In the mid-2000s, Blackbird Raum unexpectedly took Santa Cruz by storm. Rising up out of a community of squatters and travelers in 2004, they were set up like a folk-jug ensemble, but played with the intensity and political leanings of an anarchist crust punk band.
The idea that they could form a band, and even make money busking with their mish-mash of acoustic instruments—banjo, mandolin, accordion, washtub bass, and washboard—came from an Oregon group they met called the Sour Mash Hug Band, who were also part of the squatting scene. Several U.S. tours and one European campaign later, they have released their fourth album, False Weavers. After a long tour, they will return home with a show at the Catalyst on Sunday, May 5.
I asked three of the band members—Zack (accordian), Caspian (banjo) and Mars (mandolin)—to tell me the story of Blackbird Raum in their own words.
The Early Years
MARS: I grew up in a strict religious home in New York. I wasn’t allowed to listen to or play music. I decided I was an anarchist at 16, and ran away from home, only to get arrested at a protest in Washington D.C. in September 2002. I got sent home and tried to make it through my last year of high school, but I just felt like I was wasting my life. I dropped out and started hitchhiking and riding freight trains around the country, and wound up in Santa Cruz in April 2003. I think that dropping out was one of the best and most influential decisions of my
life. I met Caspian when I was 17. We became close friends immediately, started squatting and playing music.
CASPIAN: I felt incredibly alienated from the world growing up. My family has always been loving and supportive, though it took them a while to “get my deal.” School, on the other hand, was intolerable. Once I dropped out and entered “the lifestyle,” I had an identity to validate my rage at the institutions and values that controlled my life as a youth. Living in a tree and eating road-kill isn’t something that’s liable to make you feel more connected to the cultural mainstream.
ZACK: I had been squatting in the woods in a really simple structure before. I spent the summer of 2004 travelling around the country trying to figure out how to work an accordion that had been given to me.
MARS: Me and Caspian would hang out in a communal squatted space we had, sometimes for hours, when it was raining. Our fingers were cold as hell, but we would pick up the two guitars that were there, and write weird interlocking parts. One time while we were doing that, the roof came off a section of our squat, and we had to stop playing to fix it. We stood on counters and tables and got soaking wet. It was a good time. In 2004, we met the Sour Mash Hug Band and got super excited about the idea of being able to include music in our lives in a more serious way. Caspian toured with them and gathered a bunch of skills and ideas.
CASPIAN: With Sour Mash, we were riding trains around and busking at farmer’s markets from Oakland to New Orleans, playing mostly traditional songs. I needed a band that could busk like Sour Mash did, but I wanted to sing about my life squatting, the books I was reading, my weird ideas, politics. I wanted to incorporate themes from underground metal and punk music.
ZACK: I made it back to Santa Cruz about the same time Caspian got back from touring as the mandolineer of the Sour Mash Hug Band. We wrote a handful of songs while trying to learn our instruments. Caspian taught me the accordion by explaining things he’d seen other people do. We built a washtub bass and taught one punk after the other how to play it, dragging them downtown with us to busk or play random parties, auditioning different rhythm instruments with each show.
MARS: I was bummed I wasn’t in the band at the time. But I was pregnant and moved to New York to be with my family and have my daughter.
ZACK: It was only a matter of weeks before we played out first show, which was at an anarchist café in town. We started busking only after we played at least two shows, and it started as a pretty serious failure. Our first dollar made was from a man on a date, who paid us to leave. The first tour we did was to Bellingham Washington in Summer 2005. We found out a little too late that the tour vehicle was only going up there, and not coming back. Caspian and I had to ride trains and hitchhike back to Santa Cruz with all our gear. There were some pretty unpleasant moments on that trip.
MARS: In December 2005, Raum went on hiatus, and I moved back to Santa Cruz. Caspian wanted to start BBR again. While in New York I learned the accordion and the saw. Caspian said, “Wanna be in Raum? I heard you play the saw. What are you gonna do during the fast songs?” I said, “I guess I’ll learn the mandolin.” And that was that.
