Robert Hoyt calls for action at Cat concert

A small but attentive crowd got a taste of new-breed activist folk music at The Cat in the Cream on Saturday night, as Robert Hoyt played an exhaustive set. Armed with his boyish voice, acoustic guitar and strong lyrics, Hoyt, accompanied by David Rovics on bass, showed the Cat audience why he has been chosen to play at several major environmental activism conventions around the country.

Hoyt, an environmental activist himself, is one of the new breed of environmental folk singer/songwriters who reveal in unambiguous terms the state of the planet, while making equally unmistakeable calls for action: real, direct action. Singing up the beauty of mountain ranges and deep forests is not where Hoyt's songs end, but rather with a sense of imperative participation from the audience. Hoyt wants his audience not only to be moved, but to move in the direction of the most important action.

While it might sound overly political at first, the show rode mostly on laughs, both between songs and in response to hilarious lyrics. In "Swamp is Alive," Hoyt sang, "You think you're gonna live/Then you know you're gonna die/Cause a big wild pig/Is lookin' straight in your eye." One of his songs, "Shoveling Mud," was written about one of Hoyt's old jobs, has made crowds in Europe laugh, too. This song was in the Italian top 24 countdown long enough for an Italian distributor to pick the album up. To this day, Hoyt has a distributor in Italy, but not in the States.

Not only purely environmental topics make their way into Hoyt's political range, but all kinds of social issues. Sexual inequality in the workplace was covered by "Flag Woman," a song about women only getting the flag-waving job on road construction crews, a position Hoyt called the "asphalt ceiling of opportunity." Hoyt's scathing review of our nation's police forces came with the song "Bad Cop, No Donut," whose lyrics were more original than the title itself. Before "Bad Cop, No Donut," Hoyt asked everybody who had had a negative experience with police to raise their hands and look around the room. Everyone's hands were up in the air. "Now think," Hoyt said, "we pay them for what they do."

Not every song had a political lining, though. "Gasoline and Coffee," written about the only two things needed when touring, was well formed by Hoyt's four-and-a-half years on the road with a cat as his main companion. Even a love song, "Sorry We Ever Met," made its way into the set, with grim lines like, "Now they say to have loved and lost/Is better than having never loved at all/Whoever said that had never loved you/And beat their head against the wall." That was Hoyt's country number, one he said was styled after " `real' country, before it became...whatever it is today."

The best songs, though, had definite political slants. "Quittin' Time," a critique of technological fixation in the industrial world, called for "quittin' time on that old high tech plantation," as citizens renounce their status as slaves to techno-industry. During the set, the song "I Hate Money," appeared to drive a group of well dressed (suit and tie) students out of the Cat. After they left, Hoyt guessed that they were members of the junior capitalist club.

David Rovics, who was tagging along with Hoyt on this leg of the tour, played a somewhat inaudible bass accompaniment to Hoyt, but still managed to give some good backing vocals. He opened for Hoyt, playing an accoustic six-string and singing a mix of original and cover songs. One of his more amusing songs, "Make It So," was Rovics' premature nostalgia for the era Star Trek is set in. "I'm still waitin' for those good old days," he crooned, longing for the peaceful, clean, dilithium crystal powered future. Rovics' biggest success as an entertainer on Saturday night was his unintentional but perfectly executed impersonation of Beavis and Butthead's hippie teacher on the MTV series.

The real star of the show though, if such a low-key show could have a star, was Hoyt. Anyone expecting a bunch of Bob Dylan covers and tired folk would have been surprised by the fresh and urgent relevance of his music.