May 1998. I’m on a book tour in the US and, after a reading in Philadelphia, I go out for a drink with Dan, a music journalist I’ve met a couple of times. At the end of the evening he gives me a tape.
A tape! 1998 seems a long time ago. It’s so long ago, in fact, that I was even travelling around with something to play it on. It’s a copy of the forthcoming first album by a local band called Marah, which rhymes with “hurrah”.
“Marah?” I say. “What kind of name is that?” Dan tells me that it’s from the Old Testament, and it means “tree of bitterness”. For some reason, this in itself is enough to convince me that the album will be great. This band has had the good sense to incorporate into their very being all the forthcoming disappointments and betrayals attendant upon a career in music.
And the album is great, too. It was recorded for no money, and it’s about to be released on a tiny indie label based in Mississippi, and it labours under the title Let’s Cut the Crap and Hook Up Later on Tonight.
And yet the opening bars of the first song, in which a horn section plays over an ice-cream van serendipitously parked outside the studio, tell you everything you need to know about Marah — they have pluck, ambition, tunes and talent to burn. Let’s Cut . . . turns out to contain what will become three or four of my favourite songs. It sounds as though the band has taken what they need from the Stones, Steve Earle, the E Street Band, the Faces and the Pogues, shaken it all up and drunk it down. The thing is, though, that they really didn’t need that much because they had plenty of other things of their own already.
I can’t quite believe how good it is, so I buy a couple of copies of the CD and give one to my friend Lee, who runs a music shop in Islington and hears everything. He is immediately besotted. We could both be wrong, of course, but at least I have company. Since then we have been to see them play live whenever we can.
March 25, 2006. I’m on a book tour in the US again. This week I’ve been to campuses in Indianapolis, Memphis and North Carolina, but today I’m sitting in a van with Marah, and we’re driving from Memphis to Oxford, Mississippi. If you’re someone who loves both rock’n’roll and books, then this is a pretty rich journey. We have just been to Sun Studios and had our photographs taken in the room where Elvis sang Baby Let’s Play House and That’s All Right; tomorrow, in Oxford, some of us will stand in the room where William Faulkner wrote most of his novels. One of them is plotted out in pencil on his study wall.
Since that first album, the band have been picked up and put down by a major label. They have made four more albums, lost about as many drummers, played for beer money in London pubs and appeared onstage with Bruce Springsteen, a fan and champion, in a football stadium. They certainly haven’t seen the need to change their name to something more upbeat, but on the other hand, they’re still around.
Last year’s terrific album If You Didn’t Laugh, You’d Cry got great reviews, and Stephen King, of all people, picked it as his album of the year in Entertainment Weekly. He described Marah as “probably the best rock band in America nobody knows”. If the band is dispirited by the apparent fruitlessness of their eight-year journey, they never show it.
Their live shows are invariably a joy, ferocious, funny, and utterly committed, regardless of how many people show up. On a good night, when Serge Bielanko is lying on the floor in the middle of the audience blowing on his harmonica, and his brother Dave is standing on the bar playing his guitar, it’s hard to think of a better way to spend an evening.
We’ve become friends over the past few years, and a couple of years ago we invented a show that we could do together whenever our touring paths crossed, a show in which I read and they play. It’s a break in routine for all concerned. I like doing readings, but on a book tour you tend to read the same extracts in similar-looking venues, and you spend an awful lot of time on your own.
When I do the events with the band, I read five unpublished essays about music I wrote specially for the show. I read them in bars or clubs and I have colleagues — I’m part of a team.
Before tonight’s show I end up unloading equipment from the van. (To be honest, this is almost entirely because I know I’ll be writing a piece for this newspaper about being part of a team. I don’t usually bother.) As any writer will tell you, what you usually get at the end of a reading is some polite applause followed by a resounding silence — a silence broken only by an audience member plucking up the courage to ask a tentative and dutiful question about one’s working process. But the first essay I read in these shows ends with the words “OK, Marah, make some noise”, and they do — they play loud, which is one of the things I love about them, and I run as fast as I can to the side of the stage.
(I live in fear of being trapped onstage by equipment while the band rampage around me. It has happened once, and I was thrown a tambourine. I’d like to claim that I enhanced both the look and the sound of the band, but I fear this might not have been the case.) Anyway, every writer should experience the thrill of having their words punctuated by Marah’s three-guitar attack. I know what you are thinking, Sir Vidia Naipaul, but you would be wrong: a quick burst of It’s Only Money, Tyrone or Point Breeze would perk up any literary soirée.
Believe it or not, a Mississippi bar on a Saturday night turns out to be a tough gig, quite unlike, say, Cheltenham or Hay-on-Wye. At a table off to the side there’s a rowdy group that isn’t interested in listening to any of us, and although the band can drown them out, I can’t.
At one point during my reading, Dave Bielanko jumps down and suggests that they might like to take their custom elsewhere, a suggestion that is rejected with some vehemence. Dave decides that, on this occasion, discretion is the better part of valour, and returns to the relative safety of the stage.
We get through, and those who had come to hear us seem to enjoy it.
And though I’m looking forward to reading on my own at the Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent in a couple of weeks, it really won’t be the same.
Nick Hornby & Marah are at Dingwalls, Camden Lock, NW1 (020-7267 1577), on April 6
Free Marah download
Nick Hornby and Stephen King love them, will you? Here’s your chance to download a Marah track, Demon of White Sadness, from their album If You Didn’t Laugh You’d Cry. To get your free Marah track go to www.timesonline.co.uk/music
