I have this live boot of the Melvins playing in Hollywood near the end of Mark Deutrom?s time in the band as their bass player, and it?s really good. The band seems extremely hostile and pissed off for the whole set. Every lineup of the Melvins over the years has provided me with ?the best Melvins set I have ever seen? but while listening back to this boot I think that there might have been a few more ?the best Melvins set I have ever seen? that this lineup did.
So here is another one: A live version of Night Goat that I remembered at the Cats Cradle in Chapel Hill had them freezing like statues after hitting that chord near the end of the song. It just went on forever. Forever. As Buzz and Mark stood frozen, their amps just fed back for all of eternity. Then Dale looks at Buzz, looks at Mark and then folds his arms with the drumsticks in his hands and scowls out into the audience (with gardening gloves of course) for what seems like another eternity before the band goes back into the song.
It was like?whoa dude.
I met Mark Deutrom as the then new bass player for the Melvins while they opened up for Primus, I think. I knew who Mark was before all of that. It is funny how many completely different types of people I had known of from reading any assorted issue of MAXIMUMROCKNROLL in the mid eighties but there you go. And if you don?t know too much about ?the guy who wore the cowboy hat? during the Melvins five year plan of opening up for White Zombie or Nirvana during the ?grunge years?, here is a recent chat I had with him which should explain his past and the future. He has done a lot of stuff that some people may not know about, and you might even worship a few of the records that he had produced..I am thinking of especially RKL and Neurosis.
Now living in Austin Texas, I decided to drop Mark a line after spending a week getting reacquainted with the major label Melvins releases that he was involved with, namely Stoner Witch and Stag, still two of the band?s very best records in their vast catalogue. He wasn?t on Houdini but he was on the major label afterbirth that is Honky, perhaps one of the strangest underrated records that the band put out. And if you liked the records that he played on, then you should have no problem enjoying his solo album of some years ago The Silent Treatment. I just thought it might be interesting to hear what he had to say, and like the recent interviews I was able to do with both Stephen Egerton and Scott Radinsky, it went really well.
Take it away.
Brian: First off, I was wondering about where you were born and raised. I remember reading somewhere that you were from England. Is that true? What were your formative years like? How old were you when you picked up the guitar?
Mark: Born in England. Dragged around and raised near a series of Army bases in Florida, Germany, and Texas. Formative years spent mainly staring into books as an escape. My ideal universe then would have consisted of the Thunderbirds TV show and the book Treasure Island, with a soundtrack of the Armed Forces Radio Network. Heavy rotation of Steppenwolf, Blood Sweat and Tears, and James Brown on that. I also loved The Beatles, it but was all downhill for me after Hard Days Night. Radio was better then. Picked up the guitar around 9, learned White Christmas on one string. Put it down. Picked it up again couple of years later, when I heard Band of Gypsies from a neighbor in El Paso.
Brian: What brought you to Los Angeles? That was the early eighties, correct? Was it cause of the smog?
Mark: Went to LA to go to CalArts and study composition. They had a situation where you could get in there before finishing your last year of high school if you got a GED later. I applied and got in. I probably should have waited. I didn't have it together enough to be able to take full advantage of it. However, I did get to meet and study with some true heavyweights of 20th Century music. If I would have waited to go, I would have missed that window. That was the seventies
The smog ? I worked on Universal Studios back lot as a security guard for a time then. I had the graveyard, and would get off at 8am and hit the 5 with the rabid coffeed up troglodytes freaking out under the mustard soup sky, eternally late, and running into each other at 20 mph, trading info on the sides of the freeway for pointless insurance claims on now scrapped and forgotten vehicles... For the 84 Olympics someone made a popular shirt with a marathon runner with a gas mask on. They say it's better now. I was just there. It isn't. All the movies that make it look good are shot during 2 weeks in January.
Brian: You always struck me as a bit of a ?musician? but without the attitude. Seems like there must have been some punk rock as an influence. Am I correct in assuming that? Were you into punk rock kind of stuff back then? Why or why not?
Mark: I've always found experiencing truly great musicians to be a combination of inspiration and humility, so it's been fairly natural for me to keep my attitude in check. When someone like L. Subramaniam or Ornette Coleman is playing in front of you, it gets pretty easy to realize your position in the scheme of things.
There's definitely a punk rock flavoring that snuck in there as a result of living in LA when that stuff broke. I went to the Masque a fair amount and saw the Germs, Alley Cats, the Eyes, Controllers, and all those people, and also the great afternoon shows at the Whiskey with people like Devo, the Weirdos and Fear. Black Randy and the Metro Squad would be giving mohawks to people onstage at the Starwood. There was a great anarchic energy , and I was attracted to that. I saw it as being in the tradition of Dada, where nothing had to mean anything or have a purpose. Just the doing of it was the best thing about it. Like a dog jumping 6 feet into the air to catch a frisbee, just the action of it was ample justification for it's celebration. Some of it was really awful also, but no one was really going to trash anyone for getting up and doing anything they felt strongly about.
