Front Burner - Weekend Listen: Buffy

Episode Date: August 12, 2023

Singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie has announced that she's retiring from live performances. For 60 years Buffy’s music has quietly reverberated throughout pop culture and provided a touchstone for Indigenous resistance. This five-part series, hosted by Mohawk and Tuscarora writer Falen Johnson explores how Buffy’s life and legacy is essential to understanding Indigenous resilience. In this episode, Buffy is traveling from gig to gig in the 60s, armed with her guitar and little else. She makes a splash on the coffeehouse folk scene, rubbing shoulders with artists like Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. Tectonic changes are around the corner, and her rising success comes with some hard lessons about who to trust — and what it means to be a Indigenous woman in the music business. More episodes are available at: https://link.chtbl.com/v_Eag6h4

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey, Tamara here. We have a special bonus episode for you today. Buffy St. Marie is one of the most prolific singer-songwriters of the past century, and for decades, the influence of her music has been quietly felt throughout pop culture. After a groundbreaking career just recently, Buffy announced she was retiring from live performances

due to health concerns and physical challenges that have made it difficult for her to perform. In the award-winning CBC podcast, Buffy, Mohawk and Tuscarora writer Phelan Johnson explores how Buffy's life and legacy is essential to understanding Indigenous resilience. Indigenous resilience. The episode we have for you now is called Universal Soldier, and it looks at the very beginning and peak of Buffy's career as a touring musician. Have a listen. Before we begin, I want to let you know that we use the word Indian in this podcast. It's a word that some Indigenous people still use. But you shouldn't. Unless you are. You get it. So it was in 1960, oh, it might have been, I don't know, one or two.

I had to spend the night in San Francisco Airport on the way to Toronto. Buffy's got a layover between Mexico and Toronto. It's quiet. She's alone, counting down the hours until she can hop her plane to her next gig. And in the middle of the night, here come these medics and they're wheeling wounded soldiers in gurneys and wheelchairs. And I got to talking to one of the medics, and he assured me that despite what the politicians and the newspapers were telling us, yes, there was a war going on in Vietnam. They were actually pretending that

there was no war. The U.S. politicians were telling us, there is no war in Vietnam. You hippies are crazy, right? And I was one of those hippies. As quickly as they were there, the soldiers and medics are gone and the airport's quiet again. And, you know, after they left, now I'm all alone in this big airport in the middle of the night. And I'm thinking, well, who's responsible for war? Is it these guys lying there? You know, enlisted men who signed up for, you know, family tradition or, or, you know, sense of patriotism or, you know, just to see the world? Buffy picks up her notebook notebook and she starts to write. A song begins to take shape.

So then I'm thinking, wait a minute, who is it who actually makes the phone call or pushes the button that starts a war? Now I've got it. Now I think, oh, it's the politicians. Let's blame them. So she thinks she's got the answer and maybe the start of a song. She catches her flight, but she keeps writing. But by the time it was time for me to do my little set the next day,

you know, who is it who votes for the politicians? It's you and me. And just before she has to hit the stage, sitting in the basement of the Purple Onion Coffee House, Buffy finishes the song. He's five foot two and he's six feet four. He fights with missiles and with spears. If things had been just a little bit different, I would probably not have written the song. The crowd at the Purple Onion that night had no way of knowing that they were

the first people in the world to hear Universal Soldier, a song that would become a defining anthem of the 60s. But without him, how would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau? Without him, Caesar would have stood alone. And when I say, without him, how would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau? Without him, Caesar would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau? Without him, Caesar would have stood alone. That's really something when you think about that. This is not the way we put an end to war.

I ended it on a minor chord, and you don't do that. Buffy, you didn't resolve it. That's right, I didn't. Because it's unresolved. The issue is unresolved. And it leaves you with kind of a jelly-belly, insecure feeling, and it makes you think. Buffy doesn't know it yet, but the song is going to come with some hard lessons.

