Poster boy

>> One Percent Free takes his no-pay
policy to the streets—literally

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” That biblical soundbite, care of Ecclesiastes, was bang on already a couple of millennia ago, but he might have done well to add that anything old can be made new again—revamped, rearranged, remixed even.

Montrealer Max Grogan, who makes music under the name One Percent Free, is an excellent example of that, and not just in the way his records are delirious, dubbed-out mash-ups of everything under the sun. Grogan is the son of Emmett Grogan, founder of the ’60s-era San Francisco proto-freegan activists/art gang the Diggers, for whom “live free or die” wasn’t just a legal mantra but an economic one. He carries on his dad’s radical philosophy, twisting it to suit both his own creative vision and the charms and challenges of current technology, just as Grogan the elder reconstituted an earlier idea.

“The Diggers remixed the old school,” says Max Grogan, “they took it from the 17th-century Irish who didn’t want to pay for plant food, where they got their name. They did a lot of cool stuff—they were shit disturbers. You know they’ll never accept you, so you might as well fuck shit up.”

Grogan points to artists like producer Danger Mouse, for his Beatles/Jay-Z bootleg The Grey Album, and street artist Banksy, for his incendiary stencil attacks, as torchbearers of that vibe. But the ’60s Diggers aren’t buried yet. Grogan’s visual-art collaborator is planning a Digger-themed art show, Jay Babcock—founder of the late, lamented magazine Arthur and himself Digger progeny—is working on a Digger doc (Grogan’s not uninvolved) and, dig this, Dennis Hopper is developing a feature film with a script that fractures the A-to-Z timeline, or should I say remixes it?

In the meantime, though, Grogan’s up to his neck in a project that flips the freegan script and rewrites the record-industry paradigm. It’s been the better part of a decade since his debut CD, Slow Sun Fast Nomads, and since then he’s laid fairly low, travelling, DJing on occasion and working on music that he mostly rejected. “With the first one, I was disappointed, and I didn’t want to go through that again,” he says, explaining why his two new CDs, It’s Free Cause It’s Yours of late 2006 and the brand-new There Is a Great Deal to Be Silent About, took so long.

Now that they’re here, Grogan’s no-pay policy becomes a matter of give, not take—“It’s a karma thing, you have to respect it and treat it with honesty.”

Besides, the brick-and-mortar music industry, as he sees it, is so stacked against the artist (and iTunes ain’t much better) that he might as well give the stuff away for free. “It’s from the good guy to the good guy, no one in between. Anyone could pick it up—from me to you.”

Indeed, anyone. While There Is a Great Deal… can be snagged online at www.indica-records.com, 500 copies of It’s Free Cause It’s Yours will be materializing around Montreal as of this weekend, attached to publicly visible posters, for anybody and everybody to grab, take home and enjoy.

“It’s not necessarily great music, like the Beach Boys, but the thing it does have is attitude. I like the guerrilla approach of using the street because right now, every domain is shut down—not shut down, but you have to succumb to the rules, to the way it’s established. On the street, you’re the person in power.”