Buffy Sainte-Marie

00:00:08 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Buffy Saint Marie was never a household name in the US, but if you ask her peers, she probably should have been. She was a pioneering artist in the Greenwich Village folk scene, playing alongside people like Bob Dylan. She even helped give Joni Mitchell her start. But in the early days of Vietnam, when Buffy was singing protest songs about the casualties of war, she was blacklisted by the US government. Her music was barely played on radio, but she still found an audience. Her classic songs like Universal Soldier have been covered by Elvis Presley, Barbara streisand Courtney Love Morrissey, and she was the first Native woman to win an Academy Award, though she's probably best remembered by Americans for her controversial stint on Sesame Street, where she taught the cast about her indigenous heritage and Big Bird about breastfeeding. Today, at seventy nine year old, Buffy still active. She had a robust touring schedule until, of course, this year. Now she's just at home in Hawaii, where she met up with the Rick Rubin. They talk about her blacklisting and why she wrote a song about coding long before any Southern rapper ever did. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Rick Rubin and Buffy Saint Marie. I want to start by talking about what the world was like when you started making music. What was the original motivation, what maybe you start doing this? What was the culture like? I had no choice. I was living in an adoptive family in Maine and Massachusetts. You were born in Canada, Yes, maybe I think I was, but I was adopted, so you don't really know. So you don't you don't think of yourself as Canadian. I think of myself as indigenous North American, and indigenous people in North we predate those borders. Those borders haven't been around very long. And although most Americans would not know, probably a lot of Canadians would know about the Jay Treaty, for instance, which means that you know, we can just go back and forth, that we don't need no passport. But most of the guys at the porter don't know that. So as as as an indigenous person in the Americas, you not only have the world be the way that it is, which is tough for everybody, but also you get another little set of challenges in that most of the other people don't know about you yourself. You're such a small minority. I mean, there are so few people of Native American background in show business. I mean there's you know, like Burt Reynolds is, oh, well, I'm one eighth Cherokee, and my you know, some other celebrities like oah, my grandmother was a Cherokee princess, blah blah. But when it comes to real Native American people who have no choice and just there's no alternative to being an Indian. However you call us, and by the way, we all say Indian, Native American, indigenous week most of us use it interchangeably. How old we when you were adopted? That baby? They don't tell you. Adoptive children have a lot of problems that most people have never thought about. You don't get a horoscope, you don't know when you were born, you don't know where you were born. You have a birthday assigned by the court, so you never really know who you are. You know, in the cases of most marginalized kids come from a marginalized community, you don't really know. So I was about three and my family got a piano and a great piano, So that became like my toy. That's what I did instead of sports and Barbie dolls and things. And what was the music going on at that time, Like what were you hearing? Well, anything that my parents would have on the radio or records that they were had around. So somewhere along the line, I discovered Tchaikovsky and I loved that. I used to listen to Swan Lake and Nutcracker Swede and this thing called in a Persian Market and whenever would come on the radio, and I just taught myself how to play and just because it was so much fun. And I never could learn how to read music. So it's taken me all these years. And just a few years ago I found out I'm actually dyslexic in music, which I had never heard of. Yea, yeah, so there are a lot of There are a lot of people who come to music not through the path of music teachers. Yeah. Yeah. What's the first time you ever played in front of people? In the summertime, I used to go over to a state park and I used to sit around a campfire with everybody else and play songs that I'd written, and you know, Everly Brothers hits and you know, Fast Domino. This was in the fifties, so you asked about, you know, what kind of music influenced me. That's what it was. I heard CLA six as a child or whatever happened to be on the radio, which was, you know, kind of Frank Sinandre era. And then when I really fell in love with music was when I was about I must have been eleven or twelve or thirteen, and I used to go down in the basement and I was supposed to be ironing my school clothes, but I discovered I discovered rockabilly music on the radio. So Kyle Perkins, Scottie Moore, they were just my heroes. And I was also lucky enough. I was living in Maine and Massachusetts, and I used to get on a train and go to New York. I had a friend that I had met in Maine at a state park, and he would he invited me to his house, and you know, all our mother's in agreement. It was those days, and we used to go to Allen Freed rock and Roll Show. And then the Allen Freed rock and Roll Show started coming to Boston as well, so I went there, so I used to see people like Joanne Campbell. Nobody's ever heard of Joanne Campbell. Oh, shame on you. Oh man, she was hot. I mean she was. She and the Platters I think were the only women. You know, the Platters there was one woman. Oh and Laverne Baker. They were the only women. But it was Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, the Everly Brothers and Frankie Lyman. He just play a handful of songs. Yes you got it. Yeah, they play maybe two or three songs and then next Oh my god, it was great. It was just such a thrill. I knew that that's where I wanted to be in the audience, on the stage, backstage. I didn't carry just wanted to be around the music. Would you say at that time, we're all kids into it? Or was it? No? So what again? Like more like what was the world? What was the world like? Then? Like? Um? Were