Marah Jawns / Ep. 1
If there was a wrong note, it didn't matter as long as it was rocking.
-Malcolm Young
jawn one.
We played a show at Penn State in State College, Pa. It was an official student event. Maybe for kids celebrating their final exams? It was spring. Probably 1998 or 99. My mom and stepdad had a hunting camp not so far away from the campus and I remember that we stayed there the night before the show. We’d come from somewhere else, some other gig but it’s murky now. In those days we took almost any gigs offered to us, but this one was a college and colleges always paid more money than clubs. I think the guarantee might have been $500. It might have been the first time we were offered that much too. To be honest, even at the end of the band the guarantees weren’t much higher than that; we were good live but mostly no one cared. Mostly no one came to see. The gig, for whatever reason, required us to be there around 10 or 11am for an early afternoon 60 minute performance. The morning of the show it was pouring so much rain that I was sure the event would never even happen. We showed up anyway because the idea of not getting the money was unfathomable. There was one sound guy there, a student. I think he was bummed out when he saw our van pulling across the muddy grass towards the enormous stage. I think he thought he might be able to slip back up to his dorm and crash out and I don’t blame him. It was a deluge. The problem was that no one had contacted either him or us to say that everything was canceled. What could we do? Everyone just winced at each other, rain dripping down our foreheads, joking how the show must go on. We did a soundcheck and then we waited in the van by the stage until it was time for us to play. I watched the sound guy huddle under the cover of the stage. The rain was driving though. Sideways rain. We probably offered him shelter in the van but he probably said no because we looked ragged, which we were. I remember being overcome by such an awkward feeling around then. It was a feeling I’d had many times across my music years, this jabbing sense of shame that came and went in waves. To have dreamed so hard about rock and roll and then to have to contend with so many times where no one showed up was mind fuckery. My brother and I clashed about this a lot in our own ways. I believe he thought I wasn’t confident enough, or cocky enough. I think he thought I was unable to see just how foolish the masses were and just how good we were. And he was right, I suppose. I was never able to get past the reality that although we were lucky in so many ways, I could never shake the feeling we were marked by a demon or something. These are the witchy things/ living between the cracks in the couch/ that define bands. These are the fuels and tumors that either push them through their galaxy or slay them with cancerous heartbreak. We hit the stage at noon like the contract said and there was no one there. Across a vast green field you could land a 747 on not a single human being could be seen. On the high stage, the four of us plugged in and the sound guy hit his switches and away we went. I remember looking at the other band members and I felt as if parts of me were literally melting on the inside. So many years later, I laugh at it now, but at the time I was mildly devastated. Getting your hopes up is so beautiful. Everyone deserves it. But having them dashed hurts like hell. Even if you act tough and unbothered. Maybe it hurts even more when you do that, I don’t know. We might have played for 10,000 kids in the sun had fate smiled upon us that spring day. Instead, Marah from Philadelphia made 500 bucks and played for no one. We did our whole set so we couldn’t be refused our contracted money. Halfway through the last song a tarp roof over our heads gave way and what seemed like thousands of gallons of cold collected rain slammed down all over me as I played my electric. No one else got hit. I should have been char-broil electrocuted. But I wasn’t. The sound guy made no effort to do anything nor did any of the guys in the band. What could anyone really do? The show must go on, remember They busted out laughing and so I laughed too. Then we just kept on playing/ soaked to the bone. It was otherworldly. Like so many days and nights to come.
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jawn two.
