Jazz Mandolinist Don Stiernberg Brings His Instrument to the Studio.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: FEBRUARY 15, 2000
Time: 12:00
Tran: 021501np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Patrick Symmes' Debut Book Explores the Che Guevara Legend
Sect: News; International
Time: 12:06

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: It's been more than 40 years since Che Guevara led the decisive battle of the Cuban revolution, the battle of Santa Clara, which toppled Cuba's military dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Che was killed in 1967 while trying to create a similar revolution in Bolivia. His face still appears on T-shirts and posters around the world. His image is used to inspire rebellion and even to sell beer.

My guest, Patrick Symmes, is a journalist who went in search of the Che Guevara legend by motorcycling through South America, retracing Che's 1952 motorcycle trip, the trip that radicalized Che.

Symmes writes about Latin American politics and third world travel for such magazines as "Harper's," "Outside," and "Wired." His new book is called "Chasing Che.

I asked Symmes to tell us about Che's motorcycle trip.

PATRICK SYMMES, "CHASING CHE": I think he fell deeply in love with the south of Patagonia, which was one of my secret agendas in doing the trip. I had been down there before, and it's just such a shocking and green landscape and really beautiful. And he -- you know, he didn't really set out with any kind of political agenda. He just wanted to goof off, he wanted to see the world. He was 23 years old, and may -- he and his buddy went down there, and they just totally fell in love with it.

And he said in his diaries from the 1952 trip that that was the place he would like to come back to, that was the -- where he wanted to, you know, set up a medical practice and retire and live out his life. And I felt a very strong connection to that landscape, and I -- when I read his diaries about it I thought, you know, that's somebody who I think I could understand.

GROSS: But by the time his 1952 motorcycle trip was over, he -- I think it changed his mind about setting up a practice and retiring in Patagonia.

SYMMES: Yes, it radicalized him as he moved, you know, down through Argentina and up Chile and into Peru and began to see more of the poverty and the shantytowns and the -- you know, the -- he was traveling very, very rough, you know, living in leper colonies, sleeping in -- you know, he was a medical student, he'd sleep in spare hospital beds in yellow fever wards to save money. And he really had a sort of deep immersion in the full misery of 1950s Latin America. And it gradually began to radicalize him.

And by the end of the trip, he was thinking of himself more as a more political person, as a -- somebody who needed to take action about what he saw.

GROSS: Now, why did you want to retrace this 1952 motorcycle trip?

SYMMES: I guess I'd been struck by sort of the power of his -- of Che's image all over Latin America. I had spent a lot of time reporting in Cuba, and people there sort of hold him up as an example of what could have been, what might have been if he hadn't died. And, you know, there was a fellow once in Cuba who gave me a little picture of Che and said, "If he were still alive, none of this would be happening."

And there was that kind of attitude, like he was the lost, better part of us, our dreams were lost when he died. And I wanted to try and understand where that came from and why people believed in him so deeply. And I guess I saw in his motorcycle diaries his account of his trip, his own explanation for that, his own sort of origin point and where he felt he came from. And it was that notion of discovering a sense of solidarity with people all over the hemisphere, people who -- you know, he'd grown up as an aristocrat in Argentina, and he wasn't necessarily the kind of man who would go out and identify with lepers or fight for the poor.

And that was a real change in his life. And I think that travel opened those doors to him. It radicalized him, it made him aware of conditions he hadn't seen before. And also in a very personal sense taught him to sort of live in motion. He talks in his diary about discovering that his destiny was to be a traveler forever. And his mother wrote to him later and said, you know, "You'll always be a foreigner." And I think that travel sort of taught him to live never at home and to always be in motion and to be ultimately a revolutionary in a personal sense as well as a political one.

GROSS: What do you think are the main things that Che Guevara did that gave him that iconic image of the ultimate heroic guerrilla?

SYMMES: Well, there's no denying he was very brave in battle. I mean, he led from the front lines. He was Fidel Castro's right-hand man, and they made their revolution in Cuba in 1957 and '58 a real battlefield revolution, fought in the mountains in eastern Cuba. And Che was deeply respected by the men who served under him and loved because he had a kind of insane courage. He really believed in what they were doing. And he fought from the front lines. He was, you know, wounded, I think, six or seven times.

And he had a very charismatic nature, an ability to sort of not just be as battlefield tactician but to explain the kind of moral terrain that the guerrillas were on and why they were fighting, and to help convince people to join the revolution. He was very eloquent in a sort of -- you know, after the fighting, he became a, you know, a minister in the Cuban government, but he kept doing things like manual labor, volunteering, you know, to unload bags of what in the port in Havana.

