Just found this video from 1992.  It’s Mark Shark playing guitar with John Trudell.  The song is called “Bombs over Baghdad” from Trudell’s album “A.K.A. Grafitti Man”

Also, Kris Kristofferson singing “What About Me,” from his album “Repossessed.”

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In the mid-80’s, Trudell came together with legendary Kiowa Indian guitarist Jesse Ed Davis and formed Grafitti Man; their first cassette, AKA GRAFITTI MAN, was produced in 1985. While the tape was sold only by mail order, a copy reached Bob Dylan, who called it “album of the year” and played it over the PA before concerts.

Following Davis’ death, Trudell enlisted guitarist Mark Shark as the musical backbone of Grafitti Man; the band spent part of 1988 touring the US with Midnight Oil.

AKA GRAFITTI MAN includes material dating back to Trudell’s work with Jesse Ed Davis and the cassette of the same name; as well as more recent material, much of which was co-produced by Jackson Browne, who also serves as the album’s Executive Producer.

The album features Trudell’s powerful personal and political statements, as well as his method of incorporating indigenous themes and musical traditions into a rock context.

REVIEWS

“AKA Grafitti Man will shake you up and make you dance; it challenges your commitment to justice, and above all else, it rocks. (4 stars – Excellent) – ROLLING STONE

“A spell-binding performer… One of this year’s bravest albums. (Disc of the Month)” –CD REVIEW

Though he no longer had the late Jesse Ed Davis as his main instrumental foil -longtime collaborator Mark Shark plays a mean guitar on many tracks (and electric sitar on “Lucky Motel”) Billy Watts also shows himself very capable on the electric six-sting, especially on the out-of-control coda to “Nothing In Her Eyes,” a track that works particularly well, building slowly, adding tension until its spirals crazily, leading into the quiet ache of “Doesn’t Hurt Anymore.” Trudell remains a hypnotic speaker, with an impeccable feel for flow and the sound of words. He’s allowed the musical palette of his songs to develop, using more background vocals to echo his speech, as on “Sorry Love” and “Undercurrent.” Inevitably Quiltman’s traditional singing powers each track and guitars still carry the weight of the music, but keyboards also get more of a look in throughout the album, and mandolin and sitar even show their faces. This time around, Trudell sounds like a man who’s come to sad terms with life – and death. And that means being able to go on and make more music. – Chris Nickson

Daemon Artist Combines Poetry With Music On ‘Bone Days’

by Jim Bessman

NEW YORK - John Trudell’s unique mix of poetry and Native American traditional music is hard to categorize-especially for Trudell himself.

“In practical reality, it’s spoken word with music behind it,” says Trudell, a deeply compelling artist who emerged from many years of hardcore political activism in 1982 with his initial release, Tribal Voice. “But I really don’t have a description for it.”

This isn’t to say, though, that Trudell’s music is hopelessly indescribable. On his new Daemon album, Bone Days, his intensely delivered recitations are backed by his band Bad Dog’s ethereal guitars and given heightened otherworldly power by the traditional Native American vocal chants of the band member known as Quiltman.

Reaching Out

Trudell-who hails from the Santee Sioux reservation near Omaha, Neb.-says he strives to combine poetry with music as a means of “reaching out, so to speak. We’re of a generation that didn’t have any poets,” the 55-year-old notes. “The only poets that were dangled in front of us were dead, and we didn’t have our own, because the ones who were became rock stars-so they’re not recognized as poets but [as] singer/songwriters. But there’s a place for spoken word in our reality.”

Indeed, Trudell wants the words to be “the source of feeling” in his songwriting, “and then the music becomes part of that feeling and carries it. The way it usually starts is that I get lines in my head, as in [Bone Days' cynical political commentary] ‘Carry the Stone,’ where I was walking through airport security in London a few years ago and they were being unnecessarily rude, and I remarked to one of them, ‘The more evil the empire, the more paranoid the society’-which became a lyric in the song. It was just something I flipped off to them and then said, ‘Hey, that makes sense.’ It wasn’t something I was consciously thinking.”

After completing the lyrics to “Carry the Stone,” Trudell brought them to his Bad Dog guitarist, Mark Shark. “We had a general discussion of musical texture, then he took the lyrics and came back with the music recorded,” Trudell says. “But every song I’ve ever written always starts with the words, because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.”

