Earth Riot with Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir

I arrive out of the concrete cold into the warm foyer of the tabernacle. My pals Tom and Joe are deep in conversation. I catch the end of the back and forth and hear “the Blood of Christ.”  I query what this is all about. I am let into the secret and told that they are thinking of an appropriate name for a cocktail, one worthy of drinking at Joe’s Pub during a church service on a Sunday afternoon. I nod in agreement and have only one question: “Gin or vodka?” Because we need to prepare for what comes next. We want to be filled with the Holy Spirit, not of the Holy Trinity variety, but from the source, Tanqueray.

For this is not an ordinary gathering of churchgoers. We are about to bear witness to a command performance from the Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir. This holds the promise of guerrilla theater, a Broadway musical without too much of the Broadway and a different kind of music. Mingling with the parishioners nearby is a character all decked out in a bright pink linen suit, wearing a black silk shirt and a priestly white dog collar. He sports a steel gray pompadour hair-do, a Jerry Lee Lewis look. Nicknamed ‘The Killer,” I remember then that Jerry Lee Lewis is related to another infamous preacher, Jimmy Swaggert. No Jimmy Swaggert here though – this is none other than the Reverend Billy working the crowd, saints and sinners alike.

If you have hung around even the edges of the protest movement in the New York City area, you should be familiar with the Stop Shopping Choir. They are street activists and stand hard against capitalist consumerism and the deadly strategies of the earth wreckers. They regularly confound the business of banks, megastores like the Disney (Mickey Mouse is the anti-Christ) or Walmart ones, Starbucks and other fast food outlets, the energy and chemical conglomerates such as British Petroleum (BP) and Monsanto, and lately the immigration police (ICE), especially since one of their collective was recently arrested at an action and thrown into the immigration hoosegow. Arrests are a common occurrence for members of the choir. They come with the terrain. The choir’s activities include exhortations to customers and shoppers to desist from playing ball and going along as if everything is normal and all right. They do this through performance, direct action and by engaging bystanders.

We are set at our table in the club with our Bloody Marys (a relative of the son of God). There is a commotion on the stage and a drummer and a barker musician behind the keyboards are making noise. The piano man is Nehemiah Luckett, and he is an important figure in the whole unfolding spectacle. He calls the faithful to prayer. From the topside entrance a host of folks sashay their way towards the front. The choir has arrived as a merry group of pranksters. They dazzle the audience with a kaleidoscope of vivid costumes that shimmer in the bright lights of the stage. The members are of differing ages, genders and colors. There are old geezers with beards, extremely attractive women, what look to be student-age kids, and some in their middle years, a regular polyglot of humanity. I’m not one to be enthused by the multi-cultural veneer, usually presented by those who don’t want to fess up to the iniquities inherent in a society controlled by class and race, but this seems like something else. It might be an actual rainbow coalition, not a made-up one. It certainly looks impressive. 

Assembled on stage, I count over thirty individuals. They are in full voice, and they all hold up placards, which read a single word “Riot.”  Billy is the last to saunter past our spot. He winks down at us and mutters, “How’s that for a fucking intro.” He makes his way into the belly of the choir and the show is on. There is even a sign language person, just like de Blasio at his bad weather press conferences. It is visually spectacular and our threesome is in tears with laughter.  

Billy Talen and his wife Savitri Durkee have been running their choir operation since the late 1990s. Savitri is the musical director of the program. She hails from proud hippy stock; her parents ran a legendary commune in New Mexico during the Kool-Aid LSD days. The likes of Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, the Grateful Dead and other well-known zonkers of that era passed through its gates. Billy and Savitri’s daughter Lena, not yet a teenager, is also a member of the choir. At our performance, Savitri’s face is covered in a pale veiled shroud, lending a sense of mystery to the proceedings. This is both unsettling and comedic. Meanwhile, she is singing and dancing up a storm.

Billy comes straight out of a Joseph Mitchell story, the saloon preacher kind. He grew up a Dutch Calvinist in the middle of this country. That’s directly related to the Dutch Reformed Church. I was born in South Africa and that outfit was the true church of apartheid. Billy manages to turn all of those notions upside down. He uses his invented persona to spread the gospel of carny disobedience. It’s extremely smart and very American. And Billy doesn’t limit himself to acting out. He is a published author too, including the books What Would Jesus Buy? (2007), and The Earth Wants You (2016).

My friend Tom lives a few doors down from Billy and his family in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. Tom has a ton of funny stories about this. On occasional summer nights, Billy and Savitri host choir practice, and a multitude of voices wafts from their upstairs apartment into the backyards below. This is a pretty sedate residential block. American flags are not uncommon here. And yet in their midst is the white Reverend Ike of the counter culture. Block Association meetings must be a treat. Tom is our access to the Reverend Billy. They are good friends. My point is that despite this outsized reputation with arrest records and all of that, Billy and Savitri have to take out the garbage and bike the kid to school, just like the neighbors do.

The choir is now in full swing and banging it out. They do a version of “War”, the Bob Marley tune with the Haile Selassie speech off the “Exodus” album. Various choir members take solos on different songs. Other numbers have titles like “The Beyond Song” and “Earth Riot.” And then the Reverend Billy delivers his sermon. Like most street preachers, he has the gift of the gab. He says, among other things, that in the choir’s experience acts of protest have come to be expected, not just by the police and the other side, but by many who witness them. This country demands a resistance movement that disobeys and defies acceptable standards of protest. They are acceptable because, in the main, they can be controlled and co-opted. The Reverend has spoken.

The show is over, and the choir boogies off the stage, going out the same way that they came in. There is a lot of glad-handing and hugs. Billy leaves the audience with a final announcement. The choir will be gathering a few blocks down the road at Swift’s, an Irish bar. Swift’s serves one of the better pints of Guinness in the city. We have intentions of going there anyway. Let it not be said that this religious community has poor taste.

We are uplifted. There is something very amusing about all of this. I am reminded of an incident that made the news years ago. The New York Yankees had scheduled their home baseball opener of the season for 3:00 pm one Friday in April. The problem was that particular Friday was Good Friday. The Cardinal was apoplectic, and he let George Steinbrenner have it. The New York Post, exhibiting a rare instance of what some of their readers might have perceived as heresy, had a field day on the back sports page. Their headline blared, “Sermon on the Mound.” This elicited chortles from our quarters. I have the same reaction to the Reverend Billy, Savitri and their choir. They are irreverent, relevant and hilarious in a righteous way.

At Swift’s, Tom and I sit facing the window onto the street, nursing our pints. Outside, it is pelting with rain, the late dark afternoon seems even rawer and colder than it was at lunchtime. Billy, Savitri and the rest of the choir are kicking up a ruckus in the back room of the pub. Tom goes back there and hauls the Reverend Billy up front. I ask Billy if he is interested in some reportage of his effort in the Red Hook Star-Revue. He is chewing on a bowl of Swift’s french fries, not nearly as enticing as their Guinness. “Please do,” he says. See, the Lord works in mysterious ways, and that day he wanted us to tell it like it is, before putting us on the subway all the way home to Brooklyn. 

The Reverend Billy’s Choir of Stop Shopping held forth every Sunday in December this year at Joe’s Pub in New York City.