This story originally ran in The Providence Journal on Thursday, May 13, 2004 under the following headline: Up to no good -- Kids' musician and social activist Bill Harley opens a new show at Trinity Rep.

This Saturday and next, the duo of Bill Harley and Keith Munslow plays the big room.

Up to No Good, Harley's latest show for families, goes up at Trinity Rep and showcases Harley's work in the goofy-comedy-duo context that he and Munslow have been refining (if that's the word) (and it isn't) for 13 years.

The show is simple - seven or eight pieces in all, including songs and stories, plus a few songs improvised from subject matter contributed by the audience. There's a bit of a set -- four easels with drawing paper (Munslow's drawing skills, an important part of his own children's show, are incorporated here), Harley's guitar and amplifier, Munslow's electric piano. There's a bit of a storyline -- Munslow, afraid of a menacing librarian, tries to get Harley to return a library book that Munslow has had out since sixth grade.

"It's a vaudeville show with two people," Harley says. "I'm the high-status, and Keith's low-status. He's screwing me up, and I'm trying to stay on track. And it's structured loosely enough so that we can bail if [a piece is] not working."

And that's about it -- except for the comedy and the chemistry that Harley and Munslow have been building for 13 years.

In 1991, Harley invited Munslow to join his band, The Troublemakers. About a year later, driving back from a show, Munslow was bemoaning his lack of money and upcoming work and talking of taking a day job, cutting into his own career. According to Munslow, Harley said, "Don't do it; something's going to break."

"And it was my finger," Harley says now.

After a basketball mishap, Harley couldn't play guitar and had a solid month of solo performances coming up, so he turned to Munslow to accompany him musically. And from there, an onstage relationship was forged -- Munslow as the delinquent jester, subverting Harley's attempts to put on a show.

"There's probably some more -- it's hard to say adult -- content" than his usual material, Harley says. "Although -- even the shows I do at schools, I'm very much aware of myself as a family performer, in the sense that I'm trying to write stuff that works on a couple of different levels. And I've always felt that if you talk seriously -- although the word 'serious' is going to be hard to maintain with this show -- but if you talk seriously about childhood, then there's room for everybody. Because adults remember."

Harley and Munslow rarely stop performing, when they're talking with each other or with someone else. There's always a search for a laugh, as much from themselves as from whoever they're talking to.

"One of the things that's hard when you're working solo," Harley says, "is you really need an audience to give you some response. Fortunately or unfortunately, we have each other" to bounce ideas off.

"We're the Broken Clock Theater -- we're right twice a day."

World-class talent

"Bill Harley is the ultimate fool, in the very best sense of the word," folksinger-activist Joyce Katzberg says. "Traditionally, the fool is the speaker of truths that need to be spoken, in whose fool's bag of tricks resides all the wisdom of the collective unconscious."

"Bill Harley is an enormous, world-class talent who lives right in our own community," says Craig Watson, literary manager of Trinity Rep. "He's a mainstay of our Family Fun Series every year, and as well he should be. We all at Trinity think he's a terrific artist, and a really relevant and important artist, for young people."

Harley has written beautiful songs, such as "Moving Day" as seen through a child's eyes, and the lovely lullaby "Moon and Me." He's also written "You're in Trouble," about an explosive attempt to make cookies, and "50 Ways to Fool Your Mother," a rap about faking illness to stay home from school. And Up to No Good includes a rapid-fire Who's On First?-style routine about a cat named Dog and a dog named Cat.

While speaking about his work at his home in Seekonk, Harley says, "I feel it's my job as an artist to make people look at things again -- at another time, in another way." He starts laughing -- "People are going to watch this show and say, 'And what were we supposed to be looking at there?' "

But the beauty of Harley's work is that even the low comedy serves a higher purpose.

Harley was going to be a community organizer. Now he's a children's entertainer. But each time he performs, especially for families, he's organizing a community.

"I feel like me being in front of people, and them sharing something together -- inadvertently it's become this radical thing. And if I get parents and kids listening to each other in that one space, at least then we're kind of building something with each other."

In the beginning

Harley, 49, grew up in northern Ohio and majored in religion at Hamilton College, in Clinton, N.Y. He has also trained in nonviolence and conflict resolution.

