Outernational full-page feature in SI Advance.  Read the full piece by Rob Bailey HERE. | Not to mention a sweet Dr. Blum hometown Q&A! FUTURE ROCK!

Outernational at Dominion, NYC 5.24.12 | by Ricardo Aca cc: @MilesSolay @Outernational_

“We’re on some emancipate-humanity-free-planet-earth tip.” || Great interview from Austin, TX with Miles Solay, Leo Mintek and Dr. Blum in the midst of their ‘Todos Somos Ilegales: We Are All Illegals’ tour in mid-May at Pachanga Fest via Latin Recap!

Check out Tour Diary #3 via our Official ‘Todos Somos Ilegales: We Are All Illegals’ tour partners, CUENTAME.

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WE ARE ALL ILLEGALS TOUR JOURNAL PART 3 – by Leo Mintek of Outernational

April 19 – Santa Maria, CA

We began the California leg of the Todos Somos Ilegales Tour in Santa Maria, California. the strawberry capital of the USA.  We were invited by CE’ENI (Colectivo Educativo Estudiantil de Naciones Indigenas) and were greeted by an airbrushed banner announcing our concert: in a backyard.  We rocked through an acoustic set of songs from Todos Somos Ilegales and the coming album Welcome To The Revolution.  A circle pit broke out and the fired up young crowd danced and sang along to songs like For It All Now, Que Queremos and Across the Borderline. 

Santa Maria is the strawberry capital of the USA and most of the workers in the fields are from far south in Mexico and Central America.  Many of our hosts were Mixteca people from Oaxaca in southern Mexico.   Afterwards they treated us to an incredible Pozole dinner accompanied by fresh strawberry juice.   We heard stories of recent border crossings from Baja California all the way to Santa Maria. One friend had just crossed back to the US through the Arizona desert, the very same land we had visited last week, hosted by our indigenous O’odham friends from the Tohono O’odham Nation - which the Arizona-Mexico border cuts in half.  It was chilling to hear his stories of a week long journey:  hiring a coyote, climbing desert mountain passes for days, running out of water, and riding in an overcrowded truck all the way to Phoenix.  It was very heavy to hear his story and remember the desert mountain ranges from last week, having been told by our O’odham hosts that the migrants travel the mountains to avoid the Migra surveillance on the desert floor.

April 20 – Fresno, CA

In Fresno CA we played a rock show hosted by the Todo A Pulmon: Radio Bilingue radio show and played alongside Los Angeles punks Chencha Berrinches.  Fans were waiting for us, ready to sing along to all the new songs from Todos Somos Ilegales.  Little did they know that the intense touring had taken its toll on Miles’ vocal chords and they would have to indeed sing along – from the stage!  We invited fans to jump up and sing and we rocked an amazing wild show, supported by our fans who knew all the lyrics and gave back such energy!  What a night!

April 21 – Sacramento, CA

We were invited to Sacramento, CA by the Sol Collective, an amazing local art/culture/activism group we worked with at SXSW in Texas just a month before.  They host concerts and have been providing a center for local youth for years despite police repression and harassment.  They were having an awards dinner and Outernational was the afterparty.  We played acoustic in the back room and received a standing ovation from the mostly older crowd, some of them beaming with smiles, seeing that their lifelong efforts were being carried on by a new generation.  It was powerful; afterwards we heard stories of everything from SWAT team raids to neighborhood harassment of the center -  because of the ‘dangerous youth’ Sol Collective works with.  This is Sacramento, the capital of California, the city Arnold used to commute to daily from Beverly Hills in a helicopter; and where 40 years ago, Emory Douglass and other Black Panthers marched with arms into the capitol building.

April 22 – Berkeley, CA

We rolled into Berkeley down Telegraph avenue, passed People’s Park and entered Revolution Books.  This revolutionary communist-led bookstore was throwing a fundraising concert to raise money for the BAsics Bus Tour  which just kicked off from Atlanta, GA, spreading and promoting the writings of Bob Avakian, who you can hear twice on our new album: The Theme From Todos Somos Ilegales VI: ”The Greatest Country”and singing lead on Across The Borderline.  