We played a show in Paris, France. It was during the European tour for our third album, Float Away with the Friday Night Gods. We had a tour bus and our own stage manager but the record was nothing but a colossal flop. Critics hated it and so did almost every one of our fans. The Euro shows were the most sparsely populated we ever played over there. Many nights there were but a handful of people in the dark clubs and their smattering of well-intentioned applause gave me some kind of entertainer’s PTSD. Night after night, I was experiencing a sort of complex emotional vacillation; we were touring in the glorious old cities of Europe on our very own tour bus; a double decker bus, if you can believe that. I didn’t even know there was such a thing, until we suddenly had one of our own. It was fantastical. After many years of existing only in vans and only with either me or maybe a tour manager driving until our heads fell off, we were now able sit in the very front of the upper deck and watch the lakes of Switzerland and the mountains of Germany and the streets of England float by like scenes from an art house film about an unknown American band touring Europe in a tried and true rock star’s bus. At Paris, everything got weirder. Instead of another show where only a few Scotch or Dutch showed up to nurse pints in the shadows, we took the stage to a club filled with the electrified French. The show was superb. We killed it because we were so lifted by a small sea of faces instead of a half dozen or so. Afterwards we hung out very late with the Parisians who charmed us and teased us. One after another they listened to me tell them that my dad was from France. Then I would butcher the name of the village he’d grown up in and they would flash knowing grins, buy me another drink, and light my foreign cigarette in the old French style. I’m talking subtle grace and the underlying tones of faint sexual promise. Everyone there was from the record label though. The French division of Sony, who we were involved with over there. And deep down, although I wanted to bask in everything that was happening, I knew it was all a sham. Deep in my bones I knew it wasn’t at all what it seemed. We’d even been told that there would be a lot of label reps in Paris. We’d been promised they were so pumped to see the band. And despite what I knew from our careers so far, I will say that these French folks tried hard. It actually seemed as if they were in love with our band that evening. We laughed and conversed and it seemed dignified and real. I found myself letting my guard down; maybe we could crack France like no American bands ever did; we had this built-in back story that the French public wouldn’t be able to to resist, right? Short answer: no. Hours of bar talk and compliments and toasts, like so many music biz nights: it ultimately led nowhere. None of us ever saw a single one of those French Sony people again. The whole night left a ghost story in my mouth. Did we even speak with the living? Or did we perform, schmooze, and toast our future with the well-dressed dead?
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jawn three.
We played a show in Los Angeles. We were opening for Steve Earle in the House of Blues out there. I think it was around 2000, 2001. So long ago now. Everything we did is fucking eons ago anymore. Those House of Blues places were really something. Mostly our band existed in tiny haunts/ small hurt clubs that felt like human struggle in the daytime. The beat up tap beer joints or black-walled punk rock clubs were temples for local people who dug indie music, but walking into those places 5 or 6 nights a week for months on end could begin to wear you down. Perhaps the worst part was this: no one who worked there had ever heard of you or was- in any way shape or form- happy to see you. Not a single one of them would have given a rat’s ass if you lit yourself on fire and burnt up like a car wreck right there on the floor in front of the stage. Especially the lone hungover keeper-of-the-keys tattoo’d dude who unlocked the doors for you when you first arrived to load in. That guy fucking hated us. He hated all the bands except the bands he loved. That’s kind of how it goes though. Through the buttery streaks of sunlight falling across the evening planks, a lot of the people who worked at the clubs we depended on never gave us the time of day. They would just as soon grunt as they watched you disintegrate as to have to be there later on to hear you play your songs. House of Blues’s were different though. Not because they were places where the staff were friendly and went out of their way to say, Hey guys, welcome to LA. Who wants fresh paninis!? Mostly, they did not. But it doesn’t matter as much when the dressing rooms are nicer than any apartment you have ever lived in. Or even seen. Shiny wood and mirrors and thick deep paints in intellectual shades and colors wrap