iNTERViEWED
BY BRiAN LUSH
In a career spanning nearly fifty years, the music of BUFFY
SAINTE-MARIE is marked by its unparalleled range of styles and the
artist’s
unwillingness to compromise. While the plight of the Indigenous peoples
of the
North Americas is the issue most familiar in her music with songs such
as ‘MY
COUNTRY TIS OF THY PEOPLE YOU’RE DYING’ and ‘BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED
KNEE’,
SAINTE-MARIE has also given voice to the plight of the human condition
with
songs like ‘UNIVERSAL SOLDIER’ whose anti-war message is frightfully as
relevant today as it was back in 1965. The Cree songwriter’s innate
ability to
articulate matters of the heart into words and music is one that has
endeared
her to millions and has inspired countless interpretations of her work
from a
varied and legendary group of artists such as ELVIS PRESLEY, BARBARA
STREISAND,
NEIL DIAMOND, JANIS JOPLIN, CHET ATKINS and JOE COCKER. Now with the
release of
‘RUNNING FOR THE DRUM’ – her first album in many, many moons – the
first lady
of “
Pow Wow Rock” proves to be every bit as spirited
and committed to
the art of making music as ever. Co-produced by CHRIS BIRKETT,
‘RUNNING…’ puts
the listener on a musical journey that kicks off with the opening track
‘NO NO
KESHAGESH’ – an indictment against greed and corruption set to an
irresistible
driving beat. On the track ‘I BET MY HEART ON YOU’, SAINTE-MARIE gets a
little
help from TAJ MAHAL on the ivory and a haunting sample of THE BLACK
LODGE
SINGERS echoes in the chorus of the rambunctious rocker ‘CHO CHO FIRE’.
Coupled
with the CD is a DVD documentary entitled ‘BUFFY SAINTE-MARIE : A
MULTIMEDIA
LIFE’ which features interviews with JONI MITCHELL, ROBBIE ROBERTSON
and BILL
COSBY and shines a light on SAINTE-MARIE as a singer-songwriter,
digital media
artist, activist and educator.
ROCKWIRED
had the privilege of speaking with BUFFY SAINTE-MARIE over the phone.
Here is
how it went.
What
kept you away from recording and what was it that brought you back?
I never left. I’m always recording. I’ve got a recording studio in my
house.
And the last three albums I made, which started in the late eighties,
were all
recorded at home, so I’m recording all of the time. I never break from
recording. Every now and then I will go ‘Okay, I feel like going on the
road!’
My life is in a good place where I feel like I can go on the road and
I’ll put
things together on an album. I co-produce with the same person all of
the time
and I’ve put out my last three albums like that. The reason that I
wasn’t
recording during the last administration is probably perfectly clear.
There is
no sense in putting your baby out in the rain. I knew that the timing
wasn’t
right. I had also been working on the CRADLEBOARD PROJECT for along
time and I
wanted to get that to a place where our dream would come true – where
we could
make it free online to everyone instead of having to run a business. I
got it
to that point a couple of years ago and at that time, someone
wanted to
make a bio documentary about me and I always turned those down because
I think
they’re always so freaking boring with a bunch of talking heads and the
camera
panning slowly from left to right over a black and white photo. No
thank you!
Everybody else wanted to do stories of who I was back in the sixties
but the
film crew from Canada knew that I was more than that and I think they
did a
good job of capturing all of the things that I like to do. That was
happening
and I had all of these songs that I really liked and I was campaigning
for
BARACK OBAMA in Albuquerque
and the
timing was right. It was personal timing as well as market timing. I’ve
never
been the kind of recording artist that does things just because the
record
company needs money right now. This album is on my own label.
There
aren’t any record companies anymore anyway.
I know.
How
is ‘RUNNING FOR THE DRUM’ different from previous releases?
