Marah – Street Smarts
The forthcoming album also includes “Point Breeze”, about the next neighborhood over from the Italian Market, a once genteel area of fine houses that has fallen on hard times. “Skyline Of A Great Big Town” is about downtown Philly, and “This Town” is about the band’s mixed but loyal feelings for their hometown. “The History Of Where Someone Has Been Killed” is the story of the ghosts that remain after a dead body has been hauled away from a city sidewalk and the chalk outline has washed away in the rain.
“Steve Earle told us this was our geography record,” Dave says. “We tried to write about specific neighborhoods and specific streets. Sometimes the more detailed you get, the more universal the songs become. That happened on Lou Reed’s New York and Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels On A Gravel Road. That’s what we were going for.”
The Bielanko brothers didn’t actually grow up in Philadelphia but in Conshohocken, a blue-collar town 12 miles up the Schuylkill River. During their high school days there, they had a band that rehearsed weekly for years but never quite got out of the garage.
“It was an old factory town,” Serge remembers. “Its boom time was right after World War II, but most of those plants are gone now. Dave and I grew up when everyone knew everyone else in the neighborhood, but when I came back from college, most of the people I knew had moved on. It became yuppified and lost its blue-collar character in the process.
“I had a yearning for living someplace where everyone knows everyone else and the history of everything that happened. I found that sense of rootedness on Christian Street. Now that we’re on the road so much, you start to miss your home and to know why you miss it. It’s the little things; it’s the store where you buy your cigarettes every day.”
When the Conshohocken garage band finally broke up, Serge was so devastated that he gave up playing music for two years. He even gave up listening to music for almost a year. Dave persevered, however, and eventually found an ad in the local Tradin’ Times for a “Rhythm section for hire: American guitars only.” In the summer of ’93, Dave drove down to Grays Ferry, a neighborhood of brick rowhouses in Philadelphia, and met Vance and Metz.
They hit it off, and the trio began rehearsing compulsively and soon ventured out into local clubs. When Serge finally went out to see them, he felt unexpected twinges of envy and regret, especially when they played some of the old garage-band songs.
He finally weaseled his way into the band in ’95, and in ’96 Marah started recording its first album with its soundman, Paul Smith. The good news was they didn’t have to pay for studio time; the bad news was that Smith had only an eight-track recorder, and one of those tracks didn’t work.
So work proceeded very slowly, with their engineer boiling seven tracks down to two so they could add more tracks. It gradually assumed shape, however, and those who heard it got excited about what was happening. One of those people was Tom Heyman of Philadelphia’s late, great roots-rock band Go To Blazes. Heyman made sure his friends in Blue Mountain heard the Marah album when they came to town.
“Tom forced us to sit down and listen to the whole tape,” recalls Blue Mountain’s Cary Hudson. “I pretty much got it on the first listen. There are so many bands in the alt-country category, and you hear the same sound over and over, but here was a band that had its own identity.
“Sometimes you see bands that adopt a persona and try to be someone who they’re not. But these guys wrote about who they were; it was as if they were writing folk songs about their town with electric guitars. It’s nice to see people embrace their own area instead of putting on a hee-haw outfit.”
That was 1996. It took a year and a half to buy the rights back from a local investor, but Marah’s Let’s Cut The Crap And Hook Up Later On Tonight was released on Blue Mountain’s label, Black Dog, in 1998. The album suffered from its low-budget technology and its learn-as-you-go approach to recording, but the songs were undeniably strong and the passion was unmistakable. When Earle heard the album, he was so impressed that he flew up to Philadelphia to see the band.
“He marched backstage,” Serge recalls, “and the first thing he said was, ‘I love your CD, and I need another one, because I’ve already lost three of them.’ He called us ‘a literate AC/DC.’
“He wanted to sign us to E-Squared, but we told him we wanted to make another record in Philadelphia with Paul Smith. We had said that to a lot of other label guys, and you could see in their faces that they lost interest right there. But Steve didn’t flinch. He said, ‘I want to record you guys someday, but I’ll never make you do anything you don’t want to do.’ The whole deal hinged on that.”
Earle borrowed an ADAT machine from Buddy Miller and lent it to Marah to make the second album. So instead of seven tracks, they had 15. More important than the new equipment was a newfound confidence, for the second album has a focus and a clarity that the first one lacked. And whether it’s the anthemic Vietnam vet’s song “Round-Eye Blues” or the cascade of left-field metaphors on “My Heart Is The Bums On The Street,” the songwriting has improved, too. This album should do for Marah what The Brooklyn Side did for the Bottle Rockets.
“We liked that security blanket of not having to turn in a record at the end of three weeks,” Dave says. “Besides, there’s something more listenable about records made in home studios; it sounds less contrived even if it is rougher around the edges. Neil Young once said that when you record things too cleanly you can only listen to them three times because you’ve heard it all. But you can listen to Born To Run a hundred times and never get bored.
“Real rock ‘n’ roll music is the thing we’re always looking for. It has nothing to do with the distorted guitar or the 4/4 drum beat. It’s that feel of a sinking ship, music that’s about to explode or fall apart. If that’s alt-country, that’s what we are.”
Geoffrey Himes feels the same way about Baltimore as the Bielanko brothers feel about Philadelphia.