April 23 – San Francisco, CA

In San Francisco we played at the great rock club the Elbo Room.  It’s in the mission district and we were greeted by this mural in the alleyway “To all indigenous people made prisoners in their own land”.   We played a super high energy rock show to a near empty room.  Nonetheless the people wilded out during the set and the encore of Fighting Song, but we walked away feeling ‘why is this band such a secret’?  I heard the same sentiment from all the folks at the show.   We left and hoped to return to the Bay again soon.

April 25 – Reno, NV

We arrived in Reno the morning that SB1070 entered the Lower Supreme Court.  Actions were called for around the country and we performed in the street downtown with a local coalition rallying to make sure no SB1070 copycat bills are passed in Nevada.  It’s important to understand that the Federal government blocked some parts of SB1070 when it passed in 2010.  This Supreme Court hearing  - happening right now - is to try to enforce the full draft of SB1070, to increase the racist climate of policing, fear and deportations in Arizona. 

That night we played at the Reno Underground, where years before we toured with UK punk godfathers GBH.  The owner of the club is from France, he grew up and cut class with Manu Chao and loves Todos Somos Ilegales so much that he set up a great cool show, which was broadcast live on the web.  Reno is a very dark place. There is so much suffering in the streets: homeless, drugs, drunks, down and out people looking for saviors in the slot machine or a bottle.  It’s also the state capitol and gambling extends from the glitzy downtown to neighborhood 7-11s where you can find slot machines next to the beer cooler and porno magazines.  We left that night, and drove through the mountain pass, past the memorial to the Donner party: white colonists from 160 years ago who got stuck in the snowy mountains and ate corpses to survive.  We made it back to California.

April 26  / Part 1– Sacramento, CA

We made a quick appearance in the morning outside a State building in Sacramento where family members of prisoners in California State Prison at Pelican Bay were rallying.  Pelican Bay Prison is the most notorious of the super max prisons in California, at the furthest point northwest in California, over 13 hours drive from LA. There, on the beautiful Pacific Northwest coast, the state houses prisoners in Secure Housing Units (SHU) which are sensory deprived torture chambers, designed for short term punishment, and now used on people for decades.  These are people whose only physical human contact comes from beat downs by guards and who are kept in windowless cells for 23.5 hours a day for years and subject to what is understood as Torture by any modern definition.  Last year the SHU prisoners began hunger striking, led by a defiant multi-racial unity coalition, unheard of in California prisons, where the administration fosters and enforces racial division and warring.  Read more about the SHU and the Hunger Strikers here.

April 26 / Part 2 – Occupy Fresno

We returned to Fresno and set up a DIY outdoor concert at Occupy with 24 hours notice.  It was incredible.  The fans, friends, the rebellious youth,and the local occupiers all came out and sang along to Que Queremos, Fighting Song, Sir No Sir and other acoustic jams including First Among Equals’   Fresno has a very inspiring new generation coming up, many of them students whose Chicano Studies professor told them to take off class and come to the Outernational Occupy Fresno concert..  It was one of those concerts that was so honest, so face-to-face and real… the type of show that will keep you going for weeks of no sleep and hard times.

April 27 – Tijuana, CA  as told by Dr Blum

I was so excited to go to TJ and glad to finally leave stinktown USA.  We dropped our van and trailer off with the San Diego promoter and jumped in a van from across the border.  We drove across to Mexico which took a much shorter time than anticipated.  We went to the club and met the promoter, a very cool laid back old school kind of guy.  He took us around TJ and showed us the town.  He showed us all the maquiladoras, which are those huge factories where America farms out its production to cheap labor.  He showed us the wall which was pretty crazy and built into the ocean.  It was covered in street art.  We ate tacos.

After sound check we went to a Luchador match which was a silly cultural experience: dudes in wrestling masks pretending to hate each other.  More like ballet than fighting.

We were performing at and old strip club.  There was a pole on the stage.  We rocked the show despite obvious sound system issues and we were joined by Ceci Bastida and we played Canta El Rio.  I forgot how awesome that song was, I get to play a lot of accordion.  The show was decently attended and fun was had by all.  Afterwards we hung out in TJ and we met up with Pepe from Nortec Collective.  What a crazy cool guy.  Had a long talk with Pepe about the state of music today and how disappointed he is that there’s no new music, there’s too much just recreating old styles; no one is pushing boundaries enough. 

