Are Pearl Jam Fans Ready for the Indigenous Punk of Gregg Deal's Dead Pioneers?

When members of Pearl Jam and the Dead Kennedys like your band enough to put their name and money behind it, you'd be justified in feeling like you've made it. Even when, in the case of incendiary Colorado punk group Dead Pioneers, you've only been around for four years.

"To open for Pearl Jam in the size of the venues that we're looking at — being as young as we are and having skipped as many steps as we have as a band — we have to believe that we deserve, or are at least audacious enough, to be on that stage," says Gregg Deal, frontman of Dead Pioneers.

The outfit started in 2021 as an impromptu studio session; Deal, a nationally renowned visual artist and spoken-word performer, had never been in a band before, but he thought it might be cool to have some punk noise behind him as he recited a new piece.

With the full lineup of drummer Shane Zweygardt, bassist Lee Tesche (also of Atlanta's acclaimed indie band Algiers) and guitarists Josh Rivera and Abe Brennan, last December Dead Pioneers released a seven-inch single titled "Bad Indian" on Alternative Tentacles Records, the label owned by Jello Biafro, the Dead Kennedys cofounder. On April 11, it's releasing its second full-length, the Hassle Records-released Po$t-American; it will play an album release show on Sunday, April 20, at the Bluebird Theater. After that, Deal and crew will be leaving for the East Coast to open four stadium shows in Georgia and Florida with headliner Pearl Jam, whose bassist, Jeff Ament, hand-picked Dead Pioneers for the tour. Then in May, the group will head to Europe, part of an all-star punk package called the Reconstruction Tour that includes such big names as Pennywise, Propagandhi, and Comeback Kid.



But when Deal calls Dead Pioneers "young," that needs to be placed in context. True, the band itself hasn't been around all that long. But rather than being twentysomething musicians still fueled by post-adolescent fury, Deal is fifty and Brennan is 55.

"This was never what I was dreaming of when I was starting to play in punk-rock bands," Brennan says of the rapid ascent. "It was always about just making a living, you know what I mean? Doing a job that you like."

A scene veteran, Brennan has been in a litany of Colorado punk bands since the '90s, including Wretch Like Me and Joy Subtraction. Before that, he led the Tacoma, Washington, outfit My Name, which released two albums in the early '90s on Seattle-based label C/Z Records — which makes Brennan and Ament labelmates of a sort, since Green River, the band in which Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard played before they launched Pearl Jam, appeared on the legendary C/Z 1986 compilation Deep Six, one of the records that helped crystallize what became known as grunge. And as of this year, Brennan's the new lead singer of Rich Kids on LSD, the resurrected California punk band that everyone from Green Day to Foo Fighters has cited as an influence.

Deal is no slouch in the accomplishment department himself. A member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe who was raised in Park City, Utah, he's risen from commercial graphic designer to a fine artist whose bold, outspoken work has been displayed at galleries around the country, from the Denver Art Museum to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Most recently, his weighty installation piece Tutse Nakoekwu (Minor Threat) — the parenthetical in the title is a nod to the inspirational 1980s hardcore band — was displayed at the Sordoni Art Gallery at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania this past winter. He even appeared on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart in 2014 to talk about the Native American mascot controversy centering on the NFL team that eventually became the Washington Commanders.

"As for being at the forefront of the mascot debate, I'm not the guy," Deal says. "There's a dozen other people that are all kind of doing the same thing, so I'm sharing space with a lot of very intelligent and very passionate people. But being in this discussion about cultural appropriation and about representation is something that I'm very committed to."

Deal and Brennan are both husbands and dads — the former lives in Colorado Springs, and the latter lives in Denver — and they're both activists: Deal is a prominent figure in the national Indigenous rights movement, and Brennan is a longtime labor organizer. They're also both old enough to remember when punk rock first exploded, not that there's anything particularly old-school about the sound of the Dead Pioneers' music. While there are nods to classics like Black Flag and NoMeansNo on Po$t-American, as well as on the group's self-titled debut from 2023, which features fiery covers of classic punk heroes the Minutemen and Circle Jerks, the new album is a timeless attack of rage, smarts, bleak humor and even bleaker riffs.

That said, it's also chillingly of the moment. With a title that's a play on the historical term Pre-American Civilization, Po$t-American serves as a messy autopsy of a deceased national myth of equality and freedom. Po$t-American makes the case that Indigenous cultures, having existed long before European colonization, will endure long after colonialization has collapsed. There's a glint of hope amid the dystopia, but Deal and crew doesn't blind you with it. Nor should they.

On the single "Bad Indian," Deal gets more personal than he ever has before. Amid acidic guitar feedback and a martial beat, he recounts anecdote after anecdote demonstrating the casual hatred and aggressive idiocy he encounters on a daily basis as an Indigenous American: "A woman once asked me my Indian name," he sneers, "and I said, 'It's Gregg' / And she was so disappointed." In the song's chaotic video — filmed in black and white at Denver DIY venue Seventh Circle Music Collective by Sean Tredway and Jesse Nyander of local video production company Nerd Rat Media — the band performs onstage to the frantic delight of dozens of moshing kids. Then suddenly, an elderly Native American in full regalia, complete with feathered headdress, enters the heart of the pit and begins a dance.

Deal sums up his overarching view of the state of America on the final song of Dead Pioneers' first album, titled "No One Owns Anything and Death Is Real." After a catalog of Western society's racial, economic and environmental abuses pour forth in the form of fractured verse, he hits a chorus that's half tirade, half taunt: "We told you / We told you / We told you this wouldn't work."



