JOHN TRUDELL
d
| TheStudioClub.com is a big fan
of this
great man and artist. Grafitti Man was, and remains a great statement. On BLUE INDIANS we are taken for a great musical trip with guitars, rock n' roll, blues and the spoken word word from am man that is by all means a great writer. We encourage everyone to buy and listen to BLUE INDIANS |
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charismatic speaker I've ever heard. . ." -- Bonnie Raitt |
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thoughtson Trudell's new CD "John
and I have been friends for
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Jackson
Browne produced John Trudell's new BLUE
INDIANS, released on John's label Dangerous
Discs,
through Jackson Browne's label, Inside Recordings. Hearing the CD
I flash back on a show I saw
some
years back where Jackson, John, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Peter
Cyote, The Lone Ranger
(Clayton
Moore), and other were doing a benefit for Leonard Peltizer the Indian
activist, John of course
is
one powerful Indian activist himself. So much so that the FBI is
said to keep tabs on him.
Identified
as a poet, a leader for Native American rights, a powerful speaker, and
an "extremely effective"
communicator,
John Trudell calls himself "a blue Indian." Indeed, Trudell is the
complex sum of all that he's
seen,
endured and accomplished in his 53 years. Much of that life experience
is reflected in Trudell's
newest
release,
Blue Indians.
The album, as explained by Trudell, "is literally about the technical world
as
an
industrial reservation. This time everyone plays the part of the Indian
with their range of feelings and
attitudes."
Born
in 1946, in Omaha, Nebraska, Trudell grew up on and around the nearby Santee
Sioux reservation.
(His
father was Santee, his mother's tribal roots were in Mexico). Trudell
became acquainted with
economic
hardships at an early age; his mother died when he was six, leaving his
father to care for his
large
family. During the years that followed, Trudell's contempt for the
dominant "American way of life"
deepened,
along with his outrage at poverty and racism. In 1963, Trudell found
himself in the military.
"I
went for economic reasons and picked the Navy because I wanted to minimize
my changes of
becoming
a rifle-toting target. But the experience did teach me that what
was happening to me as an
Indian,
a prisoner of America, was happening to others all over the world."
Trudell
served as National Chairman from 1973-1979; with this high profile position
came increasing
attention
from the U.S. government, more notably the FBI, which has compiled a 17,000-page
file
bearing
his name. The government response to A.I.M. was swift: As Trudell
bluntly states, "They
waged
war against us. They hunted us down. They killed, jailed, destroyed
by any means necessary."
1979,
that war took a terrible personal toll on John Trudell, in the form of
a almost unspeakable tragedy
that
changed his life forever. While incarcerated in the Springfield Federal
Prison Hospital in Springfield
Missouri
in January of 1978, Trudell had been warned to watch what he was saying,
or better yet, "to not
say
it al all." On February 11,1979, Trudell led a march to the FBI headquarters
in Washington D.C. He
delivered
an address on the FBI's war against Indians, he burned an American flag
that he felt had been
desecrated
by racist and class injustice. Approximately 12 hours later in the
early morning, a fire "of
suspicious
origin" burned down Trudell's home on the Shoshone Paiute reservation in
Nevada, killing
his
wife Tina, their three children, and Tina's mother. The Bureau of
Indian Affairs officially declared the
fire
an "accident" and the FBI declined an investigation. But Trudell
flatly states, "It was murder. They
were
murdered as an act or war."
Devastated
by this loss of his family, Trudell withdrew form the world; "writing words"
became his way
"to
keep some sanity" and continue to survive...six months or so after the
fire, when I was really down,
the
lines came. The lines were my bombs, my explosions, my tears, they
were my everything.
Gradually
I started them out at my speeches, asking myself "Is this my own private
madness or is this
something
the people can understand?"
"In
April or May of 1979, I met Jackson Browne
at Mt. Taylor in Grants, New Mexico. He allowed me
room
to roam around in his world. So I was around recording studios and
musicians. And I've
always
liked rock 'n roll anyway. So I began to think about joining the
poetry with the oldest indigenous
musical
forms and the newest musical forms." First came the recording, Tribal
Voice, at Jackson's
studio
putting the poetry with the drum and chants. Later, after Trudell
met Jesse Ed Davis,
came
the
rock 'n roll. Jesse had recorded and toured with the likes of Eric
Clapton, Bob Dylan, Rod Stewart
John
Lennon, Jackson Browne, Taj Mahal and countless others. 'When we
met in 1985, he told me
his
name and then he said, "I can make music for your works.' With Jesse
and me, we each came
from
our collective Indian experience, and had our individual experiences in
the non-Indian world. We
had
both literally been to the last door of hell, opened it, and saw what was
inside."
This
joining let to his first album in 1986 titled, AKA GRAFITTI MAN.
The album, released on Trudell's
own
Peach Company label in a cassette-only format, gained critical attention
even with its limited
distribution.
In a Rolling Stone interview, Bob Dylan
called AKA GRAFITTI MAN "the best album of
1986,"
and had the album played over the P.A. system during intermissions on his
1987 tour with
the
Grateful Dead.
Signed
to Rykodisc in 1992, Trudell was introduced to an international audience,
receiving worldwide
distribution
for the first time with a re-make of his original AKA GRAFITTI MAN, produced
by Jackson
Browne.
Gaining wide critical acclaim as a poet, Trudell was cast in two movies,
one fictional
(Thunderheart),
and one documentary (Incident At Oglala)-both dealing with Indian clashes
with the
U.S.
Government during the 1970s. Trudell released a second album on Rykodisc
in 1994,
Johnny
Damas & Me. Most recently, in 1998, Trudell was cast as the
Radio DJ, in Sherman
Alexie's
award winning Sundance film, Smoke Signals.
With
his newest project
BLUE INDIANS, produced
by Jackson Browne, Trudell's powerful fusion of
poetry
and music comes from the heart and spirit of a "blue Indian." "I
see a real future for spoken
word
with music. Poetry is based on the oldest oral traditions.
In music, lyrics are written to what
the
math of the music allows us to say; And to me...it's a canyon worth
of difference...I'm just a human
being
trying to make it in a world that is very rapidly losing its understanding
of being human." John
| John Trudell
is a crazy lone wolf, poet,
prophet, preacher, warrior full of pain and fun and laughter and love, spilling out a vision of fable and truth, love and war, from the unique and somewhat desperate point of view of the Wild American. He's a reality check. Not paranoid; he's aware of the Enemy (a formidable Predator with no respect for any form of life). Justice is a fire that burns inside him. His spirit cries out for it. It makes him dangerous." -- Kris Kristofferson |
-- Federal Bureau of Investigation
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