Ol' Max Evans--The First 1000 Years

Max Evans Iconic 

It's coming up on five years since we moved to New Mexico full time. One of our first literary encounters was with Max Evans, who called himself Ol' Max Evans even when he wasn't particularly old, cause he's a cowboy or was, and that's how ol' cowboys talk, and he's nothing if not an ol' cowboy talker, Ol'  Max is.

He didn't invent the genre, but he had long been the icon of it.

Anyway.

I remember very well first meeting him. He seemed to think I was someone he knew, and he kept circling around and checking me out, and he finally sat down next to me and said, "I'm Max." I said, "Yeah, I know. How you doin'?"

He looked me up and down and said something like, "I'm just happy I'm still around to tell about it; be 89 next birthday, can't complain."

He didn't look a day over 79 and I had no idea how old he was at that time.

Slim Randels had already done a biography of him, "Ol' Max Evans -- the First Thousand Years" which I don't think I had at that time, and if I did, I hadn't read it, but I would eventually. In time.

Ol' Max had a new book out, well ... it was a compilation of some of his animal stories from years ago, and he told about his involved and complex relationships with animals over his long lifetime. NOTE: I think that's what the first time we saw him was about, the release of "Animal Stories", but you know what? I'm not really sure now, because all the times we've been at some Ol' Max event, and there have been quite a few, seem to swirl into a common encounter, not separate at all. I probably wrote about it at the time, but I honestly don't recall.

Anyway.

One animal story in particular stood out for me: "One Eyed Sky". It is perhaps the finest animal story in American literature. There is nothing else that comes close. Ol' Max has repeatedly told the story of writing it in a frenzy up in his studio in his house in Taos, typing furiously over a day and a night of passion for his topic and his story, and coming downstairs in the morning where his wife Mrs. Max (Pat) and her friend were having coffee in the kitchen and they looked at him and said, "My God, all the blood's gone from your face."

And Ol' Max said, "All that blood's right here," holding out his manuscript.

I asked him once, "When did you write 'One Eyed Sky'?" 'Cause I'd never found a date on any of the copies I'd read, and his answer was just, "When I lived up in Taos." Which could have been any time between 1949 and about 1967. Or so.

I still don't know.

Mrs. Max told me it was around 1960, but she wasn't completely sure herself.

It's kind of that way with Ol'  Max. The year a thing happened doesn't matter nearly as much as the thing that happened itself.

He went ashore at Normandy, he says -- and I assume he did -- but when that happened is not what needs to be remembered. It's that it happened. Not when...

And so it goes with Max. You may not get a straight answer from him, but you'll learn more than you ever thought possible from listening to him.

Or reading what he wrote.

We lost touch and I got very worried; I thought I should call Mrs. Max and find out what was going on with him, but then I thought, no, if it was bad, she would have enough to do without fielding calls from near-strangers, and it would be better just to let things go the way they would. I thought Max was probably quite ill, and during that period I was pretty ill myself.

Then one day Ms Ché showed me an article in the Santa Fe Reporter: "Ol' Max Evans -- The First 1000 Years" would be premiering at the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival on October 19. Ohhhhh...

The article talked about Ol' Max and the film, a biopic narrated by Peter Coyote and Sam Elliot, but it didn't say where or when it would be playing, much to my and Ms. Ché's frustration, but there you are. When a thing happens is not as important as that a thing happens. Must learn patience, eh?

Anyway.

I did a web-search and found out that the premier would be playing simultaneously in both of the theaters at the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, and it was sold out. No! Of course it was!

But, come Sunday the 22nd of October, it would be playing at the KiMo Theater in Albuquerque, and it was free, and we said, "Well, we'll go." Just like that, and we did.

We didn't expect Ol' Max and Mrs. Max to be there. He's 90-something. Almost 1000. But sure enough there he was, with Pat and Margo and a whole bunch of friends. We said hello, and his eyes brightened when he saw Ms. Ché for they had bonded years ago, and I think he was just happy to see her.

"Hey, Pardner" he says to me, and there are layers and layers of meaning which I won't get into, but that's all I really needed to hear. I was so glad to see him, and I told him so, and he knew. Yeah. He was frail as heck and had oxygen tubes up his nose (yep, I had to do the same thing for so many months), but he was hail and hearty for a 1000 year old man, and it turned out he could walk on his own and had a grand time greeting friends old and new before the start of the film.

And the film was wonderful. It's the second biopic of New Mexico literary icons we've seen in the last few weeks ("Nasario Remembers" was the first), and we were delighted with it, as was every one in attendance, including Ol' Max who got up onstage and answered questions for a good half hour after the film. He was as crotchety and funny as ever. When it was over, Ms. Ché waited for him to come down from the stage, and they had a... moment.

