Gregg Deal has a warning for everyone: “America is a pyramid scheme, and you ain’t on top!” The self-proclaimed “Bad Indian” behind the new Denver punk band Dead Pioneers delivers that blunt assessment in the opening track “Tired” from the band’s 2023 self-titled first album. It’s a scathing indictment of capitalism, racism, sexism, and every insidious side of prejudice and corruption pulsing through contemporary American society.
Delivered in aggressive spoken word against a backdrop of riveting punk guitar riffs from veteran punk rockers Josh Rivera and Abe Brennan, the song launches a new band, a new sound, and a necessary, timely new voice in punk rock music. Though Deal ends the song by acknowledging, “I’m so very, very tired,” he has channeled that centuries-long weariness into a powerful, energetic music project that projects a bold social consciousness.
When I first talked with Gregg at the Maven Hotel in Denver, where the artist/punk-rocker was completing a mural, I asked, “So, where’s this going?” and with an unabashed grin and a chuckle, he said, “Ya know, I don’t know.”
We were just a week removed from a busy weekend when Dead Pioneers performed at the Skylark Lounge in Denver, a show attended by punk icon and former Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra, the night before the band filmed a music video for the single “Bad Indian”. Deal, a widely acclaimed visual artist and Native activist, has been pursuing advocacy in defense and support of Indigenous culture for more than two decades. A punk rock fan since his early days growing up in Park City, Utah, he is still trying to get his mind around this new musical force he’s leading.
“I keep telling people I accidentally started a band,” Deal laughs, describing the origins of the group. “There were no preconceived notions. I got a grant through Red Line Contemporary Art Center to add original music to my performance art piece, The Punk Pan-Indian Romantic Comedy.” What began as Deal working with drummer Shane Zweygardt and guitarist Josh Rivera of The Music District in Fort Collins to put punk guitar riffs over his spoken word changed when Deal met Lee Tesch, bassist for the post-punk rock band Algiers, during an artists residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida.
“Lee’s a sound guy,” Deal explains, “I was drawn to him immediately, thinking we should work together.” Their collaboration for a poetry reading one night produced the demo for “Bad Indian”, which Rivera and Zweygardt loved, fueling a desire to keep writing. After securing a second grant from The Music District, the band spent two days at The Blasting Room, the Fort Collins studio founded by Bill Stevenson of Descendents, writing ferociously and cranking out its self-titled debut LP.
Though Deal acknowledges wanting to start a band when he was young, he never felt as a Native kid he was given a quarter in the overwhelmingly white music community. Now, at 47, he’s making music simply because he wants to. “Too many people think there is an authority that goes into making music,” Deal says, noting the basic DIY punk ethos in “the audacious idea that you can make something without permission.”
A year later, “Bad Indian” has streamed a million times and has appeared on the warm-up playlist before recent Pearl Jam concerts. Dead Pioneers signed a three-record deal with British label Hassle Records, and the band played the Punk in Drublic festival in Denver, opening for iconic bands NOFX and Suicidal Tendencies. The band also joined Jello Biafra’s TentacleFest in Denver, releasing a 7-inch recording on Biafra’s label Alternative Tentacles in collaboration with Hassle.
After Dead Pioneers played a dive bar in Big Sandy, Montana, with Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament’s hardcore punk rock band P.E.S.T., the band signed on to open four shows for Pearl Jam in April before leaving on a European tour in May with Pennywise and Propogandhi. Dead Pioneers is turning heads and opening eyes with its bold, fresh sound and message.
The collaboration with Ament of Pearl Jam precedes Dead Pioneers, originating in Deal’s visual art and Native activist career and Ament’s work in community building through skating. “Yeah, we knew each other before. Jeff’s company, Montana Pool Service, builds skateparks in low-income areas, which includes a lot of reservations,” Gregg explains, “I did some designs for him based on ‘The Others’”, Deal’s acclaimed art series reappropriating old cowboy-Indian comics and infusing them with punk rock lyrics. “So I knew he was into skating and hardcore. “[Ament] asked us to come to play this festival” [the Big Sandy Pig Roast]
“Two things saved my life,” Deal says, “skating and punk. So, it was crazy to be hanging out with these old-school skaters like Lance Mountain and Ray Barbee. My first deck was a Ray Barbie.”
Dead Pioneers also caught the attention of Seattle’s KEXP host Dusty Henry, who interviewed Deal and praised Dead Pioneers on a Cobain-50 podcast episode about the politics of punk. “I put it on,” Henry recalls of discovering the band’s debut on Bandcamp, “and I immediately got a sonic explosion. Dead Pioneers is so powerful and fast, it’s invigorating me on punk again.”
Henry figured Deal was an OG [Original Gangsta] punk rocker but was surprised to discover his background as a visual artist and activist spokesperson on issues of racist team mascots and cultural appropriation in America. “It was inspiring, and it’s easy to hear influences like Black Flag and Dead Kennedys as he incorporates his artistic and spoken word ideas into punk music. Truly, every line of ‘Bad Indian’ is a mic drop moment, and it’s a message that hasn’t been heard enough in music lately. I hope it inspires many people because it’s an ideology, not just a sound. After the past eight years, a band like this can be a catharsis; people are craving something substantial to hold on to.”
