Maxim Ludwig lists musical influences as diverse as Hank Williams and Tom Waits on his MySpace page-both artists whose heydays were decades before Ludwig was born. It makes sense then, that his upcoming album counts some four-dozen contributing band members.
Ludwig is nothing if not eclectic.
His as-yet-untitled first release, featuring himself and The Santa Fe Seven, spans harmonica-driven blues to achy breaky ballads, with flavors of Fleetwood Mac-type rock, country and Americana mixed in. “My first instruments were the pots and pans in my godmother’s kitchen,” 20-year-old Ludwig said. “I pretended to be Ringo Starr. By the time I was 10, I was playing blues harmonica in beer halls in a little German town my dad is from, with guys who sang ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ in terrible accents.”
Ludwig was born in Brooklyn and moved as a young child to California, spending his teen years in Malibu. His dad, Gerd Ludwig, a National Geographic staff photographer who won a Lucies award, and mom, Dana Fineman (contributing photographer to The Malibu Times, as well as People, Time and Life magazines), supported a liberal arts education, sending Maxim to Bard College in New York to study creative writing, but he dropped out after a year.
Ludwig never took formal music lessons, but learned the guitar early on from a handyman who worked around the family home.
“He was this skinny, toothless, heroin addict,” Ludwig said. “He showed up one day saying, ‘Kid, I’m gonna teach you how to play the blues.’ He built me a slide for my guitar out of a toilet paper tube and we played all day. I never saw him again and that was the extent of my formal music training.”
But Ludwig counts his lack of education as a plus, claiming that, since he never learned traditionally how to write music, he isn’t bound to one “voice.” Indeed, on his album, he plays harmonica, guitar, bass, keys, drums and various percussion instruments.
“My idea with this album was to get a bunch of guys together and just see what music could be,” Ludwig explained. “So my best friends are on the album, from small towns in Pennsylvania to a New Mexico bum who plays toys. Literally.”
Ludwig likes to use different guitar players because he might want a “certain emotionally distorted guitar sound, like an Egon Schiele painting,” on one track and a “Jackson Pollock or a Vermeer” on another.
(In addition to great painters, he also cites writers, including Shakespeare and William Faulkner, as musical influences.)
“Everyone gives what he does best and no one has a particular job,” Ludwig said. “We’re very communist that way.”
Ludwig wrote, arranged and produced all the tracks, providing vocals as well. When it comes to writing lyrics, he says that he “articulates like a doughnut.”
“There’s some really great stuff all around a song,” he explained. “You know you’ve done something good when you’re embarrassed and it hurts to say it. But there’s that weird hole in the middle. That’s where the music comes in.”
Rather than traditional lyricists, Ludwig says he admires writers like Raymond Chandler and Baudelaire, who “pick up on different parts of speech, so that there’s the author’s voice and then the voice of all these other authentic characters.”
He cited the poem “Une Charogne” (“A Carcass”) by Baudelaire, which describes the discovery of a dead body, in the most lyrical of terms.
“Baudelaire writes this beautiful description of a dead prostitute,” Ludwig said. “Anything can be beautiful if you make it beautiful.”
Ludwig produced his album, which he is thinking of titling “Old Whalesback Road,” with no support from any label and is looking to release it through his own independent label, Two Bears Fighting Records. He says he wants to write songs that really reflect what people are feeling today.
“The closest things we have to standards today are The Beatles,” Ludwig said. “Guys like Woodie Guthrie wrote about what brought people together.”
Fineman that her son’s populist consciousness was always a part of his makeup.
“He was president of his class at Crossroads,” she said. “One day he staged a protest against the war, distributing flyers to all the kids and advised staff that he was organizing a walk out. All the kids left the school at the appointed hour and marched to the federal building.”
Proud of her “extremely gifted” son, Fineman was aware early on of Maxim’s passion for music.
“When he was little, I had to spray paint his hair dark, like a Beatle,” she said. “He’d walk down Sunset Boulevard with his drumsticks, talking to all the Hell’s Angels with this British accent. He’s quite a hoot.”
Ludwig said he thinks he might do a college tour when his album is finished. When asked what’s in his future, he responded immediately: “I always wanted to learn how to fix a car,” he said. “That, and cook a duck.”
Maxim Ludwig and the Santa Fe Seven will play Jan. 9 at the Unknown Theatre, 1110 Seward St., Hollywood. More information can be obtained online at www.myspace.com/maximludwig