The album’s title track reflects both the name of his band and “hard times,” Trudell notes-”you know, ‘No meat, down to the bone.’ The average human being in America is going through some sort of hard times-physical, emotional, psychological. Everybody’s carrying a bit of bone days in them.”

Once again, with “Bone Days,” Trudell took the lyrics to Shark. “They’re also about the great search for truth,” he says, “so I didn’t want the music to just have a depressed or defeated feeling, but if nothing else, that resigned feeling that has to be dealt with.”

But that was all Trudell told Shark. “I gave no further direction,” he says, “because everybody interprets things differently with their own perception, and I want poetry to pull out of them their own feelings. And I want it to come from them, because in a way it’s almost like a mixing of natural energy-my feelings and the musicians’ feelings-and I like that better than being in a situation where I micro-manage every aspect of the songwriting process. If you’re going to collaborate, collaborate. Otherwise, quit wasting your damn time.”

Bone Days also harks back to Trudell’s earliest songwriting efforts, as the words to album tracks “Ever Get the Blues” and “Nothing in Her Eyes” were written in 1980. “I always try to go back somewhere for the time frame of the first couple of years when I started writing.”

A Vietnam vet who was chairman of the radical American Indian Movement in the ’70s, Trudell began writing after his wife, three children, and mother-in-law perished in a fire of unknown origin in 1979. The same year, he met Jackson Browne, who helped him record Tribal Voice with Quiltman. He then hooked up with the late Kiowa guitarist/songwriter Jesse Ed Davis, and the two collaborated on Trudell’s acclaimed album AKA Grafitti Man, which he rerecorded, with Browne producing, for Rykodisc in 1992.

“I started with Quiltman to put spoken word with the oldest musical form-Native American music-and he was willing to go for it, though we had no experience,” Trudell recalls. “Then I wanted to put it with the newest musical form-electric guitar-and I met Jesse Ed Davis, and he was the only one who knew what I was talking about.”

Trudell recorded two more albums with Davis before his death in 1988. “Everybody was going to be incorporated into the next album, but Jesse died and Mark picked up his guitar, so to speak, and carried on,” Trudell says. “Then Quiltman came in [again], and it was quite an evolution, adjusting traditional Native American songs to where he just makes his own harmonies to go with contemporary songs.

“Because the whole point is to take from our native culture and from contemporary culture without using one art form to mimic the other,” Trudell continues, “so our native identity remains the native identity, the contemporary identity remains the contemporary identity, and the mixing of these two musical identities creates a third musical identity.”

Trudell laughs. “In my mind, at least, that’s how it plays,” he says. “But I don’t know about the rest of the world.”

While Trudell’s modus opperendai of performance is spoken word, Shark successfully translates that verbalization into lyric and song.  There’s a heavy country accent with shades of Tom Petty and Jackson Browne. 

As the title suggests, much of the material concentrates on love and the heart, but there’s an artistic and technical side that shines.  Many guitarists can play the slide guitar, but very few play it well and Shark performs with an ease, passion and maturity that represents pure artistry.

Track: From the Heart 

Planet Peace: amt@teleport.com

http://www.teleport.com/amt/planetpeace/

by Martin Keller

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - Like Public Enemy’s seething contempt for an unjust social order or Midnight Oil’s attacks on institutional  usurpers of the human spirit and the environment, John Trudell’s AKA Grafitti Man (Rykodisc) is  simultaneously angry and compassionate, disarming in its acute cultural analysis and satisfying at every juncture.

Rock may be snoring on its laurels, but the Sioux Indian poet, former American Indian Movement (AIM) leader, and film and recording artist awakens the rock form and the listener by blending traditional Indian drumming with his band’s rock assault. Like the talking bluesmen before him, Trudell confronts subjects ranging from the tender to the wicked. The poetic strategy that originated with Trudell and executive producer ] Jackson Browne is realized by a band featuring guitarist Mark Shark, whose riveting guitar work underscores Trudell’s spoken songs.

In the haunting lines of “Tina Smiled,” Trudell remembers his murdered wife, while in “Baby Boom CM,” he offers a personal account of what Elvis meant to American culture (“I know, man, I was in his army”). But it’s “Bombs Over Baghdad” that explodes under the laser light. An indictment of the billion-dollar weapons industry and other “peddlers of death,” Trudell’s song is rife with the horrifying imagery of generals and sheiks drinking “blood and oil cocktails” while “Queen George” presides over the destruction and lies of the Gulf War.