Lessons about bad business. Like ending Universal Soldier on a minor key, this story isn't resolved. I'm Phelan Johnson, and hippies start moving. Slowly at first, because they flower better at night. There's a pattern to life, even in Yorkville, although that pattern may appall the squares, meaning those of us who don't hang around those 10 acres of midtown Toronto. Toronto's Yorkville village is barely recognizable from the hippie haven it was in the 60s.

A festering sore, according to some city fathers. The hippies bring their beards, beads and dirty feet, their vague ideas of free love, their marijuana and LSD. They're different, but what are they? We love their marijuana and LSD. They're different, but what are they? These days, Yorkville is more Louis Vuitton than LSD, more Prada than pot. But back in the day, Yorkville was the center of a counterculture movement. It was Toronto's answer to the hate-Ashbury coffeehouse scene in San Francisco and to Greenwich Village in New York.

It was pretty seedy, but it was fun. I mean, they're gentrifying it now, and I'm kind of sad to see all the mom-and-pop sleazy stores go. You know, I come from a humble background myself, and Yorkville was really, you know, it was full of students. It wasn't fancy at all. After graduating college, Buffy's on the road constantly, playing gigs, performing in coffee houses. And these coffee houses were often in old homes. There'd be some tiny tables and wooden chairs crowded around a small stage. And the thing about these venues is that they didn't serve booze.

People sipped coffee and smoked as they listened to poetry or an acoustic set. Can you imagine being a young person and on any given day, I mean, you could go to the Mousehole, the Purple Onion. Clubs were everywhere. My name is Duke Redbird. I'm Ojibwe from the Saugeen First Nation. I'm Duke Redbird. I'm Ojibwe from the Saugeen First Nation. Duke is an elder, a writer, an artist, an activist. And at the height of the Yorkville scene, Duke, a young poet, was in the middle of it. And there we were, all this incredible talent, wandering the streets, playing their guitars.

I was doing poetry in the coffee houses, and nobody was rich and famous. We were all children. We were kids. And we had a notion that there had to be a better way to live in this world than what we saw was happening in Vietnam and the civil rights movement and the sense that the bomb could fall any minute. We were anti-war. We were the flower children. We were the ones who were speaking of love. And Buffy was front and center in that movement, along with all the other folk singers of the day. Oh, there's Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee over there. Oh my goodness, Leonard, I've got a poem for you. Oh, well, there he goes. It was like that. And yeah, Leonard as in Cohen. I had a room right across the hall where this young woman from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan moved in. Her name was Joni Mitchell, and we became friends.

At that time, I also met Buffy St. Marie, who was doing the club scene in Toronto. Duke and Buffy were around the same age, First Nations and hanging around Yorkville. I'm not surprised they found each other. Indigenous folks, we have a way of doing that. There's no question Buffy is a very private person, but a very friendly person. But she kept to herself. I never remembered Buffy as being part of a scene. Remember, in those days, a lot of the young people were doing LSD, you know,

lots of them were doing other drugs and things. That wasn't the world that Buffy was a part of, nor was I, nor was Joni Mitchell. We didn't get invited to the same parties that Leonard Cohen got invited to. Keeping to herself is a theme that runs through Buffy's life. But even if she's not at those parties, she's still making connections, still meeting other musicians, including someone who would become one of the most influential singer-songwriters of the 20th century. Bob Dylan was already a name on the coffeehouse circuit, but he wasn't a household name yet.

He had just released his second album, his breakthrough, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. He was on the cusp of fame. And one night, he catches Buffy's set at an open mic in New York. Buffy's new in town, trying to make a go of it. So Bob and Buffy get to talking, and he tells her that she should head over to the Gaslight Cafe and ask for the booker. The Gaslight in Greenwich Village is

the venue to play. It was the epicenter of the folk scene, and Buffy wanted to perform on that stage. The Gaslight, it was great. It was a small place. It was like a basement coffee house. The space was a converted coal cellar. The ceiling was low. It was dark and cramped inside. They were known for packing the house and breaking fire code. And they were under constant threat of being shut down by the city. In short, the gaslight was the coolest place to play.