And so people kind of really identified with him as a very immediate living person rather than just some abstract figurehead. And, of course, since he died, when he died in '67, that began to reverse, and he's become, as the decades pass, more and more of a sort of two-dimensional symbol, an icon, stripped of that reality.

GROSS: Did you meet a lot of people along the way on your trip who had either met Che or at least claimed to have?

SYMMES: Yes, there were a lot in both categories. There were quite a few people I managed to turn up, I was very surprised, who had met him. You know, when I was down in Patagonia, I just used his diary and went around and, you know, looked up the family names and so on. And I -- right away, I found a fellow named Oscar van Putkammer (ph), who had been a, you know, a small child when Che stayed in their house. I looked up Che's ex-girlfriend from 1952, you know, I found a guerrilla in Cusco (ph) who had trained under him in Cuba.

I even at the end went and looked up Che's traveling partner, who was a fellow who went on the entire trip with him and still lives in Cuba and is sort of in charge of curating the Cuban government's version of Che's life.

GROSS: Yes, in fact, you say the reason why this guy, Alberto Grenado (ph), went on the trip with Che is that it was Grenado's motorcycle.

SYMMES: Yes, yes. They were sort of partners in crime in a way. They were friends. But above all, Alberto Grenado owned the beat-up old Norton motorcycle that they were going to attempt to cross the continent on. And they got pretty far along. Eventually Che crashed and destroyed the motorbike, but that didn't ruin their friendship. And they kept on by hitchhiking and being stowaways and, you know, riding on trucks and so on in a very kind of slow, difficult travel over the Andes through Peru.

And Alberto Grenado is a pretty diehard defender of the Cuban regime to this day. But it was really interesting to talk to him and sort of sit there as two motorcyclists chatting about the towns we'd been in and how things had changed, and what was and wasn't the same 44 years later.

GROSS: How does his version of the 1952 motorcycle trip with Che Guevara compare to Che's diaries of that trip?

SYMMES: Well, they -- I guess there's two differences. One is a fundamental sort of character difference between the two. Che, as he put it in his diary, set out for adventure. He was a -- he called himself a dreamer. He wanted to go to the South Pacific and pursue South Seas maidens and just, you know -- he had no political agenda, really. He was a lark.

Alberto Grenado, who was a few years older than him, was a -- already at that point a dedicated Marxist and tended to see things in very political senses. So they had a -- they had different purposes and agendas in the trip.

And in a second sense, I think Alberto Grenado sort of edited his account in order to make Che look a little better than he was, not necessarily in any important ways, or just a series of small discrepancies between the two diaries.

There was an incident, at one point they volunteered as firemen in a little town in Chile because they were stuck in this town and there was a fire. And according to Che's diary, Alberto Grenado rushed into this burning building and saved a cat. And according to Alberto Grenado's diary, Che rushed into the building and saved the cat. And it can't be both ways.

I don't know who's fibbing, but I got the feeling that not only were their political -- or sort of personal agendas very different, but that the diaries, you know, reflect a certain amount of positioning of the sort of Che product in our contemporary culture.

GROSS: Has Grenado kind of made a career of having taken this motorcycle trip with Che?

SYMMES: Yes, he gets a lot of status out of it. He's a -- you know, a sort of Friend of Che, as they call them in Cuba, somebody who knew him. That's a very high-status position there. And he -- you know, you'll see him at events in Cuba, you know, that -- when they're opening up a new golf course or something, they'll have a picture of him in the paper, and it says, you know, "Alberto Grenado, a friend of Che, tests the golf links."

And I don't think that's something that ordinary Cubans necessarily get to do. It helps to have been a friend of Che.

GROSS: Now, you mentioned you'd talked to a guerrilla who trained under Che Guevara. What did the guerrilla, the former guerrilla, tell you about Che?

SYMMES: I guess I was most struck by his sort of sense of great regret. He felt that he'd failed Che in a very personal way. He told me, you know, "To me Che was a saint. And he sent us, he trained us, and we failed." And I think I actually talked to a lot of ex-guerrillas on this trip, and just universally they felt a sort of great disappointment that their dreams had been false, that the revolution wasn't coming, it never had been coming, that they were mistaken.

But even so, there was a great sense of loyalty in his voice to the man he had known who had inspired them so much, and Che was a really charismatic leader who sort of exerted a kind of personal influence over a whole generation of these intellectuals across Latin America. Everywhere in Latin America, dozens and dozens of guerrilla groups sprang up imitating him, their leaders trained under him.