I got a chance to hang at the oldest bar in TJ before retiring to our hotel.   It was interesting, people tell you “TJ? Be careful!” But it didn’t feel dangerous; it’s like every city, there are parts of town that are tough.  I thought it was going to be poor and violent, but just like any city it is a mix between all classes; the area we were in was where middle class Tijuana people go to party.   TJ is no longer the American tourist area it was; there are no longer crowds of drunk Americans.  It has been decaying and now revitalized for Mexican party-goers. 

We saw police officers armed with machine guns.  We drove by the red light district.  Pretty fucked up that anywhere in the world is a red light district.  It’s a cash town; many handshakes were exchanged.  There’s a lot of hustling going on in that place.

When we were leaving to cross the border, that’s where we saw the poverty.  There are all these people whose job it is to sell things to people waiting in line to cross to the US.  Even I bought a $10 statue of a rooster from a man in the street.  We crossed over and I was sorry to leave so quickly…. (Dr. Blum)

April 28 – San Diego

We crossed back to the USA, and looked back into Mexico from Tijuana.  There are 4 border walls between the cities, walls which extend deep into the ocean, severing the land in two and maintaining two very different worlds on both sides.  That night we played the Roots Factory, who built a stage and painted this Todos Somos Ilegales mural in our honor.

April 29 – Los Angeles

We arrived in Los Angeles on the 20^th anniversary of the LA Rebellion (aka the  Rodney King Riots).   Revolution Books LA threw a series of events and we performed at their fundraiser concert at the historic Fais Do Do music hall the Crenshaw district.  People spoke on the meaning and significance of the LA Rebellion – the largest rebellion in US history, sparked by the acquittal of the police who savagely beat Rodney King - which was exceptional only in that it was caught on videotape and laid bare for the world to see.  The rebellion was responded by the largest domestic military operation ever and should be celebrated, with its shortcomings, as a righteous people’s uprising.  We performed acoustic on stage and were followed by Leon Mobley and Da Lion: a super energetic, highly skilled and orchestrated symphony of African drumming and voices.  He called his music American-African.  It was incredible and everyone danced.

We left Fais Do Do to take a well earned day of rest before May Day, where we were preparing for street performances and a big Los Angeles concert before rushing back east to Texas, Chicago and NYC: for the final return leg of the Todos Somos Ilegales / We Are All Illegals tour.

Dr. Blum and some Suffragists in Chicago on May 20, 2012

Outernational, Tom Morello, Tim from Rise Against, Amy Goodman, Son Del Viento, IVAW (Iraq Vets Against The War) and more for ANTI-NATO action in Chicago

Learn more about the IVAW (Iraq Veterans Against War) action in Chicago today on Democracy Now!: http://bit.ly/K8EwXD

Listen to the entire 15 minute interview with Jesse Menendez and Outernational: http://bit.ly/JoEteB

“I feel bad if those people who know of a way out keep their mouth shut. See, if you feel bad for bringing people the truth, that’s just another form of condescension. Cuz really what you’re saying is ‘Hey, these people can’t actually be confronted with reality and challenged with reality to transform themselves and change their own thinking’…and human beings been doing it for many years…and it ain’t easy! We’re making rock & roll, shakin’ our stuff on stage. We’re not up there patronizin’ people. There’s a “shake you out of your laissez-faire malaise,” and let’s get ROCKIN’ cuz we have a lot of work to do!” - Miles Solay

“The sound is a brilliant, aggressive, bottom-heavy hybrid that brings to mind bits of rock, rap and rock en español.”
- Outernational in The Chicago Tribune

Welcome To Chicago #NONATO

Miles in CHI REMEZCLA in “Rebel Music: The Sounds of Anti-NATO”

“What’s the importance of an anti-NATO summit show this weekend?
Outernational is coming to the city of Chicago this weekend to deliver the revolution rock, as we do night in and night out. Our concert Friday night at the Abbey Pub is timed to coincide with the anti-NATO protests going on this weekend. We will be there with The World Can’t Wait, Saturday night’s Woody Guthrie tribute show at the Metro, and then on Saturday for the IVAW march and protest. Why? Because NATO’s supposed “peacekeeping” is aimed at maintaining a world of Western imperialist—especially U.S. imperialist—domination over the people of the world.”