And in 1963, Buffy books it. The space was packed. The air was thick with cigarette smoke. Well, there's always the issue of stage fright. I walked on stage and I was singing different kinds of songs. Love songs. I also was singing Universal Soldier, and I was singing Now That the Buffalo's Gone. And sitting in the crowd was the New York Times music critic Robert Shelton. After catching Buffy's show, he writes a review and calls her one of the most promising new talents on the folk scene. And it was a huge surprise. I didn't expect to have any success at all.

I thought I'd be in New York for two weeks and then go home. But no, the Gaslight kindly blew up Robert Shelton's wonderful review to a huge billboard poster that they put outside the Gaslight Cafe. Buffy had arrived. There's this other line in that review that I want to zoom in on. He writes, Miss St. Marie often appears in a red cobra skin dress. So a red cobra skin dress sounds endlessly cool to me, but that wasn't hip at the time. Folk chic was full skirts, sweaters, and these baggy granny-style dresses.

But Buffy did things the way that she wanted, and that meant wearing what she wanted. I used to read the Fredericks catalog, and the Fredericks catalog is different now that it's online. I think they use real models, and it's kind of like Victoria's Secret. But in the old days, it was hand-drawn like Vargas pinups in very sexy clothes. Frederick's was this mail-order catalogue. Their stuff was hyper-feminine, not folk chic.

They sold dresses, bras, underwear, even butt pads. I had to see this, so I tracked down a catalog from the 60s to show to Buffy. Oh my god, look at padded butts. Who knew they had those? Those Madonna pointy bras, this is where she got them. This is it. Look at that. Yeah, I thought that might maybe jog some memories. Oh, for sure. It sure does. I still think they're real cute. And I used to put outfits together like that. So when I first sang at the Gaslight, I was in this va-va-va-boom kind of little, you know, I was real shapey. And, you know, I was petite and looked good, and I wore high heels instead of bare feet.

And I had this dress, and I had cut a jagged hemline in it. I didn't know any better, I swear, I didn't know any better. All those upside-down tunings, singing about the wrong things and wearing the wrong clothes. Even with her upside-down tunings, her all-wrong va-va-voom dresses, the scene embraces her, loves her. But the scene was changing.

I noticed that more and more coffee houses went from this beatnik coffee and tea, intellectual talk, talk, talk, listen, listen, listen attitude to, how are you doing? What, you're not going to drink with me? You know, the difference between a coffee house and a watering hole, we all know. And I think that it affected the music and the people in it a lot.

The scene just changed. Audiences act different when they're drinking. And there were a lot of places that I didn't want to play, you know, because I just wasn't into that atmosphere. I didn't drink myself, so I wasn't a part of it, and it was no fun for me, and I just would rather have a less drunk audience. There have been times during my life and career that I have been afraid for my personal safety,

mostly because of drunks, because of alcohol, or, you know, other men that you meet coming around the corner. You're on the way to your dressing room, and somebody steps in. You know, I've been afraid for those reasons. It's not surprising to me that Buffy avoids the party, that she was afraid. Since settlers landed on our shores, our women have been targets. Indigenous women in Canada are three to five times more likely to experience violence than non-Indigenous women and are five times more likely to die as a result of violence. So yeah, I'm not surprised she felt afraid.

My name is Delia Opikikiu. I'm from the Canola Creek First Nation in Saskatchewan. Delia worked with Buffy as her administrative assistant. They were also friends. And Delia remembers what it was like being on the road with Buffy. She and I talked a lot, really a lot about our own lives and about the abuses that we had suffered and how we had to be careful about our own safety. And I found that I had to be careful as a woman on my own. Definitely, Buffy was very careful as a woman on her own. She did not attend so many of the social part of the events, and I did the same. I didn't go to the parties because I was concerned

sometimes for my safety. Being a young woman, you do attract attention, and I didn't want that attention. And Buffy being a celebrity, beautiful woman, she had also to be careful. Buffy tried to stay safe. She didn't party, didn't drink, didn't do drugs. But all that didn't really matter. then free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix.

