Home Read Features Thunder Pie | Marah Jawns / Ep. 1

Thunder Pie | Marah Jawns / Ep. 1

Deep in my bones I knew it wasn’t at all what it seemed.

“If there was a wrong note, it didn’t matter as long as it was rocking.”
— Malcolm Young

jawn one.

We played a show at Penn State in State College, Pa. It was an official student event. Maybe for kids celebrating their final exams? It was spring. Probably 1998 or 99. My mom and stepdad had a hunting camp not so far away from the campus and I remember that we stayed there the night before the show. We’d come from somewhere else, some other gig but it’s murky now. In those days we took almost any gigs offered to us, but this one was a college and colleges always paid more money than clubs. I think the guarantee might have been $500. It might have been the first time we were offered that much too. To be honest, even at the end of the band the guarantees weren’t much higher than that; we were good live but mostly no one cared. Mostly no one came to see. The gig, for whatever reason, required us to be there around 10 or 11am for an early afternoon 60 minute performance. The morning of the show it was pouring so much rain that I was sure the event would never even happen. We showed up anyway because the idea of not getting the money was unfathomable. There was one sound guy there, a student. I think he was bummed out when he saw our van pulling across the muddy grass towards the enormous stage. I think he thought he might be able to slip back up to his dorm and crash out and I don’t blame him. It was a deluge. The problem was that no one had contacted either him or us to say that everything was canceled. What could we do? Everyone just winced at each other, rain dripping down our foreheads, joking how the show must go on. We did a soundcheck and then we waited in the van by the stage until it was time for us to play. I watched the sound guy huddle under the cover of the stage. The rain was driving though. Sideways rain. We probably offered him shelter in the van but he probably said no because we looked ragged, which we were. I remember being overcome by such an awkward feeling around then. It was a feeling I’d had many times across my music years, this jabbing sense of shame that came and went in waves. To have dreamed so hard about rock and roll and then to have to contend with so many times where no one showed up was mind fuckery. My brother and I clashed about this a lot in our own ways. I believe he thought I wasn’t confident enough, or cocky enough. I think he thought I was unable to see just how foolish the masses were and just how good we were. And he was right, I suppose. I was never able to get past the reality that although we were lucky in so many ways, I could never shake the feeling we were marked by a demon or something. These are the witchy things/ living between the cracks in the couch/ that define bands. These are the fuels and tumors that either push them through their galaxy or slay them with cancerous heartbreak. We hit the stage at noon like the contract said and there was no one there. Across a vast green field you could land a 747 on not a single human being could be seen. On the high stage, the four of us plugged in and the sound guy hit his switches and away we went. I remember looking at the other band members and I felt as if parts of me were literally melting on the inside. So many years later, I laugh at it now, but at the time I was mildly devastated. Getting your hopes up is so beautiful. Everyone deserves it. But having them dashed hurts like hell. Even if you act tough and unbothered. Maybe it hurts even more when you do that, I don’t know. We might have played for 10,000 kids in the sun had fate smiled upon us that spring day. Instead, Marah from Philadelphia made 500 bucks and played for no one. We did our whole set so we couldn’t be refused our contracted money. Halfway through the last song a tarp roof over our heads gave way and what seemed like thousands of gallons of cold collected rain slammed down all over me as I played my electric. No one else got hit. I should have been char-broil electrocuted. But I wasn’t. The sound guy made no effort to do anything nor did any of the guys in the band. What could anyone really do? The show must go on, remember They busted out laughing and so I laughed too. Then we just kept on playing/ soaked to the bone. It was otherworldly. Like so many days and nights to come.

jawn two.