The cover of Po$t-American was designed by Deal. It's adorned with a cartoonish drawing of a stereotypical Native American with a mohawk and intentionally brutish face. He's wielding a tomahawk, and he's about to bring the blade down on a man, mostly out-of-frame, holding up his hand in defense. That hand is white and dressed in frilly cuffs, circa the European fashion of the 1600s. In other words, it's the perfect illustration of the name Dead Pioneers.

"The cover uses illustrations that I did in 2019 with a series of paintings called The Others," Deal says. "I reappropriated comic-book images and then changed dialogue from the original source material into lyrics from punk rock songs. I was just thinking through the disenfranchisement and fight for equality within the punk rock genre, but then also what that means to me as a person who grew up on it. It's about really finding myself and coming back almost full circle. Those illustrations were my way of figuring out and articulating some of that. It's also something that I legitimately wish I could have seen as a kid.

"It's strange," he continues, "to have these ideas and these opinions and to articulate them through my work and through spoken word, through lectures, through keynotes and even in protests with a megaphone, standing on the back of a pickup truck. And now in a punk band."

Dead Pioneers has some massive and likely life-changing stages ahead of it this spring, but back in February Deal faced another fateful audience.

"We played a small venue in Albuquerque, kind of DIY," he recalls. "I was in a group show about the Transcontinental Railroad, so I had a piece in it. It was traveling, and it went to 516 Gallery in Albuquerque. One of the curators was real keen on us, so he wanted the band to come down and play in conjunction with that exhibition. It was such a special show because it was so different. It was mostly Natives that showed up.

"Everything was a blur," he explains. "The vibe was so different. It's one thing to talk about all the things that we're talking about to a crowd of people, but when we went into that space, we were visitors. I don't live down there. My tribe is not from there. But to have that community feeling immediately was just super cool. It's just a special thing about Indian country and our connections to each other, even when we're not related. Because we are still related, sort of in, at least in the historical sense and in shared experiences. When I walked into the venue and started getting ready to play, I heard three different people at various times start talking about the band's lyrics. Just overhearing them kick around my lyrics was a trip."

Dead Pioneers' trips are about to get bigger. On April 24 and April 26, the group will open for Pearl Jam at the Seminole Hard Rock Cafe Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida, with a combined, two-night capacity of 14,000 people. And on April 29 and May 1, Dead Pioneers will do the same at Atlanta's State Farm Arena, home of the Atlanta Hawks. That two-night audience could top out at over 33,000.

And it all started in a bar in Big Sandy, Montana, population 605.

"I've known Jeff Ament since 2019, when he bought a painting from me. We connected that way," Deal says. "He grew up in Big Sandy before moving to Seattle and forming Pearl Jam, and he does this annual event called the Big Sandy Pig Roast that's a benefit for Montana Pool Service, a nonprofit he founded that builds skate parks in low-income areas in Montana, which means building them near reservations. So he invited us to come up and play the Pig Roast in August last year. Jeff has a kind of a punk band, a side project called P.E.S.T., and we played with them at this dive bar. Jeff was so awesome and generous.

"After we got home," he goes on, "I got a cryptic email from a booking agent asking about our availability for doing an arena tour with a big band at the end of April. He was so casual about it. We figured out the dates with him, then I got this text message from Jeff that night. All it said was, 'I heard you're good. See you in Florida. See you in Atlanta. I can't wait.'"

Despite the mutual respect between Pearl Jam and Dead Pioneers, their music couldn't be more different: sensitive-guy grunge on the one hand, confrontational punk on the other. "It'll be interesting," Deal admits, "because a band like Pearl Jam has people from all over the place in terms of their political and social beliefs. Some people will probaby love us, and we'll get some people that hate us. I'm here for it."

Dead Pioneers isn't just eager to conquer live audiences. On February 17, the band recorded a session at the famed station KEXP in Seattle, which has added "Bad Indian" to its regular rotation. And during the United Kingdom leg of its upcoming European tour — which will include concerts in Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Slovenia, Austria, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands — the band will record another radio session, this time at the BBC in London.

"As far as the band goes, I think we're is striking a nerve," says Brennan, who will barely have time after returning home from Europe with RKL in March before turning right back around to cross the Atlantic with Dead Pioneers. "We are in a situation right now where the wealth gap, the inequality gap between the richest people in the world and the rest of us, has exceeded Gilded Age levels. So there's a lot of desperation there. There are a lot of voices that haven't been heard over the years. There's more class consciousness in the country right now than there probably has been since the 1930s. We're in a situation where rich people rule everything. They run everything, and they're greedy, and it's like they're rubbing our faces in it. So fuck them. It's time to fight back. We're speaking to that, and I think it's resonating. I don't know how we deserve it, but we're going to run with it."

"Listen, Trump is president right now. If I've learned anything from this administration, 'deserve' has nothing to do with anything," Deal says. "Also, being somebody who's never fronted a band until now, I'm starting to realize that there is a gap between the fan and the performer. And in that gap is this belief, this understanding, that you are audacious enough to believe you can be on stage and you can do the things that you want to do. For some people, that is just so wildly unattainable and unthinkable.

"You know," he adds, "at the end of the day, you're essentially writing poetry. You're performing on stage. There's an artistic aspect to this. And being given quarter to sort of think about that, I think, is pretty special. That's really cool, and it gives us space for thinking about the future."

For Dead Pioneers, that future is wide open.

Dead Pioneers with Cheap Perfume, Spells and I Am the Owl, 7 p.m., Sunday, April 20, Bluebird Theater, 3317 East Colfax, bluebirdtheater.net. Po$t-American will be released on April 11; see deadpioneers.band.