I was also going to see Queen and ZZ Top, King Crimson and Cameo and anyone else around I liked. Buck Owens, Blondie, Bad Brains. Lori Black and I would go down to hear the LA Philharmonic, when Giulini was the conductor. That was killer. We took mushrooms and went to see Miles Davis at the Hollywood Bowl. There was a lot of good stuff to hear around then.
Brian: San Francisco is where you went next, and it was there that you played in the band Clown Alley along with Lori Black. Of course, Melvins fans know that both of you had served in the band at various points. How long was Clown Alley around, looking back how do you feel about your one album that you put out, and where did you meet David your singer? He did time in Jerrys Kidz from New Mexico I think.
Mark: Lori and I moved up to SF in 83, I think. We had messed around with a bunch of people trying to get something together. The first version of Clown Alley was three girls and me. The other two were gay and would hit on Lori at times. People would say the band could be much better if they would dump the guitarist and get a girl to do that also...We might have found Dave through an ad or mutual friends. I can't remember at this point. We had an affinity based on both coming from places of desolation and desperation, namely Albuquerque and El Paso. We were practically neighbors from a kind of No Man's Land.
I didn't know anything about Jerrys Kidz. Their record was cool when I finally heard it. Dave wrote good lyrics, could sing, and was kind of unpredictable onstage. He was also hilarious, and we laughed a lot. Our shows got consistently better until the last one. I can say unreservedly that the Clown Alley record is the best Clown Alley record there is. There are things I would do differently now of course, but it's OK as a document of that band at that time. I don't listen to it. We made it for the kids, man.
Greg Anderson of Southern Lord loved it enough to reissue it a few years back on CD. The band only lasted a couple of years, but it was a good time. We could never keep a drummer, and then Dave quit. He said he didn't want to be a rock star. Our last show was opening for Suicidal Tendencies in Salt Lake City, and it was also our biggest show. I met a guy recently who was at that show, and he said it was the best show he saw that year. My new band has a couple of CA songs dialed in that we can pull out if we want. They're fun to play, and still sound good.
Brian: A little has been said about the label Alchemy that you helped set up. I remember thinking that the label had put out some of the better records during that time by some good bands. What I don?t get is what happened to that Victor Hayden guy? Was the one responsible for setting up the capital to get things rolling, and why did he disappear? What did you do for the label and how long was it before things folded? Any thing to add to the experience? Did you ever meet Pamela De Barre?
Mark: ...and the less that's said the better. I really don't know what happen to Victor Hayden either... The short version is that Victor would hang around the shows at New Method in Emeryville and other places. He was a fan of a variety of bands including Clown Alley. He started talking to me about wanting to promote some shows, and also starting a label. He wanted to be the money guy, and my contribution would be producing all the stuff and just making sure we got decent sounding records. I put together a great distribution deal for us, and we started getting the stuff out. We had ideas about being moguls of a sort. We wanted to open a club also. The Gilman Street venue was one of a few places we looked at, and then passed it onto the Maximum Rock n Roll people. You can blame us for everything that came from there.
Alchemy lasted a couple of years at the most. We put out a few good records and that was it. I went to London to make a record with the Italian band Raw Power, and while I was gone,Victor freaked out. In the end, Victor's delusional thinking contributed to an already alternative perspective of reality that contained more than moderate amounts of fabrication. Brain and/or manufactured chemicals ? Who knows ? He disappeared because he owed/s a lot of people money, including myself. When you have Pig Champion from Poison Idea saying he's going to kill you, it's best to keep a low profile. I just saw that Wikipedia says Victor is apparently the famous Mascara Snake, Captain Beefheart's cousin. Whatever...I prefer to think of him (when I have to) as some mythical chimera, like a chupacabra. Did he ever exist ? I'm not really sure. No mention of Alchemy on the Mascara Snake/VH Wiki entry, so I guess I did imagine the whole thing !
I heard the rumor about him living in a trailer in Des Barres backyard. I think she was some kind of local LA groupie that went to Quiet Riot shows when I lived there. Never met her. I did get to meet "Sweet Sweet Connie" of "We're an American Band" fame in Little Rock once when we were there with White Zombie. Does that count ?
Brian: You produced some records, maybe all of the records for the label too, as well as records by other bands like the Rhythm Pigs and their fine debut lp. Which of these records are you the proudest of, and why? Also, how did you learn how to produce anyways?