It’s funny. I wish you would say what makes it cohesive with all of my
other
albums. From my very first album, I’ve always been very diverse in
terms of
style. I came up in a very lucky time during the sixties when the
playlists
were very wide. If you turned on a radio station, people would be
playing folk
music next to flamenco, next to blues next to pop music. People could
hear all
different kinds of music at the same time. Throughout the seventies and
eighties and nineties, the playlists got really tight. A country
station was a
country station. Now we have a time that is very similar to the sixties
with
the internet. I’m still creating songs that are the best love songs
that ever
happened to me and my perfect points of view when it comes to the way I
see the
world in songs with social meaning like ‘NO NO KESHAGESH’ and ‘WORKING
FOR THE
GOVERNMENT’. They are the best that I can do about that subject. There
are
always the songs that are just for fun like ‘I BET MY HEART ON YOU’ or
some of
the dance tunes that are on the album. Since the late eighties, I’ve
been
recording at home in my own studio with lots of computers. I’ve
recorded on
computers since the 1960’s. I had the first ever totally electronic
vocal album
that was ever made and I made the first album in the nineties to be
distributed
by the internet. I’ve been comfortable with computers for a really long
time
and with recording at home. The one thing that is a bit new to people
who
follow my music but not knew to people who know me is that some of the
songs
that sound like remixes were done a long time ago but I felt that the
market
place wasn’t buying that at the time so I held them back. And I
certainly held
them back during the BUSH and REAGAN years because of their content.
They had a
real different kind of thing that you could only do with computers and
it
wasn’t until quite recently that people have been ready and willing to
accept
some of the crazy things that we can do with computers.
I
remember reading about your embrace of technology back in the early
nineties
and the digital art that you were making. Describe what it was like to
play
around with that technology in its infancy.
It was really fun because I’m an artist and a musician. I’m not doing
taxes and
I’m not trying to get someone to vote for me or to launch a rocket or
make a
war. For me, computers have always been about art. If you go into some
artist’s
studio you see the damnedest things in there. You see hammer and nails
and
paintbrushes and stuff that they paste onto other stuff. For me, a
computer was
just another tool and ingredient in what I had always done all my life
which is
making sound, music and pictures and make up stories. To me, this is no
big
mystery. This is what every little kid does at the beach. You take
fifteen four
year olds to the beach and they are all artists. They all make sand
castles,
they make pictures and plays and stories. They use their imagination.
I’m just
one of the lucky ones who always held onto that and I think it’s
really, really
natural. I have no schooling in music. As a matter of fact, two years
ago, I
found out that I am dyslexic in music. That was why I could never learn
to read
it. I know how but it’s so frustrating to me to try to read. I lose my
place by
the third bar. It’s like trying to write with my left hand. I can write
for an
orchestra but I can’t read it back.
Given
your embrace of technology, what is your stance on the argument that
the
internet has ruined the music industry?
(Laughs)
Good
answer!
The music business has been pumping and pimping artists for money for
as long
as we can remember. It’s true that those old dinosaurs have gone out of
business like some banks have gone out of business. They’ve gone out of
business
because their cheating ways finally tracked them down and caught up
with them.
There are a lot of changes that need to be made in the market place and
the
record business was one of them. It was unfair, inefficient, wasteful,
bone-headed and old-fashioned. It wouldn’t listen to opinions and
suggestions
from outside including artists whose records were being created and
shelved and
misrepresented. Although the business did give us some great music, the
internet is far more efficient way to go about doing things. I like the
wide
playlist and I like to go online and discover new things as well as
finding
albums that came out in the forties that I’ve always been curious
about. To me,
this is a huge palette of millions of colors – just like digital art is
– so
I’m a happy girl.
Going
back to the documentary that is coupled with the CD – Who did you work
with in
putting it together?
There is this company called CINEFOCUS which is run by the director
JOAN PROWSE
and her husband JOHN BESSART. They approached me like many other
documentary
companies had before. I said yes to them because I felt like they “got”
me.
They were Canadian and not American so they knew me very well. The
American –
and some of the Canadian companies – that had approached me in the past
wanted
to do a kind of ‘where are they now?’ piece on the “Little Indian Girl
from the
Sixties” and I had no interest in that. Not even when I was the “Little
Indian
Girl from the Sixties”. The CINEFOCUS people had seen some of my
paintings in
museums and were highly aware of my CRADLEBOARD TEACHING PROJECT and
they were
really familiar with all of the songs. I thought that they would do a
much
creative and accurate and fun presentation than any of the other people
that
wanted to do a documentary on me. I’m happy with the way it turned out.
From
the early days of the folk movement up until now, what has been the
biggest
surprise for you? What didn’t you expect?
You mean in terms of me?
Yeah.