OUTERNATIONAL’S CHICAGO SCHEDULE:
Fri - St. Luke’s Lutheran Church | World Can’t Wait Concert - 8pm (unplugged) | RSVP: http://on.fb.me/JOg2Et
Fri - Abbey Pub | HEADLINING CONCERT -  11pm | RSVP: http://on.fb.me/JiZTK1
Sat - Grant Park | Malcolm X Freedom Festival - 4 - 8 PM w/ Rebel Diaz + more
Sat - Metro | Woody Guthrie Tribute Show - 8 pm | INFO: http://bit.ly/J0PGgj
Sun - Grant Park | IVAW rally (Iraq Vets Against The War) | Info: http://on.fb.me/Jzebah

Hello from Memphis, TN. Big up to DUCK DUNN who just passed away. Original Stax bass player, so many records this guy did. #soul #integration

Miles Solay of Outernational & René Pérez Joglar of Calle 13 in Houston, TX - House of Blues on May 10th, 2012!

Check out Outernational in the Chicago Sun-Times on this piece about Chicago + Anti-Nato events going on next week!  Get Tickets To See Outernational @ The Abbey: http://www.abbeypub.com/outernational-and-graham-czach

Outernational relations
Morello’s presence will be felt throughout this weekend’s citywide demonstrations. He’s planning to perform at the Barefoot Summit, a series of free concerts planned (but still pending) in Grant Park during the NATO summit. He’s hoping to march with Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, and he’s already made headlines as the center of a controversy over a march by National Nurses United workers. Last week, the city yanked the permit for the march, scheduled for May 18, citing Morello’s participation as constituting, in the mayor’s words, “kind of a rock concert.” Morello responded on Twitter: “Why is Rahm Emanuel so afraid of The Nightwatchman??”

“The day it was announced I’d be playing there for the G8 protests was the same day Obama moved the G8 summit to Camp David,” Morello says, chuckling. “I’m wondering if it was a coincidence. Maybe the Nightwatchman was too much for him.”

Even some of Morello’s protégés will be in town.

“Todos Somos Ilegales (We Are All Illegals),” a new album by Brooklyn punk band Outernational, features Morello on both the title track and a mariachi-flavored cover of Guthrie’s “Deportees.” The set, mixing Clash-ing fight songs with native Mexican music styles, is a concept album about the human costs of American immigration policies along its southern border, and for the last few weeks (after also participating in various Occupy events last fall) the band has been touring back and forth on either side of the Rio Grande and points west. They play Chicago this weekend, too.

“It’s been wild and wooly,” says Outernational singer Miles Solay, from a tour stop in Arizona. “It’s an incredibly militarized and polarized situation, up and down the valley. There are neo-Nazis, Minutemen, vigilantes out here. I wondered if we’d be interacting with them on this tour, but so far not so much. The idea that any human being in 2012 is deemed illegal is obscene, absurd and obsolete to me. We didn’t make an immigrant rights record, though. We made a record elucidating our vision of the way the world could be. There are a million and one stories along this border, and we’re trying to tell a few as a springboard for people to see the issues in a different way. It’s not a policing issue, it’s a people issue.”

Guthrie’s song, “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” details a 1948 plane crash, specifically the way the victims, mostly migrant workers, were dehumanized by being unnamed in official reports: “You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane / All they will call you will be ‘deportees.’”

Outernational didn’t plan the song to be part of a full-length album.

“I told [Morello], ‘How about we do this Bob Dylan-Joan Baez bit from the Rolling Thunder Revue, when they sang ‘Deportee,’” Solay says. “Let’s do it as a duet. We pulled it together one afternoon at Tom’s house, this Mexican-folk version. That’s what kickstarted this particular record. It was just supposed to be an EP, but we wound up telling this whole story.”

The band’s other full-length, “Welcome to the Revolution,” recorded by Chad Smith (Red Hot Chili Peppers), is due later this year. But first, they’re touring the immigration songs — and joining Morello in Chicago (possibly at the Guthrie tribute, too) for a busy weekend of protest music.

“There’s a lot to learn from that guy,” Solay says of Guthrie. “He wrote in a very different time period and we are different people, but there are a lot of parallels between this tour and what Woody did.He was out there on the front of things. Everybody knows the railroad hobo thing, but why did he do that? He went out there and tried to know the people. You hear that in his songs, and in ‘Deportees.’ I’ve thought about that a lot. Not every band gets to do that. Singing your message at the exact time people need to hear it most — no one should take that opportunity for granted, man.”

Read Entire Piece Here.