Since the time Samuel Locke Ward grew up in relative isolation on a family farm in Iowa, he has taken the road less traveled at every turn. With a preternatural talent for crafting earworm hooks and catchy melodies, the prolific musician could very well have beaten a path to Nashville or Los Angeles and developed a career cranking out hit songs for the pop aristocracy.
Instead, Sam stopped in Iowa City, put down roots and took a more underground route through the world of music, one that has led to collaborations with some of America’s most significant left-of-center musicians. Over the past quarter century, he has built a jaw-droppingly large discography — more than 60 releases and counting — along with an impressive bullpen of musical partners.
“I love pop music, but a lot of pop is very predictable,” said collaborator Jad Fair, who co-founded the mutant rock group Half Japanese in 1974. “I prefer having the feel of a pop song, but with some twists and turns. Sam is great at that.”
Earlier this year, Jad and Sam released their debut album, Happy Hearts, on the venerable indie label Kill Rock Stars, which also released Purple Pie Plow, the brand-new record by SLW cc Watt, his ongoing project with former Minutemen bassist Mike Watt.
Sam (a longtime cartoonist for Little Village magazine) has also worked with members of indie-punk satirists the Dead Milkmen, whose guitarist and vocalist Joe Jack Talcum told me, “I appreciate Sam’s disdain for bigotry and hypocrisy and the way he weaves those sentiments into his lyrics, but I also think he has a healthy optimism about humanity despite the darkness of some of his songs. Also, his melodies are super catchy.”
Born in 1982, Sam was raised by two high school band teachers in a rural interzone somewhere between Oskaloosa and Ottumwa where he messed around with guitars, pianos, horns and other instruments at home or at school. In a pre-internet age, one’s horizons were limited to the menu of options offered by mass media, so when Nirvana hit the bigtime in the early 1990s, Sam began to find his way to underground music.
“Even though Nirvana was a major label platinum-selling band, they were the entryway to DIY music,” he said. “One of the greatest things about 1990s music and art was that there was this fetishization of things that were doable and achievable at a grassroots level. Like, Nirvana made it sound like you could actually start a band.”
With limited pocket change, Sam educated himself with compilation CDs that he bought from mall record stores, like Introducing the Minutemen, Death To the Pixies, and Cream of the Crop: The Best of the Dead Milkmen. As he was hoovering up new musical knowledge, Sam began creating crude multitrack recordings by MacGyvering a children’s karaoke cassette tape machine while he was in high school.
“I started going to shows a ton to see the punk bands of the late 1990s, like the Horrors out of Cedar Rapids,” he recalled. “They had their own tape, so it just seemed doable, like, ‘Oh, well, I can do that!’ Then, at a certain point, I was like, ‘Oh, well, I don’t even need to be a band to do that.’ You know, I can just make music myself.”
After Sam moved to Iowa City in 2001, he lied about his age and experience, and ended up doing sound at the local rock club Gabe’s Oasis, a job he kept for several years. Today, he works at a daycare and drives a school bus — think Otto Mann, The Simpsons’ bus driver character, if he were really into garage rock and free jazz. According to Sam’s wife, Grace Locke Ward, he writes songs in his head during his day jobs, or while he’s doing the dishes around the home.
“I know because he is always humming something or playing air guitar, but with accurate hand chord positions,” she said. “I don’t think he is ever not writing or planning out art. Even if he is talking about something else, Sam is still creating and planning simultaneously somewhere in his head.”
His home studio consists of a dozen-year-old Dell PC tower loaded with recording software and surrounded by microphones, a drum machine, two keyboards, cassette deck, guitar amp and a bass guitar that he plugs directly into his audio setup. Sam then records each instrument one at a time until he either has a finished song or the basic framework for a track that he’s making with long-distance collaborators, like Mike Watt.
SLW cc Watt’s brand-new album, Purple Pie Plow, is the follow up to 2021’s Let’s Build a Logjam and its predecessor Real Manic Time. The seeds of their project began after Sam opened for the punk legend at Gabe’s. At the end of the night he drunkenly threw one of his CDs into the window of the bassist’s van — which wound up getting a lot of airplay on the Watt from Pedro Show.
“I heard that he was playing my music on his show a lot,” Sam said, “and I was like, ‘Man, he must really like this.’ I thought, ‘I’m gonna write him and ask if he’d want to make some music together.’ So, I wrote him, and he agreed.”
All of the SLW cc Watt albums were constructed piece by piece over the internet, similar to the way Watt used to collaborate with Black Flag bassist Kira when they had a two-bass band, Dos. Back in the 1980s, they made their self-titled first album over long distances by mailing cassette tapes back and forth to each other, building their compositions bit by bit.
“Technologies change,” Watt said, “but the primary concept remains the same — it’s about Sam bringing something, with Watt reacting to it, and that’s the result you find in our releases. Our plan is to next try a fourth one, maybe start on it near the end of this year.”
Grace played drums on the first two SLW cc Watt records, which was a logistically difficult task, given that someone has to watch her and Sam’s two kids. “I have a lot going on and usually choose to spend any ‘creating time’ that I have sewing,” she said. “But I love playing drums, and when you’re asked to play on an album with Mike Watt and the dude you love, you fuckin’ make it work.”
Dead Milkmen drummer Dean Clean and Joe Jack Talcum play on the latest SLW cc Watt record, Purple Pie Plow. This collaboration started a dozen years ago when Sam approached Joe about touring together, which was a pleasurable experience for everyone that snowballed into a split LP released in 2011, Just Add Tears.
“It was a lot of fun,” Joe said of their two tours. “Sam was a great travel companion. He always had interesting things to discuss, and he seemed to know someone everywhere we went.”
Dean, the Dead Milkmen’s longtime art director, is a big fan of Sam’s comics, which led the band to ask the Iowa Citian to create the artwork for a bonus EP included in their 2022 album reissue of Metaphysical Graffiti. And the collabs kept coming. Sam had known Jad Fair since around 2010, and during the pandemic he approached the singer to do an album together, but there was a hitch.
“Sam first contacted me when I was working on a project of releasing 100 albums in a year’s time,” Jad told me. “When Sam first wrote to me, I had only recorded 32 albums and I thought it would be difficult to add more to my recording schedule, so I asked Sam to ask me again in a couple months. Two months later, I had finished 50 albums and felt better about being able to record with him and still stay on schedule to reach the 100 mark. Sam and I decided on recording one song each week. I’m very happy with how it worked out.”
Over the years, Samuel Locke Ward has joyfully subverted expectations in all areas of his creative life — as a do-it-yourself home-taper, an underground comics artist and a husband and father of two young children.
“Now that our kids are older,” Grace said, “Sam can get away with being loud and recording at home. Our kids think it’s cool and often will contribute something: banging on a drum, singing to his songs. He is writing a series of songs with our 7-year-old, and the first one is called ‘Cats In Space.’
“The kids are always singing and drawing and being creative,” she continued, “or listening to records and realizing that Sam or I played on them. That always blows their minds. Joe Jack Talcum played Candyland with Orson and took him shopping for clothes when he was 4, and then years later Orson starts to listen to the Dead Milkmen and realizes who his friend Joe is. Creativity gets passed down simply by it being part of their everyday lives.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s August 2023 issue.
