Michael Franti

Franti was born the son of Tom Hopkins, a black man, and Mary Rodrick, who is white, in Oakland, California, on April 21, 1968. Unable to cope with the scorn of a racist family, Roderick gave her son up for adoption. After seven months in a foster home, he was adopted by Charles and Carole Franti, a conservative white couple, who raised Michael in Davis, a predominantly white city about 75 minutes northeast of San Francisco, where Latinos and Chinese far outnumber African-Americans.

Being a college town, there were ideas circulating in Davis, but Franti always felt an undercurrent of racism: “You could see it in people’s eyes.” He was in kindergarten when he was called “nigger” for the first time, by a group of kids, as he was walking home from school. Devout Lutherans, the Frantis never missed church, and Michael grew up with hoop dreams. Posters of Dr. J and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar covered his bedroom walls, and he slept with a ball in his bed.

While he loves them, growing up, he never felt like he fit in within the Franti family, largely because of the tone set by Charles, a physically abusive alcoholic. “He was just kind of a depressed person,” Michael says. “You’d come home from school, and he would be in front of the TV, after he came home from his job. Then he would drink, and you never knew what you were gonna get: the quiet guy who was just sittin’ there or the guy who’s pissed off and angry about something.”

As a result, he sought family structure from friends and their parents, teachers and coaches. In elementary school, he befriended a school janitor, a black man and ex-con, with whom he’d shoot baskets and learn about being black in America. At an early age he began reading about Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglas, Malcolm X, Ghandi.

When his mother, a teacher, was accepted in an exchange program in 1980, Franti moved to Edmonton, Canada, for a year. “It changed my whole perspective: I realized that not everyone sees the world like America does.” In Edmonton, he discovered Bob Marley’s Uprising album, and was blown away. He bought a ticket for Marley’s show in Edmonton, but the gig never happened. Marley fell ill from melanoma and died the next year. Franti still has the ticket.

As his peers delved into drugs and alcohol, Franti abstained, as the starring center of his high school basketball team, and because of his father. He began roadtripping to shows in the Bay Area, where he caught the Beastie Boys, The Clash and The Police and a lot of reggae. Trips to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury proved revelatory: “I was coming from a mostly white town, and a mixed family, and all those things didn’t really matter there. There’s a greater sense of acceptance – you get to chart your own course, rather than have it dictated to you, because of the way you look.”

As he neared his senior year, his father’s alcoholism intensified, and Franti ran away. “I told my dad that I wasn’t going to come back unless he stopped drinking – and he did. He went to AA.” But it didn’t last. Of his abuse, Franti says, “He wans’t, like, beating all the time, but he would definitely not be shy about pushing you around or hitting you or whatever he felt was necessary at the time. And that’s what ultimately led to me leaving.”

He left Davis in 1984 on a basketball scholarship to the University of San Francisco, where Division I pressures would soon siphon the fun out of the game. While his teammates rarely left campus, he started hanging out in Haight-Ashbury, just four blocks away. He began smoking weed (which he stopped a few years ago) and participating in rallies against apartheid in South Africa and the Iran-Contra/Oliver North scandal.

After three seasons at USF, he switched to San Francisco State University, where he studied film, music, performance art and theater. His father, who had never missed one of Franti’s sporting events – home or away – disowned him. “He said, ‘You’re not my son anymore. I wish I never adopted you,’” Franti says, with a sad, deflecting laugh. “That was one of the most painful times in my life. He thought, ‘You’re just gonna be a fuck-up.’”

At 21, Franti had dropped out and was working as a bike messenger, while promoting underground parties and DJ events and playing bass and singing in The Beatnigs. “We started combining poetry with instruments we would make out of metal, kind of like Stomp .” His musical aspirations were full of promise, but when his then-girlfriend, Allison, got pregnant he was sure it was over. “In that first moment, it’s like everything else is gone. I was scared shitless.” That year, she gave birth to the first of Franti’s two boys, Cappy. To this day, he sings Allison’s praises for not only supporting his decision to drop out of college, but also to pursue music. The couple lived together for three years, but never married. While Cappy’s birth lit a fire under Franti, forcing him to focus on his musical vision, it was also the impetus for him to find his biological parents.

Two years after contacting an agency he discovered on television, Franti dialed his mother’s Massachusetts phone number: "When I called, I was concerned that if I said, “Hey, this is your son,’ she might hang up, and I would feel like I’d never want to call back, or she’d never take my call again. So when I called, I said, ‘I have something really important to say, but I want you to take down my number first, just in case we get disconnected.’ She did, and then I told her my birth date, and I said, ‘Does this day have any significance to you.’ And she was like, ‘Yeah,’ and I said, ‘I think you might be my mother.’”

The call was relatively short, as shock washed over Rodrick. The next day, they reconnected, shed some tears and set up a visit. After nearly 20 years, their relationship is still evolving. “We’ve never really gone through that whole process of everything you need to go through to feel close, but I would say we’re actively working on it.”

Through Rodrick, Franti met his biological father, who, from the start, “just wasn’t that into it,” says the singer. “Years and years went by and he never bothered to tell his family and his other songs about me. Finally, I just said, ‘Fuck it. I’m gonna track them down on my own,’ which is what happened.’ My dad’s never really expressed an interest in being a part of my life. It’s sad. It’s something I feel sadness and pain about.”

More then anything else, the main message in Franti’s music is that it’s okay to be yourself. And it hasn’t always been easy for him to practice what he preaches. In the late 90’s, after Spearhead released two albums on Capitol, the label underwent a regime change and Franti thought he was hallucinating when the new president asked him to collaborate with Will Smith and turn his group’s next record into a cameo-packed chart-topper.

