by Dean Budnick

Few individuals within the jam band scene were familiar with Mark Karan prior to his initial appearances with the Other Ones in the summer of 1998. At that time the story that immediately surfaced was that Karan had performed on the theme to the TV show Friends (not quite true, see below). Rumors aside, over the course of that run, Karan began to garner the allegiance of some notoriously demanding fans. Following the tour, Karan joined Bob Weir in Ratdog, a role that he occupies to this day. More recently, the guitarist has formed a new group, Jemimah Puddleduck, with fellow Other One, John Molo and two additional players (Bob Gross on bass, Arlan Schierbaum on keys). The following interview with Mark touches on all of these topics and looks to the future as well. For more of Mark's musings (and updated tour information as well) visit http://home.pacbell.net/mkaran.

DB- Let's start with the Others Ones. How did you get tapped for that gig.

MK- That was through John Molo pretty much. It's funny, it's kind of assbackwards. I grew up in the Bay area, listening to the Dead as a kid and I moved to Los Angeles about nine years ago. I've played with a lot of different bands down here and I do some sessions, whatever it takes to get by in the music world. John and I had crossed paths a bunch of times on some gigs and once in a while in the recording studio. We just enjoyed each other's music and each other's company. So when Stan Franks didn't work out with the Other Ones, John was there because of the Hornsby connection [Molo has performed with Hornsby for more than 15 years]. He just gave them my name.

DB- You mentioned that you saw the Dead quite a bit as a kid. When was your first show?

MK- I don't remember the first show. It may have been on my birthday at the Fillmore in 66. I know I went to see the Dead on my birthday but I can't remember if that was the first time I saw them or not. But me and my little junior high friends we all used to go see the Dead: at Speedway Meadows and Golden Gate Park at the Panhandle and Polo Field. Bill Graham used to put on Sunday afternoons from 2-6. He offered the same show that had happened Friday and Saturday night and if you were under twelve you got in free. We were all too young to be part of the Haight-Ashbury scene, we were all eleven, twelve years old but we were wannabes like crazy (laughs). We were the little baby hippies running around with long hair and our little batik jackets with fluorescent painted peace signs on the back, wanting to be as much a part of it as we could. After a couple of years I practically lived at the Fillmore, Fillmore West, Winterland and all that stuff.

DB- So that must have been a heady experience taking the stage with the Other Ones.

MK- It was definitely a mindfuck to play the music that I had grown up with and cut my teeth on and to look around on stage and there's Phil and there's Bobby and there's Mickey. It's like, "Wait a minute, the real guys, and I'm up here doing it." To be playing that music, especially St. Stephen/The Eleven was just a total rush. I really felt blessed and thrilled to be where I was, and where I am, it's been a great two years.

DB- What was the dynamic like on stage, with so many players, and three guitarists?

MK- I think that the general consensus was that the Other Ones was a bit cluttered and I would have to agree with that. On the other hand, I don't think it was particularly anyone's fault. When you have that many musicians playing together and they haven't had that much time to work out, it's inevitable. But I think that for all the strength of personality and whatnot that everybody was pretty considerate. There were definitely some toes that were stepped on here and there because everybody can't be vigilant at all times musically. You'd pick up a thread that someone had going and not necessarily notice that another person is going somewhere else. Overall, I think people were pretty considerate and did the best they could to play together given the amount of preparation time that was available.

DB- How much was worked out in advance in terms of setting out who would play leads?

MK- Not much and coming from the place that I come from in terms of my musical background, I probably would have been a little more comfortable if we had done that. If we had more or less delineated who was going to play where. I think that would have helped out with the clutter. But the B-side is that it would have taken away a lot of the spontaneity and the true nature of improvisation. I think that what everybody was after was to go for it and whoever happens to jump on it there it is.

DB- What were the standout moments for you on that tour?

MK- There were a lot of moments, I remember the feeling of being in them but I couldn't tell you what night they were. Those were the times where Steve and I would find ourselves locking into that sweet spot where we weren't being overly accommodating nor was either one of us steeping on the other and we were able to find that place where we were able to really weave the music. I guess probably my favorite show was Alpine. The setting was just amazing and the vibe on stage was really great. I'll never forget the moment at the end of the show when we came out for an encore. The way that place is set up there's that grassy hill almost perpendicular to the stage, so there's just this wall of audience. And we came out and the houselights were down and they all had their Bic's going. It was pretty surreal.