Everyone’s A Hippie
CASPIAN: I think this band wouldn’t have happened in another town besides Santa Cruz. The cultural brew here was just different than any other place.
ZACK: There is a way in Santa Cruz in which everyone is a hippie. The yuppies are hippie-yuppies, the bros are hippy-bros, so the punks are hippie-punks, and in the early days of Blackbird Raum, that is who heard us, because no one else probably could have. The music was too folky to be punk, but too angry and abrasive to fit in with a more new-age scene. Camper Van Beethoven were one of the first American folk-punk bands, and they also were based in Santa Cruz. Maybe it’s in the water.
CASPIAN: It was just a natural extension of folk music, crust punk, radical environmentalism, DIY arts and crafts and a host of other interests. The idea that you could take music regarded as quaint—not just by its audience, but also by those making it—and then transform it into some grand artistic and political statement makes me laugh now. I mean, we have a washtub bass, for crissakes! A big part of being in an acoustic band was the stringent noise laws in Santa Cruz. It was a big part of why we played so many shows. We were the only band that wouldn’t get shut down.
ZACK: We played acoustic because we didn’t have electricity, we didn’t have vehicles to haul huge amps and drumsets around, we couldn’t afford electric instruments, and we needed to busk to make ends meet. It’s hard to busk with an electric guitar. Some of our earlier songs definitely were inspired by our respective conditions. Living in the woods and spending a lot of time there enhances ones feelings of awe for the beauty of the wild
CASPIAN: I wanted to get out there on the road and show people what we’re doing, how fun and weird it all is. I had already been traveling around the US by freight-hopping, so I knew people all over. Touring seemed a natural extension of that.
MARS: Being part of something different than mainstream culture was really inspiring to me. I think a lot of people feel like something is wrong. The planet is being destroyed for profit. People spend so much of their lives in front of televisions. Abuse in relationships is rampant. Bombs drop in other countries. And everyone is going about business as usual. I want to talk openly about these issues. I try to bring that into our music.
We Yelled Even More
CASPIAN: Our first record, Purse Seine, was recorded for free by a goth dude in a living room in Sacramento. We weren’t happy with it, but we needed something to sell if we wanted to fund better recordings. I remember at the time wishing we had guidance, but nobody from the established “musical underground” wanted to touch us, even though there were a lot of folks at our shows. We knew activists and criminals not label dudes!
People were aware of us, I think less through the internet and more through just an informal network of travelers, zines etc. The anarcho-punk movement has been global since the early ’80s—somehow they managed this without Twitter—and though we’re connected to a lot of other scenes and subcultures, that’s a big part of our community.
ZACK: The next album we recorded after Purse Seine was Swidden. It was easier, because we knew what we were doing as musicians. The recording process was very different because we actually recorded in a real studio and paid the engineer.
CASPIAN: Swidden was recorded by an older folkie dude in a WWII era bunker in Port Townsend WA, it is also where we recorded Under the Startling Host. Both of those records were collections of songs we were playing live. We were used to yelling our heads off, partly because we thought we were punk, and partly because we wanted to be heard busking and at house shows. When we got in the studio we yelled even more than we did live, because we didn’t have to play our instruments at the same time, and it freed up a lot of wind.
MARS: We really wanted a more live sound on our early records. While False Weavers still has those elements, it also includes some material that doesn’t quite fit our usual sound.
ZACK: We brought in other singers, tried a ton of new instruments, and used a bunch of the wacky analog effects in the studio. The second way in which it’s different [than the prior albums] is that we experimented more with different song styles. Chumbawamba was a big influence. Before “Tubthumping,” they had been an anarcho-punk band, but they mixed it with electronic sounds and folk instruments, and it’s all cut and pasted together with this mixed chaotic effect, which we’ve emulated outright.
