Saturday, June 23, 2001     By Scott Mervis, Weekend Editor, Post-Gazette

There are a lot of guys out there who pass themselves off as blue-collar rockers, but Mike Stout is unquestionably the real thing.  The singer-songwriter, who releases his new CD, "Working Infinity ... Love from the Bottom," at the Club Cafe tonight, was not only a steel worker for 10 years, but he also was the last grievance chairman at the Homestead Works. In that role, he fought to win more than $10 million in lost wages, pensions and other benefits for 3,000 displaced workers. At the same time, this self-proclaimed musical lobbyist, who played the folk clubs in New York in the late '60s, was writing issue-oriented songs and performing them at picket lines, rallies and labor conventions. On his fifth album, Stout remains as topical as the headlines. "Phila-POSH and Moran" is a folk-rock song that addresses the Right to Know law, calling for workers to be informed of what chemicals they are using on the job. "Armies of the Working Class Poor" is an attack on retail companies that sell products made in sweatshops. Songs like "I Will Be There" and "The Day Has Come" are working-class anthems in the Tom Joad mode. "I'm always trying to promote different ways of doing things," says Stout, who now works at the employee-run Steel Valley Printers. "I don't think the same old ways work, and I'm trying to promote the peace and labor movement and the justice movement. "I don't care what movement you are, guerrillas in some foreign country or Martin Luther King, if you don't talk about the poor, you don't talk about the bottom, you'll never pull society forward. I try to reflect that in my music." Stout, an avowed Springsteen fanatic who saw the Boss eight times on the last tour, sings with gritty passion and is backed by an all-star local lineup, including Reb Beach (Winger, Alice Cooper), producer/guitarist Buddy Hall, B.E. Taylor, Kenny Blake, Pete Hewlett and Jeff Thurston. Tonight's record release party is a benefit for the "living wage" campaign, which would require employers awarded city contracts to pay workers at least $9.12 an hour. It was approved by City Council and is about to go before County Council.

It's the latest in a long line of causes that Stout has adopted. And the issues never stop coming. He says that with the global concerns rising to the surface now and the new administration in the White House, "I don't think I'm going run out of material anytime too soon."