There's some guerrillas still in the field today in Colombia who trained under him in 1963. And even one of their leaders puts on the little beret and sort of strikes the Che pose and looks up for the photographers in exactly the same way as Che would pose, you know, trying to evoke that connection, that image of the past and hold onto that -- you know, what the Cubans call the heroic years, the spirit of great revolutionary change that was supposedly going to sweep over Latin America.

GROSS: You say there are anti-communist groups that see Che as their hero too.

SYMMES: Yes, there's a -- even the contras in Nicaragua would look up to him as a sort of (laughs) a pan-theological guerrilla. It doesn't really matter what your ideology was. He was a charismatic guerrilla leader who shot his way into power, and that's the basic example.

You find people in Argentina who were associated with the right-wing death squads and even leaders of them who claim to revere and admire Che. So the ideological differences no longer hold much meaning. There's this kind of universal agreement in Latin American and many European countries as well that he was an inspiring figure who did -- you know, made the ultimate sacrifice to speak for the poor and the disenfranchised. And I guess you find that the poor and the disenfranchised don't have a lot of spokesmen, so they're willing to take anybody.

GROSS: Now, you met a lot of people who met Che or claim to have met Che. Is there a story that you came to think of as the kind of typical apocryphal story about meeting Che?

SYMMES: (laughs) Well, there's so many that were so startling and strange sometimes. I made a habit as I traveled along -- I was on the road a long time, four and a half months, about 10,000 miles -- and I would feign ignorance. I'd say to people, So who's this Che Guevara character in the papers? You know, what's the story with him?

And I'd get these just incredible tales, that he was, you know, really a European or a North American, that he was, you know, Castro's brother, that he was a drug dealer, that he would -- you know, any kind of crazy thing, you know, there were all these stories about, he wasn't really killed, he's alive today in such-and-such a place, just the most fantastical accounts.

Somebody told me he was an internationally famous car thief. You know, just things that made no sense at all. But again and again, people felt that some sort of connection to him. And I think it's because there are so few heroes in Latin America, there are so few people who even tried to speak up and do anything about the tremendous poverty. And you don't have to agree with his ideology to sort of notice the tremendous emotional power that his image has for people who are the down-and-out of the world.

GROSS: My guest is journalist Patrick Symmes, and he retraced Che Guevara's 1952 trip across Latin America and has written a new book called "Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend." Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: My guest is journalist Patrick Symmes. And after retracing Che Guevara's 1952 motorcycle journey across Latin America, he's written a new book called "Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend."

Let's get to Che Guevara as a pop icon. There were souvenirs, I imagine throughout Latin America, with his likeness on it. Why don't you describe the range of souvenirs that you found?

SYMMES: I was nearly run off the road quite a few times by trucks that had Che Guevara mud flaps on them.

GROSS: (laughs)

SYMMES: I don't know the symbolism of that, but it was -- you know, I would be sort of hurtling off the side of the road as a truck passed with Che mud flaps. You know, you -- Cuba is the main place for buying Che souvenirs, but you can get them all over. You know, they make skis with Che Guevara's likeness on them, beer, cigarette lighters, nail clippers, you know, T-shirts of course, rock albums, you know, Rage Against the Machine puts Che on their albums and flies Che flags at their concerts.

You know, I'm fond of -- I bought a pair of Che maracas, which I really like to break out sometimes and play on.

GROSS: Did you talk to souvenir vendors about what sold best, and how the trends seemed to change from year to year?

SYMMES: Yes, I mean, far and away the best seller, what they all -- you'll see them, they're everywhere in Cuba now, Che tourism is one of the main props under the Cuban economy, and I think far and away their big seller is -- what they look for is Europeans who want to buy Che T-shirts. And you can see at any one place -- I was just in Cuba a few months ago -- you see 25 or 30 different varieties of Che T-shirts, and there's sort of intense competition among the vendors, you know.

And then the international marketplace is no slouch, you know, at exploiting his image either. Swatch produces a special line of Che Swatches, which are only available -- you know, the Cuban government bought the entire production line and sells them for profit at Jose Marti Airport outside Havana. So everybody gets in on the act. It's a big cash generator.

GROSS: The old -- ultimate capitalist (laughs)...

SYMMES: Yes, yes...

GROSS: ... transformation of the communist revolutionary.

SYMMES: Yes, his ex-girlfriend said to me, "It's just too ironic. He's become a consumer item."

GROSS: (laughs)

Well, Che Guevara transformed himself. Tell us something about his family background.