We played a show in Paris, France. It was during the European tour for our third album, Float Away with the Friday Night Gods. We had a tour bus and our own stage manager but the record was nothing but a colossal flop. Critics hated it and so did almost every one of our fans. The Euro shows were the most sparsely populated we ever played over there. Many nights there were but a handful of people in the dark clubs and their smattering of well-intentioned applause gave me some kind of entertainer’s PTSD. Night after night, I was experiencing a sort of complex emotional vacillation; we were touring in the glorious old cities of Europe on our very own tour bus; a double decker bus, if you can believe that. I didn’t even know there was such a thing, until we suddenly had one of our own. It was fantastical. After many years of existing only in vans and only with either me or maybe a tour manager driving until our heads fell off, we were now able sit in the very front of the upper deck and watch the lakes of Switzerland and the mountains of Germany and the streets of England float by like scenes from an art house film about an unknown American band touring Europe in a tried and true rock star’s bus. At Paris, everything got weirder. Instead of another show where only a few Scotch or Dutch showed up to nurse pints in the shadows, we took the stage to a club filled with the electrified French. The show was superb. We killed it because we were so lifted by a small sea of faces instead of a half dozen or so. Afterwards we hung out very late with the Parisians who charmed us and teased us. One after another they listened to me tell them that my dad was from France. Then I would butcher the name of the village he’d grown up in and they would flash knowing grins, buy me another drink, and light my foreign cigarette in the old French style. I’m talking subtle grace and the underlying tones of faint sexual promise. Everyone there was from the record label though. The French division of Sony, who we were involved with over there. And deep down, although I wanted to bask in everything that was happening, I knew it was all a sham. Deep in my bones I knew it wasn’t at all what it seemed. We’d even been told that there would be a lot of label reps in Paris. We’d been promised they were so pumped to see the band. And despite what I knew from our careers so far, I will say that these French folks tried hard. It actually seemed as if they were in love with our band that evening. We laughed and conversed and it seemed dignified and real. I found myself letting my guard down; maybe we could crack France like no American bands ever did; we had this built-in back story that the French public wouldn’t be able to to resist, right? Short answer: no. Hours of bar talk and compliments and toasts, like so many music biz nights: it ultimately led nowhere. None of us ever saw a single one of those French Sony people again. The whole night left a ghost story in my mouth. Did we even speak with the living? Or did we perform, schmooze, and toast our future with the well-dressed dead?

jawn three.

We played a show in Los Angeles. We were opening for Steve Earle in the House of Blues out there. I think it was around 2000, 2001. So long ago now. Everything we did is fucking eons ago anymore. Those House of Blues places were really something. Mostly our band existed in tiny haunts/ small hurt clubs that felt like human struggle in the daytime. The beat-up tap beer joints or black-walled punk rock clubs were temples for local people who dug indie music, but walking into those places 5 or 6 nights a week for months on end could begin to wear you down. Perhaps the worst part was this: no one who worked there had ever heard of you or was- in any way shape or form- happy to see you. Not a single one of them would have given a rat’s ass if you lit yourself on fire and burnt up like a car wreck right there on the floor in front of the stage. Especially the lone hungover keeper-of-the-keys tattoo’d dude who unlocked the doors for you when you first arrived to load in. That guy fucking hated us. He hated all the bands except the bands he loved. That’s kind of how it goes though. Through the buttery streaks of sunlight falling across the evening planks, a lot of the people who worked at the clubs we depended on never gave us the time of day. They would just as soon grunt as they watched you disintegrate as to have to be there later on to hear you play your songs. House of Blues were different though. Not because they were places where the staff were friendly and went out of their way to say, Hey guys, welcome to L.A. Who wants fresh paninis!? Mostly, they did not. But it doesn’t matter as much when the dressing rooms are nicer than any apartment you have ever lived in. Or even seen. Shiny wood and mirrors and thick deep paints in intellectual shades and colors wrap their arms around a stinky bass player with $9 in his wallet and a yellow mustard stain the size of a seagull’s head on his thrift store slacks. I remember feeling so accomplished up there in our room. I felt like I’d done something right with my life. A little taste of the tea on Steve Earle’s side of the street led me to fantasizing. I dared to picture us deserving of more. I wrote some good fucking songs, I mumbled to myself. This is where our band deserves to be. An hour later though, after we’d completed our sweaty 28-minute opening slot in front of a huge room full of west coast Earle fans who’d never heard of Marah, I’d burst into that fancy backstage room and see it entirely differently than before. Fact is, I needed to get the fuck out of there as soon as possible. Moments before, as the feedback shimmered off my brother’s guitar while we walked off the stage raising our beers at the crowd in solidarity, I’d reared back and thrown my harmonica/ centerfield to home plate/ high and far into the crowd. It had been a spontaneous act but almost immediately I regretted it. I never saw it land but I was absolutely certain that it had killed someone. Or at least slit a forehead open so that human brains were slithering out. As the rest of the guys grinned and congratulated one another, I ran up the steps back to those cushy quarters in abject terror. I envisioned the entire crowd gathered around some delicate young actress freshly arrived from Nebraska as she went paler and paler… leechy ribbons of her raspberry blood rolling off her temples, snaking across the floor. And smack dab in the middle of that carnage sparkling like a battleship at dawn? My Hohner Blues G harp, with my goddamn fingerprints all over it. I pictured 400 slightly buzzed IPA dudes in Uncle Tupelo shirts all hollering that they’d seen me do it! I was mortified, my heart racing as I suggested to the band we ought to pack up and get out of there with the quickness. But no dice; they wanted to drink their free Coronas. Hours later, after Earle’s show was over and no LAPD had busted into our dressing room shooting their guns, I calmed down and realized that someone had probably just caught my harp and stuck it in their pocket like a minor league foul ball. No big whoop. Whatever. Ugh.

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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.