When he asked to leave, the label said no, and it took him nine months to break free of his contract. He began work on Spearhead’s third album as if it would be his last. Breaking from the polished, urban feel of 1997’s Chocolate Supa Highway, he began re-exploring the music of his youth – Curtis Mayfield, Sly Stone, Marley and a heap of ‘70s soul – while crafting an album protesting the death penalty. What resulted was an album of a lifetime: 2001’s Stay Human, a stroke of genius written, recorded and produced by Franti. Immersed in politics, it featured his most anthemic and heartfelt songs to date.

With Stay Human, Franti had finally hit gold on a trail that he’d been blazing for almost a decade – since 1992, when his Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy briefly served as support act for U2. Co-founding The Beatnigs eight years prior he eventually left to focus on rhyming. He formed Disposable Heroes with fellow Beatnig Rono Tse in 1991. On the group’s lone album, Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury, Franti emerged as the West Coast’s answer to Chuck D. in tone and force, spitting militant, leftist rhymes. The group scored a minor hit with the still-impressive “Television, the Drug of the Nation,” and toured the world.

But by the time the Heroes hit the road with U2, their songs had become shtick for Franti. “I was going around the world doing this angry-man routine, but I didn’t really feel angry every day.” On the tour, Franti bonded with Bono during conversations that awoke his inner storyteller. Two years later, Franti returned with Spearhead’s debut, Home, an album built upon personal experiences and highlighted by tracks like “Positive,” about getting tested for HIV (he was negative), and “Hole in the Bucket,” maybe the smartest pop song ever written about the homeless.

Ever since, Franti has plotted a wholly individual course, rising as a beacon of humanity and a complete stylistic anomaly in the musical world. He’s a complete original, says collaborate Robbie Shakespeare: “That’s the thing I love most about Michael. Everything he does, the way he approaches his music, is completely original.” “The music he’s trying to do is from his heart,” says friend and former tourmate Ziggy Marley. “It’s not for the commercial success, but to reach people’s soul and spirit. And I think people react to the sincerity and the joy that he puts into his performance – and the freedom of it.”

Two months after his gig in Ohio, Franti is home in San Francisco, grabbing lunch at a vegan restaurant. His guitar leaning against his knee, he’s recalling the first time he actually purchased an album: "I got this gift certificate for five dollars to this record store across town. So one day I rode my bike there and picked out Earth, Wind & Fire’s Greatest Hits on cassette, and brought it up to the counter. “The clerk looked at me and said, ‘That’ll be $5.37.’ I was like, ‘What? It clearly says “$4.95” right on it.’ I was traumatized. Up until that point, I had never really bought anything in my life, except food – and in California there’s no tax on food. I had to ride back across town to get the 37 cents. So my first attempt to buy a record, was like my first run-in with the government !" he laughs.

It’s the day before Franti’s seventh annual 9/11 Power to the Peaceful festival, a free day of music and activism in Golden Gate Park, and his schedule is full. There was a meeting this morning to go over last-minute details, and once he’s done eating, he’ll promote the gig with an AM radio interview. The festival is a sight to behold: Thousands jam into Speedway Meadow to bounce to Spearhead, the concert space lined with hip vendors and dozens of activist groups.

Tonight, he’s hosting a pre-party at his house in Hunter’s Pointe, where Michael Kang of String Cheese Incident will jam with Franti and his longtime friend and actor Woody Harrelson. A couple friends coming straight from the Burning Man Festival are staying over, so he’s hunting for a futon today, too.

In the gritty Hunter’s Pointe, Franti is anonymous. “My neighbors think I sell pot,” he says, laughing. His house is unassuming from the outside, where a Toyota-4Runner sits. He’s restoring it, with plans to donate it to a local church. The interior is minimalistic and decorated with a few pieces of artwork from around the globe. There is no television, but there is a computer monitor which he uses to watch cartoons and Pink Panther DVDs with his five-year-old, Ade, his only other child. Franti is finalizing his divorce from Ade’s mother.

Before getting home, he stopped at a Mexican folk-art boutique to buy a gift for his girlfriend, Carla Swanson, a petite brunette filmmaker and graphic designer who volunteered her services to Franti’s management company. Their romance ignited as she assisted on the editing of I Know I’m Not Alone. When she arrives, Franti envelops her, stamping her with a long, sweet kiss. “I wake up every morning and I can’t wait to see her,” he says. "I can’t wait to find out what the next things is that we’re going to do together. “Growing up, I never had examples of healthy, loving relationships. It’s only been through years of dealing with it on my own, and learning how to be more skilled in personal relationships that I’ve gotten to where I am now, where I have a great one.”

A healthier, stronger love isn’t the only thing that has come to Franti with time and hard work. After 20 years, he’s making the best and most relevant music of his life. As much as he disapproves of its policies, the Bush White House has played a role in that: Franti has matured as both a poet and musician in step with the unfolding of the second bush presidency. It’s fueled his lyrics and vision. As a result, his past three albums – Stay Human, Everyone Deserves Music and Yell Fire! -carry a resonance and purpose lacking from his earlier work. To be sure, his moment has arrived.

In time, another relationship also blossomed. In 1999, his adoptive father, Charles Franti, suffered a stroke, and in the four years that followed – prior to his death in 2003 – he bloomed as a human being. “He became this really beautiful man,” Franti says. "He cared about people, hugged people, loved people, and he made amends to me and other people in my family that he hurt along the way. “That changed me as a person. One time, I was expressing my gratitude to him. I said, ‘Dad, you’ve changed so much, it’s amazing,’ and he said, ‘I haven’t really changed, I’ve always been like this. It’s just that I was never able to express it. And I was never able to let it out.’ “And that’s why I make music: For me, music is a way to let it out. My goal with my music is to create a place, a moment, for other people to let it out. Beyond politics, beyond anything else, that’s my favorite part – just seeing people experience joy.”