The first thing you think when you meet Ben Harper is that he’s too good to be true. Lithe, graceful and almost bone thin with black, black eyes that seem to bore right into the back of your head. He has a perfectly symmetrical face that makes one recall Jimi Hendrix on the cover of Are You Experienced? without the aggressive facial hair, yellow feather boa and menace, but with most of the charm.

 
He drives a hybrid car, turns off the water when he brushes his teeth, wears shoes from recycled materials and had his entire house painted with a solvent-free paint called Bioshield.

“Okay, okay, I am that guy,” says Harper with a laugh. “But I’m not that squeaky clean. I mean, I wasn’t always this well behaved. I did have my bouts with some rock-star behaviors—you know what I’m taking about—but in the end I decided that this is really who I am, so I should stop fighting it.”  

He likes to save the fight for other things, like poverty, injustice, farm workers rights, the debacle that is the clean-up of Hurricane Katrina or sometimes just plain meanness.

“I always loved that John Lee Hooker had a bumper sticker that said ‘Mean People Suck,’ on the back of one of his cars. Mostly I just want to take a stand against evil people.

But evil is relative. There are evil thoughts, evil deeds and evil people. Get him talking and he’ll tell you a little about his fascination with some of rock’s darkest hours, whether it’s Led Zeppelin and their hotel-room orgies (with or without the mud sharks), his theory on Hendrix’s final hours or some of the rock carnage that littered the Sunset Strip before Cameron Crowe sanitized it and stuck it into Almost Famous. Right now Harper’s reading I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, the oral history-style biography about Warren Zevon by his ex-wife, which chronicles his dissolute lifestyle—the drinking, the carousing and odd, unacceptable behaviors such as rubbing a pot roast over his chest like his character in his song “Excitable Boy.”

“I’m utterly captivated, but equally appalled. I put the book down, I pick it back up,” says Harper. “I just would hate to be chronicled like that after I’m gone. I guess I just have to outlive everybody.”

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