“Good evening. This is John Trudell from Radio Free Alcatraz, welcoming you to Indian land Alcatraz on behalf of the Indians of All Tribes.” The Santee Dakota Vietnam veteran’s voice transmitted from a cell block in the notorious prison that once incarcerated Indigenous parents who refused to send their children to government boarding schools. Beaming through the San Francisco Bay fog, Trudell earned a reputation as a compelling thinker and speaker. This lent to a life that both incorporated and transcended music, poetry, acting, and activism. From his leadership during the watershed Alcatraz reclamation in 1969 to his performances across international music stages, Trudell delivered news from Indian Country, as orator and troubadour. On important Indigenous matters, Trudell deftly shifted between past, present, and future. He talked about poverty, patriarchy, brutality, and history, as well as sovereignty, community, family, and future. He could comfortably shift from nineteenth-century Indigenous leaders’ speeches to twentieth-century Bureau of Indian Affairs policies. This made him an ideal national spokesperson for the American Indian Movement, which he helped lead after the 1973 Wounded Knee defense that resulted in a clash with US federal forces, three deaths, FBI infiltration, civil war on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and the incarceration of numerous Native leaders. It also made Trudell a target. FBI and other agents tracked him for years, gathering a thick file, and occasionally buzzing his performances with helicopters. In 1979, Trudell experienced the unthinkable loss of his family in a fire that he called “murder” and an “act of war.” “It was like I was in this exile of feeling that there was really no safe place, and a lot of disillusionment set in,” he described the aftermath. “We burned through to a thousand suns, and somewhere a wild horse runs,” he wrote in “Tina Smiled.” Seeking refuge and purpose in his writing, he began wondering if his words could become songs. Providing singing and drumming, his Warm Springs Native friend Quiltman Sahme helped him try. After a successful first show supporting Bonnie Raitt, they made their first album, Tribal Voice (1983). Trudell’s words found further harmony and rhythm in Kiowa/Comanche musician Jesse Ed Davis. “I can make music for your words,” Davis promised upon meeting in 1985. Given Davis’s resume—Dylan, Lennon, Harrison—Trudell didn’t hesitate. “The thing that struck me was a Bob Dylan imagery consciousness and I immediately heard music behind this poetry,” Davis said. Trudell benefitted from Davis’s musical talent and experience. Davis, seeking a new musical path, welcomed collaboration with Trudell and the company of other Native artists, including Charlie Hill, Buffy Sainte Marie, Floyd Westerman, and Joy Harjo. Together, Jesse and John began making a comeback. Jesse only needed more time. His comeback ended too soon when he died in 1988 after years surviving addiction. “My mind drifts a lot about my time with Jesse,” Trudell said. “Jesse and I believed in each other...” Trudell again found healing in music as he continued working with his Graffiti bandmates Quiltman, Mark Shark, Rick Eckstein, Gary Ray, Bob Tsukamoto, and later Billy Watts. Now playing under the name Bad Dog, the group continued refining its sound in the studio across several albums and on live stages around the world. Bad Dog appeared at Farm Aid, toured with Midnight Oil, and joined Peter Gabriel’s dynamic World of Music, Arts and Dance festival. “When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art,” Trudell reflected. There is powerful truth in the music Trudell and his collaborators made. On the captivating “Beauty in a Fade,” Trudell, Davis, and Quiltman blended poetry, tribal drumming and singing, and weeping bottleneck slide guitar into a song and sound unlike anything heard before or since. The music Trudell made with Davis in their Graffiti Band, and then with Bad Dog, anticipated forthcoming trends in popular music that married rap with rock guitar. Trudell and his bandmates were sometimes too advanced for popular comprehension, but enlightened listeners such as Marlon Brando, Kris Kristofferson, and Davis’s old pal Bob Dylan got it. Dylan played Trudell and Davis’s AKA Graffiti Man before taking the stage and called it the best album of 1986. “Only people like Lou Reed and John Doe can dream about doing work like this,” he pledged. Because Trudell’s music is challenging to characterize, it’s tempting to instead describe its motive and thematic power, but Trudell proved elusive here too. If we call him an activist, then he insisted that we at least consider what that means and our own relationship to the claim. “I don’t look at it as activism,” Trudell said. “There’s a sense that we’re human beings and there’s a way that human beings should live. And we’re not living like that.” His suggestion to his audience? “I think that it’s everybody’s responsibility to head in that direction. Those who will take the identity of poet or activist or any of that are no more responsible to do that than everyone else.” On the Bone Days (2001) lead track “Crazy Horse” we hear Trudell, backed by Quiltman, demonstrating his understanding of spoken word as an extension of the oral tradition. That is perhaps the most accurate way of explaining Trudell’s music, which otherwise defies easy description. In style and substance, it echoed everything from talking blues and rock and roll to the Old and New Left folk movements. But its originality is apparent. Dylan too struggled to define the music when he again praised Trudell in 2022 with an essay on the Bone Days track “Doesn’t Hurt Anymore” included in his book The Philosophy of Modern Song. “There’s a difference between imitation and influence,” Dylan writes. “And then there’s something else entirely. Like John Trudell.” The music contains the wisdom of someone who had suffered, he guarantees. “In this song there’s a million ways to go mad, and you’re familiar with them all, you just don’t talk about it and even if you did, your words would be difficult to catch,” Dylan imagines. “His words carry in their simplicity the confidence of ancient wisdom.” Perhaps then it is appropriate that Jesse Ed Davis called Trudell “an Indian Bob Dylan.” Traditional with a vanguard spirit, Trudell’s work joined a chorus of Native musicians who have always contributed to new forms of American music. Quoting a speech by Chief Seattle during a Radio Free Alcatraz broadcast in 1969, Trudell told listeners, “My words are like the stars that never change.” Those words also characterize his own reverberating multimedia power in storytelling and song. He was a master of both. - Douglas Miller, Oklahoma State University