. I can see that as the bass comes in, then the birds start singing, people start thinking, “Oh my gosh, that sounds like music!”

And then of course for the littler kids there’s Bear, and every time the bear talks it’s funny.

BH: Usually I know that if they are crying it’s not because of my material but something else.

But I’ll never forget this… I have this one story that is a short “jump” tale and the only reason you tell it is to go “Boo!” and surprise the audience. It’s a little dumb story where I wake up at night and there’s this little two inch ghost trying to scare me, but at the end I scream into the mic and the audience jumps into the air.

Anyway, I remember doing that once when there was a family in the front row who had driven an hour and a half to come see me and the four year old freaked out and couldn’t be calmed down and they had to leave and I felt like such an idiot. So now with older kids I have some ghost stories, but with family audiences I’m pretty careful with material.

Most of the time when a kid is screaming I’m standing on the stage trying to figure out how long does this go on before it has to be addressed. Because the audience starts to worry. With big band shows with lots of people on stage it’s not a problem, you can just turn the music up, but with me it’s just out there, it’s just me and my voice, so there’s a real fine balance that you have to strike.

And here’s the other deal with live performance, a lot of kids (and adults) don’t even know how an audience is supposed to behave, they don’t know what a show is. If we tell kids that they’re not going to be able to run around during the show, that this is a special listening show, they may need to be reminded, but they’ll understand it. I think we demean kids when we assume that they can’t pay attention for that long.

BH: Right, and as I do this longer I realize that that is one of my jobs. We do less and less things together, especially with people we don’t know, and that’s not a good thing.

BH: Tolerance in a very broad term—that there are many different ways to be.

Acknowledgement that what they are going through has value, that who they are and what they are experiencing is real. And that other people go through the same things, too. There are a lot of situations that are unfair for kids. They don’t have power and they can’t change things. There are things that they want to do that they can’t do, and not necessarily just because it’s not good for them, but maybe there’s no money, there are too many kids, or we have to do something else. If adults acknowledge that and say, “This isn’t fair, but it’s the way it is,” then kids will understand that. But a lot of times we don’t do that, we just say, “No, we’re not going to talk about that.”

I feel like if I say, “You’ve got a brother who drives you crazy? You’re not the only one,” or “Sometimes your parents don’t pay attention? You’re not the only one,” or “Sometimes things don’t work out right? You’re not the only one,” then kids will know that somebody is on their side.

BH: It should make me calm down about what I’m doing—and every once and a while it does—because people have recognized that what I do has value. I should stop worrying about whether I’m any good and I should trust myself more that what I’m doing has value, because I’ve had that affirmation for it.

Now I shouldn’t have to ask “Do you like me? Do you like me?” I should just do my work and not have that kind of insecurity. It’s settling in a little bit.

The first Grammie didn’t make a huge difference in terms of my career. I mean, I’m in my fifties, what am I going to do now? What am I going to change? More people may come see my shows, but I’m not going to change the nature of who I am or what I do.

BH: It really is. I’ve been doing this for thirty years and when I started there was Raffi; Sharon, Lois, and Bram; and maybe a half dozen others, but now there are so many people that I can’t even keep track. I think that is all really good.

And it leads us to the long discussion of what’s happening with the music industry generally, where CD sales are going down, so what I suspect is that local and live performances are actually going to become more important. This happened with bands where CD sales went down and their music was passed around as files, but this increased the band’s visibility and drove people out to their shows.

There are a certain number of people who get into children’s music and think, “Oh my gosh, I can make a lot of money with this!” And they’re going to find out that that’s not true—that’s just not true. There will always be a percentage of people who make a fair amount of money, but in the end we’ll find out who wants to do it because they really love doing it.