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this podcast, just search for Money for Cups. I've toured before. I've pretty much only ever dated musicians, so I've often found myself carrying gear and selling merch. It's fun, but it's draining. Touring wears you down. It's easy to get sick, which is what happened to Buffy on the road. I was pretty young, I don't know, 21, 22 or so. I had just gone to Greenwich Village. Hadn't been there too, too long when I was invited to get on a bus and play in Florida in February. Oh, I said yes. And I went to Florida and I played at a little club called the Coconut Grove. I had been

there maybe, you know, a few weeks and I had a cough and I went to the doctor and he told me, oh, you've got bronchitis. And he started giving me shots of something to fix my bronchitis. And he gave me some pills, a prescription and stuff. And I kept on playing and stayed in Florida for a while. Buffy thinks she's feeling better, so she heads out on the road again. I got in a car with some friends and we were going to Atlanta. And I started feeling funny a couple of days into this trip. So she goes to find a pharmacist.

I said, yeah, I'd like to fill this prescription. And he said, it's an out-of-state prescription. You cannot. And I said, gosh, I really, really, really feel awful. Can't you do anything? He said, well, he looked at it. He said, how long have you been taking this? And I told him. And he said, well, you're going to feel a lot worse because you're in withdrawal. You've been taking codeine, a lot of codeine. I had not realized that I was taking an opiate. Morphine, heroin, codeine, there's a bunch of them. And codeine sounds very innocent, but it's an opiate. And I found out what withdrawal was like, how horrible that is.

The experience shakes Buffy, but she does with it what she does best. She turns it into art. This is her song, Codeine. Stay away from the men pushing the codeine around Janis Joplin covers Codeine. Codeine will kill me, honey, that's the bargain And Courtney Love. Oh, I live out my days a slave to codeine And Courtney Love. It's a song that seems to speak to women. Women who battled addiction and demons.

The song is striking, unsettling, and so raw. I feel like I'm dying and I wish I was dead. The words say it perfectly clearly, you know, I feel like I'm dying and I wish I was dead. It was weird to be over-prescribed and become addicted to a drug. What it taught me was that I never, ever wanted to experience withdrawal again. was that I never, ever wanted to experience withdrawal again. So I was very, very careful not to get involved in addictive drugs. That was the canary in the coal mine for me.

I don't ever want to feel like that again. Things could have turned out very differently for Buffy. She could have gone down a dark path. Indigenous people in Canada and the States and in too many other countries carry a heavier burden when it comes to addiction. And it's no surprise that colonization and the ongoing impacts of intergenerational trauma are the major cause of this. I probably don't need to point out the addicted Indian stereotype here, but yeah, that's a thing. A lot of us Indigenous folks spend a lot of time making sure that no one can point that finger at us. We have to craft our public image very,

very carefully. But after Kodine comes out, we're talking 1964, Buffy gives interviews about her brush with addiction. And I gotta say, to me this is wild. To be Indigenous, to speak so openly about something that could be seen as shameful or taboo, it's pretty hard to do now, never mind 60 years ago. But Buffy tells her story as a way to warn other people, especially other women. In order to be super good in show business, you kind of have to be a careerist. I mean, even if the careerist is going and do coke with the boys, because that's where all the deals were made. They go out after the show and you have some wine with the businessmen. You know, you're a little woozy and, you know,

with the businessmen, you know, you're a little woozy, and, you know, you wind up in situations. And I didn't do that. I was scared. And I didn't have any backup. I didn't have a manager backing me up. And I've had some Me Too things happen to me too. So I missed both the business opportunities and the social networking that went with that because I wasn't comfortable drinking.

And I was kind of afraid of men. with that because I wasn't comfortable drinking. And I was kind of afraid of men. But men who will take advantage of a young woman are everywhere. And Buffy was about to meet one who would leave a real mark on her early career. There's this one story that Buffy's told maybe more than any other. She humors me, though. You want to hear that same old story again? Here you go. Okay, in the Gaslight Cafe, I'm singing Universal Soldier in my little mini dress, and the highwaymen are there. I didn't know that. The highwaymen were coming off a huge hit, Michael. Roll the boat ashore, hallelujah. They had number one hit, worldwide hit.