SYMMES: He was -- the motorcycle journey really changed his life and his world. He was born into a kind of aristocratic family in Argentina. They didn't have a lot of money, but they were very intellectual and educated. And he went to medical school, and never practiced as a doctor, but he had a kind of a noblesse oblige. I think his mother was a very amazing character, a beautiful, wealthy woman, a political radical, who raised him to be very independent and filled their house with, you know, Spanish Civil War veterans and artists and writers.

And -- but they didn't have any money, so he also grew up -- you know, he was in street gangs when he was a kid and was -- had a sort of rough and tumble childhood and knew that side of the world as well.

And he also, from a very early age, suffered from terrible asthma, so that his whole life was kind of a physical challenge. And I think that's crucial to understanding him. He had what's sometimes called the asthmatic personality, which is reacting against the feeling of suffocation, against the feeling of weakness by polishing your will, your willpower, and always fighting on.

And he was just incredibly rugged. I came away from that motorcycle trip with a sort of deep respect for his physical toughness. He had to keep going, he had to keep pushing, even when it was desperate and he probably believed that they couldn't succeed, he still fought on, and he ended up dying in a very squalid way at the end of a failed mission in Bolivia, but unwilling to ever quit.

GROSS: Patrick, when you were, you know, spending 16-hour days on your motorcycle in rainstorms and feeling quite despondent, what got you through it? I mean, unlike Che Guevara, you don't, to my knowledge, has asthma, you're not the asthmatic personality. You weren't a revolutionary in the making. Did you ever say to yourself, Why am I doing this?

SYMMES: Yes, all the time. But, I mean, one of the great lessons of the trip is it's amazing what you're capable of when you have no choice. I would have things like -- I had a terrible accident in deep, deep southern Chile, when -- I have no idea what happened. I just woke up on the side of the road with the motorcycle on top of me and a broken rib. You know, I was in the middle of nowhere. There wasn't a single other car around.

And what do you do in that situation? Well, you get up and you go on, you have to. It's not like there was any choice. Again and again, I'd find myself in places and experiences where I was very vulnerable, there was nothing to do but trust people by the side of the road. And again and again, I found that those people always came through for me. I was sort of shocked at how good human beings turned out to be, because people could have taken advantage of me over and over again in any kind of situation where I had breakdowns, and I was, you know, sleeping in strange villages in the middle of nowhere.

Between not having any choice at the worst moments and between that sense of wanting to live up to the sort of good treatment I was receiving, I found it kind of necessary to keep going and keep pushing on and keep trying to, in the end, reach Bolivia and see the final things he saw, the places where he died, the places where he fought and died.

GROSS: Well, on the lighter side, one of the things you learned from Che Guevara was how to freeload. After reading his diary, you decided that when it came to freeloading, Che Guevara was a prince.

SYMMES: Yes, I'm a little ashamed of it, but I traveled a lot before I started on this trip. I'd even hitchhiked across South America once. And I'd sort of incorporated the notion that when you're on the road like that, you're living out of a backpack, you're far from home, nobody knows who you are, there's a kind of a glancing quality to the life.

And it's very tempting sometimes to -- you know, as Che would do, fabricate these stories about who they were and just kind of throw themselves on the mercy of people. It's very easy to sort of become rude and just insist that people take care of you when you don't have any resources and you're far from home.

And he was a champion at cadging free meals and drink off people, getting into parties. He was always in search of liquor. And I used to study up on his techniques and use them. You know, I got into a firehouse one time, and Che had this whole technique of refusing to have a drink unless someone would give him food. So if someone offered him a drink, he wouldn't drink it, he'd just leave it sitting there until they got insulted and said, Why aren't you drinking? And he'd say, Well, you know, in my country, we're used to having some food with it. So then the person would buy him some food.

And I didn't really believe that would work until I tried it, and it worked perfectly, so there's a lot of things you can learn from Che.

GROSS: Patrick Symmes is the author of "Chasing Che." He'll be back in the second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with journalist Patrick Symmes, author of the new book "Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend." It's about the motorcycle trip Symmes took across South America, retracing Che's 1952 motorcycle trip.

You went to the place where Che Guevara's remains were secretly buried, and then they were in 1997 dug up and taken to Santa Clara in Cuba, where he led the decisive victory against the Batista regime. Tell us a little bit about your visit to the place where his remains were secretly buried.

