Marah Is For Soul Salvation

Mine is a tale rather like Alice In Wonderland.but a story awash solely in the dark and the curious. I'm a has-been at twenty-nine and various forces, both concrete and metaphysical, have driven me virtually full-circle, back to a town I swore I'd never live in. Philadelphia, that is. It may be the cradle of Liberty but for me, growing up, it was always the locus of tyranny, which emanated from a certain key relative. Every association I have with this city is inextricably bound to my experience of it through that relative's worldview. Of course, to go even farther out in the realms of long-verboten First Person Rockcrit-mode, the Liberty that was wrought here in Philly by the Founding Fathers was never meant to include my person. You may well dismiss that as African whining but that very fact affects my thought and creative processes.and my chosen work, in that many believe it's not my natural right to cover the bands you read about in this column. And that it's dubious at best that I should love a band like Philly's around-the-way-boys Marah. But I do love their music, their Rock & Roll Spirit. And the dark descent Underground that characterizes my personal version of Carroll's classic tale has led me to a "curiouser and curiouser" terrain that's been alleviated almost exclusively by viewings of Marah.

Philadelphia is Marah's utopia. It is simultaneously my own private dystopia.

Still Rock & Roll music always provides a ray of light.

If you have no idea who Marah is, they are Philly's most beloved band other than The Roots. Yes, they're often compared to that gritty, blue collar-blues singer from New Jersey and to the Replacements --- who are one of the chief Missing Links between the 60s folk-rock of the Byrds and the 90s Alt-country of Uncle Tupelo et al. Sure, Marah --- brothers Dave & Serge Bielanko, Joe Hooven (bass), Mick Bader (drums) & Mike Brenner (guitars) --- are influenced by the past and cover songs from both acts. But they are not in the No Depression gang (although they employ banjo to great effect) nor do they traffic in ersatz white trash culture. With some more seasoning, Marah could be more like a variant of the roots-proud Canadians in The Band. "Christian Street" is the best rock song in aeons. Right now, Marah is the greatest Rock & Roll band in America --- them and Royal Trux.

My arrival in Philadelphia just nigh coincided with the release of Marah's second album, Kids In Philly. Alas, I missed their triumphal return and block party around the record in March because my allegiances were still primarily to Manhattan and t he run of Allman Bros. and Gov't Mule shows to be found there that month. I did eventually give the record a few spins and ease my way towards clarity on the Marah Question: bar band made good? Alt-country second wavers taken a left turn? Hometown boys fr om Skid Row single-handedly save Rock & Roll? I'm sure you're familiar with this customary rockcrit twaddle and have been prey to the hype surrounding this quartet. Of course it was David Fricke's (infamous) description of the band's first album as "what Exile On Main Street might have been if the Stones had made it on a Folkways budget" that set me on the infernal Grail Quest after the elusive Let's Cut The Crap And Hook Up Later On Tonight. And, by and by, I caught up with the Bielanko brothers' Marah in the flesh, their almost hit & run shows taking on the air of sonic guerrilla warfare.

I first saw them in the rain at Penn's Landing, on Memorial Day weekend. I was impressed with how they kept their small, bedraggled audience essentially captive. Also, I am almost as much a sucker for banjo as a swinging horn section. "Faraway You" from t he second album --- which has definitely avoided the dreaded sophomore slump, despite some nay Sayers --- quickly became my favorite, with it's surefire, crowd-pleasing giddiness. And then there is the blaring, heraldic horns and jet-propulsion fire of the South Philly paean "Christian Street." Singer/guitarist/songwriter/banjo-player Dave and his brother Serge write songs with such humanism which leavens their palpable Philly chauvinism.

