Originally appeared in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press

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First, some background. I had reported in the past on a talk Peter Yarrow gave to a Minneapolis business group. This was a very conventional group of corporate types, but I noticed when Peter sang about the hammer of justice and the bell of freedom, that some of these tough-minded business types got awful shiny around the eyes.

Peter liked my write-up enough that he placed a call to me. When I didn't recognize his voice, he began singing "Puff the Magic Dragon" on the phone. And he asked me to drive up to Duluth for their August 28 concert, at the Bayfront pavilion.

The concert was great, and all three principles were in fine voice. They sang all the great songs, "If I Had a Hammer," "Blowing in the Wind," "Leaving on a Jet Plane," and my personal favorite, "Stewball," about the racehorse who drank wine.

Each took a solo turn. Paul, who started life as a standup comedian, told a very funny story about retreating to a backstage restroom, only to find out he had mistakenly entered a neighbor's house. "What could I do?" he asked, as he realized the man standing outside the bathroom door lived there. "Being a liberal folksinger, I opened the door and hugged him!"

Mary made fun of Peter and Paul's affinity for technology. (Paul has run Celebration Station BBS, a Christian chat board in Maine, for many years, and Peter has ambitions of a moral reengineering of global corporations.)

She told a funny story about how as a young woman she fixed a frayed distributor coil on her car with a BandAid, and how the mechanic insisted on replacing her perfectly suitable BandAid with a brand new plugwire. She identified as exclusive this male behavior to replace obvious analog technologies that work fine -- auto parts, audio equipment, and computers -- with something sleek and black, with a hard-to-read label, that is never quite as easy to use again.

Then there's Peter, the intense member of the group. Peter yearns to ignite in the corporate world in the 2000s the same kind of upheaval that PP&M, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan ignited in the youth culture in the 1960s.

To this end he has formed a partnership with management guru Richard Schroth. The two have already made preliminary forays into business groups. Schroth, because he is a very well-regarded business thinker, gives Yarrow credibility in and access to corporate climes. Yarrow, because of the simple but emotionally overwhelming songs in his repertoire, gives their joint presentations more power that any lone management guru could manage.

Their message: the future is providing an opportunity for organizations, and the people in them, to realize the most idealistic dreams they ever had. Not just justice within the corporation (and that's not nothing), but a vision of people working together in ways that don't savage one another, that don't annihilate competitors, that don't insult the environment we all have to live in, and that fit with the best values of the communities they reside in.

The enforcer for this new vision is computer technology. The Internet provides groups seeking the truth an unprecedented arena for people to compare notes and to plot coordinated, informed action.

Just as Pentium chip buyers corroborated their dissatisfaction on the Net in 1996, and forced Intel to fix its notorious floating-point error, other groups today use the Net to monitor the global excesses of companies like Nike, Nestle, and Microsoft.

It's tough to be the bully on the block when a tough block watch program is in operation, and that's what the Net provides. The sit-down strikes of the future are as likely to happen on the web as on city sidewalks.

How this campaign develops is still up in the air, but the music will be a key ingredient, Yarrow, who graduated forty years ago as a psych major, told me. The age of high tech requires a balancing measure of emotional connection. Peter, Paul & Mary were founded, back when computers were too big to fit inside a house, on the intuition that the right music, sung simply and sincerely, wielded as much change power as an atom bomb.

And I must tell you, as I stood by holding his scuffed-up guitar, while Peter waded into the crowd by the harbor, signing autographs, and embracing people he had never met as if he had known them forever, that I think he is right.

Readers looking for a good backgrounder on Peter, Paul & Mary should check out a web site at Peter, Paul & Mary.

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.