SYMMES: That was the end of my trip. And I got in there, I'd just finished about 10,000 miles. I was about four months into the trip. And I was just utterly exhausted. And it's this sort of brown, parched landscape in southern Bolivia, very desperate, these tiny little hamlets. And I got into town, and immediately on my arrival, because I was the only gringo there, a fellow from the local radio station interviewed me about who I was and what I was doing here.

And unbeknownst to me, that interview was broadcast over the entire province. So the next day when I set out, you know, there's a very remote area to go try and see Che Guevara's -- you know, where he fought his final battle, where he was killed, where he was buried. As I drove down the road, villagers would come running out of their huts saying, Hey, you're the gringo on the radio! And, you know, I talked to Che Guevara right on this spot 30 years ago, right here, and he told me this and that.

And you never quite know whether to believe those stories, because there were so many of them. And I think people get very excited about having a connection to him. But I'd sort of -- wherever I'd go I'd be confronted by people who had heard me on the radio and wanted to argue about Che Guevara's doctrines and ply me with moonshine.

And it was a very funny and odd end to the trip. You know, you bump into these European Che tourists who had Che tatoos, sort of wandering through this landscape, and it was just a surreal place, and very grim and sad. But in the end, the villagers sort of -- it's the most exceptional thing that ever happened to them there, and they sort of look back on it all kind of fondly.

GROSS: Were Che's remains still buried there when you were in Valagrande (ph)?

SYMMES: Yes. During the course of the four and a half months that I chronicle in "Chasing Che," they were searching for his remains. And so it's a constant theme in my book about the -- sort of the search for these phantom remains. In the end, they actually did find them. He was buried in this vast valley. You know, they sort of found most of his remains. And there was a very sort of ugly necrophiliac argument between Argentina, Bolivia, and Cuba over who got the remains. And eventually Cuba won, and they were exported to Cuba and put on display. And there was a very grand funeral there, which I attended.

And he's now sort of an official museum exhibit in the Cuban revolution.

GROSS: Well, as you point out, in Cuba, Che Guevara is part of the establishment.

SYMMES: Yes, it's funny, when you get to Cuba -- and a lot of places elsewhere in Latin America, he's a leftist symbol. But in Cuba, a lot of people who are dissatisfied with the regime also exploit his image. And then he's -- at the same time, you know, if you walk into a Cuban school, you will see his name on the blackboard. His picture is in every school I've ever been in in Cuba, his face is everywhere. He is the official patron saint of the revolution. His lessons are taught to children all through school. Toddlers literally nap under his gaze, and every child in Cuba takes the pledge, We will be like Che.

So he's got this sort of twin nature as a kind of -- the establishment, a symbol, you know, an official propaganda symbol whose face is seven stories tall on the side of buildings, but at the same time, he's used in a kind of subversive way by the dissidents within Cuba who think he represented some more humane trend in the revolution, a more hopeful and noble and personally sacrificial kind of leadership than they have now. I think people are exhausted in Cuba, and he symbolizes those hopeful early years, what they call the heroic years.

GROSS: After you completed your motorcycle trip, retracing Che Guevara's trip, you came to the conclusion that Che Guevara was a brutal man.

SYMMES: I think that's been sort of washed away with the forgetting of the years, the -- I mean, his life's work -- he was a very inspirational man, a charismatic leader. He gave a lot of beautiful speeches. But in a lot of ways, his life's work was setting up ambushes and was teaching others how to conduct, you know, recon. He was a soldier, he was a -- he viewed himself as a sort of intellectual soldier of fortune fighting in the socialist cause. He directly trained and led or inspired or directed guerrillas movements across Latin America and in Africa.

He was personally a violent man. He -- you know, when they were in the mountains of eastern Cuba and he was with Fidel Castro, they caught their first traitor, a guerrilla who'd defected, and Castro sentenced -- said, He has to be killed, he has to be sentenced to death. But no one would volunteer to do it except Che. And I think that he believed in a very kind of harsh world. He believed in violence. He said, "Violence is the midwife of the new societies. We mustn't be afraid of a little violence."

And that too was his legacy. Everywhere I went in Latin America, I saw the scars of this tremendous epic of decades of violence and guerrilla warfare. And it's not all his fault, but he did his very best to increase the violence, to polarize the climates, to try to train people to use violence, to be a midwife of the new societies.

And the cost for that was incredible. It's a continent covered with mass graves, with fresh scars. And that too has to be part of his legacy.

GROSS: Of course, his violence was fighting against violent regimes. There was already a lot of violence in Latin America.

SYMMES: Yes, he didn't step into an empty world. I mean, he was reacting against a very legitimate kind of constant repression. I mean, for example, in Cuba, the conditions there before the revolution were awful, and people rallied to their cause and responded to the guerrillas and joined them and were willing to sort of liberate themselves under arms.

