RED HUNTER
by Charlie Shaw, NYC (revised May 1, 2004) Stinger, Williamsburg--The pale, thin Red Hunter wanders onstage with a glass of whiskey and surveys the crowd. It's one of the last shows on his self-booked US tour, and he's been on the road a long time. We can tell something unusual is about to happen. He's not trying to grab anybody's attention, but the room gets very quiet. Striking one note on his guitar, he begins to chant in a chilling, hypnotic monotone, and his voice sends a shudder through the audience. Nobody's ordering drinks, nobody's looking around. Even the workers behind the bar are frozen. This is not the common, imitable music of our time. Reciting what sounds like a Tuuvan prayer, he meditates: "A million tents and trailers will cover the open desert, your kids will learn again how to build a fire, where to look for water. The families are bound together now by the fall of all the great cities, finally to sing out their stories and the histories of hunger and of victory…" As he unravels his strange apocalyptic imagery, I breathe a sigh of relief; for the first time in years I'm watching somebody stand alone on stage and do something entirely unique, imitating no one, obeying only his inner demons. It's his final performance in New York and I know immediately we're witnessing a spark that will ignite an explosion. Inducing change and inspiring experimentation wherever he goes, this artist is about to have an extraordinary impact. All over the country, college and listener-supported stations are discovering his homemade album Alien Sun. [Listen at www.redhunter.tv] This record contains songs that he wrote and recorded during a year of homelessness in LA at age 23. The only thing getting it played on the radio is word of mouth from enthusiastic listeners. He's pretty happy about this. "Yeah, I just heard from two stations in Colorado, and it's been played in San Diego, LA, Missouri, New York City, Florida--I don't even know where it plays because I can't keep up, but I'm trying to get a system going. It would definitely help me figure out where to tour this summer." For the next few months he will be in Austin working on his new record, Good and Evil. "Of all the cities I passed through, Austin made the most sense to me. It's not all rich and glossy, and people have completely different values here than LA. There's all kinds of creative leaps happening because people take a lot of risks." Last year, fed up with LA and finding a supreme lack of creativity there, Red turned down several record deals and zigzagged all across the country booking his own shows and sleeping on friendly floors and couches. Tips and scattered record sales fed the boy and put gas in his car. "Sort of a vision quest, I guess you could call it. By the time I got back to LA three months later I knew who my friends were, I knew who I loved, everything was crystal clear. I stayed one night at my friend Steve's [aka Chevez, the co-producer of Alien Sun] and left the next morning for good." Talking with him it seems that Red Hunter has lived many lives. In school he studied piano and symphonic composition. At 21 he toured France as a singer, performing in giant cathedrals, and then returned to the US to learn to write down the music he heard in his head without using an instrument. He dropped out of college and found work as a pianist and percussionist in Isla Vista, sleeping on rooftops and open rooms on campus. Ultimately he finished school, tried a couple weeks as extra in Hollywood, "the single greatest waste of time in the galaxy," surfed couches, tagged along with Food-not-Bombers, waited tables, lived in a 10 by 10 music studio where he wasn't allowed to, ate canned food in his car, and showered at the gym. I can hear everyone from Blind Willie Johnson, Andy Kaufmann, Nick Drake, Tom Waits, Dracula, Harry Partch, Frederick Chopin, Stockhausen, Syd Barret, Sara Vaughn, and Ian Curtis in his music, as if he's channeling spirit after spirit onstage. It's a huge range of styles from dark and withdrawn to 1930s vaudevillian to shrieking hellfire priest, from lazer-fast rhymes and foot-stomping to whisper-thin despair. He uses the term "moonshiners" to describe his generation of artists who don't need businessmen and labels to make records and tour. When I asked if he'd ever consider signing a record deal, he smirked. "I could imagine a fair record deal coming along, but I have a pretty wild imagination. These days I don't really think about it, I just concentrate on the moonshine thing. Home-made records, playing shows, and having something actual to say, that's the kind of stuff I work on, and that's enough." Red's childhood was spent in a different town each year; he's the son of a Navy Commander. His great-grandparents were poor Eastern Europeaners--his prized possession is his great-grandpa's violin that was once used to beg for food in Transylvania--so it's no suprise that he says he was born for this lifestyle, "Travel, trading songs for meals and lodging, all that stuff is in my blood. I come from a long line of peasant folk singers and gypsies." One thing about Red Hunter that really distinguishes his music is that it gets into politics, economics, and ethics without even trying. For him, these things are inseperable from adventuring and partying, and part of the purpose of his writing and performance is to suggest specific action to the listener. He calls UNICEF "the North Star" and if you ask him about his influences, he will not ramble on about other musicians. Rather, he launches into the groups and social workers that inspire him: "First and foremost, Peter Unger's book Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence does with logic what I hope to do with music. It's so fucking easy for the average person to save human lives. I was crazy lucky to get to sit down with him at his home in New York and had my mind blown out my ears. Also Dan Eldon, the war photographer, is probably my all-time hero--a true master. His journals were the perfect marriage of adventure and humanity. I had barely started to get to know his amazing mother and sister, Kathy and Amy, before I left LA. You can read all about their projects at www.creativevisions.org, and I hope to be of more significant help to them in the future. And even Food not Bombs, practically a household name, is really a miraculous not-organization that runs itself magically with no hierarchy of command." In his forthcoming album Good and Evil, Red examines even the simplest acts as being related to war and famine. He talks about charity the same way today's stars talk about sex, money, and power--as if it's all that matters. With a style as hard to pin down as a house of mirrors, with paraphrases from the Tao, dark forests, manic stomping, and gloomy boat rides down the black river, the wide-eyed Red Hunter will wake you up, pull back the veil, and point to where things might go from here. listen to tracks off a bunch of records: www.redhunter.tv
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