Beyond their street erudition, Marah's collective gift is a near-mystical relationship to the Energy that fuels Rock & Roll. It's perhaps sacrilegious to say so but I have seen Marah open for both my long-cherished Jayhawks and the cult hero Steve Earle ( Marah's label head) at South Street's rock hall TLA and wanted to leave at the intermission following the former's typically brief (45 minute) sets. Marah opened the summer's huge Crowes-Page show across the river in Jersey and blew away the headliners an d arrogant guitar-slinging stowaway Kenny Wayne Shepherd from their humble toehold on the local stage. Whether it's the pomp and circumstance of taking the stage to the Theme from Rocky or lap-steel maestro Mike Brenner burning it down, the quartet in concert hijacks your heart, if you're a true believer, to the point that you have nothing left to give. One cannot bottle or buy the natural rapport Marah has got with their audiences; witnessing them delineates the maturity a concerned critic/rock lo ver like myself prays will come to the current Teen Pop audience in a few years' time.

Why? Some critics have said Marah are desirous of rock stardom writ large, in the old 1970s Cock Rock sense. And that they haven't a shot at that because of the dominance of hip-hop and bubblegum in the culture. Certainly, Marah are still quite unknown, d espite wowing crowds repeatedly at South By Southwest in Austin, copious praise from the Rockcrit Establishment [SEE Greil Marcus at Salon.com] and Stephen King donning their tee in People magazine. I would never dare to speak for folks as potentially cantankerous as the men in Marah and am not privy to their ambitions. But the way forward to music that sustains one in light and dark and age lies on their path.

That statement lumps me in with the "old fogies" William Repsher called out in his New York Press article on Marah. Repsher claims that the bandwagonesque laurels heaped on the conquering working class heroes of Marah derive from a selfish and desp icable place in aging white male critics who, obsolete and out of touch, sneer down from upper-class perches to reward the band for rising from the abyss of the gray, drab underworld. It could also be said that since Marah shows is all the way Live! they purvey a rootsy, primitive-electric sound that white male critics reared on the Newport Folk Festivals of yore can relate to with ease --- as opposed to the edgy, potentially threatening tricksterism of the leading album of the day, OutKast's Stankoni a.

However, it's of little import to me that Marah be rock stars or beautiful losers from South Philly who presented their street-poesy to the Cosmos only to have it ultimately shot down in a rain of arrows. Should Dave Bielanko eventually become the walking inference of Saint Sebastian, I will remain forever impressed with the band's verve, nerve and odes to plainfolks. Of even more interest to me is their vision of America, if only their portion of it bounded by Vet's Stadium and corner bars in Perkasie. For their youth, the Bielankos have a great understanding of how deep self-knowledge wholly enmeshed with one's own urban or rural corner of the country creates great, universal music while specifically describing the American Dreams. Unwittingly, they must ken that this sort of writing ability is a typically American trait that animates our most enduring artists --- the ones famed Yank observer De Tocqueville claimed didn't exist (in the 1830s) and would never emanate from this cultural blac k hole --- from the faceless authors of 19th century penny dreadfuls to the Byrds' Gram Parsons to OutKast's Andre 3000. This knowledge will award Marah future greatness when the pop sensations crowding them out of the charts and airwaves are little more than dust.

After a long haul out with the ill-starred Page tour and subsequently their mentor Steve Earle through Europe, Marah recently did a sold out two-night stand here in Philly at its' best rock room, the Khyber. It was so crowded that, once I'd conned the guy on the door to let me in, I could only just strain to hear Marah out in the bar. When I finally dared venture into the actual gigging space, it was so bad that the Bielankos' kind mother had to help me up and down the steps to and from the melee. Her sons can certainly rest assured that they will always be shown mad love from their "homeys" (unless that bullshit, alt-rock-derived backlash sets in, denouncin g them for sellouts and the like). Dave Bielanko did claim that he and his band mates were just about to head into the studio and record the best "rock 'n roll record" that either the band had ever done or the world had ever seen. No matter which way the boast leans, the next gift from Marah is eagerly awaited.

The way they saw fit to ring in the Xmas & New Year's holiday this past weekend (back at the TLA) bodes well for Marah's next millennium. Bassist Hooven, particularly, was riding his gear, socking bottom to the audience. The brothers could hardly restrain themselves from stepping off the very lip of the stage, the elder Serge leaping out into the crowd of year-end diehards to blow his mouth-harp. The band's performance was so raw and direct it seemed they might be too wiped out to make their New Year's Eve show in Collegeville. Everything about their singular energy effected the right degree of seasonal cheer.