And they were finishing up an album and needed one more song. So, you know, I did my set. And then the guy asked me, you sit down, talk to us. And they said, yeah, we need one more song for our album. And we'd like it to be Universal Soldier. And who's the publisher? And I said, I don't know. I don't have one. I didn't know what that was. And the guy sitting at an adjacent table, but not of the same party, wasn't one of the high women, he said, oh, I can help. I'll be a publisher. Oh, great. So he wrote up the contract, and I sold the rights to Universal Soldier for $1.

$1. She sold it to this guy for $1. $1. She sold it to this guy for $1. And the highwayman recorded it, and it was on a good-selling album. And Donovan recorded it, and a couple other people recorded it. A lot of people thought Donovan wrote it. He's five foot two, and he's six feet four.

He fights with missiles and with spears. That's the Scottish musician Donovan. His cover of Universal Soldier was a hit. He's been a soldier for a thousand years. To this day, Donovan still gets credited for the song. And sure, I get it. Songs get covered all the time, and not everyone gets their due, and that's just how things go in the music biz. But for me, there's a bigger story here

about erasure, about indigeneity. It's a thing that's been happening forever. It's our art, it's our bodies, it's our land. It's a different kind of take, but it's still a take. In 2014, Donovan made it into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. A lot of Buffy's contemporaries from the 60s folk movement have. But after six decades of making music, over 20 albums, Buffy still hasn't been inducted. The success of Universal Soldier and Buffy's other songs catches the attention of a major label. Vanguard Records comes calling,

and she signs a seven-year deal with them. In 1964, her first album, It's My Way, is released, and it's a hell of a debut. One review in the music magazine Cashbox says, once in a great while, a new folk singer comes on the scene of special merit. Buffy St. Marie is just such an artist. Codeine is on the album, so is Now That the Buffalo's Gone and Universal Soldier. I felt like a basketball star who just, you know, gotten their favorite draft pick. I was doing what I wanted to do. I had no idea I'd be able to travel and see the world and share my music and see things that would turn into other songs.

The accolades keep rolling in. Soon, Buffy moves out of the coffeehouses and onto bigger stages, like Carnegie Hall. She's touring internationally, Australia, Hong Kong, playing places like the Royal Albert Hall in London. I was a rarity. I had something that none of my Indigenous peers had. I had airplane tickets, and I had visibility. But even once she started making a name for herself,

Buffy remembered the people she was coming up with in her coffeehouse days, people like Joni Mitchell, who was still trying to make her mark. I can't remember where I first met Joni, and she played me her music. It was somewhere out on the road, and played me her music. It was somewhere out on the road and I loved her music. And eventually she gave me her tape, which I carried around in my purse because I thought she was just fabulous. She was absolutely beautiful. She was smart. I thought she could have a career. So I brought, you know, she was Canadian, right? She's from Saskatchewan. So I brought her tape to all kinds of people, a lot of big weeks in the music business. And they only wanted to hear about me. They didn't want to hear about my friend. And eventually I played it for a guy who was like a junior executive in my agent's office. And his name was Elliot Roberts. And he said, okay, I'll go down to see her. And of course, he made a tremendous, wonderful career with Joni.

You might not know the name Elliot Roberts, but you probably know the names of the musicians he worked with. Acts like Tom Petty, Tracy Chapman, the Talking Heads. He even managed Neil Young for over 50 years. Working with Elliot Roberts was big, but Buffy also had a hand in getting Joni's music out there. And go round and round and round in the circle game. Buffy recorded Joni's song Circle Game even before Joni did to help get her music out there. And go round and round and round in the circle game. Round and round in the circle again. Round and round in the circle again.