Punk rock’s substantial quality was always the connection for Deal, whose Punk Pan-Indian Romantic Comedy performance explains how punk rock and hip-hop appeal to many Native kids as a marginalized population. When he first saw a skateboard video, he says, the punk soundtrack “just made sense to me. The first time I heard Black Flag, fear dissipated, and sadness went away. That music helped me find myself as a youth. Now, informed by decades of learning, I know who I am, and I make no excuses or apologies for how the message manifests itself.”
All this arrives at a place that produces a band like Dead Pioneers and singles like “Bad Indian”. What some people call an activist,” Deal observes, “others might just call an adult with an opinion. I do take actions to stand up for my beliefs and my people.”
The scathing social criticism at the heart of Deal’s lyrics is rooted in the punk rock that inspired him. “Hearing Rage Against the Machine was both shocking and breathtaking,” he recalls, and “I remember pulling out the Evil Empire CD with its picture of books about social justice, and I read all those books. Rage catalyzed me to learn about important things like AIM [American Indian Movement] and the Black Panthers.”
That fueled the conviction that music could be a powerful political force, instrumental to Deal “as a young Indigenous kid growing up in a white neighborhood trying to figure out who he is.” Like many fans, Deal felt that punk rock was dying after Nirvana, “When something marketable overshadows the voice of young people saying the things that need to be said.” With Dead Pioneers, Deal is unabashedly picking up the mantle.
Dead Pioneers’ debut album is an impressive sonic achievement with distinct sounds echoing roots from Minutemen to Rage Against the Machine to Public Enemy. The album’s second track “We Were Punk First”, draws its title from the skateboard art of Walt Pourier, whose Stronghold Society uses skating to support Native kids. Throttling listeners with screaming chords against aggressive lyrics, the song mocks hipster appropriation, demanding, “It’s time to get some things back. Language back. Culture back. Ceremony back. Identity back. Homelands back. Land back. LAND BACK!”
In its fast 22 minutes, Dead Pioneers shifts between hardcore punk rock and Deal’s sardonic spoken word sprinkled throughout the LP, ridiculing appropriation in tracks “Political Song” and “Dreamcatcher”, which asks, “Who are all these white people sleeping in their cars?” Noting misappropriated tattoos of dreamcatchers on aloof white people, Deals offers the scathing rebuke, “Are you a nightmare?”
“As an artist and a public speaker, I’m painfully aware we don’t have an MLK [Martin Luther King] now, we don’t have any Malcolm Xs, we don’t have any Cesar Chavezs. These days, we don’t have figureheads because everybody is the figurehead. This is capitalism, so we have the activist who is also looking for a book deal and is looking to be the face of a movement. So, as people act like crabs in a bucket, pulling down everyone who is saying what needs to be said, the only place you can say it is in the arts, in movies, books, music, visual arts.”
Dead Pioneers and Deal will continue saying what he calls “the quiet things out loud” when the sophomore LP tentatively titled Po$t-American drops in March. Deal notes, “[Po$t-American] feels like a first album,” and he promises “it will be unapologetically political.”
The album’s first single, “My Spirit Animal Ate Your Spirit Animal”, was released the day after Thanksgiving in November 2024, and Deal hammers the issue of appropriation, calling out “culture vultures and pretend-ians” with lines like “History known and history unknown, robbing us like Lily Gladstone.” Another song, “Mythical Cowboy”, mocks the pop-culture historical John Wayne trope and lays into people like Kevin Costner and his obsession with manifest destiny. “Just another white dude benefiting off of our stories,” Deal dryly notes.
Deal believes that what makes Dead Pioneers matter is that an Indigenous frontman and Indigenous guitarist deliver a message of political significance at a time when Native people are finally getting space in punk rock music. Deal is proud that “Dead Pioneers allows me the platform to say the things I’ve been saying my entire life in a way that connects with new audiences.
“It’s not just a record, but also the culmination of a 20-year visual arts and activist career. The only thing that trickles down is the trauma of the poor – the most economically disadvantaged are Native people. We’re the poorest in a continent where we should be the richest people.”
Dead Pioneers exemplifies punk rock finding its conscience again, becoming political again, following the pop-punk radio-friendly phase. “It becomes a double-edged sword,” Deal concedes, “doing this in capitalism. But I’m grateful to a label like Hassle that steps back, lets me say what I need to say, and gets our work out there.”
“I’m not interested in being a voice of the people – I am interested in making interesting and provocative art, and I am interested in writing true things. I’m interested in that brown Native kid who sees what we’re doing and realizes what’s possible and decides to go out and do it for themselves. Cause I’m old, man,” he laughs.
Dead Pioneers’ powerful first single, “Bad Indian”, ends with Deal shouting in righteous indignation over searing guitar chords, “You know the old saying, the one that says the only good Indian is a dead Indian. Well, I’m a bad Indian … and I’m here.”
Yes, he is, and with Dead Pioneers, he says the quiet things out loud. This loud, smart, aggressively socially conscious band has arrived on the scene, and these guys are just getting warmed up. The music world has only begun to hear the message of punk rock’s new conscience.