Sam Baker - Pivitol Moments
The album sort of just lay around for several months, but slowly by judicious radio play, word of mouth and a sort of grassroots growth more and more people started latching onto the songs and music of Sam Baker, especially over here in the UK.
He never really had many expectations of MERCY, other than that it was forged out of truth and a sense of justice. Actually getting to the point where he conceived a life beyond his day job was an alien thought. He didn’t promote the record, neither did he advertise it; and he manufactured, initially, about 1,000 copies.
“I didn’t market it at all,” he says. “There was no marketing—I played out at gigs a lot and radio guys started playing it, but there was no marketing. I don’t think I even understood the marketing of it, but it just went into the bigger world on its own. It felt so good.”
So how did Sam Baker reach a point so late in life that he could get his music out there into the bigger world. Well, it’s been quite a story—one that could have been an epic fictional novel if it weren’t all so true. He appears to have enjoyed a typical small town America upbringing in a small, rural town on the prairie between Waco and Fort Worth
“Yes I did. I went to a college, in Denton, about an hour and a half away and took the music programme. I took guitar lessons with a group of jazz players, and they taught me everything I know now,” he explains. “I just thought: ‘Well if I go to college I’ll get a job.’ When I was at college I got an internship, with the Government Agency at a bank. It was a job, you know. Back then I went from cheap hotel to cheap hotel to cheap hotel, I drove an old car, I had one black suit and I wore it every day.”
This job was in Sam’s words pretty mundane. It involved travelling from town to town, mainly across Texas and visiting banks as a bank examiner and conducting an inventory. At the time, he was more than happy to become part of the establishment because it offered that all important security that we all have to have in our lives.
“For a job like that you had to follow orders and wear the uniform and I did because it was my job,” he explains. “I did that for a very long time—they were nice people and it was good. The travelling made it very interesting—it was a young man’s dream.”
The travelling that was involved with this job instilled in Sam a restless spirit. He found it difficult to settle in one town for too long and loved the whole idea of travel.
That restless spirit found him working as a carpenter and a white-water boatman, and just travelling the world—until those travels led him to Peru in 1986 and at just 32 years old his life was turned upside down. “I got in the middle of somebody else’s war,” he explains ruefully.
It was a very traumatic experience; the train in which he and some friends were riding
on. became the target of a terrorist assault by the Sendero Luminoso or ‘Shining Path’ Maoist group. Several passengers died, including a German boy and his parents, who were sitting next to Sam. Though he nearly bled to death, Sam survived but suffered a constellation of injuries and after effects—shrapnel in his leg, renal failure, brain damage, even gangrene.
To read the full story turn to issue 73 (August 08) of Maverick Magazine…