It is intended to prevent false and distorted reproduction and profiteering. On February 21, 1970, at around 4:30 a.m., three gasoline-filled Molotov cocktails exploded in front of the home of New York Supreme Court Justice John M. Murtagh, who was presiding over the pretrial hearings of the so-called "Panther 21" members of the Black Panther Party over a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. The political leaders came to us afterwards and said we had to take this task of revolutionary rock ’n’ roll seriously, and thus Prairie Fire came into being. I witnessed all the same damn hierarchical and privileged structures of knowing, being, and assigning social tasks that have been the identifiers of a class society for the past 10,000 years. Prairie Fire was also involved with the Iranian students and the struggle to overthrow the Shah, an involvement that was exhilarating on many levels. There are many, many more tales to tell about Prairie Fire, and lessons to benefit other musicians and activists. As subsequent events have demonstrated (no one predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union) the RCP and much of the radical left didn’t know what they were doing either. – was now in full ebb. We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny. This is illogical and incompatible with a worldview claiming to be scientific. Prairie Fire played at several of these events, including one just across the street from the White House. In the heady days of the early 1970s, when the radical movement was large and growing, we played for enormous crowds at antiwar demonstrations and for small gatherings, often called to meet and greet visiting luminaries of various leftist persuasions. We hope that people interested in Revolutionary ideas and events will make more and better editions possible in the future. Machbar Shah! If you were the enemy there could be no discussion. Thus began Red Rock, a large, unwieldy ensemble that practiced at the Mime Troupe’s warehouse and became wrapped up in all the political debates raging at the time, within the Mime Troupe as well as society at large. By this time the Vietnam War was over and the schisms and splits that arose in the “Movement” had separated us from many while aligning us more tightly than ever with the Revolutionary Communist Party and the issues it considered paramount. Predictions of imminent revolution and/or massive repression created an atmosphere of anxiety. If you were a Party member you could not disagree because disagreement meant challenging the superior grasp of truth by the leadership and implied disloyalty, a threat to unity and, potentially, enemy action. What the RCP and all other groups do in daily life shows us exactly the kind of society that they envision. We got involved in radical politics through the Black Panther Party and were subsequently invited by members of the San Francisco Mime Troupe to help form a band that would function as an adjunct to the Mime Troupe’s own musical accompaniment, a sort of musician’s auxiliary. There were profound political issues that underlay our choices about what we sang, and what we did and why we did it. Welcome back. Our tour in 1975 took us to 58 cities in 29 states. The place erupted like nothing I’d ever seen. What I can say now is that what I experienced between International Women’s Day 1971 when Prairie Fire first performed, and the last half of 1980 when the whole thing unraveled, was extraordinary by any measure. The Weather Underground, who wrote, “Any conception of socialism defined in national terms, within so extreme and predatory an oppressor nation as the US, is a view that leads in practice to a fight for particular privileged interest and is a very dangerous ideology. 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