would you? Would you say you were unusual for being in that group of people. I wasn't in a group of people, which was pretty standard for me because, like I said, I lived in two different places. I lived in maineand Massachusetts, so um, I didn't really have tight social groups. I had trouble at home. There were pedophiles in the neighborhood and in the house. So I was kind of a loner kid. And so the music that I was hearing, I was I was with that Dominomo than I was with the other kids. And in high school now I'm maybe fifteen sixteen, yeah, and I'm hearing these doo wop and rockabillyum you know, um Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley. But it wasn't But just so we understand, it wasn't all the kids listening to. It wasn't any like subculture music. It was subculture music, but it was it was it was described the grown ups would have thinked it would have thought, oh, it's just cheap, you know, that's um uh. They they either would have associated with black people in very ugly terms, or poor people or not us anyway, you know, it was. It was something that was a little um risque. It's just so interesting because looking you know, looking back, we think of both the music of the fifties and the sixties as so ubiquitous and so mainstream was not so it was the underground music of the day, and good girls didn't listen to that kind of music interesting. Yeah, bad boys did. Um, so I went through different social thing. I think I went through social demotion because of the music that I liked. I didn't care. Yeah, because that's what I wanted to do. Anywhoys, go home and listen to my records and you felt it in your heart? It was it was not a It made sense to you. It didn't have to make sense to everyone else. Do you think the other people didn't feel it? Think of my own situation, you know, the handful of kids hung out with I think they looked. I think they thought it was sinful. They wouldn't have used that word, and they weren't really churchy, but they were definitely you know, it was just like looked at beneath them. They would think it was beneath them, think that it would they be ashamed to listen to it. Do you think I think they hadn't discovered it. Tell me your first experience of folk music. Oh gosh, let's see, I guess I was in college. I went to the University of Massachusetts and I got a degree in teaching and a degree in oriental philosophy. By the way, you started out in philosophy, I heard ye see, I've always considered myself very fortunate in that I came along into show business kind of by accident. I didn't really, you know, I just surprising that I was there at all. But I was called a folk singer because that's what they were trying to sell. So I came to Greenwich Village straight from college. But here I was in New York City for the first time, and I was a songwriter. But you weren't supposed to be one yet, and the folk police could get after you, and if it was it acknowledged at that time that folk music was really an old form being brought back. So it was everyone knew that this is old music. I think. So we think of the sixties as when folk music started. Really yeah, okay, yeah, so's it's interesting that it actually even then it was old music. Yeah, it was just a new wave of this old music. It was interesting in these old forms of music. And like I said, I felt as though I was very fortunate to come along when I did. In the first place. The window to show business was just the left opened by accident. I think, you know, we were coming out of the Eisenhower generation, and it was like Frank Sinatra and you know that kind of um loungy big bands was still around. But I was very lucky because I didn't know any think about folk music. I was. I was just giving over my degree in orial plosity, and I stepped on stage and I sang these songs. Now, I was lucky enough to be around real folk singers like Pete Seeger New and McCall jon Bias, who sang songs that were four or five hundred years old. They were real folk songs. And see that really thrills me as a person who doesn't read music. And I don't come from any kind of formal music background, including the Paul Simon kind of music background where you grow up in New York. Your uncle's in the business, your other uncle's a lawyer, and somebody else, you know what I mean. I don't come from that and marginalized people. I think would I think it would be very surprising to most of you guys who are really solid in the record business and have not really experienced what it's like to be really marginalized and not know anybody, not have a rolodex, not not have an addressed book, not know how it's done. Who does it? I mean we don't even know where the door is. There's no way for Native American people to get into show business. There just isn't and it's very rare anyway. I think for anybody in show business to hold the door open for anyone else, it's just like, I'm here, how do you like me? Now? You know? But I didn't feel like that. I mean, I carried Joni Mitchell's tape around in my purse for long time, long months and months, and I played it for all kinds of people in the music business. How did you first run into Jonie? Well, she was a fan of mine, and I don't know where it was. It could have been a Saskatchewan and Minneapolis or somewhere. We were both on the road and I heard about her and I heard her musing. I just thought she was just great. I thought, oh, she's great, she's beautiful, she's smart, she's got she wants to she wants to do this. Nobody wanted to hear it. So finally I played her stuff for Elliott Roberts and told him to go down to the where, I don't know, the Black Cat Cafe or one of those little clubs in the village, and they made a great career together, but it was very, very hard. People who really are connoisseurs of folk music would realize the folk music comes from everywhere. It's just music made by folks. It's not just music made by the chosen few who are making the music business some money. We're going to invest in this, We're going to keep the public thinking that it's very folky, but really we're pumping dollars out of it. I mean, so many people made money on what he got three and well even Bob Marley later, right, I mean, you and I are in the music business. We know where it's at. There's always been people