But he tried to export that model to make it apply in places like the Congo in Africa, where he backed a guerrilla army that fell apart, or Bolivia, where he believed he was coming to liberate these peasants who, you know, were living under oppression, and indeed they were brutally poor and still are, but the peasants didn't welcome him. They turned on him. They ratted him out to the army because they didn't know who he was, they viewed him as a meddlesome outsider.

And it was easy, I think, to extrapolate too far from the example of the kind of liberating Cuban revolution, which really was a legitimate middle-class, popular rebellion that needed to happen, and then to try to export that to societies where there was a lot of repression and there was a lot of violence, but that ultimately adding violence, you know, adding, as many of the guerrillas told me, their own efforts simply made things worse.

Jacopo Timmerman (ph) said all the guerrillas achieved was to grease the wheels of the killing machine.

GROSS: Che Guevara was considered very handsome, very rugged looking. And that certainly has helped his iconic status. Do you think he would have kind of reached that iconic status if he looked more nerdy?

SYMMES: (laughs)

GROSS: Or just, just, you know, like, less, less macho and less attractive?

SYMMES: I think it's true that some of the power of his -- some of his power today comes from the fact that he was a very dashing fellow, and that was always the case, even when he sort of rose to be a battlefield commander in Cuba, it was partly his eloquence, it was partly the sort of dashing figure that he cut. And a lot of his sort of worldwide image today rests on a single photograph that was taken of him one day in 1960 in a beret, sort of -- his eyes burning off into the future. And, you know, it was an image that sort of caught a sort of fiery look in his eyes.

And you can't underestimate the power of that image as a symbol, even when, you know, the reality of Che Guevara, whether -- you know, whether he actually looked that way or not, you know, isn't necessarily what determines whether people care about him. He is a symbol, he is two-dimensional now. And the angle of the beret, the length of the beard, and the fire in his eyes, all contribute a lot to that.

GROSS: Well, Patrick Symmes, I want to thank you very much for talking with us.

SYMMES: Thank you.

GROSS: Patrick Symmes is the author of "Chasing Che." He's a contributing editor at "Harper's" magazine.

Coming up, jazz mandolinist Don Stiernberg.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia
Guest: Patrick Symmes
High: Writer and traveler Patrick Symmes writes about Latin American politics, globalization and Third World travel for the magazines "Harper's," "Outside," "Wired" and "Conde Nast Traveler." His first book is "Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend." Symmes traces the path of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who in 1952 traveled via motorcycle across South America from Argentina to Cuba and emerged a revolutionary. Guevara was an upper-class Argentine medical student before he started the journey, but the poverty he saw radicalized him. He became famous for his part in the Cuban revolution.
Spec: Art; Cuba; Ernesto "Che" Guevara; Media

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 2000 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 2000 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Patrick Symmes' Debut Book Explores the Che Guevara Legend

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: FEBRUARY 15, 2000
Time: 12:00
Tran: 021502NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Jazz Mandolinist Don Stiernberg's New Album Inaugurates Blue Night Records
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:45

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: Don Stiernberg is a jazz mandolinist who was described in "Mandolin" magazine as "either the finest jazz musician to ever play mandolin, or the finest mandolinist ever to play jazz." Stiernberg was the protege of Jethro Burns of the famous music and comedy team Homer and Jethro. Stiernberg performed with the Jethro Burns Quartet and performed on the last two albums Burns recorded before his death.

Stiernberg's first recording as a leader is also the debut CD from the record label Blue Night. We often play music from it in between interviews on FRESH AIR. So we decided it was time to meet Stiernberg. We invited him to join us from the NPR bureau in Chicago, where he lives, and we asked him to bring his mandolin to demonstrate a couple of things.

But let's start with a track from his CD, "About Time." It features Kurt Morrison (ph) on guitar, Jim Cox on bass.

(AUDIO CLIP, SONG EXCERPT, DON STIERNBERG, KURT MORRISON, JIM COX)

GROSS: Don Stiernberg, welcome to FRESH AIR.

DON STIERNBERG, "ABOUT TIME": Thanks very much.

GROSS: Few jazz musicians play mandolin. Is the instrument particularly well or poorly suited to jazz?

STIERNBERG: Well, I think it's really well suited to jazz, and you can think of the mandolin as sort of a cross between the violin and the guitar. It's -- the pitches are the same as a violin, but you play it with a pick like you would a guitar, so I think it's as well suited to jazz as those other two instruments are. You can do a lot of different things with it.

