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CLOSE-UP
— Indigenous Rock
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Robby
Romero was a pre-teen
when he met Dennis Hopper in Taos. The fledgling musician
took Hopper’s advice to try his luck in Hollywood, and
was soon opening for Paul Butterfield and hanging out with
the likes of Bob Dylan, Gene Clark of the Byrds, Rick
Danko of The Band and Leonard Cohen. He also sank into
drugs and drink and, very ill, went home in the 1980s to
Indian country to purify himself. There he hooked up with
mentor and activist Dennis Banks, founder of the American
Indian Movement, and began life on “the red road.”
 Now he and his
band are changing the world — and the world of music;
America’s social confusion is, after all, clearly
evident in its popular music. “I’m not saying it’s
good or bad, right or wrong, I’m just saying people
should pay a little more attention.”
The
four-year-old band has performed its socially conscious
music with 10,000 Maniacs, Bruce Hornsby, Carlos Santana,
Bonnie Raitt, and Jackson Browne, and its self-titled EP,
“Red Thunder,” is being distributed by Canyon Records
and Indian Arts. Red Thunder has appeared in several MTV
“Free Your Mind” public service announcements, and
Romero directed a VH1 special, “Makoce Wakan: Sacred
Earth,” about Native American spiritual sites.
Romero
believes that indigenous
wisdom will “usher us into a time of healing. It’s in
the native prophecies,” he says, “that the children of
America will come to the doorstep of indigenous people.
And if people don’t change the way they’re thinking
about the earth, about themselves, about their part in the
Sacred Circle of Life, then we’ll enter — if we
haven’t already — the point of no return, and the
earth will begin to cleanse herself. And when this
cleansing process takes place there’ll be no
discrimination. Those who understand the natural laws of
life will have an easier time surviving.”
— Janet
Kinosian |
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