I'll say no more about that except I think it made his day.

He sure made ours.

Thanks Max. Pat. Lorene. Slim. Ollie. And so many others.

"She Rocks Harder..."

Undated photo of Buffy Sainte-Marie from her MySpace page

Saw Buffy Sainte-Marie at the KiMo in Albuquerque August 13, 2012.

"She rocks harder at 70 than she ever did..." is how she was introduced, and it is no exaggeration. She's been on tour for her latest CD, "Running for the Drum," released in 2008 or 2009 (not sure, views differ) since 2010, and her show in Albuquerque last night was a reprise of her "¡Globalquerque!" appearance last year at New Mexico's premiere World Music festival. Her band consists of members of the award-winning Canadian Indigenous rock band Gathering of Flies.

They call much of the music on "Running for the Drum," Buffy's most recent CD, Pow Wow Rock. Compared to what she was doing Back In the Day, it's a big step, and I was wondering last night when she started doing the "Indun Stuff." There was nothing like this before, at least not when I was more attuned to the whole music scene in which Buffy's genre was rather rigidly categorized as Folk. Not Folk Rock. Folk.

And quirky Folk at that. There wasn't anything quite like it in those days, but there was. She was a unique talent, and yet her music seemed always familiar somehow. Her catalogue of folk hits and award-winning commercial-movie type music is extensive.

Most Anglos are never exposed to the Pow Wow culture that is so appreciated among Indians, they never hear Indian music -- either the traditional style or the contemporary -- and something like Pow Wow Rock can come as a real surprise, especially when presented by someone with such an extensive repertoire in completely different genres.

"She rocks harder...than she ever did." See for yourself.

The music on her "Running for the Drums" CD is tame compared to her live show, in part because her band of Indians from Winnepeg is so strong, and they don't appear to be part of her CD. She herself is no slacker, but her band, members of Gathering of Flies, are the musical driving force, and that is in some measure due to drummer Mike Bruyere ("Ojibway, Ojibway, Ojibway" as she says when introducing him) -- a big measure of the driving force though he himself is rather diminutive.

The drum is the heartbeat of the Earth and is the central factor of Indian music. Bruyere manages to impart the spirit of that heartbeat while rocking as hard as anyone onstage if not harder.

The audience, of course, was made up largely of geezers and coots like me. One fellow said to me after the show that it was one of the first times in a long time he'd been in a room -- as he put it -- with so many of his contemporaries "in time and in space." Indeed.

I was in the front row so it was sometimes difficult to get a bead on the rest of the audience, but the "room" appeared full, the audience was probably seventy percent my age or older, not a few of them with their canes and walkers and wheel chairs, and ever so many of them with stories to tell of forty years ago -- or whenever -- and they last saw Buffy or bought her album, or in my case, were in a movie that featured Buffy's music heavily in the sound track. "Forty years ago" figured heavily in the night's festivities, and yet in some ways, many of us were allowed to forget, or if not forget, at least allowed put in perspective the vision of "forty years ago" -- and maybe let go.

For many of my generation, of course, that's not going to happen. But Buffy has largely moved on -- and at the same time stayed true to yesteryear.

When I watched the DVD that came with "Running for the Drum" this morning, it occurred to me how little I really knew about her. I had no idea she'd been adopted out of the Cree Reserve, she didn't actually know when she was born (1940, 41, something like that). Her (adoptive) mother was part Micmac but she was not raised among her people or in Indian culture. Her awareness grew with time. She was raised White. Well, sort of. She was "tan in a sea of white" and yet there was always something drawing her to Native Peoples from her earliest days, and at the same time offering her so many of the advantages and inducements that accompany being White in North America. (No matter what else she is, she is very Canadian!)

And I realized how she came to do Indian music, or at least her version of it, and why it has taken her so long to get there. The only way I can put it is this: unless it comes naturally, you can't very well do it at all, and she had to live long enough for it to come naturally to her before she could do it. Getting to that point was a process that took time and belief and courage.

The Pow Wow rock segments of the show were the ones that got these old geezers in the audience on their feet clapping and stomping and shouting, and there were enough Indians in the audience that they could accompany the music from the stage with their own calls and chants in a kind of circle of sound and life that is so much a part of the pow wow. It was a thrill to see it and hear it happening spontaneously the way it should be.

It's not everyday something like this happens.

Buffy Sainte-Marie is a legend -- a very self-aware legend, let it be said -- but she isn't stuck in The Back Then, rehashing her Old Hits one or two more times before she dies. Oh no, she's well beyond that.

And for that, I'm grateful. She was also very pleasant for a PhD! (/s)