their arms around a stinky bass player with nine dollars in his wallet and a yellow mustard stain the size of a seagull’s head on his thrift store slacks. I remember feeling so accomplished up there in our room. I felt like I’d done something right with my life. A little taste of the tea on Steve Earle’s side of the street led me to fantasizing. I dared to picture us deserving of more. I wrote some good fucking songs, I mumbled to myself. This is where our band deserves to be. An hour later though, after we’d completed our sweaty 28-minute opening slot in front of a huge room full of west coast Earle fans who’d never heard of Marah, I’d burst into that fancy backstage room and see it entirely differently than before. Fact is, I needed to get the fuck out of there as soon as possible. Moments before, as the feedback shimmered off my brother’s guitar while we walked off the stage raising our beers at the crowd in solidarity, I’d reared back and thrown my harmonica/ centerfield to home plate/ high and far into the crowd. It had been a spontaneous act but almost immediately I regretted it. I never saw it land but I was absolutely certain that it had killed someone. Or at least slit a forehead open so that human brains were slithering out. As the rest of the guys grinned and congratulated one another, I ran up the steps back to those cushy quarters in abject terror. I envisioned the entire crowd gathered around some delicate young actress freshly arrived from Nebraska as she went paler and paler… leechy ribbons of her raspberry blood rolling off her temples, snaking across the floor. And smack dab in the middle of that carnage sparkling like a battleship at dawn? My Hohner Blues G harp, with my goddamn fingerprints all over it. I pictured 400 slightly buzzed IPA dudes in Uncle Tupelo shirts all hollering that they’d seen me do it! I was mortified, my heart racing as I suggested to the band we ought to pack up and get out of there with the quickness. But no dice; they wanted to drink their free Coronas. Hours later, after Earle’s show was over and no LAPD had busted into our dressing room shooting their guns, I calmed down and realized that someone had probably just caught my harp and stuck it in their pocket like a minor league foul ball. No big whoop. Whatever. Ugh.
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jawn four.
We played a show at the Elk Creek Cafe in Millheim. That’s my town, the tiny hamlet in Central Pennsylvania that I’ve called home for a long time now. We’d played the club before, of course, it being pretty much the only music venue of its kind for many, many miles in any direction. But in all of the time’s we’d done so, I’d never actually acted on a little fantasy I’d been carrying around with me. You see, ask any touring band schlub about being able to mosey on over to your own band’s show from a hotel very close to ‘the venue’ and I guarantee you they will tell you that it is one of the best things in life. Why? Because after so much time having to navigate the lost world of other people’s cities just to pass out in bed, finding yourself staying in accommodations within walking distance of the actual stage you’ll be on that night is a pure delight. But I wanted to one-up that seldom felt feeling. So that day I told my brother not to worry about double parking the van outside my house on Penn Street, a block away from the cafe. Don’t bother, I said, excitedly. I’m bringing my shit up there with the wagon. The wagon in question was a rickety garden wagon I’d bought at a yard sale in Sugar Valley for ten bucks a while back. Up until then I’d mostly used it in the summer to transport my kids and their backpacks to the daycare down the street. Morning after morning, I’d be out there wheeling them over the root-lifted sidewalk ramps and around the deep craters along the edge of the concrete where, judging by the level of damage: largish meteors had once fallen. Today though, today was going to be different. So I lugged the wagon around to the front of my house and carried out my Fender amp and my guitar case and my gig bag with all my harps and crap in there. Into the wagon it all went. It fit so perfectly/ like destiny coming down. Then I lifted the pull bar and locked my hands in the handle and started off on my way. Up the street, heading north, towards the main drag and the doors of the Elk Creek. It hit me then: how many people had ever even done this? In the long storied history of rock/roll, how many motherfuckers had ever hauled their shit to the gig in a garden wagon? I felt so good. I felt so proud. That night before and after the show, I told everyone who would listen about what I’d done. People smirked, said that’s really cool, missed what I was saying altogether. Fuck all of them. It WAS really cool. It was sublime actually. Life-changing. Somehow I’m sure it was life-changing.
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jawn five.
