News & Updates — red power

The great Shawnee rocker Link Wray invented the power chord and helped set off the hard rock revolution, influencing punk, thrash & heavy metal with his 1958 hit "Rumble" spawning the future headbanger generation. He made his first record in '55, before heading to Korea with the Army. He got tuberculosis and spent a year in the hospital. A lung was removed and he was told he'd never sing again (they were wrong). So he started working out instrumentals and made several records, some of which were recorded in a makeshift studio in a chicken shack (often in partnership with...

Part Mexican-American and part Santee-Dakota Sioux, the inspired poet/musician/actor/activist John Trudell grew up on a reservation in Nebraska and became heavily involved in the Red Power & American Indian Movements and was also a hemp advocate (alongside Willie Nelson). In '69 he was the spokesman & broadcaster for the All Tribes Occupation of Alcatraz Island, which put him right in the FBI's crosshairs. His entire family (including his children) all died in a suspicious fire the day after Trudell burned an American flag on the steps of the FBI building in '79. Soon after, his poetry career started. His first...