I'm still trying to track down exactly how Hopi Reggae came about, but according to a recent New York Times article, hip young Hopis began listening to Bob Marley and other Jamaican groups on the radio back in the '70s; the reggae message, of oppression, resistance, revival and salvation inevitably resonated with Rez youth, and the chunk-a chunk-a beat was definitely in synch with the ancient drum pulse you hear at Native American ceremonies like the Santo Domingo Corn Dances, the Hopi Snake Dance, or the winter Deer and Turtle Dances at other pueblos. The burgeoning fan base began doing the eight-hour roundtrip commute to Phoenix to see big-time reggae bands in concert, and after awhile bands began coming to the Hopi mesas to perform.

The Times piece, by Bruce Weber, is built around a review of a 2007 concert at the Hopi Veterans Center, featuring Steel Pulse and three or four other well-known groups, that drew a crowd of more than 2,000, most of them Hopis but also Navajos, Utes, and Havasupais from the Grand Canyon, along a few local Anglos. According to Weber, there have been nearly 60 reggae concerts on the Hopi Rez in the last two decades. Obviously, it's a sweet strong strand of cultural syncretism that isn't about to snap soon, if ever. One can imagine the Hopi prophecies about the downfall of the White Man's Machine Age (dramatized in Reggio/Glass films like Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka - syncretism isn't a one-way street) coming to pass, and a hundred years from now the big drums thudding away in the depths of the kivas, like the heartbeat of the Earth itself, and old men singing a medley of Buju Banton's Untold Stories with a Maize Sprouting Chants brought north from Meso-America a thousand years ago, along with a half dozen kinds of seed corn, a digging stick, a calendar set to music and linked to the sun and stars, and a wooden flute to play it on, all humped in a doko basket pack by the benign shamanic agronomist/ambassador plenipotentiary Kokopelli.

The first Casper album I ever heard, about 10 years ago, "Original Landlord," was on a cassette a friend of mine bought at one of The Friendly Hopi's concerts, in Washington D.C. of all places, and for years it was one of my top 10 road trip soundtracks, especially perfect for drives to and from river rafting trips and treks down Buckskin/Paria, Dark and White canyons, and the nether lands beyond Hanksville, out around The Post, The Reef, Waterpocket Fold, the Amazing Maze, and places far too sacred to mention here.
The "Hopiland Winter" cut has been on infinite replay inside my head since early January of this year, when the south San Juans began sliding into one of the mightiest mythic wintertimes ever, with sleeping avalanche chutes from Ophir to Trout Lake, across Lizard Head to south of Rico, awakening with a vengeance, and the snows fell and fell and kept on falling until you needed a periscope to navigate, and the drifts froze up into diamond-hard terrestrial icebergs the length of Colorado Avenue. This is true rock 'n' roll: rock as in bedrock, roll as in the piano roll of the seasons unreeling eternally, the music of the spheres heard only in moments of immaculate silence, golden and unequivocal.

The best Native American rock - Buffy St. Marie's Now That The Buffalo's Gone, Tom Bee and XIT's Reservation of Education, Many Hogans' Navajo Rock & Roll Star, the best of the Dineh rapper Na'tay, and anything by Blackfire, who are one of the half dozen very hottest and most important rock bands on the planet today (think The Clash/Rage Against the Machine meets early U2/the political phase of the Airplane, with a dash of The Who and the Dylan of Highway 61 Revisited, set to a Chinle backbeat) - has never achieved the fame it deserves, and maybe that's the way it should be. Secrets revealed are all too often secrets betrayed, treasure cheapened and truths misunderstood . . . But for those of us who actually live close to the source, in the backcountry, the Outback of the American West, off the b.s. grid and the maps drawn by dirt pimps, carpetbag cowboys and hucksters, it's the best kind of good fortune to have our own soundtrack, for powder days, river ramblings, canyon pilgrimages, Wilson Meadows moonrises with halos of frost and Ajax rainbow eruptions, instances as evanescent as a snow crystal and as timeless as the deepest, oldest sandstone . . . the Right Stuff, for the right place, right here and right now . . . and you can't not dance to it.