who are in the business to make money, and they've always been people in the business to make great art. It just there's both paths, Yes, there are. And I think most most non musicians, just most listeners wouldn't realize that. And I think that most new artists don't know that. And I think the record business has been terribly complicit in keeping try to keep them ignorant. Yeah, and it's a business of sharks, yes it is. I mean I was so green. I had never met a lawyer, I had never had a conversation with the businessman ever, I remember when I first went to New York, I was running around in my little heels and mini dresses and things. And I remember I went into the Musician Union for the first time, which is kind of like walking into the lobby of the Sopranos. I mean, I grew I grew up around Italian American you know, semi mafia people you know in Maine, Massachusetts, idea that and I look upon it very kindly, like people in the Sopranos would, because I was seeing the family side of that, but the business side of that, wherever it's coming from, whether it's people whose roots are in this part of Europe or some other part of Europe. Show business was developed in Europe through vaudeville by h by people who were not only concerned with the show, they were also concerned with sustaining the business. I mean, that's not necessarily greed and I'm going to rip off artists, but of course the part that we object to is exactly about that, and they've been artists ripped off forever and ever. So I had never met a lawyer or a businessman. I remember when I first went into Vanguard Records and they asked me who my lawyer was, and I said I didn't want I didn't have one, and they said that's okay, you can use ours. So I signed a seven year deal. How did you know to go to Vanguard? How did you How did you know? I was just stupid? Blue Note also wanted to sign me. So Vanguard was very big. Yes she was. Yeah, Joan Byers was already on Vanguard and having a fantastic career. Yeah, yeah, so she was. She was already signed her first album. I guess was just about time that I showed up and they wanted to sign me, and I said, yeah, I get Depending on how you look at it, I kind of either fell into or lucked into having a career. My first album, all of a sudden, I was Billboard's Best New Artist. What just singing these songs that I'd been writing all this time, and they were about everything, and I didn't think it was going to do anything because people were pretty suspect of songwriters anyway. And my first album is called It's My Way. I think they just put it into outer space or something, or into the Library of Congress. I don't know. It just got some big honor. I thought it was awful. But everybody else I thought it was awful, oh that it was included, or you thought it was awful that the albums oh no, I thought the album itself was awful. Oh no, the songs are wonderful, but I just think they took the wrong takes. And of course an artist had no say in those days, like when did you getting into the music business? Just to put me in the date song? Um, ninety mid eighties, okay, okay, okay, it was the early days of hip hop music. That's right, so nice, so nice. Yeah, so it was. It was. It was a scene where at first it was very naive and it was like, yes, students are in the streets, we have discovered our brains. We're not going to your freaking warm And there was a lot of protests bubbling under. I had written Universal Soldier, although everybody, you know, everybody thought Donovan wrote it. And I still have people come up to me today and argue that Donovan wrote Universal Soldier in Codine. And see, Donovan was a person of conscience who wrote all of his own songs except for two songs, and those two songs were Universal Soldier in Codine, So he got credit for writing those as well, and I don't think he ever took credit for it, but his management never pointed out that it hadn't written them. Who, how and why did you write codine? Codine? You know, for years, until very recently, people wouldn't understand this, but now people would. I was addicted to codeine by a doctor in Florida. I had been playing at Freddy Neil's place in Coconut Grove, you know that little club that he used to have. I don't know. I went to a doctor who said that I had bronchitis. I've been coughing and things. I think I was probably just exhausted from being on the road all the time and practically lived in a bus. And he addicted me to codine. And he apparently had addicted many young ladies to codine and turned them out. And so people who are addicted through their doctors to an opiate, and codeine seats an opiate, I mean codeine. It sounds oh silly, triket tweet kids stuff. Codeine is as much of an opiate as heroin is. It's an opiate. And just like all the doctor drugs, the synthetic drugs now like percocet, and you know all of the oxy what's you know oxyconton all of them there, Yes, they're all synthetic opiates. If you it's my belief, now you might disagreement. It's my belief that if a person gets into drugs through social reasons, they're very likely to get addicted in a kind of a different, almost more difficult way. You know, they're in and it's fun and it's wonderful, and you know they haven't fun with their friends. But if if a doctor addicts you and all of a sudden, you have to leave town. That's what happened to me. I had to leave Florida and we were driving through Georgia and I was just feeling horrible, no idea what was wrong with me, and went to a pharmacist to refill a Florida prescription. I didn't know you couldn't do that, and the guys that I can't feel that it's from a different state, But how long have you've been taking it? And heap the pharmacists pointed out to me that I was addicted to an opiate. I had no idea. I had just been going to the doctor for my shots and for my pills. So I went through withdraw cold turkey. But it wasn't like I ever had any fun on it. So it's kind of a kind of a really interesting that I would have I would have guessed had I not known the story that there was a long blues tradition of songs about drugs, cocaine, blues, cocaine, like those kind of things. Yeah, I would think, Oh, you're doing one of those kind of songs. I would have never guessed it was a personal issue. Oh yeah, it's amazing, Yeah, because