Oh God! I had no idea that I had ever been blacklisted. That was such a
huge
surprise. I found out that the JOHNSON Administration had blacklisted
years
after the fact. I was totally surprised. I got to see my FBI file and I
was
just flabbergasted. Two years ago, I found out about the CIA and the
NIXON
Administration too. Those have been the two most surprising things in
my whole
life. I had no idea that anyone thought that I was that important. I
had never
broken the law. I’ve always had a very clean record. I never smoked
dope on the
WHITE HOUSE lawn or nothing like that.
Did
you ever find out why?
No. they don’t tell you. You see your FBI file and anything pertinent
is
crossed out. They were following me because they thought that I might
be a
trouble maker. They continued to follow me after they never turned
anything up
so it was a total waste of money on their part.
They
followed JOHN LENNON around too and what did he ever do?
They followed lots of artists. When I found out about in the eighties,
what was
I going to do? Call a press conference? Who gave a shit? No one knew
who I was
anymore. Mission
accomplished,
I guess. They do it very well and they don’t tell you that they’re
going to do
it and there is not necessarily a good reason for them to do it. They
can
destroy a career. TAJ MAHAL was good friends with EARTHA KITT and the
three of
us were in the same boat. We all found out about it in the eighties.
EARTHA
felt that LYNDON JOHNSON was just an egotistical man and that people of
color
were being targeted in his Administration because we were already doing
something
that he wanted to take claim for which was ‘The Great Society’. We were
already
doing it. That was what she felt about it but I don’t know. Who knows?
I think
it was just a bonehead being a bonehead. I never thought I was
important enough
to warrant such consideration so I was really surprised when it turned
out that
I did. The only thing that really pissed me off was that at that time I
was
really very serious about being effective in making good social change
and I
was gagged. That was the part that bothered me. Now NIXON – that was
easy to
put together because it was the NIXON Administration that was a part of
the
PINE RIDGE RESERVATION being transferred to the government in secret –
the part
of the land that contained uranium. I was one of the people that ended
up being
hurt because of that. Many other Native people were hurt worse than I
was.
Where are they now?
They’re
all dead.
And I’m still having fun! I’ve got a great record and a great DVD.
Where
do you think the need to express yourself musically comes from?
I don’t think it was a need. I think it was fun. It’s not as thought
someone
sat me down and ordered me to take piano lessons. I saw a piano when I
was
three and I never developed a fondness for dolls or for sports – team
sports. I
just nailed myself to the piano and my crayons and paper and dancing
around. I
used to lie on the floor with vacuum cleaner pipes to my ear listening
to SWAN
LAKE.
I invented the headphones. You didn’t know that did you?
I
believe it!
That was the kind of kid I was. I just loved things that people
nowadays call
the arts. My family didn’t call it the arts though. They just knew that
I was
playing the piano and they thought that was nice. There no lessons for
me and
there was no need.
Of
the hundreds of people that have covered you songs over the years,
whose
interpretation stands out the most for you?
Oh God! JOE COCKER and JENNIFER WARNES! I won an ACADEMY AWARD because
of them!
I like that! I’m actually looking at the statue right now. They did
great. That
also had a lot to do with the arranger STUART LEVINE and WILL JENNINGS.
You
know what? I also like CHET ATKINS’ cover of UNTIL IT’S TIME TO GO. His
version
is so beautiful. They’re all beautiful. What I like about them is that
they are
all different. To think of writing a song that is so personal to m that
is also
personal to other people is just a trip. It’s a privilege to write
songs that
other people like too. How nice is that?
NO
NO KESHAGESH strongly resonates for me as a listener. What inspired it?
The state of the world that we’re living in inspired it. I started
writing it
during a Republican administration and into a Democratic administration
and
back again to a Republican one. During this time, I saw people go from
greedy,
to greedier to greediest. I had been saying since the seventies
something JOHN
TRUDELL once told me. He said “BUFFY, there are some people in the
world who
don’t want Indians or anybody else interfering with their complete
control of
all available lands and natural resources. That has been such a
stabilizing
statement to me. Whenever I see things going really bad, I put myself
back at
any time in our history and there has always been an upper one-percent
who
wants to own and control everything including nature and people. We
have
survived these boneheads that seem to appear in America
every thirty years or so. We’re in another war right now and to me war
is just
‘Money Laundering 101’. Back to ‘NO NO KESHAGESH’. KESHAGESH is what we
call a
puppy that eats his own and everybody else’s. It actually means greedy
guts.
