This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
Meet Bert Malcom, an indie-rock artist and poet living in the Black Hills.
Malcom's story is about more than finding his artistic voice. It's about finding his family and his place in the world. And he did it all with a guitar on his back.
He joined "In the Moment" in SDPB's Black Hills Surgical Hospital studio in Rapid City for a conversation and a few live performances.
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The following transcript was auto-generated and edited for clarity.
Lori Walsh:
When did you first start thinking, "I've got something to say and I want people to listen"?
Bert Malcom:
Well, I started with my poetry being part of a program based out of Nebraska called Louder Than a Bomb. And what we did is we did spoken word not just in there but in the Twin Cities as well and surrounding areas.
During the competitions and stuff, I decided that I enjoyed it. One of my friends brought it up and he decided to perform one of his pieces in the middle of class and I was like, wow, that is something that I want to be a part of.
And so I joined the team and then we won state and that was really fun, and I thought that was really awesome.
And then how I got into music is actually when I first moved to South Dakota, I moved here and I was displaced, but I had a guitar.
And what I mean by displaced is I moved up here in hopes to meet my biological family, and I was freshly 17. And I moved up here and was displaced, so I didn't really have a place to live when I first moved here. So I spent a lot of time in Art Alley and there was this event that came around and it was called Summer Nights, and it was one of the first things that I experienced here in South Dakota being back since I was five years old. And so I thought that was really cool.
And so I started playing and I spent many, many, many a day in Art Alley here in Rapid City, South Dakota and playing guitar and just practicing. I only had five strings on a six string guitar. I'm pretty sure I played out of tune most of the time.
I just kept practicing and it went from having only two songs that I could sing to people that I wrote to having over 60 songs now.
Lori Walsh:
Wow. You're looking for family and you find family then in different ways, you find family in all ways, in no ways.
Did you achieve the goal of finding some kind of family?
Bert Malcom:
I did. I had to track down all my siblings when I first moved to South Dakota. So I first moved here and I had no idea where any of them were. I just knew that I had a brother named AJ who was here. And so I came here, he met me off the Greyhound and he's like, "well, let's figure it out".
And so I kept looking and eventually I found my older brother, he was incarcerated. And then I found my younger brother and he was in a group home in Indiana. And then I found my little sister and they changed her name.
And so I finally found them all. I got us all to meet back up again, and then I decided I wasn't going to stick around in South Dakota very long, so I hitchhiked for a while. I was a hitchhiker and I hitchhiked to California and then to Chicago and then to New York, and then all the way back to South Dakota.
Lori Walsh:
Guitar with you the whole time?
Bert Malcom:
The guitar with me the whole time.
Lori Walsh:
Okay. So tell me about what having the guitar on your back did for your ability to meet people, connect, survive.
Bert Malcom:
Well, I was never hungry for very long. I would play on a lot of street corners or I'd find some really busy intersections and I'd play there, or I'd played on streets where people walked around with a million dollars in their pocket or I've played on streets where people only walked by with 20. And it just really depends on, I guess, your powers of manifestation.
Lori Walsh:
Which street did you make more money on? The million dollar street or the $20 street.
Bert Malcom:
Believe it or not, probably the $20 street.
The billionaires don't really care, but it's the people that connect with you and give you their time and have that time and understand what the value of time over monetary value and stuff, time is really an incredible investment that you can give to anyone. And so, I've got people that didn't pay me a dime but they still sat there and listened, and I considered those the most valuable times that I had.
Lori Walsh:
Do you carry a notebook? Are you typing down lyrics in a phone? How are you tracking and remembering the music as it's coming to you and as you're working on it?
Bert Malcom:
I just played it a lot until I remembered it, but I've never written anything down.
Lori Walsh:
Really?
Bert Malcom:
Yeah.
Lori Walsh:
So then are you surprised often with how it changes then in that you're trusting that process?
Bert Malcom:
Yes, because my songs have metamorphosized like crazy, so they don't sound near as the same as they did when they first started off.
Lori Walsh:
So someone comes back and sees you on the same street corner on a different day they might hear the same song, but it's a different song, like a river.
Bert Malcom:
Absolutely.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah.
Bert Malcom:
I've had some people and my wife as well, she said the same thing. She's like, oh my gosh, this song has metamorphosized and changed to this, or she'll tell me that it's changed too much and will make me change it back.
Lori Walsh:
Okay. So then for some artists who are listening, Bert, they're going to be like, I get to that point where I'm like, that's it. That was it. That was what that song wants to be. I wish I had it recorded. I wish I had it written down. And if I understand what you're telling me, you're like, mm, maybe.
Bert Malcom:
Yeah. I used to live by kind of like a philosophy when I was homeless in California and it was, the most valuable songs that I will ever create will never be recorded because they were lived in.
And I had some really incredible jams with musicians that I've never seen again but they were the most talented jams and the most fun, and everyone was in sync. Everyone was just feeling the vibrations at such an internal level that I've had things that we could never create again happen.
And luckily I caught a few, so there's a couple of me out there just street performing. There's a couple of me out there street performing and you can see, there's this one where I'm actually on a train in Chicago and there's this gentleman and he's like, can we improv something? Can we just make something up? And I'm like, yeah, absolutely.
And so we sang a song together and we didn't know what to sing about, so we just called it "The Train Song" and we just started singing about being on a train. And it was really fun though.
So those are moments that even if lyrically it wasn't the most charged experience, it was still cosmically one of the most fruitful.
Lori Walsh:
So how much does the Louder Than a Bomb experience influence you?