We played a show on a boat in Philly, a riverboat thing. This was around the Float Away record again, when the record label we were signed to (Artemis Records) had real legends of the business working for them. They had experienced press people and legendary A&R people and their radio people had actually done tons of blow with DJs all over the nation back in the day. Back before now had happened and everything was getting stupid. The internet was in its infant stage in 2003 when we did the boat show, but pretty soon it would explode. Then nothing would ever be the same again. All of these old radio heads and traditional A&R fuckers, they’d be toast, their careers up in smoke in a matter of months. Most would survive, of course. You don’t spend years smiling ear-to-ear as you listen to another drummer talk about how much he loves Rush/ or sipping designer beers (but pouring most of it out when the band isn’t looking) as you tell very green young people what they want to hear/ and not end up forming survival mechanisms that could withstand the nuclear holocaust. They’d survive the decimation, alright. They’d all end up creating yoga apps or going to chef school or working for iTunes or some shit. But in 2003 the guillotine blade was still in the air. And bands like ours were, unbeknownst to us, the last in line. As we passed through the doors to Old Fashion University’s School of Success, we never had the slightest notion that this was it. Soon, rock radio would be mostly dumb and pointless. Soon the ancient ways of ‘breaking a band’ like touring them relentlessly in a van and making sure their album got a tiny mention in the Village Voice would fade into the ether of a digital wilderness where everyone was record industry. And damn near everyone was an artist. This boat then. It was something being run and promo’d by 93.3 WMMR. They were one of the big guns in Philly radio for a long time by that point. I’d grown up listening to WMMR. I wore their t-shirts to middle school. In high school, me and my brother and my buddy John took a casino bus in the summertime with tons of old ladies headed for Atlantic City. There, WMMR was putting on a free simulcast concert with The Georgia Satellites right on the beach. We got in the front row. And we also got the roll of ten dollars in quarters that the casino buses gave every person who paid to ride with them. The old ladies thought we were cool as fuck. And guess what? We were. So now that the Float Away album was out and people were working behind the scenes to get it on the radio, an invite from MMR to play a special event just for their listeners was such an honor. Sure the gig might be mad, but this was our home turf. This Delaware River was the river we still fished in at least a few times a week. It was as Philly as it gets in our eyes and we jumped at the chance to play for radio listeners who never felt the need to dig much deeper for tunes than Aerosmith, Thorogood, Seger, or Joel. It was a fun crowd, nothing huge, but it all clicked. The sun was setting when we played and the city skyline was lit up with flashes and glints and lights going on in the buildings off in the distance. During the gig I’d immediately noticed an old friend from the neighborhood in suburban Conshohocken where my brother and I had grown up. Jimmy was there with a lady. I knew right away who he was; he had the same straight long hair that went down to his hips as he’d had long ago, but now it was platinum silver even though he was just my age. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, but I was struck by something right away. Something that has never left me to this day. Any awkwardness or weirdness that I might have (and probably would have) been able to conjure up in myself simply by noticing someone from my past early in the set…it was all completely lifted out of me from the get-go as I saw that Jimmy and his girl were having the time of their lives. I saw him pointing at us and smiling and yelling into his lady’s ear. And she was not hearing him, I was sure, but she was happy as hell/ smiling back at him/ shaking her head like she agreed with him anyway. It relaxed me. It eased me in a way I don’t believe I’d ever been eased onstage before or since. It dawned on me, against my own deeply entrenched insecurities, that Jimmy from Conshy was blown away that Serge and Dave from up the street were in a band. And that they were being played on WMMR. And that they were playing their asses off on a boat on the river right now/ right here/ right in fucking front of him tonight. And they were really really great. Like: the real thing. A real band. Not just more talk from dudes playing bad metal in the garage down the alley. This was different. This was very very unusual. And it hit me like it hit him. Maybe more so in a lot of ways. Afterwards, we had a love fest. We hugged and drank and Jimmy gushed and his wife was lovely but it was her man who kept the conversation rising and rising as he drank beers and kept saying that he couldn’t believe any of this. That he was so proud of us. And that he knew we were gonna make it really big. Which, of course, we never did. And I never saw Jimmy again. We had that one last supercharged evening together and that was it. I went my way into the night and he went his. He died like a decade later at the age of 42. I didn’t hear about it for a long time. He never knew how much that night meant to me. How much his words and his smile meant to me, coming from the same streets I’d come from. Coming from the same places and the same people and the same soft summer evening skies back when we were kids.