you know, I didn't really have that personal I will see at the time maybe twenty two. Yeah, and see, I don't drink. I still don't drink. I just zero alcohol all my life, just because I never never did. Um. And I I was a girl by myself, and I looked a certain way, right, I mean I looked a certain way. I didn't run around with some granny dress. I was either smart enough or stupid enough to get my first show business dress from the Frederick's catalog and the Fredericks catalog. You even know what that is now, But it used to be this thing. You'd see it advertised in the back of movie magazines when I was twelve, right, and it was sexy clothes for women, and it was drawn. They weren't photos, they were drawn, so they were really they were really pretty. And so I ordered this dress and I over dubbed Donald. I made it ever A ragged him, and I mean like a v him. And I showed up in my high heels and think you know, there were people people around, like Judy Collins and others in not very flamboyant clothes. So I was also making that mistake. So here I showed up. I wasn't singing folk songs. I didn't know how to read music. I didn't had never met a lawyer. I mean, I was really mean, and I was wearing the wrong thing. And you know, looking back on it, all I can say is, you know, be yourself and be who you are, because I had an awful lot of fun even though I was doing everything wrong. I didn't soar to the top. I didn't become, you know, the equivalent of Madonna and Michael Jackson. But there were reasons why, and it had nothing to do with lack of talent. But those of us, like you and me, who are in show business, we know all the things that it takes to make an artist and it's not all good, and it's very tricky for anyone to negotiate as long as it lasts in that kind of center. I had no idea that there was anybody standing in opposition to me or trying to trip me up. I just thought I was lucky to be there and to get to make one record, you know, and you were. I mean, the other side of it is, we did get to do it. I did get to do it, and I got to do it for my reasons, not so much for show business reasons. And it took I didn't find out for twenty years about I didn't know that there was any such thing as blacklisting, none of us did. I had no idea i'd been taken out. I had to find out by accident. We'll be back with Rick and Buffy Saint Marie. After a quick break. We're back with Buffy Saint Marie, who's explaining why her music was blacklisted by the US government in the sixties. Do you think the song Universal Soldier is the reason. That's what most people say, That's what Wikipedia will say. They'll say Buffy Saint Marie was blacklisted by two American presidents because they objected to her outspoken stance expressed in Universal Soldier. But I don't think it was that. It wasn't that. That's what's so fascinating about that song is there are lots of anti war songs. There are none from that perspective. That's a wild perspective. Have you heard the war Racket? You got to hear the war racket? Okay, I mean you probably most Americans, even people in the business like yourself, lost track of me probably in nineteen seventy or something. And if they already had children, they may have seen me on Sesame Street for five and a half years. They may have. But most people think that I kind of came and went. And that's what I thought. I thought, singers common singers go. But I still had a big career in other places, and so I thought, oh, you know the US, something else came along. I actually, you think that the popularity in Canada versus the US had to do with blacklist things? So absolutely, so interesting. Absolutely, I was in Canada. I was in Toronto one day. Now, this isn't in the eighties. I was in Toronto. I showed up for an interview in a radio station and the guy said, I'm going to start this interview with Opati Marie by apologizing to you for having gone along with what I was praised to have gone along with on White House stationary. The guy had a letter from the Johnson White House commending him for having suppressed my music, which deserved to be suppressed. And the only person I knew I could talk it over with besides my lawyer, which I mentioned it to him one day and he suggested, did I get my FBI files? And I said, oh, come on, you know I've never broken the law. I've never I'm not even the one who parades down the street with a sign. You know, I'm not that kind of protester. I'm a writer, right, And the only other person I could tell besides my lawyer was my friend taj Mahal and Tyres and I were classmates together at the University of Massachusetts, and then we both moved to Hawaii, and I had already been here for a long time, and our sons wound up best friends, and our sons wound up being college roommates at Berkeley College and music incredible, I don't know, so anyway, we were real good friends, and Tyres pointed out to me that Eartha kit Too had been blacklisted, and he knew some other people who he thought had. So my lawyer said, well, let's get your FBI files. I said, oh, there aren't any. Well they were like like thirty one pages. I think, wow, it's all redacted. I mean, you know, they were following me around and making sure that I wasn't something that I ravel rousing. Yeah. No, but I wasn't much of a rabbel rousing. I was a writer, That's who. I'm a writer and a philosopher. I'm not a card carrying fist pumper. I'm just not remember the original inspiration for Universal Soldier again, just because the perspective is tell me the story. I absolutely remember it. Let me let me just set it for it. Okay, I'm in Greenwich fille Is. There's students all over the streets, right. It's it's it's about music, and it's about the fact that we kind of don't trust mister Man anymore. You know. It's like we're coming out of the eyes and our generation. It's Kennedy time. Anyway. I was in an airport. I was in San Francisco Airport, coming from Mexico on the way to Toronto. I had a concent at the Purple Onion and in the middle of the night, some medics came in. They were wheeling wounded soldiers in kearneys and wheelchairs and things, and I got to talk into one of the medics, and you know, I asked, I asked him. You know, he assured me that there was a war going on in Vietnam and it was horrible. And I just got to