I first encountered “Mr. Serious� opening a show for Chuck Prophet. Expecting the usual sort of alt-country troubadour that normally fills such slots, it was a major shock to experience a cross between Elton John, Alice Cooper and Jerry Lee Lewis, leaping astride his electric piano, screaming his incongruously melodic songs with terrifying intensity and leaving both himself and his audience in danger of severe injury. Well, obviously, I must have been drunk and imagined it. So, at SXSW 2006, I went straight from a Flaming Lips show to Mark Mallman’s showcase next door. In my review, I said that Mallman was better then the Flaming Lips (who themselves were Flaming Brilliant) – and I swear it’s true.
Mallman has fond memories as well. “SXSW is the Mardi Gras of rock, always a blast, always. I wish it were SXSW 364 days a year; I need one day to sleep and recoup, of course. I’d nearly finished demoing the album, was actually rewriting tunes in the van on the way down from Minnesota to Texas. I become very obsessive at the later stages of writing, and wasn’t sleeping or eating healthy, got fever, the shakes, etc. Plus I was on these weird pills which didn’t permit me to take any cold medicine, so by the time I got on stage, it added up to this feverish, surreal experience. The band was absolutely on fire, I was totally out of my mind, but in a good way. It’s how I prefer things.
So the new album Between The Devil and Middle C didn’t experience an easy birth?
“Difficulty is my muse. On my previous record, Mr. Serious, I wrote the tightest pop stuff of my career. So, when it came time to write Between the Devil and Middle C I had to find a new difficulty level to keep myself interested. Basically, making a record has three parts, writing, demoing and recording. My solution was to add a fourth step: dialogue between songs. I wrote about 80 or so tunes, then I tracked them at home, made a mock up and started to look for themes. In all, I recorded 42 songs. What I discovered was that I had written an album of Existential Crisis; that was my theme. The challenge then was to keep it ‘street level.’ ‘16 Animals’ is a rockified take on the spiritual and the animal, like in Hesse’s Steppenwolf, whereas ‘Tell it to the Judge’ takes more of a Camus stance on things, that being ‘Some people are going to get punished for things they never do.’ ‘After the Hangover’ is a bit more Christian in its approach. I was reading the book of Revelations around the time of the floods in New Orleans last year. On TV were scenes of people trapped on their rooftops at the mercy of helicopters. I thought to myself, ‘If that was me up there, I’d be thinking this is the beginning of the end. Or, this IS the end.’�
“In order to keep the tunes grounded, not overbearing, I made a conscious effort to include alcohol or substances in every single song on the album. Something really hedonist in the mix heightens the tension, thus reinforcing this character’s plight. It’s very much like a movie script. Not one detail was overlooked. I dragged and re-dragged the river till I found just the right body parts. Of course, it’s rock, not philosophy, so there are some tunes like ‘Tell Me How a Man Gets Close to You’ that are simply about an actress who I was dating at the time.
Grandson of a professional Milwaukee boxer, Mallman began playing the piano at three years old. His disdain for authority and classical tradition would pass him like a foster child from reluctant piano teacher to reluctant piano teacher. “At 14 years old, after 11 years of memorizing Bach and Mozart, I met this guy from a Milwaukee bar band, who introduced me to The Doors, The Doobie Brothers and Pink Floyd. I was sold.� The bands he lists give a clue as to the melodic pop sensibility which infuses his songs, in stark contrast to the live shenanigans for which he is famous, notably his capturing of the record for the longest rock performance in history, a period of 52.4 hours at Minneapolis’ Turf club. This is an achievement about which he is characteristically nonchalant:
“If I would have done it in an art gallery, no ground would have been broken, but doing it on a stage in a rock club flipped the context of ‘rock concert’ on its ass. I couldn’t give a shit about world records; actually, it’s more fun for me to push boundaries. Now and then you hear about people doing long shows like this, and I’m definitely not the first; people (CNN and the news media) just made a bigger deal about mine than others. It was an enlightening, enriching, invigorating challenge and I’ll keep doing it every five years till it kills me. That’s the way I want my story to end, it’s a bit morbid, but, yeah, eventually my plan is to die up there. Is that crazy? I guess so. Well, my plan is to never die actually, but we’ll see which one comes first.�
~Oliver Gray
###
Between the Devil and Middle C is out now on Badman Recording Company.
Buy Album from CD Universe