Even as Buffy continued to rise, the sting of losing the rights to Universal Soldier all those years ago stayed with her. But she wasn't giving up. And right when Buffy's in the middle of struggling to get her song back... The phone rang, and somebody says, Buffy, it's for you, I'll pick up the phone. And it's this business guy who works with Elvis Presley. He says, Buffy, Elvis just recorded your song. It was Elvis's manager on the line, Colonel Tom Parker. Picture a smoking cowboy, a bit like an

aging Marlboro man. And the song that Elvis had just recorded? It was Buffy's love song, Until It's Time For You To Go. You're not a dream, you're not an angel, you're a man. I'm not a queen, I'm a woman, take my hand. When I was 12 or 13, I mean, Elvis was just the star in my heart.

I was so in love. I had never seen a boy like that. And let me tell you that Elvis Presley, when he was 19, was not Vegas Elvis. He was beautiful, and he was talented, and he was hot, and he was everything that every teenager wanted to be and every teenage girl wanted to love. So, yeah, getting a call from the colonel saying that Elvis had recorded her song, it was a big deal.

So I said, really? He said, yep, and we're going to have to have some of that publishing money, honey. In the music biz, publishing rights translates to money, honey. You hold the rights, you make the money. And Elvis's manager wanted a piece of that. And I was the one who had given away the publishing to Universal Soldier for one dollar. That's how dumb I was. That's how green I was.

The colonel assumed that Buffy would say yes. That it'd be a done deal. That she'd swoon at the sound of Elvis's name and hand over her song, but not so fast. When Elvis's business guy said, we're going to have to have some of that publishing money, I said, no. And they had never heard that. And they came back and they said, no, we're going to have to do that or we're not going to put it out. And I said, well, you know, I'm a fan, but no, I'm not going to do that. Elvis didn't write it and you didn't write it. And they kept coming back to me and I never did say yes. It didn't matter that it was the colonel on the line.

It didn't matter that Elvis, her teenage crush, would sing her words, giving her song a ton of exposure. For Buffy, there was no way she was ever going to hand over her publishing rights again. So yeah, she said no to sharing those rights with Elvis. But here's the thing. Elvis did record her song. He recorded it nine times. And because Buffy said no, because she kept those publishing rights,

and because Elvis, one of the biggest musicians, like, ever, recorded her song, it made her a lot of money. Until it's time for you to go And I never gave them one penny of the publishing money. So I learned my lesson. And even though it was big time and everybody advised, if he does that, you're going to make so much money. I said, no, it's not about that.

I wrote the song. You didn't. End of story. Until It's Time for You to Go became one of Elvis's signature songs. It was such a hit for Elvis, you'd think that he had written it. And just like Donovan with Universal Soldier, Elvis' cover shoots the song into the big time. The song is one of Buffy's most covered tunes. It's been covered by, like, everyone.

From Cher to Barbra Streisand. Even the Monkees have a version. And holding on to the rights for Until It's Time for You to Go? Well, that was Buffy's lesson learned from selling those rights to Universal Soldier for a dollar. But she never gave up the fight for that song. A decade after handing over the publishing rights, she bought Universal Soldier back.

Well, most of it, at least. The good news is that ten years later, I bought it back for $25,000. But I could only buy a piece of the publishing back. As Buffy becomes more well-known she's asked to do more mainstream press, radio, TV shows. Invites come in from The Tonight Show and Good Morning America. And she sees the opportunity in her position. She's an Indigenous woman, and she's holding a captive audience.

What I'm trying to do is to use each time that I appear on television or on the radio or in a concert, to use just a little of that time to inform the non-Indian population what's going on so that if they want to help, they can. I think that the non-Indian people must understand why the Indians are in the state of affairs that they're in. It's not because they're lazy, ignorant, inferior, stupid or anything. Chances are that if an Indian kid makes it these days,

it happens because of some lucky accident. And Buffy speaks out about Indigenous rights, about treaties and land. But it's going to come at a cost. She just doesn't know it yet. That's on the next episode of Buffy. That was an episode from Buffy. You can head over to that podcast feed right now to listen to the entire series.