CRAZY HORSE NEVER DIED

CRAZY HORSE NEVER DIED

DUSTY FINGERS

ROXY GORDON

Music brainiac Brian Turner reveals a rare and fantastic record from his secret stash—hey, quit drooling on the magazine!

The presence of Roxy Gordon—Texan, American Indian poet, writer, activist, journalist, and musician in the most rudimentary sense—was unique and unmatched, sadly unknown to a lot of the mainstream. The distinct, sharp, reedy drawl that hovered over his recordings and performances gave them a ragged, pretense-free tone. The vast majority of Native American recordings that people do get wind of are often relegated to, say, the Smithsonian Folkways label, or cheeseball Putumayo releases, so the complexity of what Gordon did wasn’t so easily tag-worthy to most folksy ethno-documentarians.

While some Native sounds/influences do filter into his recordings, he remarkably held a stylistic musical mirror up to white American and European culture as much as his own, with astounding cross-pollinating results. Crazy Horse Neuer Died, released in 1988 on Peter O’Brien’s fledgling Sunstorm label, is a pastiche of varied, low-tech sonic backdrops providing Gordon with a palette for his songs and poems. His intonations could be said to evoke the likes of

Mark E. Smith, Damo Suzuki, or even Alan Vega in the realm of stream of consciousness, text recited raw and decorated by (and blended with) simplistic musical means: droning cheap synths; wolf samples; echoey, bare-boned acoustic pluckings; and other mysterious sound generations all hanging opaquely behind his lyrical gold.

Perhaps lacking in the extra-nihilistic doom vibe of, say, the Fall or Suicide, the common bond is simplicity, and a ragged DIY sense of outsider bemusement in tone and inflection of Gordon’s readings, comparable to David Byrne’s Eggleston-like snapshots, or maybe even Sacha Baron Cohen asking “Who Is America?” Observing both from afar as well as in the trenches, Gordon dug into the proverbial questions of how individual, disparate ideologies intersected with government/ societal declarations of who actually belonged where and exploring how they behaved on their own.

Gordon’s Choctaw/Assiniboine upbringing in rural Texas locked him well into the questions of his ancestral heritage, achieving great focus upon his picking up a guitar, editing a University of Texas literary publication, moving to Montana with his wife, Judy, and then landing at Caltech, eventually hobnobbing in L.A. with Rip Torn, novelist Richard Brautigan, and Jim Morrison. Back in Dallas in the mid-’70s, he founded a local chapter of the American Indian Movement (AIM), eventually sharing stages with Dylan, Ernest Tubb, and Leonard Cohen (who, upon reading Gordon’s 1984 essay “Breeds,” declared, “It is strong. The word goes out. Can a change come on a dove’s feet?”). He was in good company from the get-go.

Further support emanated from fellow Texas outsiders: Butch Hancock, Terry Allen, and Ray Wylie Hubbard all showered praise. A deep, brotherly connection developed between him and Townes Van Zandt, who described Roxy as “a real poet” amongst the vast array of those laying claim to the title; the two traveled and bonded extensively in the years to follow. Most of Gordon’s writings enveloped both personal microcosms and the world at large. Crazy Horse Must Die drew heavily on a meeting with Syrian poet Adwan and hence established the psychic connection between the Native American struggles and those of Palestinian people living under Zionist encroachment. Popol Vuh-style synths gurgle behind Gordon’s monotoned reading that could easily be Mark E. slamming NME journalists: “So the white men called Crazy Horse and his people pagans, said they practiced dangerous religions, said they wore funny things on their heads. The white men said, ‘You can’t stop us, God is on our side, it says so in the Bible. You are few and you are ignorant. We are many and we are civilized.’ So Crazy Horse’s people took to terrorism.” Later: “So they mounted an expedition to go kill the pagan devil. And at its head rode General Custer. And Crazy Horse never died. Crazy Horse never died. He’s alive.”

Elsewhere, “Living Life as a Living Target” draws content from his wife, Judy, viewing a TV show about prairie dogs burrowing underground to evade predators, translating into an allegory for Native American life, declaring that “the world still needs those who die for the survival of the races. And then on the other hand, there are those moving targets that move so fast they just never get caught." All the while his echo-flanked voice is accompanied by paranoid, pitch-warping staccato synths.

Gordon was especially a champion of women, illustrating Native Americans as focused targets for judges in “I Used to Know an Assiniboine Girl,” where a victim married to a physically abusive white man gets sentenced to 50 years in a Montana penitentiary for fighting back. His torn emotions between cultural isolation and wanting to be around others is a focus on “Junked Cars,” where Gordon relishes industrial wreckage and debris, finding beauty in the fact that they were used by humans and abandoned to take on a new, stark splendor. “An Open Letter to Illegal Immigrants” resonates today especially, citing materialism and religion as the real catalysts for the import of misery to these shores, and ultimately the demon that needs exorcism from the world.

Gordon’s sharp critiques, DIY spirit and boundless reach out to all forms of media found him a timeless purveyor of storytelling through unlimited forums. He used his network and varied platforms to publish six books, pen for Rolling Stone and The Village Voice, and pump out six albums. Crazy Horse Neuer Died is his second record, resurrected recently by the Paradise of Bachelors label, complete with an extensive booklet full of photos, lyrics, and fascinating history. The label is set to continue the reissue campaign, hopefully putting Roxy on the wider radar.

There’s a lot of rancor here to reckon with, but also optimism. The album begins with a lone wolf howl and ends with a group of wolves, still standing and amassing in number. We lost Roxy to liver cirrhosis in 2000, so today is as good a time as any for a reexamination of the dense, informative, and otherworldly body of work he gave us. Cheers to a real upstanding American.