SPEARHEAD
Michael Franti is known for his outspoken every day, all those questions go through my
political ravings in the Disposable Heroes of
Hiphoprisy and The Beatnigs, but where those
groups were loud and ground round in your
face, his new project Spearhead is on more of
a laid-back conscious groove tip that gets you
to bop your head as it implants subtle revo-
lutionary ideas in your mind. -Brian Brannon
Spearhead seems like a definite change of
styles for you. What made you change?
Well, from The Beatnigs through Disposable
Heroes, I've been doing lots of music that was
just noisy and lots of clanking metal and slam-
ming chains and grinders and all kinds of shit,
and I just wanted to do a record this time that
was more like the type of music that I enjoy lis
tening to when I'm just chilling at my crib, so
that's what we did.
It also seems like you're taking a different
attack towards your subject matter.
Yeah, instead of writing songs that are just
like telling the government to fuck off, I wanted
to write songs that were like personal stories
that you can just relate to your own life, but
they still had social meaning to them. And I just
found over my years of touring that people pay
a lot more attention to what you say when you
don't scream in their face. When somebody yells
at you, you just want to turn your head, so that's
basically the new approach. It's a whole lot more
subversive that way. People who wouldn't nor-
mally listen to really aggressive music end up
hearing these ideas just because they can get
into the music.
The song "Hole In The Bucket" deals with
people hitting you up for change on the
street, what made you write about that?
Every day, I go to the store and there's
like three or four of the same dudes who
are always asking me for change and I just
get sick of it after a while, I'm like, "Fuck
man, these muthafuckas." Some days!
feel like giving them change, and other
days I don't, but
head like, "What is this guy going to do with the
money if I give it to him? Should I give him the
money or not?" And rather than make a story
that says, "You should love all homeless peo-
ple," or whatever, I wanted to make a story that
just talks about the whole futility of it. At the
end of the day, none of the shit's really going to
change, so that's why I wrote that story.
What made you come up with the whole
"Dream Team" concept?
Basically I've been a basketball player my
whole life and I played at the University of San
Francisco, so it was just weird to me that in the
same year when we had all the Rodney King
uprisings and there's so much racial tension that
America could have this Dream Team in the
Olympics that had ten black players on it rep-
resenting to the world. And people at home,
white people, didn't really want to invite black
people into their houses, but they love the fact
that they were out there winning in the name of
the red, white and blue. So I just put my own
Dream Team together with historical figures.
Tell me about the other people in the band.
Mary Harris, she's the singer, I met her out in
Philadelphia, she was playing with Schooly D at
the time and was working at Ruff House where I
recorded this album with Joe The Butcher. I met
Le Le Jamison out there, the keyboard player,
and Keith McArthur, he played bass for the last
tour that we did with Disposable Heroes. And
David James is the guitarist and James Cray
is the drummer, and I just hooked up with them
out here. When we put the
band together, we just left it
up to everybody in the
group who all was going
to be in the band, so
we've got like a pret-
ty cohesive unit. Oh
yeah, I almost forgot
Sub Commander
Ras I Zulu, who has
been my friend for like ten years, been in San
Francisco for a long time. He kind of just raps a
little bit, he talks in between on the record. He's
a Jamaican guy, but he's lived here for a long
time. He's been my friend ever since I came to
San Francisco.
So you were saying that you wanted to do
this because it's more like the kind of music
that you listen to at home. Why is that?
Well if I go to a club, I want to hear stuff that
makes me go crazy, but when I'm in my house,
I want to have vibes that are just laid-back. I love
listening to Bob Marley, Stevie Wonder, Sly and
the Family Stone and Marvin Gaye, they keep
my house alive and warm, so that's the type of
record I want to make this time because I'm a
story teller, and if people only want to listen to
your story when they're dancing or only want to
listen to it once or twice because they can't get
into the music, then you lose the impact. So I
wanted to make a record that people could lis-
ten to over and over again in their house.
The home seems like a really important thing
that a lot of people are overlooking.
Yeah, definitely. These days, it's sort of tough,
there's so many outside pressures going on, it's
hard to maintain the safe home, a safe haven for
you, a place where you can go to just feel chilled
out, to be with your family. And for me, music
has always been a big part of my home, of my
house, in creating the vibe and the life for my
house, so that's why we call the record Home.
Anything else you want to say?
I want to give a shout out to all the people
who are taking skating to the next level because
I remember when I was a kid, every now and
then someone would have a quarter-pipe or
something, and everybody would get excited to
go skate on that. Now I see muthafuckas skat
ing on top of vans and up and down staircases,
taking it to the next level. And I keep up with it
because I play basketball in the parks and I
always see fools trying all kinds of crazy shit, so
to everybody out there keeping that sport alive,
and the lifestyle
alive, just stand
firm.
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