We're celebrating 25 years of Dakota Life. Over the course of this anniversary season, we'll revisit some of the people we've met on the show over the years. This month, a conversation with Paul LaRoche, the founder of Brulé.
LaRoche founded Brulé after discovering his Lakota roots and incorporating them into his sound. He was adopted at birth and raised in Minnesota by non-Native parents. In 1993, his wife, Kathy, discovered his biological family, and he was reunited with them on the Lower Brulé Sioux Indian Reservation.
A couple years later, he started Brulé and the group has been touring heavily ever since.
Dakota Life featured the Brulé story in 2007. We recently touched base with Paul LaRoche again.
SDPB: You've done a lot of touring through the years. Do you have your favorite stops?
PL: I like to say that our most exotic performance was we were invited to play over in Saudi Arabia. And that was off the chart.
Kind of our home base, that we've probably worked in the most would be the Midwest. I would say our most popular stop of all, all these years has been the Black Hills. We've ended up in the Black Hills at least for a week [every year]. There's been times we spent the whole summer. The South Dakota audience has always been our strongest fan base.
SDPB: You played in rock bands before Brulé. What kind of music were you playing?
PL: I like to say that I was a product, musically, of the sixties and seventies. I played a Hammond organ and synthesizers and pianos and, you know, anything that had a keyboard. But we had a tendency back in those days because, rock and roll music was starting to take on kind of a heavier edge. So, I wasn't into metal rock or anything, but I was into the heavier rock side.
There were groups like Deep Purple, the Stones, Manfred Mann. The Dave Clark Five came over here and had a bunch of hits. But they had a keyboard player that stood up. Prior to that, a lot of keyboard players were sitting down. And so, this guy stood up. Mike Smith was his name. And, and you know, when you're a young kid, you see that you go, I want to do that. So that was one of the things that I latched onto.
I had the tendency to lean more towards kind of the heavy rock. And that carried right on through the years up in Brulé... a lot of the songs have got some of that early rock keyboard sound built in. But of course, these days, nobody really recognizes that as a hard rock sound, but back in the sixties and seventies, that was a cutting-edge sound, especially that heavy organ sound.
SDPB: How did the original members of Brulé come together?
PL: You know, it started so nonchalantly. The very first performance, I was going to perform as a soloist. And before we got to the gig, which would've been in '95, and we were scheduled to play at a mall over in Rapid City. And before I could leave, uh, my daughter Nicole said, 'Hey dad, if you could write some of these melodies down, I'll play my flute with you.' And that was the start. So, it started out as a duo.
Shortly after that, our son, Shane, came back from college. And he said, 'Hey, you guys should have a guitar in the band.' He taught himself to play guitar while he was finishing up college. So now there's three of us. And we got a drummer from out in the pine Ridge area, Chuck Davis was his name. He was our first traditional drummer. So now we have a band. That's the configuration that we started out with, I would say between 95 and 97.
What we are today is, we're still a four-piece group, but we've changed a little bit. Shane has moved from guitar to drums. Nicole is still the lead instrumentalist playing the flute. And then I do multiple keyboards and do some vocals.
We started to bring some dancers along because we had family members who were dancers. And the first time we went out with the dancers, everybody went that's cool. I've never seen that before. So, we found ourselves kind of carving out a musical performance that really had never been done before.
SDPB: Was the dance element choreographed at the start, or just spontaneous?
PL: When we started out, it evolved from just kind of winging it and a little bit of chaos on stage. What we found out is that with the traditional dancers -- it was, and it's still to this day a little bit difficult for us to control that because traditional Native American dancers on a contemporary stage, um, has never been done before. So, to us and to our culture, it was new. Musically, there was a timing factor.
Today, it's a totally choreographed show. But what we've tried to do is take traditional Native American dance and let it be organic. We needed to find how to come up with that Broadway discipline without trying to destroy the organic part of being a Native American dancer. It took a lot of work. We just had to carve that out where nothing existed before. Contemporary Native American dance is a totally new discipline.