Back on the reserve, we had a little puppy and we called him KESHAGESH.
Sometimes, I’m just kind of open hearted about songs – especially love
songs,
but other times, I’m quite strategic about writing a song like
‘UNIVERSAL
SOLDIER’, ‘BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE’ or ‘NO NO KESHAGESH’.
‘UNIVERSAL
SOLDIER’ came out at a time when people really like the sound of a
voice and a
guitar, but ‘BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE’ was written at a different
time and
I wanted it to be effective but people were into a lot of
male-dominated rock n
roll so I put ‘BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE’ in that kind of a format
so that
you’re too busy dancing to it before you realize what it’s about.
Strategically, I’ve found that a song that has a strong message is
better
served in a simple and more danceable format. ‘NO NO KESHAGESH’ is very
serious
song with very serious things to say but its’ very danceable. It stays
interesting and keeps changing and it sounds like a big rally.
‘CHO
CHO FIRE’ is another song. What inspired that one?
That’s got its own story. When my nephew was a teenager, he used to
travel
around to pow wows with a tape recorder and he’d send me copies of the
tapes.
Once he sent me a tape of a group of kids and they were singing in
their own
language. After listening to that tape, I wrote a song around it but we
couldn’t figure out who it was that he had taped. He thought it was one
thing
and I thought it was somebody else. It turned out to be the BLACK LODGE
SINGERS
when they were kids and they’ve gone on to be one of the most beloved
pow wow
groups ever. I got in touch with KENNY who is the lead singer for BLACK
LODGE
and I sent him the tape that I had and he said “Yeah, that’s us!” So I
made a
deal with him and we went fifty/fifty on it. A lot of people will rip
off
indigenous music just because they can. I don’t do that. He ended up
with half
the writing credit on the song even though he never heard it. CHO CHO
FIRE is
another really danceable tune and it’s dedicated to the jingle dress
dancers.
Explain
–if it’s explainable – how the creative process works for you in terms
of
songwriting. How do you go about that?
The same way I go about it with regard to writing curriculum or
painting. It
just kind of pops into my head and if it’s intriguing enough for me to
be
intrigued then maybe someone else will like this too. Depending on how
long I
stay interested is as far as I develop it. I’ve got thousands of songs
that
I’ve never let other people hear. Usually, it’s all one thing for me
whether
it’s writing curriculum or a song or a painting. At the heart of it,
there is
something that needs to be communicated either through visuals or words
or
through music or interactive multi-media curriculum. If you can say
something
in three minutes that takes somebody else four hundred pages in a book
to make
their point, then you’ve done a good job. The song ‘UNIVERSAL SOLDIER’
in three
minutes makes a certain point. It’s about individual responsibility for
war. I
didn’t rite a big, fat book over it. I did it in three minutes. The
same can be
said about ‘BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE’ – it keeps you rocking all
the way
through. That is the same thing that I’m trying to do with curriculum
writing.
The problem with education in my opinion is that kids are bored and
teachers
are bored and they don’t have to be anymore. We can use all of he new
tools to
make engaging, accurate curriculums that are also fun to use. Our kids
are
really sophisticated when it comes to multi-sensory computers. There is
no
reason why we can’t be using multi-sensory learning in classrooms.
Talk
about the CRADLEBOARD PROJECT.
I was a double major in college. I had a degree in Oriental Philosophy
and
Education. I was already a teacher and I already knew how to write
curriculum
and I had already been on SESAME STREET
and all of that. When my son’s teacher came to me and showed me the
materials
that she was using, it was the same bologna that they had tried to pass
off on
me. I knew that changes needed to be made. I put my teacher’s hat on
again. So
long as I was just writing text and showing pictures, it just wasn’t
the live
thing that I wanted it to be. I wanted the kids in the classroom the
same
experience that I had when I went back to Saskatchewan
and spent time on the reservation. There was real, live people doing
really fun
things. The idea of taking kids online in the late eighties was very
appealing
to me. I connected one of the schools on the Star Blanket Reserve with
my son’s
school here in Hawaii.
It all came
alive, once we put the kids in touch with one another using faxes and
pen pals
and we were taking them online before it was considered possible to go
online.