thinking, well, who is it Who's responsible for war? Is it these guys? Is it these poor guys lying here? You know, some some private you know, he signed up to make the world a better place, or a family tradition, or see the world, and now he's lying here. Half dad, right, Well, there's a certain hot responsibility right then, But you know, the night's going on, the flight's going to leave in the morning. I had nothing to do. I got a long flight ahead of me, and I'm just thinking about this. So the song really is about individual responsibility for the world we're living in, you know, That's that's the way I put it. And it's about alternative conflict resolution. They're all part of the same thing. Okay, So nobody knew I wrote it. Everybody thought Donovan wrote it, so that wasn't the problem. However, a little bit later I had written this other song. Was it a big hit for Donovan? It was a hit for Donovan. I couldn't tell you how many of the soldo were. I think so yeah, I think it was yeah. But see I didn't I had. I told you I had never met a businessman, and I had been in town, and I had been in Greenwich Village, I don't know, not very long. And I was singing Universal Soldier. I had been singing it in Europe as well. That's where Donovan heard it. But I was saying I was singing it at the gas like cafe. Did you ever see that place? Oh, downstairs plays a real famous place for movies to sing past, the hat club, And the high women came in and they heard it. And the high women were like a preppy group like the Kingston Trio, right kind of imagine, you know, for preppy guys singing a lot of folk songs. And they heard Universal Soldier and they were coming off this huge hit. Michael rolled a voter show a Hallelujah right, Oh, it was like number one. They were coming off this hit and they wanted to record Universal Soldier, and they said who's the publisher? And I said, what's that And the guy at a guy at another table who was a friend of my manager at the time, said oh, I can help you with that right, and he made up a contract at the table. I signed it. He gave me a dollar and he owned the rights to Universal Soldier, and Donovan got a hit and he got credit for having written it. So you'll find out as you get to know me better. I like to turn things positive. The positive about this story is that ten years later I was able to buy back the rights at least part of the rights to Universal Soldier for twenty five thousand dollars, which is a lot of money at that time. So I was doing that well to rescue my own song. And at the same time, see, I had written this song called until It's Time for You to Go. You're not a dream, You're not an angel, You're a man writing like you played at a million weddings. Yeah, and everybody was recordies. I'd been in the sixties. You wrote it in the sixties. Did you ever record it in the sixties, sixty three or sixty four? Show? No? Really, Oh, maybe sixty four sixty five. Yeah, he said, one of your earl. We really Yeah, I didn't know that I got my second album. I think incredible. Yeah, but okay, so I've written this song. Oh god, Bobby Darren recorded it. Now, he recorded it in the first the first person to cover it by Bobby Darren was the first person to cover it. Yeah, can I use this guitar? Here? Do we have time for please? Oh? Please? Okay. So the way the way I had written it, da da da, You're a man, I'm not a queen. I'm a woman. Take my I'm not a queen. I'm a woman. Take my hand. We'll make a space in the lines that we plan and he will stay until this time. Oh, you to go see how it goes, and he will stay until this time for you to go. Well, it holds what's called a suspension, and most people don't know what that is, but it's it's a da here there's note in here again. Well, Bobby Darren and his musical director, they didn't catch that, and they recorded it really vanilla and here's time burned. It dawned on ba ba bam. So it's not like every other song right fathered me. Oh, it just pissed me off for years. And then many other people who recorded it, like Sonny and Share recorded it, ROBERTA. Flack recorded it, d Atkins recorded it was How was the Roberta version? Oh it's beautiful piano. Yeah, she does it on piano, and she gets the chords right. I mean, the real musicians got the chords right. But whoever followed Bobby Darren's Vegas version did not. And Elvis Pressley recorded that, Barbara Streissen recorded at Boston Pops Orchestra. Everybody recorded it, right. What's your favorite version? Oh? Gosh, I loved what Chad Atkins did. Glencamble did a beautiful version, and it's been done in other languages too. But anyway, when I was trying to say is that this song kind of brought me to television, and they wouldn't let me on television with Universal's older, right, so I think. But once I got on television, I opened my mouth and I was talking about you know, Native American rights, alternative conflict resolution. I mean, that's not who they hired. They wanted a chick in a short skirt to come on and sing the song and talk about how much fun it was to you know, celebrity chat, and I didn't do that. Harry Bellafardi invited me onto the Tonight Show and I sang now that the Buffalo's Gone, which is about the breaking of the oldest treaty and congressional archives, which had been done in the on the administration of George Washington, right, Benjamin Franklin, those people, right, they unilaterally broke the oldest treaty in congres rational archives, and now that the Buffalo's Gone tells that story. And it was on my first album along with Universal Soldiers. So I did that song with Harry Bellafonte when he filled in for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. And the next time that I was invited to come on the Tonight Show to actually be with Johnny, I was told in no, on certain terms that you know, it was to sing celebrity right, just no, no, And it's not going to be Universal Soldier, and it's not going to be any kind of song of you know, asking for change or pointing things out. Wasn't going to be a protest song. So I turned it down. The screener, I was talking to the screener, you know, one of the producers calls you up and talks it over with you. Yeah, we'd love to have you back on, but you know times have changed, so you don't want to hear it. We don't want to hear any of that