GROSS: It has almost a more metallic sound than a guitar, and I think it has a lot less sustain than, for instance, an electric guitar, you know, a lot of jazz musicians play electric guitar, and they could get a nice sustained note. What do you do to compensate for that lack of sustain?

STIERNBERG: Well, the strings are in double courses, so there's only four pitches on the mandolin (plays the four pitches), but they're -- the strings are in pairs. And what that does is make it possible to do a tremolo. So the sustain on our instrument is the tremolo, (plays a riff with tremolo) which is a good thing for a nervous guy like me. (plays more tremolo)

GROSS: (laughs)

STIERNBERG: So we can sustain notes, we just have to (plays tremolo) achieve it in that way. (plays tremolo)

GROSS: Hearing you do that, I think of a lot of really, like, bad mandolin restaurant players. I hear "Arrivaderci Roma" in my mind.

STIERNBERG: Oh, sure.

GROSS: (laughs)

STIERNBERG: Yes, one of my favorites. (starts to play "Arrivaderci Roma" with tremolo) Oh, you said bad. OK.

GROSS: Right. (laughs)

Did you learn to do a lot of corny stuff like that when you were learning mandolin?

STIERNBERG: Yes, things happen to you when you're a mandolin player, and that's one of them. You know, you tell people you're a mandolin player, and then pretty soon you're playing Italian tunes. The "Godfather" theme comes up quite a bit (inaudible).

GROSS: Oh, sure, sure.

STIERNBERG: Of course -- (plays familiar Italian dance tune)

GROSS: Oy. (laughs)

STIERNBERG: Those are wonderful tunes, though, they're great tunes. They help build a technique on the instrument.

GROSS: Right. How did you end up studying mandolin?

STIERNBERG: Well, the mandolin kind of came to me. I -- my brother plays guitar and banjo really well. He's older than I am, and so I sort of appropriated it. And I was trying to learn it on my own for a good while, and then my mother heard an ad on the radio, "Study mandolin with the great Jethro Burns." So she sent me down to meet Jethro, and that's what really got me serious about it. I got really excited when I heard him play in person, and wanted to learn to play like he did.

GROSS: Yes, Jethro Burns was half of the country comedy team of Homer and Jethro. What were they most famous for?

STIERNBERG: Oh, they had a really long and great career. Most people might remember them from a -- for a series of Kellogg's Corn Flakes commercials, where they would tell corny jokes and, you know, do routines, play a little music on the commercials. But also they were on all the major television shows. They did about l40 records.

I guess their claim to fame comedy-wise was parodies of hit songs. They started out writing parodies of country songs, of Hank Williams tunes and, you know, things of that nature, and then later on they moved on to just parodies of anything, Frank Loesser songs and just pop tunes of the day.

GROSS: It was actually a surprise to me to read about and then hear what a good player Jethro Burns really was, because I always just thought of him as a really corny comic. In fact, why don't I play -- you were on his last two records. You were his student, and then recorded with him, performed with him.

I'm going to play something from one of his last sessions, and this is a recording of "I Can't Give You Anything But Love." You're featured on rhythm guitar with Jethro Burns on mandolin.

(AUDIO CLIP, EXCERPT, "I CAN'T GIVE YOU ANYTHING BUT LOVE," JETHRO BURNS WITH DON STIERNBERG)

GROSS: That's Jethro Burns on mandolin with my guest, Don Stiernberg, on rhythm guitar, and Don Stiernberg studied with Jethro Burns.

Don, did Jethro Burns teach you the kinds of things he was doing on that track that we heard? Is anything that we heard on that track kind of distinctively Jethro Burns to you?

STIERNBERG: Uh-huh. Yes, a lot of it was a good representation of his style, I think. And he would show me things of that nature. Mostly he would -- he taught me tunes, and we would just get together and learn this -- what he called the standards, and jazz tunes that -- you know, of his day that work really well for improvising with.

GROSS: Well, can you demonstrate some of the stylistic things that he showed you?

STIERNBERG: Sure. The main thing about Jethro's style of mandolin playing was that he would use the whole mandolin. He was a great single-line player, as you heard on that last, you know, "I Can't Give You Anything But Love." But also, he would play in a style that he kind of invented, chord melody style, where he could play a tune rather than one note at a time -- (plays tune one note at a time) -- he would play it four notes at a time. (plays tune four notes at a time) More like a jazz guitar player might play chord melody style.

GROSS: Must have been very gratifying for you to play on his last sessions. Do you think he had a sense that these would be his last sessions?

