At its annual ceremony dating back decades, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., has honored a wide range of pop and rock musicians, from the Who, Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, and Earth, Wind & Fire to, this past December, the Grateful Dead, Bonnie Raitt, and Latin legend Arturo Sandoval. But now pop and rock musicians who’ve been booked to play the prestigious venue are grappling with an unexpected twist: Should they still perform there after Donald Trump announced his takeover of the venue and fired its board of directors?
The reverberations in the music community started immediately, when Ben Folds said he was stepping down from his role as artistic advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra: “Given the developments at the Kennedy Center, effective today I am resigning as artistic advisor to the NSO,” he wrote on social media. “Not for me.” Opera singer and actress Renée Fleming announced she was leaving her role as artistic advisor at large out of respect for colleagues who’d been let go, and Shonda Rhimes, creator of Grey’s Anatomy and the Kennedy Center board’s treasurer, also resigned.
This week, actress and writer Issa Rae announced she was cancelling a sold-out show, “An Evening with Issa Rae,” citing “an infringement on the values of an institution that has faithfully celebrated artists of all backgrounds through all mediums.” Low Cut Connie pulled out of their scheduled March show, with leader Adam Weiner saying that his friends would be ”directly negatively affected by this administration’s policies and messaging.”
Other musicians booked into the venue, including Peter Wolf and singer-songwriter Jonatha Brooke, haven’t yet announced their plans. (Representatives for both artists did not immediately return a request for comment from Rolling Stone.) Wolf is scheduled to talk about his upcoming memoir at the Center in March.
Meanwhile, a rep for Guster said the band’s performance in March is “still moving forward as planned at this juncture.” And singer-songwriter Chris Pierce, who’s opened for Neil Young, has decided to stick with his March date as well, both to honor his commitment and as an act of resistance.
Editor’s picks
“My first reaction was, ‘Oh, boy, I’m going to have to meditate on this and put some thought into it,’” Pierce tells Rolling Stone. “When we booked this gig months ago, I thought about the values of the Kennedy Center and respecting inclusion and empowerment. And I ended up with the conclusion that I needed to think about my own lyric and what I stand for. I thought about the first line in my song ‘American Silence’: ‘Will you rise up when your comfort is in jeopardy/Will you resist justifying the complexity?’”
In coming to his decision to proceed, Pierce says he thought back to his parents, an interracial couple in Pasadena, California, who had to cope with a hostile atmosphere of their own. “There was a cross burning on our lawn when I was five, and I thought about their reaction to that,” he says. “They didn’t pack up and move. They wanted to make a statement that they should not be scared and should speak out. We stayed in that neighborhood and opened some hearts and minds.”
Pierce, who has written songs about the late congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis (“The Bridge of John”) and the 1921 Tulsa race massacre (“Tulsa Town”), says he’ll pointedly be playing those songs and others like them at his March 12 show. “My set is full of songs about subjects that I really feel like I need to speak about, and I’m going to do my set exactly as I do it,” he says.
Adds Pierce, “I respect and appreciate folks who aren’t going to continue [playing the Center]. They made their personal choice. But musicians have a unique opportunity to open the door to healing. I’m not going to sit home and sulk. I’m going to get out and do what I can do and raise my voice. This won’t be the first time I’ve played under the roof of someone who runs it who I don’t align with.”