protest stuff, just singing until it's time to go. So I turned it down. So when it comes to you round about way to your question about was I blacklisted because Universal Soldier? No, I was blacklisted because I'm an outspoken person. I was a woman on television pointing out the fact that they were stealing Indian land, the particular parts of Indian land that contained uranium. You don't want you don't say that right. So anyway, j Edgar Hoover, he was not a fan of mine, both apparently both the Johnson and Nixon governments. I didn't find out about the Nixon blacklisting until gie a few years ago on the Internet a guy from the CIA, not the FBI. The CIA also was talking about Cotel pro you know, and me and other a few other artists being followed, and really it was an attempt to shut us up. Now at a certain point, all of a sudden, I couldn't get any airplay. It didn't matter what we recorded. I was I was recording in nash We're leaving a whole lot out. I was spending time with chet Atkins. Chet Atkins fixed me up with Norbert Putnam's Eric Code six one five bands, just solid, wonderful band, Oh my god, and we were making really good records. I mean, I want to give you a list because I think probably I've done some I think you've probably lost track of me significantly enough so that you've probably missed eighty percent of what I've done. That's good, and you've probably heard just a few little things. But I'll feel ye an after this great and we'll put together a playlist based on what you give me, and we'll attach it to this, to this interview that everyone could hear. Yeah, I think it would be interesting to people because you know, you know how it is. You've you've known an lot of artists with long careers. Yes, and things change and you come and go and you For me, it's always been like people think that you're so creative when you're out there on the road right, no time to be creative, and you barely have a chance to get a nap. You're exhausted all the time, and then you take you take some time off and they think that you've not creative anymore, which is when, at least in my case, that's when I'm most creative. Yeah, there were also some show business mistakes I think that I made, taking certain people off and just not just not being much of us. I'm not much of a social networker at all. I didn't go to the right party. But what I've had, I think has been a different kind of life than the lives of my peers in show business. I never did drink so and I was afraid of man because, like I said, in my childhood, it was Peter. It was just it was. There are a lot of pet files around, so I was kind of I was afraid of men. And I didn't go to bars. And that's where all the deals I made after the show. You go out with the business people and you make nice and everybody has a few drinks and you sit around and there's wine and there's livity blind who knows what alice? While I wasn't there, I don't even know what there was what else because I wasn't there, and I wasn't there for good reasons. I was by myself. I wasn't a guy, and I wasn't a girl with an entourage around her. I didn't have strong management. I was just a little piece of something, and I knew how you get treated when you show up in the wrong place at the wrong hour. So I think I did really well in negotiating show business on my own terms to the end where I feel very satisfied as a writer and an artist and the places that I've been and the people that I've met and the things that I've done. I took sixteen years off in the middle of my career to raise my son, and the first five of those we were on Sesame Street. Then when it was time for him to go to school, I said, well, you know, we Reagan had cut the budget to the arts for Sesame Street and we had already been on five and a half years, and when he did that, it would have meant that we would have had to move to New York or just not be a part of it anymore. So I asked my son, who was I guess from five at the time. I said, do you want to still live in Hawaii or do you want to live in New York? And he said Hawaii, And that's what I was hoping. He was a good choice. Yeah, so I took time off. We'll be back with Rick and Buffy Saint Marie after a quick break. We're back with Buffy Saint Marie. Tell me where a song comes from for you? I wish I knew. I just don't know. So usually start with an idea or might it start with music? It might I might be fooling around with my guitar or my piano or you know, any any kind of a dram anything. I don't know, what just pops into your head. I don't know. Just I think I write the same way that I did when I was three, which is might be bad news for some people, but it's kind of good news for me, and it's all I got. Yeah, I think it's only good news because it's you were playing. So if you're keeping the childlike play, that's it. That's only good thank you. That's exactly it for me. The music is playing. And I know that there's a lot of work, and like I said, this show and you got to show up, and there's business, but that that initial thing, the thing that keeps us happening, you know, wanting to be musicians every day, is the fact that it's fun. What's the story of Little Will Spin and Spin? Oh, thank you. It's just talking about our kind of like the human condition all the time, whether you're talking about the schoolyard or the church, or blah blah blah blah business or politics. There's this idea of this think local, act locally, think globally. It's like a gearing the way that you're making things happen in your family life at home, in your personal life, inside your heart and mind, where you know things are going on. It really really does affect the neighborhood, your island, or your community, your nation, the world. It really does. So it says things like, Merry Christmas, jingle bells, christ is born in the Devil's in hell. Hots they shrink, but pockets swell. Everybody knows, nobody tell right, it's like Christmas time. Yeah, it says, blame the Angels, Blame the Fates, Blame the Jews or your sister Kate, teach your children how to hate. And the big wheels turn around and around. Oh, the sins of Caesar's men, cry the pious citizens who petty thieve, the five and tens and the big whales turn around and around. Turn your back on weeds. You've hold silly, sinful seeds, You've