CALIFORNIA STARS: The Byrds & Beachwood Sparks' Golden State of Grace

1968: the greatest white pop group of our times, The Zombies, released a landmark album entitled Odessey & Oracle. This recording contains the song "Beechwood Park," which I assume gave juice to the naming of current Los Angeles psych-folk-rock qua rtet Beachwood Sparks (yes, I now know about the street intersections story but this is a more poetic connection... although that latter bit does echo the providence of Stills & them looking outside and dubbing themselves "Buffalo Springfield" afte r a steamroller or whatever). The infamous year of international youth rebellion also comes into play as the leading Los Angeles band of the 60s, the Byrds featuring Gram Parsons, issued their turning point masterpiece Sweetheart Of The Rodeo (Colu mbia). Just as the Zombies were the apotheosis of 60s pop in Britain, the Byrds attained true (commercial and critical) Olympian heights in America. The Parsons and Clarence White-era Byrds are credited with the foundation of the American roots music move ment known as "alt-country" or whatever the genre's clever arbiters at No Depression magazine and elsewhere decide to call it.

In his autobiography, David Crosby has claimed a patent to the suede fringe-and-beads look indicative of a Cosmic Cowboy Style. Plus, he wrote the nonpareil horse opera "Cowboy Movie." It might do well to cite the weird Broken Arrow-derived appearance of Neil Young and his fellow geniuses in the Byrd-acolyte band Buffalo Springfield. Most impressionable to the No Depression crowd, of course, is the late Parsons' cowboy shirts and gloriously neon-baroque sartorial collaborations with rodeo ta ilor Nudie. Musically, all influence must not be hijacked by my beloved Parsons: the underrated, earlier work of ex-Byrd Gene Clark, solo, with the Gosdin Brothers and with Doug Dillard, perhaps deserves the crown of origin (someone please tell them folks at Universal to reissue the Dillard collaborations!). And so the Byrds (and the Flying Burrito Brothers) get to reign supreme in the collective consciousness of alt-country aspirants, dreaming high lonesome dreams tinged with acid visions. The collective sum of these tropes is arrayed as a dazzling constellation in the smoggy firmament above the Beachwood Sparks' City of Angels.

Much has been made already of the recent quartet of Byrds reissues, in all the major rock rags. Hardly know what to say. McGuinn remains an interesting character due to the changes he underwent: from early Greenwich Village earnest strummer to Sunset Stri p Acid King. Hillman was the pretty boy and Thief of Hearts, Parsons No.1 the blink-an'-you-miss-'im Southern Gothic soulman, Clark the beautiful dark horse and Crosby (already) the funky purveyor of all the "weird shit." So, with all the indelible dra matis personae flown save McGuinn, this post-Flyte Byrds lineup on these reissues is a puzzle. The show is quite obviously carried by Clarence White, bluegrass prodigy, inventor of the String Bender device. This is most acute on the overtly arch (?) p astoral of Farther Along.

To get a pretty convincing assessment of the development of the Byrds and how they shaped the sound of California rock, read Brit Barney Hoskyns' Waiting For The Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes and the Sound of Los Angeles (Bloomsbury). Hoskyns pro bes the 60s version of a High Lonesome Sound: the morphed folk-rock of the early decade altered by the rich hippie privilege of Laurel Canyon; rock stars caught between hippie ideals and Hollywood playing at Cowboys & Indians in the studio, on the Strip, composing themes for myriad mini-Westerns that only lacked redface; how isolation, musicbiz paranoia, hard drugs wasted the corporate-freaks and artistes alike at the turn-of-the Seventies. Eerily, Hoskyns traces links to Charles Manson from Neil Young an d Sly Stone, among others. The Byrds, even more so than the Beach Boys, are sketched as the progenitor of the hip California dream of rock and mellow good times. Thus the story of their ruin illustrates the other great American lesson: how isolation in th e extremes of this country (Manson & Co. in the desert... the rock elite that Manson aspired to be part of sequestered in the Hollywood Hills) is dangerous to our collective well-being. The communication --- often best effected at the shows of the Byrds o n the Strip, now Marah and the Sparks on tour --- between disparate groups of folks is what saves America from Itself.

