Environmental activist comes to town playing his tunes

When Bill Oliver was a kid, he couldn’t decide between Smokey Bear and Chuck Berry so instead of trying to choose, he just did a little of both.

“They were my heroes early on,” he said. “Still are.”

Bill Oliver is on his “Never Say You’re from Texas” tour of New Mexico and Arizona and will be passing through Las Cruces, stopping to perform at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, May 8 at Downtown Blues Coffee.

Oliver is an environmental activist musician who has come down the years, most recently with the Otter Space Band. He has shared rallies, campfires and concerts with the likes of Katie Lee, David Brower and Ed Abbey.

“As the musician part me developed, I got to play songs and be around folks in biology, naturalists and park rangers quite a bit.”

He went to community college in biology for years as he “stretched out” his GI bill. You could catch him writing songs in the margins of field biology notes.

“I got activated,” he said. “I’ve always been kind of in the Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger school of folk music and I got into the east Texas wilderness and forest issues. We were trying to save mixed forests, wildernesses from overzealous forest service policies of the 70s and 80s back where we are taking so many wonderful forests out of action.”

Oliver and whoever he was working with at the time were able to earn a living playing their music for schools and parks, keeping topics neutral enough for the audience.

“I’m playing a lot of solid waste songs and recycling and general natural appreciation songs which paid the bills,” he said.  “So we played protest songs by night and the schools by the day. Our day job supported the activism.”

They supported groups that were trying hard to fight through the court system and street theater and lots of other ways, demonstrations.

“We would be trying to play and have a good time at campfires and keep some kind of levity going,” Oliver said.

For the past several years, Oliver’s Otter Space Band has been active. Coming to Las Cruces, it will be his sweetie, Virginia Palmer, who “brings a lot of energy and fun to it – singing and playing with tambourines and percussion.”

Palmer, too, has been an activist for most of her life, he said, in Texas and in California. She does a lot of organizing and helping with the band.

“Aldo Leopold, Greenfire, The Sand County Almanac – all of those were iconic beginnings of many of the cohorts with which I was working, hanging out with in the 70s, 80s and 90s,” he said. “So this little trip through he southwest is seeing folks I haven’t seen in a while.”

Oliver said he might describe his music as a bit of folk rock with country jargon infused with humor and some allegory.

The Wednesday concert at Downtown Blues Coffee, 130 South Main, co-bills with local musicians Cleve and Sweet Mary Hattersley. Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door. 

More about Oliver can be found at Billolivermusic.com. For event information call 575-523-8828.