sowed at your strata. The camel's load, honey, prey like hell, when your world explode. Little wheel spin and spend, big wheels turn around, Nan says, swing your girl fiddle, or say later on the piper, pay Josie do swing and sway dead, will dance on judgment Day. Little wheel spin and spin, the big wheels turn around and around. So I think some of my songs they've definitely written by a philosopher. I have two kinds of protest songs and then other songs of empowerment. You got to Run is one of them, carry it on as another. It's the opposite of a protest song. A protest song will lay out what the problem is. And this other kind of song for which we don't have a name for the genre, is like the solution beautiful. Yeah it works, but nobody's doing it right now. And you know, I do a lot of interviews, and a lot of interviewers are asking me, well, where are the great protest songs right now? And all I can said is a hip hop, you know rap. You know, it's kind of hard to find, But I think the sentiment to drive the creature video is still there among young people and the rest of us. But I don't know what is happening with you know, hello, Paul Simon and Sting and you know some of the other people who've made a freaking fortune a fortune. How can they see these things going down and not respond with their just the heart of their talent and brains. You know, they're I don't know where their songs are, do you know? I don't know. Are you hearing people write that kind of songs anymore? I hear I hear young artists doing protest songs. I've um they exist. They exist, they're not They're clearly not in the mainstream, and they're not. They don't seem to have the same impact that they once did. And I don't know why that is. In the sixties, they were making money off protest music, right, I mean, I wasn't getting much money out of Universal Soldier, but Donovan's people were, And so was the guy who had given me one dollar, who stole the right how he didn't steal him, he didn't. I was just green. I was just dumb. No, I don't. I'm not mad at him for that. That was just me. How did you end up meeting um? Jack? Nichi? Jack Nichi? Jack, you were married yet? Okay, I know very little? Not then, Okay, I'll tell you. Okay, I told you I was a philosophy major, which you can dig because you were philosophy major too. Okay. So one of the people I came across, of course, with Friedrich Nizzi, and Friedrich Nizi unfortunately was totally u misportrayed by the Nazis who just misconstrued a lot. Anyway, he was a great philosopher and I really thought he was terrific. Um. So I'm already recording for Vanguard. I don't know how many albums I've made for them. But Jack Nietchi saw cash Box Magazine the picture of he said he fell in love with me, but my picture in cash Box magazine and got in touch with then he my records, right, got in touch with Maynard Solomon and just was begging to make a record with me. And I guess it was Oh, you know, I was already in Nashville working with chedd Atkins, which was a dream come true. Oh God, he was wonderful anyway, Jack, That's how Jack discovered me and Jack wanted to make an already working with Neil. He had already been working with Neil. He had already been working with Neil Young. Yes, and so Jack wanted desperately to make a record with me. And I didn't even know who he was except that he was He was the He was the grandson of Friedrich Netzi's brother. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, it's that Nietzi. Those are the Nietzi's we're talking about. So really his name, Yes, that's really here. We thought that was his stage name. No, oh, no, he come he no. You know, people will tell you terrible stories. Jack himself would tell you terrible stories about himself. Jack died a few years ago, by the way, So we we met. We made this album called He Used to Want to Be a Ballerine or I think it's the worst record either one of us ever made, but some people liked it. But it has a few really nice things on it. So anyway, every now and then Jack had called me up and he'd need something like he needed me. He was he was scoring performance Donald Campbell's movie. It was Mick Jagger's first acting role performance. It's really good too. It's a great movie and great score. I mean Jack in case you're in case our listeners don't understand Jack nets Is. He's very very well known for movie composer and totally original, you know, and he doesn't use ghosts to write his music. He was really really unique talent, very wonderful talent. God. He wrote beautiful things that most people will never hear. And I was scoring my own movies, but I was also working with Jack from time to time because Jack was all in love see, and I didn't see him for years and years and years, and then he came back into my life because he said that he was scoring a movie and it was a real good movie with Richard Kere and Deborah Winger, and he couldn't come up with a main theme. I don't know. I didn't understand that at all. Jack is, he's just a brilliant composer, but he can't improvise. And I've never understood that. See. I'm a writer too, but I can't read. So there's all kinds of ways to approach music, and they're all good. There's no right way, and it's a mystery every time. See. So Jack wouldn't go up with the melody and he came to visit me, brought the director along. I hadn't seen him in a long long time. And by that time I was done with Sesame Street. I was raising my son by myself here in Hawaii, and Jack showed up and I played him love lift us up where we belong? Right? And I played the whole melody and the bridge and everything, and that became the main theme for an Officer and a Gentleman, and it became the main theme for the song up will We Belong, which was my melody, a little thing that Jack wrote, and then words by Will Jennings, genius Will Jennings, Yes, oh god, what a writer. But Jack didn't tell the movie director that I had written it. He pretended he had written it. Yeah, so at some point he had to tell Taylor Hackford that he had not written it. And so this was not a big deal because movie companies would know how to handle that, but it was. It was very weird. I wrote a lot of things that went into Jack's scores, but he would always tell me, no, don't don't tell anybody because and I didn't care anyway. All