DB- What do you think of the Strange Remain [the two disc set that documents the tour]?

MK- I think I can be honest here. I don't really like the sound of it that well. I have a lot of audience tapes and in a lot of ways I enjoy listening to them more because I find them to be better documents of what actually happened. Certainly it's well recorded and well mixed but everything sounds overly separated and disembodied. When I listen to the show tapes it sounds more like a band.

DB- And the Ratdog gig followed?

MK- Right. Ratdog pretty much came as fallout from the Other Ones. I did the Furthur 98 thing in the summer and then out of that- you know Bobby hadn't had a lead guitar player. I guess after touring with the Other Ones he redeveloped an appetite for having lead guitar in the mix. Actually a lot of people thought I would be a shoo-in but they looked at several different people and a guy named Dave McNabb had the gig for the first two weeks of that fall tour. Then for one reason or another he didn't seem to fit what they were looking for. He might have been too straight-ahead acid jazz and Ellis had really been pushing for me. So they just called me and said, "Dude, you were probably the right choice all along, will you come out now?" And I said, 'Of course."

DB- Before we get to Jemimah Puddleduck your current project, let's talk about your background. The one tidbit that surfaced prior to the Other Ones tour…

MK- Let me guess…

DB- So did you play on the Friends theme?

MK- No, although I toured with the Rembrandts [who recorded the song]. I'm not ashamed to admit that I was a fan of theirs. I like pop music. I started out playing music because of the Beatles, and as awesome as they were, the Beatles were all about three minute pop songs. So I have a real soft spot in my heart for that kind of stuff. For me, the Rembrandts, pre-Friends theme, were always this band that wrote good Beatles-influenced pop tunes with Everly Brothers style harmonies. They had three albums prior to then but the Friends theme killed the partnership between the two guys that were the Rembrandts because one of them thought they had this punk ethos and that they had lost their credibility.

DB- What else had you been doing from a musical standpoint, both during and prior to that?

MK- I've always had original bands I played with that were trying to get out records. I played with a really cool singer/songwriter named Sarah Baker for years. I was also in this really weird satirical band called Bandaloons that was kind of doing what Weird Al was up to before he came along. Meanwhile I was constantly playing in bullshit bar bands and on demos to keep my rent paid because I've never been a day jobs kind of guy. I've always supported myself with my music. At times I played music that I didn't care about all that much but it kept the wolves away from the door so I could go out and play the music that I loved to play.

DB- I'm sure Jemimah Puddleduck falls into the latter category. How did that come about?

MK- There's a guy out here who has a Grateful Dead-oriented radio show that comes out of Santa Barbara. He called me and asked if I wanted to do a Mark Karan and Friends kind of thing at the Ventura Theater opening for Merl Saunders. I said sure and I called John Molo and see if he was interested. He was into it and then I called a couple of other friends I enjoyed playing with. We all got together at the keyboard player's house and threw up a couple of mikes in the room just so we could listen back to what we were doing. I showed them a couple of tunes that I'd written and talked about some covers we could do. Then we just jammed for the afternoon and had a blast. The whole time we were thinking that this was going to be a one-time thing. We all went home with copies of the tape and by that night we were talking to each other on the phone, saying, "This is not Mark Karan and Friends, this is a band that needs to be something that we keep doing because this is too good."

DB- It must be a challenge juggling schedules in order to get out and play.

MK- More than you know. Phil has been working so much that John has been unavailable. But he came home from the Phil tour quacking at high decibels about getting a good high-quality web site up that involves some real effort. Of course at the time that he ends up getting less busy with Phil I end up getting busy with Ratdog. Then you have to throw in the additional thing that our keyboard player is doing stuff with the old 70's funk band Mandrill and once in a while he goes out with the Pointer Sisters. This is a priority in terms of musical expression and fun and something that we all want to be part of but at the same time we're all doing other stuff that's important.

DB- I can tell you that although she hasn't heard your music, you may be my fourteen month old daughter's favorite band [Jemimah Puddleduck is the name of a Beatrix Potter character]. How did you arrive at that?

MK- Back in high school I had this friend Billy Armstrong and we had a band that we were putting together and just kicking names around. I think Billy A came up with it, and I just cracked up. I just loved saying it, I loved the way it felt rolling off my tongue. So when we decided to take this on as a band I dubbed it that old name which I had floating around in the back of my mind.

