Walking on a Dream

Singer and songwriter Danny O’Keefe didn’t intend to write a concept album about the hypocrisy of the American Dream. He had gone to bed in a hotel room one night in 1968 thinking about the Lewis Carroll book Through the Looking Glass and planning to write a song based on that famous children’s tale. But it wasn’t Alice in Wonderland that visited his dreams—it was the long-dead Nez Perce war chief Looking Glass. Upon waking, O’Keefe recalls in the liner notes of Looking Glass & the Dreamers (Road Canon), he was given the words, “Looking Glass in Oregon, one night had a dream, of soldiers slowly riding in a solemn, endless stream.” Fifty-two years later, O’Keefe has brought his own dream to fruition in an ambitious album that reflects the broken promises made by the American government to the First Nation people and the karmic debt that has ensued.

Best known for the 1972 hit “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues,” O’Keefe had never experienced anything like that visitation. “At the time, growing up in Washington State, strangely enough, I knew very little about the natives in this region,” he says, during a phone interview from his home on a wooded island off the coast of Seattle. “We lived in Wenatchee, Washington, right near the Yakima reservation. When I got that visitation from Looking Glass, it opened a whole reality that I had no knowledge of.”

The album’s 13 songs are lyrically complex, emotionally moving, and spaciously arranged. Sonically, O’Keefe and engineer Gary Shelton have created an alluring aural soundscape that complements the cinematic quality of the lyrics. 

The album recounts the history of the peaceful Nez Perce, from their pastoral life in the Pacific Northwest, the 1877 betrayal of the tribe by the U.S. Army, their exodus to Oklahoma, and Nez Perce Chief Joseph’s death in 1904. The inspirational words of Chief Joseph inform this work—on several songs, the tribe’s joy and sorrow are told through recitations by Native singer Milton “Quiltman” Sahme. “In the end, we measure what we found, by what we lost,” O’Keefe sings in “The Captain (Three Sheets to the Wind).” 

Why did the project take so long to record? “It took an enormous span of time, not just to write the songs, because I had a lot of the songs at least sketched out [years ago], but the project just never finalized itself until a friend of mine, Marlin Greene, who does my websites and was my first recording engineer in Muscle Shoals, insisted that I record it,” O’Keefe, 77, explains. “He put me in touch with engineer and multi-instrumentalist Gary Ogan, who lives in Portland and is native. Gary was very enthusiastic. I thought we’d go into the studio and put down some demos. But before I knew it, he had the music all fleshed out. I wasn’t sure that was right, so I sat on it for a while. Eventually, I came back to it and thought, ‘This is the time to do it. Let’s get in the studio and make it as good as possible.’”

Last year, O’Keefe and Shelton put the finishing touches on the tracks. “We were just trying to get it to where it was as perfect as we could humanly make it,” O’Keefe says. “That was the goal. If we found something that was wrong, we’d re-edit it and re-cut it. Finally, the day came to where I said, ‘OK, this is it!’”

The album is structured like an epic poem and evokes strong political and environmental messages. For O’Keefe, Looking Glass & the Dreamers is unlike anything he’d ever recorded. “For me, the songs are very visual,” he says. “I had been to all those places on the Nez Perce reservation, including the places where the Nez Perce patriots—the warriors—are buried. I wanted that cinematic feel to it—they were horse people, so I wanted the sound of the horses, the wind. I thought at one time that I wanted to make a film from this, if I’d had the money. This was as close as I could get.”

It is important to tell their story. “They were great people—and still are a great people,” he adds. “I don’t know a lot of them, but those I know are good friends. Their ancestors were kicked out of the Salmon River Valley by people who simply said, ‘We’re bigger, we’re tougher, we can make you do whatever we want.’ But when you visit their ancestral homelands, it’s very powerful—it just feels that the Nez Perce should be there. They were good horsemen, good cattle ranchers—they would have prospered there and would have been competitive with the immigrant population. 

“There is that innate prejudice of the conqueror—if you can make your enemy into an inferior being then you can do whatever you want to them. That was and is the inherent fault of America. We’re bullies. We’ll destroy whatever we need to get our way. That’s not what our Constitution is, and it’s not what we have been taught we are, and yet we see it on a constant basis.

“We’re going to have to deal with that if America is going to be that shining city on the hill that we imagine ourselves to be.”