I watched a documentary on that, and that's just thrilling to even watch the documentary. I can't imagine being in the room or being part of those competitions. But how much did that teach you about just going with the flow, essentially?
Bert Malcom:
What it taught me is lyrics and delivery are both equally important. So delivery is beautiful, if you can deliver a song or a piece of poetry beautifully, it's phenomenal but it is only half the battle. The lyrics and the content that you have behind it, Louder Than a Bomb taught me, they're so much deeper and there's so much more meaning that you can put into something and to mean what you say. And so when you say something, they always say mean what you say. And Louder Than a Bomb taught me to stop, rewrite, scratch over and write again. And when I don't write anything down it's really hard. So I have to stop and re-rehearse a different way and then teach myself differently.
Lori Walsh:
Let's hear some poetry. What would you like to perform for us today, or do you just want to jump in and do it?
Bert Malcom:
Yeah, absolutely. This poem is called "Take a Picture."
You see, sometimes you can hear the pop, pop, pop as some prejudiced cops start shooting nonstop circling my home block until one of my baby cousins get shot. They want to get us tased with mace, slip our wrists up in these chains, mark me property, estate.
My grandma told me to mark the day these prison stripes make me a slave because they tried boarding schools to break. Now they're going to try some different ways. They're going to try and kill a brave by taking mama's kids away.
Now take a picture.
They want to make us pay for those free classes we take. So now my bachelor is fake; I couldn't use it anyway. That's how the government commodities, these oddities were modern comedy. How am I supposed to look to the future like no adequate optometry? How am I supposed to stay headstrong when they're scraping my culture like a lobotomy? And how am I supposed to feed my babies when there's no jobs in this res economy?
Now take a picture.
I see martini glasses and tequilas in your kitchens. For you, it's happy hour. For us, it's called addiction.
Got dirty windows and broken glass, but you could pass for rough living. Got me as a statistic, sipping and slipping, I'm poverty-stricken.
Now take a picture because you can't see me. These stereotypes type my story so that I may never differ from cops looking for a Native man with their fingers on the trigger. They frame my face, they take my picture on poverty porn, and I fit the suspect description.
So take a picture because I can't stand it when these warriors drop their weapons in a war, sometimes when you're beaten and forgotten, you forget what you're fighting for. And I can't take it when our women are subjected to submission because some others still grieve over some daughters still missing. And I won't take it when these hypocrites try to degrade me with their scriptures, think they can try to tame a savage because they couldn't kill me with the liquor.
Now take a picture.
Thank you.
Lori Walsh:
If you're just tuning in, that is Bert Malcom here on "In the Moment" from our Rapid City studio. Now we're going to put some links up to places where you can find him on Facebook and such.
Bert, that's just, wow. I mean, wow. When you're hanging out in Art Alley and people are coming up and talking to you, are there other artists that are doing similar things? Like is there a, for lack of a better word, scene a community?
Bert Malcom:
There's a different scene everywhere you go. And it's always funny because it's always the underdogs that I find myself kind of amongst. And the underdogs in any scene just tend to have the most interesting backstories. And so the artistry that I find here is definitely a lot more, I guess, watered down than a lot of places that I've been.
But what makes me happy and gives me a lot of hope about South Dakota is that the culture still makes it here somehow. So I traveled with a lot of crusty punks, that's what they called themselves when I was homeless. And out here there's still a crusty punk culture. And that surprised me when I came out here, I was like, holy cow, that's insane. The style is here and everything.
Lori Walsh:
What do you mean watered down? Say more about that.
Bert Malcom:
So what I mean by watered down is I feel like we don't have enough resources to baby the beautiful cultures that are kind of hidden within.
So out here in city, there's a music scene, but you really got to know your marketing and you really got to know how to reach out to people and everything like that. And it's the same thing everywhere. But out here, there's not resources of people that will tell you that or teach you that.
And so there's a lot of empty shows that I've seen that needed to be heard. There's so many talented people out here, but because people don't understand that that culture exists out here, I see so many empty shows.
So when you say is there a music scene? I think there's a scene, but I think it could be 10 times bigger. I think if people gave the locals a chance, they could see an incredible community outreach take shape.
Lori Walsh:
It's not the artists themselves.
Bert Malcom:
Oh, not the artists themselves, definitely.
Lori Walsh:
They're not afraid to express their art fully. They're not holding back.
Bert Malcom:
Oh, absolutely not. I've met so many raw and real phenomenal artists that all they talk about is something that comes straight from their heart. And that's always inspired me, and I take that everywhere I go.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Will you sing for us?
Bert Malcom:
Absolutely. So this is a song that I wrote, it's called Walks on His Hands. And I wrote it about people who feel like they weren't really given the right resources to live in the world, but they still go out and they do the best that they can.
[MUSIC]
Lori Walsh:
Bert Malcom, it is my life privilege to push a button so that people can hear you.
Bert Malcom:
Thank you.
Lori Walsh:
That's all I've done today is our job is just to show up and let you do your thing and bring it to the people in South Dakota, of course, but then so much beyond. You have given us a great gift today. I'm really, really grateful.
Anything you want people to know about what you've got coming up next?
Bert Malcom:
I guess I would say try to catch my releases before I take them down because I'm actually taking all my music off the platforms so that I can focus on remarketing and rebranding and I'm going to release everything the right way. And so everything that I've pretty much released right now is kind of a rough draft, and it's all recorded on my phone.
Lori Walsh:
So hot tip, you're going to want that in your archive.
Bert Malcom:
Yeah, absolutely.
Lori Walsh:
It is. Good to know. Thank you so much for coming in today. The door is open for you to come back anytime you want.
Bert Malcom:
Absolutely. Thank you so much.