So we are interested in a lot about the Byrds: the sphere of their influence, their lofty position as America's answer to the Beatles, the clash of egos, their musicianship, how they wrought rock in their image, their embodiment of essential American and regional characteristics... and their modishness, their aesthetic...

The Sweetheart's lasso, the cowboy shirts, cryptic album art, eerie harmonies and the gliding lap-steel carry over to Beachwood Sparks. The quartet --- Chris Gunst, Aaron Sperske, Dave Scher, Brent Rademaker --- lassos the clouds and revives the Co smic Cowboy Myth. They call their sound "psychedelic country music." The disc's inner sleeve art even obliquely, unwittingly invokes the cover of Neil Young's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. The Byrds had "The Ballad of Easy Rider;" the Sparks got a tune called "Ballad of Never Rider." The record meshes laidback grooves, lacy, lilting guitar parts, loose & loopy four-part harmonies, sunny AM pop gems ("This Is What It Feels Like" taking up where Wilco's grand "Outtasite (Outta Mind)" left off), st ealthy organ vamps reminiscent of Les Zombi and sometimes, as on sturm und twang set piece "Old Sea Miner," the sound attains that stratospheric, supersonic sublime quality of a cross between prime Byrds acid-visions and Spector Teenage Symphony.

The cream of California bands --- from the ubiquitous Byrds to "America's Rolling Stones" Moby Grape to eco-conscious Spirit and surf stars the Beach Boys --- are all invoked in the record's space-twang-psych-surf music. And, addressed to any detractors: only "See, Oh Three" overtly references a Gram Parsons composition. "Farmer Dave" Scher attempts to work out post-country geometry with his lap steel playing rather than mimic Sneaky Pete. Sho'nuff, they got a fan in false prophet Beck, unclothed Emperor of Post-rock, yet the Sparks are quite apt to sound like the Grateful Dead in Workingman's Dead vein at odd moments (have the Phish-heads taken note? The Sparks deliver for trancing). Also, the early-80s Paisley Underground scene fronted by Rain Parade an d Parsons-idolater Sid Griffin's Long Ryders no doubt gets the nod. The Beachwood Sparks may not be the Second Coming but are certainly doing their wee bit to restore the majesty of the genre here, after the lowdowndirtyvarmint Eagles' MOR buzzard-picking of poor Gram Parsons' charred carcass in the Joshua Tree desert.

In a recent interview, bassist/vocalist Rademaker (Florida-bred like Parsons) claimed there was not much of a scene centered around their style of playing in Los Angeles. Typically, this critic might venture to include Compton-native Marc Anthony Thompson , aka Chocolate Genius, who so indelibly spliced his vodun vaquero wet-dream cover of Prince's "Irresistible Bitch" with vintage Richard Pryor honky phrasing at the Roots' Artist tribute back in December. Thompson is sitting on a goldmine of sepia-twang e xpression, which would truly be the avant-African, futurist Thang... far beyond any issue of the newest latest hippity-hop. (Think on it for a spell, my Brother, I beg. Puffy ain't conquered country yet. Look to Funkadelic's seminal "No Compute" and the S parks' spacey pardners The Ohio Players. Hey "Far East Mississippi," sans funky black bottom could be shoehorned into the Sparks repertoire, if you have any imagination). Forget Kenny Rogers guesting on Wyclef Jean's latest. Africans' reclamation of Count ry is the coming sonic revolution.