"I thought that that's what I was going to do," he says at his house. "But I was always interested in music and art. So I always tried to find a way to combine those two."

When he and his wife, Debbie Block, moved to Providence in 1980, "that's when I first started performing on the side."

At the same time, Harley and Block were two of the founders of the Stone Soup Coffeehouse as a home for activist folk music. And Harley and his college roommate, Greg Morello, founded The Learning Connection as a local embodiment of the "free university" concept; they had established a similar place in Clinton.

Harley and Block were both active in efforts against nuclear power and U.S. intervention in Central America, and Harley performed at disarmament rallies during the nuclear-freeze campaign.

Harley started performing for children before he had children himself. (Noah Block-Harley is 20; Dylan Block-Harley is 16.) In the early '80s, he and Block were working at a summer camp, and Harley was in charge of "keeping the kids quiet for the last half-hour at the end of the day. . . .

"I seemed to have some kind of natural proclivity for performing for kids. It didn't bother me so much; I wasn't afraid of them; I was writing material that made sense for them."

The jump to becoming a full-time performer for children and families was "one of the few conscious decisions we made," Harley says. "If I was going to make a living at this, we needed to find a way to reach the parents, too. So we made a conscious decision . . . and not only commercially, but because if I was going to talk about things that were important in kids' lives, we ought to be talking to the parents, too. . . . I watched my friends play in bars for 70 bucks and I said, 'I can't do that and have a family.' "

Of course, the road Harley took has its own set of challenges. The difference between a 35-year-old and a 40-year-old is scant; the difference between a 5-year-old and a 10-year-old is vast.

"I have to do all different things to make this work," Harley says. "I have to have a huge range of stories and songs. Because a lot of times I'll walk out to an audience and think, 'Wow -- this audience is a lot younger than I thought it was.' . . .

"I think that when you work with kids and families, there's an inherent devaluing of your work. Like you're doing that because you can't perform for adults. And I've kind of dealt with that monster; I've done performances strictly for adults, though less and less of it as the years go by."

Ultimately, he says, an audience is an audience.

"If an artist isn't interested in their own material, it's pretty obvious to a sophisticated audience. And a 7-year-old can be sophisticated. They can see that a person isn't performing for themselves; they're performing 'for me.' . . .

"I'm more interested in honoring [kids'] emotional lives, right here where they are."

Mark Twain?

It's worked so far; Harley's been called "the Mark Twain of children's music" by Entertainment Weekly; Billboard magazine said, "If Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes fame were to grow up, he'd be Bill Harley." He's been nominated for two Grammys and was signed to the giant A&M label. Along with his recordings, he's had five books published and hosts Hump Radio, a show devoted to children's literature on Vermont Public Radio.

Big deal.

"I had my flirtings with mass culture," Harley says, "and it just wasn't ever going to work."

In the late '80s, Harley had separate deals with Chicago Public Television and Maryland Public Television to develop a show for kids. Both deals fell through for the same reason: "The guy got canned."

A&M signed him in 1990. "They paid me a lot of money to make an album [Big Big World], and they paid to have a video made. I think they suspected that I was going to get a television show."

He had a New York booking agent who booked him into kids' package shows at 3,000-seat venues. But "it was chaos. Just people walking all over the place. And I had bands there, and it's OK if you're playing with a band and nobody's paying attention. But if you're telling a story and there are 3-year-olds wandering around eating cotton candy -- as a solo performer, you've got to get something back from the audience."

Then A&M dropped Harley, and three months later dissolved the entire children's music division. "It took me about nine months to realize that [getting dropped] had nothing to do with me at all. It was just that label trying to find something, and after a year and a half realizing that we weren't going to make them a whole lot of money."

Harley isn't quite dismissive about his Grammy nominations, but pretty close.

"I was doing a lot of NPR stuff at the time (he was a regular commentator starting in 1991 and still contributes occasionally), so I think I had some more cachet back then. The thing about the Grammys is, it's just a beauty contest when you get down to it. Who listens to everything? . . . I lost to Elmo the first year.

"It'd be nice if it happened, but at this point I'm more interested in doing good work."