Todays slice of Thunder Pie was absolutely free for each of you. But if you have ever considered becoming a PAID SUBSCRIBER here, this week would be a great one for you to do that. I could seriously use the scratch because my regular outdoor labor has evaporated here in the heart of winter. If you like my writing (and the idea of supporting me in my efforts to keep on doing it) then please consider paying me for my work. You’ll get new words from me every single Friday morning at 9am EST. Now that I’ve added this Marah Jawns series to my arsenal, I’ll be including them as well as my beloved (!) Scroll of Jawns on a pretty regular basis as well,. But mostly for paid subs.
I’ll just come out and say this and believe me when I do. I fucking hate promoting myself. But it’s the nature of the beast with art and there’s no way around it. You either get seen and heard as an artist hollering from the mountaintops or you toil in the wilderness of absolute obscurity until you die from that shit.
I’m really hoping to get a couple new yearly subscribers this weekend. $120 a year…for like 47 or original essays, stories, jawns, and hot slices of memoir. That’s a very good deal! Why do people shy away from it? Is it because the internet has so much free shit? What will happen in the years to come? How much will folks gripe and bitch when the art we’ve taken for granted for so fucking long just goes away? When it becomes insanely subpar and AI driven because there are basically no bands or writers or painters or poets or whatever who can afford to work hard to create their best work simply to hand it out on the internet corner absolutely free.
Grrrr.
Buy a subscription. Hell, buy two if you can afford it. Save the goddamn world.
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I love you fuckers. Have a really great week, ok?
sb
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Things I Liked This Week.
Arle and I watched the film Here recently. It’s based on a critically acclaimed graphic novel of the same name and reunites Forrest Gump’s Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. Doused in AI aging/ unaging, the movie is pretty different than almost any I’ve seen before in that it only allows one view, from one corner of a single room in a single house, for its entirety. It moves more like a play than a flick, actually. Most reviews have slammed it but we both thought it was spectacular. Seriously. It has guts and sadness and joy and tons of anger and fear and optimism and death… just like any house is haunted by if it stands long enough. Fuck the critics and the uppity people. This movie is well worth seeing.
Severance on AppleTV continues to blow my mind. I’m mentioning it again because it’s such a powerful series. And Arle and I are only 4 episodes in so far. Between you and me I get wildly uncomfortable and peculiarly thrilled when I’m watching it. Just like I get watching old live footage of The Replacements. I’m pretty sure that’s how you know something is magnificent.
My oldest kid, Milo celebrated their 16th birthday this week. I wrote this about that. I love them so much. Time is moving so fast. Goddamn it.
I’ve largely ignored the news this past week simply because I hate whatshisface and every one of his pathetic ring-kissing minions. Too much info about them begins to make me feel despondent and helpless. Anymore I think it’s okay to step away from ugly trouble. I don’t think we have to hurl ourselves into the righteous front lines all of the time. It will kill me if I do it. I used to think I had to but now I don’t. I want to love my family while I can. Time is limited. Time is running out. And I want to make handiwork with my hands, create whole worlds with my imagination. I want to smile at the sky more/ stab myself in the eyeball less. It feels nice. And it isn’t wrong.
The landscapes around my neck of the woods in Central Pennsylvania have been snowy and frozen and cottage-core in the old country ways this week. Everywhere I go I see true wild crows painted into the side of the road. I see bald eagles painted into the high hemlocks by the Elk Creek. I see corners of fields far off in the distance where deer have surely stood but don’t stand now/ the afternoon slashing the shadows out there with punishing winds. The farm fields and the wooded ridges beyond them are like some flea market table of priceless Wyeths, each one free for the taking.
Tales from the road. Very cool. Another corner of the American dream. And, fwiw, I really dig Float Away… Maybe the production is a bit Brit Pop (so fucking what?), but the tunes, as always, are top notch.
Marah always rocked. No matter how many people were there, how long the set was or how you guys were probably feeling. That's what made those shows so special for us. For that time nothing mattered but the music. Fuck problems or politics or life or whatever. Just loud rock music. Bliss!