DB- Is there going to be a Jemimah Puddleduck release any time soon?

MK- I think the first thing that we're going to put out there is a live disc. We've been trying to get the shows out through the trading community as much as possible for free. That's what the scene is all about. But there are those who don't have access to that. So we have multitracked versions of our live shows and I think we're going to go out and pick the best version of songs and put together a compilation. That way we won't have to rush the studio process, which we're slowly working on.

DB- Describe the band's music.

MK- I don't know what to call it. I'm a blues freak and a r&b freak and I grew up listening to the Dead and the Beatles and Quicksilver. So in terms of my own input it's an amalgam of all that stuff. A lot of it is more or less blues-based but rather than sticking to the twelve bar format and when we get to the solos going around a couple of times in a blues progression and coming back to the song, it's more like we'll do the song, get to the solos, and then go to Mars for fifteen or twenty minutes. It's similar perhaps to the early Grateful Dead approach, the Live Dead era. Which, given my age and when I was into the band the most, that's the stuff that was most influential to me. I mean, God, the Dark Star on that record [Live Dead] is like, HELLO! (laughs) So it's an opportunity to play really good songs, it lets me sing and it allows us to go to some unexpected places musically.

DB- Why don't you say a bit about the players. I'm sure many of our readers know John Molo.

MK- Let's just say I've been very fortunate to play with a drummer with the caliber and heart of John Molo. He's a genuine thrill and always good for a surprise or three. Bob Gross is our bass player. He's an old buddy of mine. We played blues gigs around town together for years and I'd come to find out he's a total Deadhead. He was thrilled when I got the Other Ones gig. We've always clicked musically. We harmonize well vocally and I've always liked his feel as a bass player. The keyboard player is a guy named Arlan Schierbaum and he's just a fucking loon. He grew up doing the prog rock thing. He's really into the classic vintage keyboards He's got several B-3's, lots of Leslies, and a ton of Wurlitzer electric pianos. With Jemimah Puddleduck he plays B-3 and Wurlitzer electric piano. No synthesizers or anything, it's all the organic stuff. All the furniture. He runs his keyboards through all these guitar stomp boxes, so he comes up with the most bizarre fucked up sounds and textures without having to resort to synthesizers. It's really cool. He definitely brings a unique thing to the mix.

DB- Since you're describing the musicians you've played with, I'd like to hear your thoughts on two notable bandmates, Phil Lesh and Rob Wasserman.

MK- They're very different bass players certainly. Playing Grateful Dead music with Phil was ridiculously cool because no one does it quite like he does. He has a very defined and unique approach to melody and rhythm that really takes you to that place. I don't know how else to put it. Rob's style is very different. He's much less aggressive, not as much a driving a force on the bottom. But he's very exploratory and adds a really creative approach to the bottom with his melodicism and of course the texture and tonality of a stand-up as supposed to a bass guitar.

DB- Speaking of Wasserman and Ratdog, when Dave Ellis left, how did that alter the nature of the band and its music?

MK- Well I love Dave, he's a great player but truthfully it opened up a lot of a space having one less player. One reason I enjoy the line-up of Jemimah Puddleduck is that there's only four of us. Having only four people on stage you can get pretty busy and still hear everything. So in that sense there's more room now but Bobby's pretty attached to the sound of a saxophone. We're getting together with a guy [Kenny Brooks] for this next little run to do a little playing. I don't know how it's going to pan out. I know Bob's married to the idea of having that extra voice in there.

DB- How has the group's sound evolved during your time with the band?

MK- Some of these songs that are classics came along after I had pretty much stopped listening to the Dead. I was totally hip to Weather Report Suite but I didn't know from Ierrapin, I never heard the song before [site editor's note- !] It was like, "Wow, okay, this is cool." It was that same way with Sailor/Saint which I didn't know. The thing that I notice about Ratdog now which I'm really getting off on is that Bobby is such a songs- oriented guy that sometimes he doesn't let the jams go as long as I would like. What I've seen as time has gone by and the band has continued on, is that it feels to me that he has gotten more confidence in us, that we might be able to offer something interesting in terms of the jams. I think his fear is that without someone as brilliant at Jerry that twenty minutes of music might get a little redundant. I think he's beginning to trust that we all have something interesting to contribute that will keep the music interesting and the people interested.