Since then, Harley has returned to marketing his music himself (he's made 22 recordings), through the Round River Records label he and Block run from their home. (They have one full-time employee, Michele Eaton.)

Harley builds his career on "pockets," as Block calls them. "There are about 50 or 60 towns where he's got an audience, or we're building an audience." Harley played about 200 shows last year, Block says, including a weekly residency at the Paul Cuffee School, a charter school in Providence. And more are expected this year.

In 1991, Harley played a show at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on a bill headlined by Sting. "I admit to being intimidated. We had 10 minutes on stage, and at 81³2, I looked out at the audience -- it was a family show -- and I said, 'Wait a minute. I know these people -- I know them better than Sting, or Adam Ant, or Little Richard. What was I worried about?' I was worried about everyone backstage. So I promised myself I wouldn't be like that anymore. . . .

"I don't really need to be any more famous. Because you get close up enough to see what that's all about."

Guiding light

Katzberg has known Harley and Block for more than 20 years, and says, "They really are a team. Debbie is the guiding light that few people really see, without whom Bill Harley would be just another fabulous singer and songwriter and comic. . . . I wish the whole world had a Debbie Block. Bill's the engine and Debbie's the gas."

Block does all the bookings and distributes all the recordings.

"We're a mom-and-pop business, in the true sense of the word," she says, and they try to live that ethos. Block says she turned down an opportunity to work with the children's division of a record label in Los Angeles. "It was really clear that that would become my life. And it was also really clear that that was something I wasn't interested in" with two small children at home.

At one point, Block says, McDonald's offered "a lot of money" to put Harley's music on a compilation recording in Happy Meals. "But at that time, McDonald's was still using styrofoam packaging. So I said to the broker, 'This is a great opportunity for us; we'd really like to consider this, but we really need for McDonald's to switch over to paper and not use styrofoam.' How could I tell my kids, who are like Save the Earth kids, that we had sold out to McDonald's? And they couldn't deal, and so we said, 'No.' . . .

"For us, the way we do the business has always been as important as how much business we do. Because it's a reflection of who we are as people, and the way we want to see the world.

"It's weird, because we don't think of work where you support yourself as service, but I very much see his work as a service in modeling what's possible, and the more positive aspects of who we are as people, and who we can be."

Is it too safe?

"In a performance," Harley says, "you get [one] chance to make a point."

Do people always get it? According to Harley, people have written to him, thanking him for making entertainment that's "safe" for their children. But is it too safe?

"I haven't shirked from speaking out when I felt like I could make a difference," Harley says. ". . . I do a lot of benefit work, and if an organization wants my help, I'll listen to them and see whether I can help them. Which is different from content. . . .

"I had a story that I was telling a lot last year called 'Weezie and the Moon Pies.' And at one point we take our bikes completely apart. And this was before Iraq, and I've told this story for six or seven years -- I said, 'Here's the first rule of the universe: It's always easier to take something apart than it is to put it together. It doesn't make any difference whether it's a bike, a human being or a country.'

"I told that in Livermore, California, which is fairly conservative, shortly before the war started, and there was this spontaneous applause. And I thought, 'OK, I've made my point for the night! Thank you! Now I can talk about underwear again!' . . .

"I see people who are really different from me. And it's my job to say, 'What have we got here? What have we got in common?' So I'm more interested in addressing the commonalities. . . . "

"I got a letter from a Mormon family in Utah saying, 'We love your stuff; our kids can listen to it and they're completely safe.' And then two weeks later I got an almost identical letter from a lesbian couple in San Francisco.

"Well, those two families are really not talking to each other. And I think, 'Well, maybe I'm not saying anything at all; maybe I should run for president quick.' Or maybe that the things that are most important to people, they have in common."

"We have so many experiences in common," Block says, "and if we can laugh at ourselves, and remember that, somehow all the other stuff that separates us becomes less important."

Up to No Good plays Saturday and May 22 at 2 p.m. at Trinity Rep, 201 Washington St., Providence. Tickets are $18; call 351-4242.

Rick Massimo, The Journal's pop music writer, performed in a number of musical settings with Keith Munslow from 1990 to 2003, and played on the recording of one Bill Harley song in 1994.