Franti, Raising The Alarm

Franti also visited the Gaza Strip and Palestinian territories, speaking to refugees and Israeli soldiers and interviewing grieving mothers from both sides of the divide. He'd gone to Iraq to see the effects of a single year of occupation; the West Bank and Gaza Strip journey was to see what three generations of occupation had done to Palestinian society. Franti found "a lot more hopelessness and despair" there but also instigated some revealing dialogue between Palestinian farmers and Israeli soldiers.

"It really restored my faith that way, just seeing how simple it is to get people to stop and be quiet and listen to one another," Franti says.

It was natural that Franti gravitated to local performers, from street musicians and a Palestinian hip-hop crew to a collective of Israeli and Palestinian musicians and Iraqi metal band Black Scorpions, which not surprisingly had great difficulty finding instruments and accessories, sometimes using telephone wire for guitar strings.

Franti says he quickly recognized that nobody wanted to hear protest songs, or songs about the war, though he did play "Bomb the World" ("You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can't bomb it into peace") to a group of off-duty American soldiers in a Baghdad bar. Franti called that "the hardest show I'd ever done in my life" but also facilitated a party that brought some of those soldiers together with the Iraqis behind Radio Iraq, Baghdad's first independent radio station.

In the film, Franti says the trip "made me realize one very important thing, which is that I'm not on the side of the Americans, Iraqis, Israelis or Palestinians. I'm on the side of the peacemakers . . . whichever country they come from." He's still in touch with quite a few of the Iraqis in the film, "in e-mail touch, which is difficult in Iraq, and there's a lot of people in Israel and Palestine we still keep in touch with. The lead singer from the Black Scorpions now goes to school up in Victoria, B.C., and I've seen him several times -- he comes out to our shows."

Franti has written a companion paperback, "I Know I'm Not Alone: A Musician's Journey Through War and Occupation in Iraq, Palestine & Israel," and put together "Food for the Masses," a collection of lyrics and black-and-white portraits from his early years with the Beatnigs to Spearhead's CD "Everyone Deserves Music." It showcases why many place Franti in the hallowed tradition of Bob Marley, Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield.

Besides copies of original handwritten lyrics, "Food for the Masses" includes a CD/DVD of unreleased live performances. Franti hopes the book will lead to a reconsideration of the breadth of his work and its evolution from militant passion to a more compassionate, personal bent.

"I've been known as a political artist," Franti concedes, "but if you go through the book and read the lyrics, there are songs about sex, songs about food, songs about partying, songs about sadness, songs about love and songs about political things. I've always tried to express the full cycle of human experience."

Listen to an audio clip of Michael Franti and Spearhead

Appearing Friday at the 9:30 club

Next:"Probably the funkiest, most danceable record, but also the most raw sounding," Franti says. "I'm writing from little one-minute video clips that I take with my little still digital camera and edit together on my Mac. So I'll make the music first, put the images and then write from what the images are telling me. It's just been a different way of writing songs."