The whole thing came alive! I started my foundation in 1968 – the NEWAN
FOUNDATION – and I had always been the only donor. It had all been on
my own
dime so I had continued with the CRADLEBOARD TEACHING PROJECT from the
mid to
late eighties and in 1996, the KELLOGG FOUNDATION gave us a grant to
model the
project initially in eighteen states and everywhere form there. We’ve
written
SCIENCE THROUGH NATIVE AMERICAN EYES as well as GEOGRAPHY and SOCIAL
STUDIES
THROUGH NATIVE AMERICAN EYES. These are all real school curriculums.
This isn’t
like those stupid curriculums that are still in schools today. They’re
so
shallow that they wind up being about nobody. Nobody can identify with
them. We
were writing real school curriculums. People are surprised that every
culture
that has survived has science. Science is simply a matter of observing
and
experimenting and finding out what works and passing that knowledge on
to other
people. It’s a whole paradigm shift with regard to interactive
multimedia as a
means of delivering education and also cross-cultural education. I
can’t tell
how much trouble education departments are with those old fashioned
curriculums
that don’t seem to be very engaging to students or teachers.
How
far do you think contemporary Native Music has come and where do you
think it
could go?
When I first started doing Pow Wow Rock and gave it a name in the
seventies, I
envisioned it as being in the same boat as blues music was in the
thirties. It
was incredible. It had a lot potential but nobody knew about it. People
were
pretty surprised when they heard Pow Wow Rock for the first time or
when they
heard about it for the first time. They didn’t really know what to
expect but
the Native American community got it immediately. Since that time, we
founded
the Aboriginal Music category for the JUNO AWARDS in the eighties.
Finally the
GRAMMY’s caught on and they followed suit in the late nineties. During
that
time, because of my records and touring and a lot of the work that I
had done
with local musician groups and aboriginal records companies, people
form all
different genres who also happened to be of First Nations backgrounds
have just
plain gotten the idea in their heads that they can be who they are.
It’s a new
way of thinking for Indian people. It’s a new way of thinking for a lot
of
people. A lot of people think that there are only a few options
available to
them because that is all that is being advertised on TV that week.
Non-Indian
journalists used to ask me “What are you? A folk singer or are you a
traditional Indian singer?” or “Oh my God! Are you a pop singer?” As if
those
things mattered and they don’t. We are who we are. I learned a phrase
from a
long time ago that goes “…reality is your friend” That’s what keeps me
from
going nuts during it all. I’ve won a whole lot of awards for ‘RUNNING
FOR THE
DRUM’ so I’ve been going to a lot of award shows as well as Aboriginal
awards
shows. In Canada
we have three major, ACADEMY AWARD – level Aboriginal music award shows
that
are televised. That’s a lot of Indian people making all different kinds
of
music. We’ve come up with all different kinds of music that define our
existence and our reality. It wasn’t like the record business invented
a whole
lot of genres so they would know where to stick their records so that
consumers
could find them in a store. The new way of thinking is that you make
your
business fit reality instead of trying to make reality fit into the
business.
You get to have a GRAMMY category or a JUNO category just because they
feel
that the Indians got left out. If you have the numbers you can suggest
that
they have a category for you and we have the numbers on both sides of
the
border.
What
would you like a person to come away with after they’ve listened to
RUNNING FOR
THE DRUM?
I want them to come away with the desire to hear it again. I hope that
they
find something that they absolutely love and that they find new things
that are
a little surprising. The quote FOREST GUMP, ‘Life is a box of
chocolates’. They
all taste good to me. I’ve made each song its own little movie. I hope
people
will come away with a sense that they can do many things. All of the
things
that they could’ve done when they were younger can still be done now.
There is
still an artist in there and there is still a musician in there. For me
it’s
all about play – the music and the paintings. The DALAI LAMA says the
purpose
of life is happiness and if you can look around and find happiness in
this
crazy world that e live in then I think you’re on the right trail. For
me it’s
always been about keeping your nose on the joy trail. You’ve got to
find the
things in life that bring you closer to joy because there are tears in
t he
world. We need t keep a good handle on what keeps us going and pass
those
skills on. For me I pass them on through playing music.
MARCH 8,
2010
BRiAN
LUSH (FOUNDER,
EDiTOR-iN-CHiEF)