Recently, my friend obligingly, repeatedly rotated for me Spector's magnificent flop that he cut on Tina Turner: "River Deep, Mountain High." Spector was the Gotham-exile, vampiric King of Teen with unrivaled Wagnerian visions (odd for a Jew considering W agner's anti-Semitism... visions unrivaled even by acolyte Brian Wilson). And there, amidst the horns' great blare, stark Bop finger-poppin' and the soaring wail of the Queen of Rock, lies divinity. "River Deep, Mountain High," followed by Sly Stone's "St and!" Gene Clark's "Eight Miles High," Wilson's "God Only Knows," Parsons' "Hot Burrito No. 2," Arthur Lee's "Maybe The People Would Be the Times Or Between Clark and Hilldale," Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band's "Keep Sayin,'" Santana 's "Everybody's Everything," Jose Feliciano's "Chico & The Man" (reaching perhaps but I always associate both song and show with LA), War's "Slippin' Into Darkness," Steely Dan's "King Of the World," Buckingham-Nicks' "Long Distance Winner," the Doors' "L A Woman" and the Buffalo Springfield's "Questions" (and we'll gratuitously toss in Little Feat's alternate, horny take of "Rock & Roll Doctor" from Hoy Hoy): that's the apotheosis of California pop.

The lyrics on Beachwood Sparks eschew commentary on California's notorious ecological disasters, propositions negating Affirmative Action, the Ebonics furor, volatile cholo culture, the rampant influx of Mexicans evading La Migra, the preval ence of Samoans, racial strife erupting from South Central, Hollywood star maker anomie, the hard and desperate Strip milieu of such Sparks precursors as Guns & Roses or even the travails of the Naked Guy (wherefore art thou?). Thus the Sparks might well be labeled newbie Rhinestone Cowboys who dispense prairie platitudes to the equally ignorant. Their sound is rather like some wispy white folks version of Reggae, without the monotheistic focus and purpose of racial uplift --- I actually sussed aural link s with the peerless The Harder They Come Soundtrack (chiefly Cliff's compositions). Not quite their fault that their odes to Strip, sand and surf --- like Wilson before them --- are about Good Times... such is the prerogative of artists. And loneso me (apolitical) cowboys who roll ever off into the sunset at the Western horizon, rambling with Spanish guitar and six-guns strapped to their person. Sorry, I'm getting as florid as Lafcadio Hearn in New Orleans up in here...

Anyway, the Beachwood Sparks are more interesting than the sub-ska, surf-lite redux of Smash Mouth, No Doubt, and Sugar Ray et al. What's so novel about Farfisa au go-go and that implied, sun baked racism? The Sparks are obviously not too cognizant of how to locate Watts on the street atlas, yet their purpose is to spotlight a glorious sound of yore. As the faux hillbilly horror of the Eagles attests, Parsons' beauty and genius can never be duplicated. So let the Sparks merely be what they a re: a good night out. An aspect of The Scene Rademaker denies does actually still thrive in Topanga Canyon (see Allison Anders wittily brilliant Sugar Town), where Mountain Mama Liliquoi Moon (La Belle Cipher formerly known as Lisa Bonet) holds court with her love gangs ter Pirate crew, including latter-day Canadian folk rock import Cree Summer.

Despite such bounty on offer and the surreal crystalline beauty of Mike Davis' "City of Quartz," the Beachwood Sparks have already stated a desire to follow Neil Young's retr eat to Broken Arrow and the Dead's exodus to Marin in the wake of The Death of Hippie. Makes a curious cat music-lover like me ponder the health of Los Angeles' local rock scene when a three year-old band already wants to head for Them Thar Hills. Was the re perhaps a curse placed by the African Queen Califia (for whom the Spaniards named the state) mandating that rather than falling into the sea, the residents would be doomed to repeat the same failures of ego excess and thwarted transcendence in cycles?

