PHOTO: JEAN FORDYCE | Longtime rocker Walter Salas-Humera strikes a prehistoric club for gender equality in his new video “She’s A Caveman.” The frontman of The Silos, who has also had a long solo career bridging rock and Americana, presents the tune on his latest solo album Walterio, out on the Hoboken-based Rhyme & Reason Records.
In the new video, which we’re happy to premiere today, he blends clips from old caveman movies like Eegah! with stop-motion clay animation and his own visage, playing and singing alongside the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, looking, at 59, like George Harrison’s dad.
Salas-Humara has written with people from Alejandro Escovedo to novelist Jonathan Lethem. But on “She’s a Caveman,” composed at the Steel Bridge Songfest hosted by Timbuk3’s Pat MacDonald in Wisconsin, he found a 15-year-old co-writer, Tari Knight. “He came with some fantastic lines,” Salas-Humara says. “My favorite is: She can hunt and gather me/ She can carry me across her land bridge.”
The video, too, has a teenage touch: the claymation is by 14-year-old Paavo Rundman. (Of course Salas-Humara is something of a visual artist as well; his dog paintings have made him popular in another realm).
Sonically, the singer says “She’s a Caveman” “is as much an homage to primitive rock as it is to primitive humans. Its muscular delivery celebrates the power of man and women as they work together to build the human race.”
“Society functions better when everyone recognizes not just gender equality, but the equality of all humans,” he says, “and I hope this fun rock song and video will be a small contribution to that end.”