“In the beginning, when I first started making music with [guitarist] Jesse Ed Davis in 1985, we made a conscious decision to make art on record and not just record songs for an album,” Trudell says. “It was a way for us to express truth. Today, the safest place for indigenous people and non-Indian people to express their truths is through art and culture because we live in a time when the institutions of the state don’t tell the truth and everyone knows it. That’s why creating art and culture is so important to our continuation and evolution as spiritual human beings.”

Trudell turned to poetry in 1979 to deal with the devastating grief and loss of his wife, Tina, their three children, and his mother-in-law. His family was killed in a suspicious fire at their home on the Shoshone Paiute reservation in Nevada. Trudell believes the fire was “an act of war” carried out by the U.S. government in its ongoing battle against the American Indian.

At the time, Trudell was highly visible as the National Chairman for AIM, which had successfully occupied Alcatraz Prison in the San Francisco Bay Area and Wounded Knee in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Both events were world news for the duration of the long and, in the case of Pine Ridge, bloody occupations. Two FBI agents were killed at Pine Ridge; fellow AIM leader Leonard Peltier was charged, many believe unjustly, with the crime. The story is told in an upcoming documentary film by Michael Apted called Incident at Oglala and in a parallel dramatic feature film, Thunderheart (starring Val “Jim Morrison” Kilmer and Sam Shepard).  Trudell appears in both movies.

It’s not the first time the Grafitti Man has appeared in a motion picture. He had a cameo in the critically acclaimed Pow Wow Highway, a movie Trudell prefers to Dances With Wolves. Kevin Costner’s film “proves more dangerous to us in the long run:’ he says.” It’s a romantic movie about our past, which makes the Indian and his and her problems invisible today in the present.

Wolves denied us our contemporary setting, which anyone who takes the time will see is full of poverty and other health and social issues.

“People need to see us today for who we are and what we have to offer the wider culture, including our concern for the environment and the spiritual side of us which the system and the marketplace often deny,” Trudell says.

“One thing everybody can do to help get the word out about the things I discuss in my poetry is to call your local radio station and ask them to play the record. Music is dying from the technology it relies on; [technology] can go into infinity, but that human element is getting lost.

Hopefully, by using the spoken word, the traditional Indian music, and contemporary rock, AKA Grafitti Mancan help give this culture a new infusion of human energy.”

Trudell employs basic rock, blues, traditional indigenous music, street shuffles and folk songs to craft a compelling hybrid that encompasses many viewpoints and visions of reality. His politics call for expansiveness and evolution rather than revolution. The result is a moving, shape-shifting, rock & roll treatise on the state of the world.

Listing Jackson Browne as executive producer, AKA Grafitti Man is a compilation of Trudell’s previously released cassette-only collaborations with the late guitarist Jesse Ed Davis and Mark Shark (a mean guitar slinger himself), first issued on Trudell’s own label during the Eighties.

The opening track, “Rockin the Res,” begins with a native chant; it sets the tone as Trudell invites us to “listen to the skies/Listen to the sound/Something on the land/Something going down/Down dressers/Speeding by life/Fever’s heart/Burning rivers to cross.” The band establishes a skeletal, rocking theme, and Davis carefully fills the space with blues.

The title cut follows, a funky strut in which Trudell delineates a materialist culture in moral ruin. Again, Davis cuts through the band’s steady groove, shaking his jagged guitar lines through the mix. From there the “songs” juxtapose current affairs with myths (“Baby Boom Ché,” about Elvis; “Wildfires”; “What He’d Done”) and politics with spiritual awareness (“Bombs Over Baghdad,” “Somebody’s Kid,” “Rich Man’s War”).

While it’s true that backing poetry with music has been previously – and often miserably – attempted by others, Trudell, with his Lou Reed-style delivery, pulls it off in spades. The difference? His musicians – Gary Ray and Chad Cromwell on drums; Quiltman providing chants and percussion; Bob Glaub and Rick Eckstein on bass; Browne, Steven Soles and Kris Kristofferson on backing vocals; and many others – are experienced in the art of understatement, and Trudell tells the truth simply, without artifice or undue drama.  In doing so, he provides a powerful and transformative listening experience – you can hear the pain and joy in his voice. 

AKA Grafitti Man will shake you up and make you dance; it challenges your commitment to justice, and above all else, it rocks. – Thom Jurek