A Protest Song Gets a Television Showcase
By Ralph Blumenthal

Rahav Segev for The New York Times

Spots derived from a new protest song by David Ippolito, above in Central Park in 2003, will air in the Bay Area and on national cable news shows on Wednesday.
It's hardly the stuff of sweet New York summer Saturdays by the rowboat lake, but David Ippolito, the barefoot troubadour known simply as "That Guitar Man from Central Park," has a new song going national, airing Wednesday night on left coast television.

It's called "Resolution (The Torture Song)," a cri de coeur against the nation's interrogation policies growing out of the Iraq war, along with appeals to Attorney General Eric Holder to hold top Bush Administration officials criminally accountable.

"I'm a possibility junkie," the irrepressible Mr. Ippolito likes to say. "If it's possible, let's try it."

Boiled down from a six-minute video posted on YouTube, the folky protest song has been compressed into three 30-second television spots with Mr. Ippolito calling on viewers to contact Mr. Holder to "do your job."

They are scheduled to run in the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose market Wednesday night on the Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow shows on MSNBC and afterwards in that market on Comedy Central on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" with Stephen Colbert.

And if supporters like Cynthia Papermaster in Berkeley, Calif., have anything to say about it (more on her below), it will be shown far more widely around the country.

Mr. Ippolito gained fame with his free weekend concerts by the Central Park lake near Strawberry Fields starting in 1992, drawing legions of fans, including the 90-year-old impresario Sid Bernstein, who brought the Beatles to America, and allowing him to eke out a living from contributions and CD sales.

I saw him performing in the park and wrote him up in 2003 as a striver unspoiled by failure or success.

It's no secret that he wears his sympathies on his sleeve (or his arms since he often performs shirtless) and his website carries this message:

The inspiration hit me one day when I looked around and realized that songs of social conscience were mostly being written by artists who had been around a while -- Neil Young, Bruce, CSN... (So glad for Green Day, the Dixie Chicks and John Legend.) So, I wanted to compose a single piece that would span generation... and genre, and race, and style, and gender. I set about writing a song which would include a rock driven groove throughout, a soul section, a verse of rap, a folk/country section complete with banjo and fiddle. I was hoping the whole thing would come together and marry into one cohesive message. It seemed a little audacious at the time, but I was hoping to get lucky with this artistic guess. As I said to Brian Bauers the engineer about halfway through the project, "It's nice to be right." The result is the song and now the video 'Resolution'.

The genesis of the video, he told me, was a park concert on July 4. He performed the song with the folksinger Christine Lavin filming the crowd's singalong -- realizing only later that the bucolic setting and feel-good mood were all wrong given the subject. He then re-recorded the video in grittier settings -- alleys near his apartment -- to evoke a prison.

He put it up on his website and it was picked up by YouTube. Laura Manske, a magazine editor and staunch Ippolito ally, started emailing notice around and it reached Ms. Papermaster, a recently retired law librarian in Berkeley.

"I was unbelievably thrilled," said Ms. Papermaster, 63, an antiwar activist. "Not only was it a great music video, it was a subject near and dear to me that I'm working on 24/7." Her goal, she said, was to convince Attorney General Holder to name a special prosecutor to expose illegal torture by American authorities.

Mr. Ippolito's video moved her, she said, to take $10,000 out of her 401K to buy television spots in the San Francisco area. She approached peace groups to underwrite other airings but all, she said, were too preoccupied with their own fund-raising to help. So, she said, although she was living on Social Security with no health insurance, she was prepared to commit another $50,000 or more for wider distribution, especially, she said, if Mr. Holder were to move against former Vice President Dick Cheney.

"I would spend my whole retirement," Ms. Papermaster said. "It's that important to save our country."