My first NDN
Kar was called, The Spy Car. I
bought it from a teacher for one hundred dollars. It was a blue 67 Newport
Chrysler; complete with its own bear dent (bear wasn’t hurt), and an
eight-track tape player that was easily worth two hundred.
This is how I wrote the song NDN Kars:
I was 21 years old, the year
was 1978, and I was headed on a canoe trip into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area
(BWCA) of northern Minnesota. We stopped in Winton, MN at the municipal liquor
store. It was last stop at the end of the line where the pavement becomes dirt
on US 169. The Muni had a great juke box and pool table and was the last chance
to get a cold one before entering the BWCA. In the restroom someone carved Indian
Cars on the wall. I
remember telling my friend Chuck Rikala, “When I get back, I am going to write
a song about Indian Cars.” At that time the connotation of an Indian
Car was
negative. To me, it’s about the richness of being poor.
The Spy Car looked like it had a Mohawk with the canoe tied down on top. We
travelled by water from Fall Lake, to Basswood, through Pipestone, and Jackfish
Bay. Straddled the international border, fished some walleye and turned
around. Our motto was: if you want to paddle through rock you must use a
stone canoe. Etched in my mind on a granite tablet carved from the Canadian
Shield was NDN Kars. When I returned home from the canoe trip it
took a few months for my thoughts to ripen.
I was living in the Mountain
Ash Berry district of Virginia, MN. In the fall the birds outside my kitchen
window would become inebriated eating the fermented mountain ash berries. They
would sing boisterous melodies. Sometime they would fall from the tree to the
ground. If they were un-lucky the neighborhood cat would pounce on them. One morning
after watching this drama play out, I started writing NDN
KARS. It took me fifteen minutes to write the song. I took me
fifteen years to learn how to perform it.
I was in a band. We called
ourselves, The Swartz Bros. We were the Black sheep of the Iron Range, MN. One
of our first gigs was at a little bar on Main Street in Virginia, the Pick
Wick. I sang NDN Kars and another song I had written called Lord
Help Us Sinners. At the end of the night I remember the bar
owner telling Sharon Rowbottom (singer) that the only two songs she did not
like were the religious song and the song about Indians— both were mine.
She said she did not want her bar turning into an “Indian Bar”. Sharon told her
to, “F off!” Well, not in those exact words. She said it with much more grace, but she had my back.We never played there again. I was proud of Sharon. We were punks,
but mostly we were for the people, and I knew the song had meaning for the
people. I didn't even bother to say anything to the bar owner.
In 1983, I had moved (hitch
hiked) from the Iron Range, with one hundred dollars, twenty pounds of manomin (wild rice), an acoustic guitar and a
backpack. I got let off on route 66 in Albuquerque, NM the day before
Thanksgiving. There was a little café there called the Morning Glory. I got a
gig at the café on Thanksgiving Day for twenty dollars, a Thanksgiving meal,
plus tips. I performed there a few more times after that. I remember the
positive response people had when I sang my new song NDN
Kars.
In 1987, I played in Esthete,
WO with the Sand Creek Band made up of the Ridgley brothers, Eugene, Ben, and
Gail from the Arapaho Nation. We did a gig over in Rapid City, SD and it was
Eugene Ridgley who showed me the art of playing 49 on an
electric guitar. That was it. Put a 49 melody in the chorus of NDN
Kars and sang it
along with the guitar. It worked from the very first time. Later that year, The
Sand Creek Band came down and we recorded NDN Kars at Radical Recording studio in Tempe,
AZ. We did it in one afternoon—tracking, overdubs and lead vocals.
The first Indian radio
station to play NDN Kars, was Kili, in
Porcupine, SD. I sent a cassette tape up with my friend Russ Zephyr to
drop off. He said that by the time he reached the end of the driveway it was
blasting over the airwaves. When something catches on in the underground it sticks.
The song went on to become a cult classic and an anthem for our people.
Many bands add it to their live set lists and other artists have recorded their
own versions of NDN Kars.
The essence of the song is in
the line, “I got a sticker says ‘NDN Power’. I stuck it on my bumper. That’s
what holds my car together.” Belief in a higher power.
In 2010, we recorded the Punk
(Skate) version. My son Keith is on drums, his friend Joey Dougherty is on
guitar and vocals and Jimmy Vickers is on bass. Two old punks and two
young punks, one great song, really fast. (2:06)
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