Near ‘starting to wind down on all that’

Holly Near isn’t kidding when she says this may be her “last major tour.”

Since her first performance at the age of 8, the Ukiah High School graduate has been on the go, whether belting out songs in the Broadway musical “Hair,” being a guest on “The Partridge Family,” touring with the Free The Army Tour or creating her own recording company way back in the early 1970s, long before it was commonplace.

And now the 63-year-old activist-singer-songwriter says, “I’m starting to wind down on all that and this may be it.”

But at this moment, she just wants to get out and play the new material off her new album, “Peace Becomes You.”

“I feel like a teenager,” she says. “Let’s get a van and go on the road.”

Recorded in Sebastopol, the new work is a massive 28-song, 2-CD collection featuring original material and songs by everyone from Irving Berlin and Jacques Brel to Gnarls Barkley and Keb Mo.

Before Near plays the Glaser Center in Santa Rosa this weekend, she took a break while getting her car tuned up to chat about musicals, red-hot mamas and getting rich and famous.

Q: Take me back to the first performance that started all this.
A: I sang at the Veterans of Foreign Wars talent show when I was 8 and I sang, “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” from “Oklahoma.” I had long braids and wore my blue jeans and at the tryout I sang a capella.

Q: Do you remember the response from the audience?
A: Oh yeah. When you’re a kid it’s amazing and I remember people talking to my mother about my voice and thinking, “Whoa, I guess we’ve got something here.”

Q: What kind of advice would you give a young singer coming up through Ukiah High School today?
A: Often young people will ask me, “How do I get started?” and often I interrupt them and say, “You’ve got to stop using the word ‘started.’” If you’re singing, you’ve started. What they’re really saying is how do I get rich and famous? I don’t have advice for that. But for me, you sing. And you sing every opportunity you get. And if people like you, they ask you back. It sounds really simple, but that’s how it goes.

Q: Back in the early 1970s, when you started an independent record company, did you realize how revolutionary that was?
A: No. Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it.

Q: But it just seemed logical?
A: Yeah. It was an action of necessity. I was getting offers from the music business to sing, but they wanted me to change the lyrics. And they actually wanted me to make a choice with this big voice, to either become the red-hot mama or the helpless waif. Back then you had Linda Ronstadt or Bonnie Raitt — those were the two choices. They turned out to become really articulate, powerful women, but when they first started out, the music industry put them in those places.

Q: And you could feel those same forces pressuring you?
A: Yes, and when I couldn’t make that decision, I felt like I was somehow lacking. But I started to see that there was an audience for the way I wanted to do it. And it meant working on the outside. By the time people like Tracy Chapman and Melissa Etheridge and Ani DiFranco came along, we’d already laid that groundwork.

Q: Have you heard appreciation from them over the years?
A: Oh yeah, I think they’re aware. And every one of them opened for me at the height of my career. I think we feel like proud mothers looking at them now.

Bay Area freelancer John Beck writes about entertainment for The Press Democrat. You can reach him at 280-8014, john@sideshowvideo.com and follow on Twitter @becksay.

IN CONCERT
Who: Holly Near
When: 7 p.m. Sunday, October 14
Where: Glaser Glaser Center, 547 Mendocino Avenue, Santa Rosa.
Information: glasercenter.com 
Tickets: $25 advance/$30 door.
Tip: Near returns to her hometown of Ukiah for two shows on Dec. 8 at her sister’s venue, the Space Theater, at 508 W. Perkins St. Go to spaceperformingarts.org for more info.