was, as you know, a little bit here, a little bit there, and so eventually we got married. That's a big jump, though, from a terrible jump to leave me. It was a leap of stupidity. How did that happen? Happen? Oh? God, I had lost track of Jack, So there was an awful lot that I didn't know. Yes, I was raising my son in Hawaii and doing education and concerts in foreign countries. But the US didn't love me anymore, so I didn't know what was going on. I didn't know about Jack's police record. I didn't know about anything. And he came along and he was so nice to my little boy and carrying him around in his shoulders, and wouldn't it be wonderful and blahity blah and I've been out shopping for the ring and this is what he told me. Oh, anyway, I kind of just I just said, yes, I liked him. We had been friends. We were musical at this point. Well, yeah, I had known him for a long length of time, but there were many years where there was no calendar at all. It was him for years. Yes, yeah, and I had known in the sixties. When I knew him, he's kind of cuckoo, but he was on best behavior when he came back into my life, and we were married for just a short time when I realized I was in deep trouble. And you know, I say this in all Calvin d Did he have a drug problem? I don't know much at all. Oh, well, you know there's a filmmaker named Christians Saint Clair I believe his name is, who's making a movie about Jack. And he asked me to speak out because I don't talk about Jack, and I said, only if Jack's son, Jack Junr, is part of this, which he was. So I saw a little bit of about I saw a little bit of what Keith Richards did because he and Keith were very good friends, and what Jack and Willie Deville had done together lots and lots of clips. And I did my peace too. But I don't think it's come out yet. And I really don't feel comfortable in describing Jack in any way except to tell you that he was super brilliant, I mean genius brilliant, you know, seems a very unique intelligence. He was brutal. He would tell you that everybody in Hollywood thinks he's an asshole, and that they he was right. He would do terrible, terrible things because of his he had. He had a mental problem exacerbated like you know, an awful lot of people exacerbated by alcohol. So he was an alcoholic and drugs exacerbated, but his real problem was a mental problem. Friedrich Nietzi died in a mental institution. So did his father, the father of Friedrich Nietzchi, and you know, so it's something that runs in the family. And all I can tell you is in defense of Jack, who was no day at the beach. Yes, and the first to admit it was that, you know, he would get a score of brain chemicals that was just Tara, and he'd lay it on whoever was there, and most of the time that was me. So I hung in there for about eight years and finally finally I had to. I won't I'll spare you the details, but they were pretty dramatic. You know. Andrea Warner's book, she wrote an autobiography, She wrote a biography of me. She just called it Buffy Saint Mary the Autobiography, and she goes into some of the details. But musicians sometimes, I guess, I guess the reason why I'm willing to talk about it a little bit is to share with you Jack's probably going to go down in history unless you talked to Keith Richards as being a real jerk, And why would I brought up with that for so long? Neil Young also loved Jack. Yeah, Leslie Morris too, just loves Jack. A few people, just a few. Jack has a few people, and I'm one of them. Who um who even though he was crazy and we know he was crazy and we know he was an asshole, and would agree with all of that, but the most honest person I ever met. So many times, the brilliance comes with other things. It's like, I don't know, it's I do. I think sometimes it does, but I don't necessarily think it has to. And I don't know. It doesn't excuse either. It doesn't have to and it's not an excuse. But it's true that they come together sometimes it's not. It's like the same that break from reality allows innovation. I think you're right. I think you're right, and even less severe breaks with reality, like me wanting to live in Hawaii. You know, I live in the mountains over here, not because I'm Barbie wants to go to the beach. No, it's not that I live here because it is an it's an aberration for a person in show business to hide away in a place nobody can find you. It's an aberration, but it's my aberrations. Sounds really healthy to me. It is healthy, and it has been, and it has been for me. So it's always a it's always a balance because you know, people in the US don't understand that I have a big career. They don't know because they think, oh, that was the little Indian girl that would make you cry, you know, or and I you know, to address that further. You know, people people would just think the little Indian girl is mistaken because I wrote a song called My Country chis of Thy People You're Dying, which is Indian one on one in six minutes, and it's heavy. But I tried when I put this album together, of it's a retrospective of all the strong songs, whether they're strongly positive or protest. There's not one of them that's pap you know, it's all pretty strong stuff. And when you look back on it, you know, how are you going to do that? My Country tis of Thy People You're Dying, Universal soldier now the buffalo is gone. I did them exactly the way that I did then, only I'm a better guitar player and a better singer, and we have better recording now. My latest album is Power is Medicine Songs, but the one before that, Power in the Blood, is what I would advise first time listeners to hear. I think they I think they'd like that album. It's very diverse, has a lot of different kinds of music in it. Great. Thank you so much, my pleasure. Thanks to Buffy Saint Marie for sharing her story and inspiration with Rick. Be sure to check out the playlist Buffy created for us at Broken Record podcast dot com, and also subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast, where we'll be putting up our old interviews and also new ones, sometimes with some extra content. Broken Record is produced with help from Jason Gambrell, me Belle, Leah Rose, and Martin Gonzalez for pushing industries. Our theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond. Thanks for listening.