City, Country, City

At the opposite end of the amber waves, the Sparks' unwitting fellow travelers are again Marah... who insist they ain't alt-country; yet do work in banjo, harmonica and lap steel. And even open their set with bagpipe solos (so why haven't they coll aborated with Germantown's Rufus Harley, the world's only jazz bagpiper??). Marah are most likely to avoid the insular trips and sinister traps that undermined California rock's first flowering in the 60s (we're talking everybody from Phillips to Sly Ston e to the Dead to Dennis & Brian Wilson and the baffling, self-imposed exile of Love). Philadelphia, pointedly City of Brotherly Love, a character and silent witness in their songs, will probably keep the Bielanko brothers rooted in reality both euphoric a nd mundane. Truthfully, Marah, on Kids In Philly, are more so the city cousins of the trippy Strip cowpokes in the Sparks. They too wear their roots on their threadbare sleeves but the stunningly strong sense of place in their lyrics evoke the quotidian verities of the city's dead ends, devastation, and the small joys of the Street. Marah make corner symphonies out of rustic and ghetto junkyard parts. Theirs is a total sound and aesthetic that envelops and enlivens the listener simultaneously.

I don't really know why I chose to write about Marah and the Beachwood Sparks in tandem but I see something similar in their attention to a regional sound grounded alternately in honest details and kaleidoscopic sunbursts. Then there's something about the Byrds and the current crop of reissues, how they, as the quintessential American band of the last thirty years, have a long arm of influence reaching out to the best of young bands today (SEE McGuinn sitting in with Wilco on Hard Rock Live). Oh, I don't know! But there's something... the connections more evident than my poor, potion-altered cerebellum can manage to excavate from cultural riddles at present. Some might argue that Marah are legitimate and the Sparks mere honky-tonk poseurs. However, for all the Darkness I see at present and my gloomy sojourn at the bottom of the velvet Rabbit-Hole, I am still a rock purist/militant and I truly believe that the younger musicians aware of their roots, trying to carve out a part of the country in song for posterity, are the ones that have some place to go. And those will be the ones that we care about as we age, that make indelible songs integral to our lives.

Meanwhile, the Sparks are sailing on their axes toward castles in the air. And what a high their debut brings. It's utterly incomprehensible since they may well be the first group I adore where I'm not enamored of the singing. This is no way detracts from the songs, which are great. They could just use some Poco Deliverin'-style verve live (God bless Richie Furay). Essentially, Gunst's fragile, ethereal vocals launch the songs onto the astral plane of Americana. Live, you just drift along in the band's su n dazed orbit --- once you get IT --- and find yourself deep on the prairie planet with other ghosts of the American Road. Time ceases flowing and you lose your moorings in a single, known place. Perhaps even your inner adhesions set sail. The quartet ain 't no ways reached the Mount Tamalpais high attained by the Byrds. They ain't as dark and crazed as late Moby Grape genius Alexander 'Skip' Spence. This ain't the low-rider funk of War. Can't match the son satoris of Santana. Nor do their compositi ons match the sand-drenched, Spector-steals of Brian Wilson. Still, it is quintessential Kalifornia Kool, for these pre-millennial days of "post-rock." De Sparks got po'-ten-shull, as Jimmy Castor said. As with the Amorica-era Black Crowes --- [largely LA -based at the time... whose "Stand!" answer song "Sting Me" may or may not have been inspired by the LA Riots? Recorded in 1992, "Sting Me" now sounds like a rehearsal for Amorica's dark, sprawling Americana visions] --- who proselytized mightily about Pa rsons, Leon Russell (even Carney seems obliquely, unwittingly invoked on Beachwood Sparks), Nick Drake, that Zappa-associate and genius born in mountains above Los Angeles called Lowell George, and paid homage to Sly Stone, War and Santana t hroughout that album, the Sparks see themselves as cultural antennae luring adoring audiences to the Promised Land of Cosmic America. They admire and envy long-ago Laurel Canyon exile Neil Young who did It (and does it) His Way. As previously stated, they 're poised to erect their own New Buffalo (hope they don't fail)... striking out for the Territory perhaps as intrepidly as those original badasses of the New Wild West, George Hunter and his Charlatans?

With Young actually singing "Buffalo Springfield Again" on his latest record, the Beachwood Sparks might just serve as heralds for a coming age of honky-tonk heaven.

Marah is already ensuring that rock 'n soul music (as an earlier great Philly outfit, Hall & Oates, put it) remains in the blood of the American Experience.