CASPIAN: Ironically, the music sounds more “live” to me than our old records because it was conceived for the environment in which it took place. My personal goal was to stay true to the sounds and ideas that we’d addressed in the past, while moving away from them just enough to make people uncomfortable, and thus interested.
MARS: I felt like we had this momentum as a group. We sort of settled into our sound. It became easy and exciting to write music together. Also we had been touring and we were warmly welcomed so many places we went and most people seemed really stoked about what we were bringing.
Now:
Caspian: We’ve played a lot of shows in forests, parking lots, etc. We’d break into abandoned buildings for a night and play a show by candlelight. We played a squatted pier in St. Louis in a lightning storm. We still do this stuff occasionally, but it’s rarer now. I prioritize people seeing us, and obscure locations make that difficult. We play bigger venues, but every tour we end up playing in someone’s living room, and people are crowd surfing and walking on the ceiling. We don’t busk as much anymore, mostly because it doesn’t pay as well as it used to.
ZACK: Our audience has an interestingly large range. I suppose playing acoustic instruments account for this. Punks show up with their parents or their kids, and everybody has a good time. Some people like us because of the folk melodies and banjo twang, some appreciate the obvious punk influences, and some are simply “political bedfellows.” People relate to a displeasure, a feeling of having been cheated by life or by society, and, often enough, a desire to strike back.
MARS: I care deeply about the Earth, and I have a lot of compassion for people and other creatures that experience war, repression, prison, poverty, etc. I can’t imagine expressing myself through music, action, or otherwise without that part of myself being included. From my family being homeless, to having friends go to prison, these problems have come real close to home. When I was arrested at a protest when I was 16, I witnessed some really intense police brutality. The cops had us surrounded, a hundred or so of us. One cop started beating this guy who was in front of me. The guy fell into my arms. We couldn’t move because we were crowded and surrounded entirely. I held this guy that I didn’t know, while he was beat by this cop with a baton. I refuse to be a person who can see that, and then turn a blind eye. Of course those themes are in my music.
CASPIAN: Our world is dominated by pragmatic arguments. People that care are laughed at. Most music, even underground music, doesn’t address these issues. My goal has been to create validation and community for those who feel sorrow for the destruction of the world, to tell people “I see what you see”. When KB Homes builds a bunch of tract housing over a beautiful meadow [on Market Street) that I used to sleep in when I was living on the street, there is a logic that says “they own this place,” but it’s just not true. The plants and animals, the people that use it with respect own it, not the people making a buck of destroying it.
ZACK: I am still living off the grid, although now I live in a nice neighborhood, totally legally. No water or electricity, no rent. I used to steal to survive, but I got caught in a pretty serious way, and since then have been buying or scavenging everything I need. I don’t have a job, but just gig around and make money when I must.
CASPIAN: I still dumpster dive, and I still spend a lot of time in the wilderness, but when I go to bars now I just buy a beer instead of drinking the bottom of someone’s abandoned one. Not all of us squat anymore, but still hang out at squats and play at a lot of squats when we’re touring.
MARS: Becoming a parent has changed things. I’m still a part of DIY punk subculture. Doing what I can to be an awesome parent and model for my daughter is a big part of my life. I no longer squat. I think it makes sense that I wouldn’t be squatting forever, because that wasn’t the most important thing about our community. It was a strategy for making space for what we wanted to build.
CASPIAN: I would say we’re odd even for a folk punk band, which is already too odd for a lot of people. A lot of songs tend to be about riding bikes and falling in love. We’re more likely to write songs about pagans being burned at the stake. We were actually making money doing this obscure music because we did it out in the open, where everyone could get our CDs. But then there is the fact that we’re playing original music, and screen-printing shirts and patches. We didn’t fit in with the buskers or the scene bands, just like we were too punk for the folk crowd and vice-versa. But ultimately if you keep playing the hell out of your music, and thinking critically about it, it will get good, and when it is good people will pay attention.
Blackbird Raum plays May 5 at the Catalyst Atrium at 9pm, $8.
