Let’s get to know John M. Goodfellow
““His music speaks to the human condition. It starts with the story and he builds music around that. It’s the classic Woodie Guthrie perspective but I don’t think it leans politically. It’s more from an everyman perspective.””
What is your orientation to music today, especially when considering your solo project, Go El Grande Go?
First of all, the name, “El Grande,” was my street name. I lived on a street in the Lower East side in New York that was a hub for heroin, and the dealers all got to know everybody because they kind of stabilized the block, if you will. So, they’d yell, “Yo, El Grande!” People knew each other. So, when I was thinking of a band name, that came to my mind. But Go El Grande Go is my project because I’m financing it all and it’s my lyrics. It’s a multi-genre, folky style of music with some international instrumentation influences. That was Clinton Street where I lived before. Now it’s a hipster neighborhood but this was back in the 80s when there was still arson fires pretty much every night the year that I moved there, things burning up all over.
When I first started singing when I was very young it was to outboard engines. Because I spent a lot of time commuting back and forth across the Puget Sound with outboard engines. And I would hum along there just singing along with the outboard engines. But to have something to say involves listening. Even now when I warm up, I listen to what’s outside. Sometimes there’s a garbage truck out there. But guess what? A garbage truck has its own tone. Traffic has a tone. Air conditioner, refrigerators, they have a tone and you can use that tone and make it into a song. So, I’ve always been attached to drones. Maybe that’s the bagpipes. Bagpipes having amazing drones. But, yes, the spiritual practice of listening is very important.
What is SAMA and what is your involvement with the organization?
We found out that the word is actually an Arabic word. When they do the Sufi dances, it’s the first part of the ceremony, before the dancing, when they just listen. “Sama” means listen. To me, that’s huge. That’s so huge for music, in general. The practice of actually listening is a spiritual practice. You have the outside and the inside and it really is - the human is the border between the inside and the outside. So, I really love that as a word.
And what does SAMA do today, given the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic?
SAMA started as a concert series to bring all these international artists that wouldn’t get to Seattle - because we are far away - to the city. New York is often the entry point for a lot of people from around the world. And they think that’s all America is. So, the concept of SAMA was to bring artists from around the world into Seattle to share influences. Sufis from Pakistan, music from Morocco, Polyphonic Greek Musicians - let’s find a way to get these musical and cultural experiences here. But then COVID hit and so we are now doing live streams weekly at 7:00 PM PST. It’s been a fascinating way to see this process grow. We still will bring artists in once the new reality is set. But in the meantime, we are continually making sure that music and art and beauty - all these things that make life worth living - continue to prosper.
There isn’t any kind of a regular forum for international music in Seattle. Somebody comes through town on their way to Canada maybe or to San Francisco. But Seattle is kind off the beaten path in terms of the international music scene. So, it’s kind of a way to get that more regularized. We in Seattle think of ourselves as being very musical - and we are - but it’s very white music.
Can you explain your role with Banya 5 and the origin of the bathhouses?
I founded Banya 5. I grew up here in Seattle and I did saunas both at the Washington Athletic Club with my dad. But also I had friends with saunas at the Hood Canal and the mountain lakes. So, when I moved to New York in the 80s, I started going to Russian baths there. At the time, in the 80s, AIDS became a big deal and they started shutting down a lot of the baths. But Russian baths are more communal, they’re more open, they’re not private, and therefore avoid the sexual hook up stigma. At one time, bathhouses tried to compete with people’s baths at home, so they had private rooms. But that led to sex and AIDS and everything else. So, most of those shut down in New York. But the Russian baths still were open. They were spacious, communal.
Going to them was a very fun ethnic experience for me. There was a very large Jewish, Soviet, Russian, Eastern European influence there. We still use a lot of those words in Banya 5, like “Schvitz” and other general expressions. But, yeah, it was something after being in New York that I really wanted to bring here. It was a very communal experience. And a rare experience. It changes you. You’re going through extreme hot, extreme cold and you tend to be more open to conversation. It helps you deal with the struggles of the day.
How do all your myriad interests fit together? Is there a through-line that you’ve noticed when considering Banya 5, SAMA, your music, and even your writings and books you’ve published?
Community probably more than anything else. I’m interested in community. My music has always been searching for more of a community. My historian work is about a community, about Seattle. Even though that can be a little overused of a word today. But, regardless, we started Banya 5 fifteen years ago and that was not at the forefront of people’s minds. But it was in my mind because I’d experienced it in New York and I knew how important it was. Even today, we get a lot of newly divorced people. They just want to be around others but not feel any pressure to do anything. Of course, we’re a non-sex place. We’re such a sexualized country but by taking that off the table, allows other relationships to develop.
As you continue your work of helping to shepherd a city toward new cultural discoveries, how do you see Seattle helping to shape the world at large moving forward?
Seattle is becoming a cosmopolitan city that still doesn’t have its identity as a cosmopolitan city. I think most people live in their own communities, whether it’s the South Asian communities, Somalian communities. They don’t have a lot of intermixing within the city. But this is a way to have these communities interact with each other. If we can find some music to get people to come together, like they did in Banya 5, then that is a very important foundation for Seattle to actually evolve into a proper city. Not just an Amazon-Microsoft-Boeing tent.