STIERNBERG: Oh, yes. That's kind of why they took place. He knew that he had limited time. He had cancer. And he still felt well enough to play, and so he and his family decided that it was time to have him play and record as much as possible of -- you know, play music the way that he wanted to play it.

So I got the call to kind of help him with that project. We recorded about 70 duets at his house. Did some at my house too, but I guess most of them at his house. And we'd just go in the basement and play favorite tunes until he didn't -- you know, didn't feel well enough to keep playing. And got quite a few of them down.

GROSS: My guest is jazz mandolinist Don Stiernberg. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: My guest is jazz mandolinist Don Stiernberg.

Let's hear another track from his CD, "About Time." This is "I'm Coming, Virginia."

(AUDIO CLIP, EXCERPT, "I'M COMING, VIRGINIA," DON STIERNBERG)

GROSS: Don Stiernberg on mandolin from his CD, "About Time," which is, by the way, the first CD on a new label called Blue Night.

That is just really a delightful track, and helps me realize what it is I like about your playing. I mean, you just have this really nice sense of time, very relaxed.

STIERNBERG: Thanks.

GROSS: Which is something that I think you don't hear that much in mandolin because there aren't that many mandolin jazz players. (laughs)

STIERNBERG: Right. There's -- well, there's, you know, four or five of us now that I can think of, but, you know, compared to other instruments, it's definitely a small number.

GROSS: The mandolin has such a smaller fret board than the guitar does. Does that make it any easier or more difficult?

STIERNBERG: Well, the size of it isn't so much a factor as the way that it's laid out, at least to my way of thinking it's easier to deal with, because it's tuned to the same interval (plays intervals) all the way across the mandolin. So when you learn one set of patterns for scales and chords, then you can just move that around up and down the fret board, and it's a little bit less to keep track of, it's -- than, say, on a guitar, (inaudible)...

GROSS: Just is more like logically arranged?

STIERNBERG: That's it exactly. It's symmetrical, in fact. So that makes it a little bit easier for me to hear something and then play it on the mandolin than on a guitar or some other instruments.

GROSS: When you started playing mandolin, was it hard to find a place for yourself in other people's bands? Most jazz groups aren't looking for a mandolin player.

STIERNBERG: Yes, I've always been able to find places to play, but quite often I'm playing other styles of music too, especially early on. I played in a bluegrass band, that was my first professional work.

GROSS: Have you been able to make a living playing music, or have you had to have day jobs also?

STIERNBERG: No, I do make a living playing music.

GROSS: What kind of settings do you mostly play?

STIERNBERG: Well, I play other instruments, other string instruments, as I mentioned, playing guitar quite often. And I also play tenor banjo, which is really like a big mandolin, the same sort of tuning system. And I play fiddle in country bands from time to time. So I'm kind of, like -- you know, I'll play -- most of the time, I'll play in jazz bands or bluegrass bands, and sometimes in country bands, and also society bands here in town.

GROSS: Now, you sing as well. When did you start singing?

STIERNBERG: Well, again, it's on that list of things that I started looking to do to try to help keep the calendar filled at a -- you know, as a working musician. I used to sing harmony parts going all the way back to the Morgan Brothers, the first band that I was in. So I've always enjoyed doing that. And then as far as singing as a featured singer, that's been more just in the last couple years, kind of following suggestions from friends about that. I'm a little bit reluctant about it, but trying to sing some of the jazz standards that I love.

GROSS: Well, why don't we close with a track from your CD, "About Time," that will show off your singing and your playing? And this is, "If I Could Be With You."

Don Stiernberg, thank you very much for talking with us.

STIERNBERG: Thank you, Terry.

GROSS: And thanks for playing for us as well.

STIERNBERG: It's my pleasure.

GROSS: Don Stiernberg's CD, "About Time," is the debut CD on the Blue Night label.

FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our engineer is Audrey Bentham. Dorothy Ferebee is our administrative assistant. Roberta Shorrock directs the show.

I'm Terry Gross.

(AUDIO CLIP, EXCERPT, "IF I COULD BE WITH YOU," DON STIERNBERG)

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia
Guest: Don Stiernberg
High: Jazz mandolinist Don Stiernberg is a 20-year veteran of music and studied under the jazz mandolinist Jethro Berns. His new jazz mandolin album is called "About Time" and is the debut album on a new label.
Spec: Entertainment; Music Industry; Television and Radio; Art

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End-Story: Jazz Mandolinist Don Stiernberg's New Album Inaugurates Blue Night Records
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