Mark: Started producing in 1982. I was always stuck by the sonic qualities of certain recordings like the stuff that came out of Sun in Memphis, Phil Spector, Queen,Todd Rundgren, Tony Visconti, Eddie Offord, Motown . I wanted to know the nuts and bolts of that. I became friends with an engineer that had a 24 track studio when I lived in LA. He taught me a lot about how to run a session, miking techniques, mixing, all the usual stuff. The thing that he impressed upon me was that there was no right way to do something. It was all about how something sounded.
Rhythm Pigs was the first full length LP I did. They were from El Paso also, so when they got to SF, they wanted to work with me. I think Ed is still there. It's a cool record. All the LPs I did for Alchemy have good and bad things about them for me. I just tried to get the essence of the band onto each one. Everything I've done sounds pretty different. Probably, the most well recorded Alchemy LP is the Gluey Porch LP, just because the studio was really excellent, and it had this massive room that just resonated with the space in the material. The RKL record is a really under appreciated record,in my opinion. People think it's the band playing live in the studio, but it's all overdubbed. They could really play. The Sacrilege LP is a great thrash metal party record. The Neurosis record is a really brutal, angry loFi punk rock thing . Producing was, and still is, a learning process for me. I did a record for a bluegrass band called The Meat Purveyors in 2004, titled Pain By Numbers that just burns it down. It's good to try new things.
Brian: You recorded ?Gluey Proch Treatments? as well as ?Ozma?. Both of those records seriously made my jaw drop when I heard them. People I knew fucking hated those records before warming up to them ten years later. Which record do you like better, and why?
Mark: They are definitely polarizing recordings. There's certainly not a lot of middle ground there. GPT has a nervousness to it that translates into this genuine anxiety that's almost palpable throughout the entire recording. There's probably a few factors that contribute to this, including the basic alienation of everyone involved. I didn't know the band at all then, so there's the weird thing of getting to know people as you're working intimately with them. They were in an alien situation in an alien town in a studio the size of an aircraft hanger. I don't think Dale was even using his own kit.They just drove 1000 miles in a van with Kiss faces painted on the side, and a leaky transmission. Taking all that into account, how could you not be somewhat anxious?
Buzz told me years later that they white knuckled it the whole time, trying to stay off the beer while they were getting this thing done. It has become a classic of sorts. I can't say it's ever been exactly enjoyable to listen to. I don't know what it does, but it does do something. Dread,anxiety,negation...they have their place in the popular music canon just like The Captain and Tenille, and Shakira. Once we went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and there was GPT, in a display about Nirvana and the Northwest scene. It was good to see it in there.
By the time we did Ozma, we had personally been through a few shake ups, and managed to remain friends through that, so things were more familiar. The studio they decided to do it in wasn't finished, and the monitoring and control room had serious issues. Consequently, it sounds kind of unfinished to me. It's the pop bastard twin to GPT. The song "Candy O" probably turned out the best on that one. It works better as a record of songs, GPT does something else. I don't like one better than the other. It probably took me ten years to warm up to them also.
Brian: You were in the Melvins during their major label period, and the band produced some very good records with you in the band, particularly ?Stag?. Which record in hindsight was your favorite, and why? I remember hanging out with you guys when you were doing ?Stoner Witch?. To this day, a friend of mine Justin swears that the tape I got from you guys sounded better than the album. It seemed like with all of that gear and all of that time there that it must have been like being a kid in a candy store. Is that correct?
Mark: It's really difficult to pick one out of those, but I think Stoner Witch works best as a record from front to back. We were working at A&M at it's absolute peak, and had Joe Barresi working on that. That was a killer combination, and we did the whole thing in there. The studio was amazing, with the best gear. One night I was walking down the hall and heard Tom Jones singing. I walked into a control room and Tom Jones was throwing down a vocal in the booth. That was one of the coolest things I ever saw. It was the Voodoo Lounge for the Stones. They still had Keith's bong in a closet. That was the vibe in there. Stoner Witch does one thing really well with absolute conviction, and that is rock.
Stag is kind of lacking in deliberate intention as a whole, and meanders around for me personally. I think there's some stuff on there that is just weird for weird's sake, and I contributed wholeheartedly to that. There are some excellent individual tunes on it, but there probably should have been more material to choose from get something more uniform in direction, in my opinion, as a producer. Quite a few people love the freakiness, myself included. My favorite moments on Stag are the quiet ones. I would like to have done an entirely quiet record. I feel the freakiness had more structural integrity and musicality on Honky. I'm proud of all that material. We worked hard on it. It holds up. and probably will continue to do so.
I would imagine that you got a copy of SW that was right off the master, so that would account for there being more presence, and really more of everything before the mastering process does what it does. I would suggest bootlegging your copy immediately with the tagline "Now with extra sound".
Brian: The band at this time had all kinds of odd and strange encounters with a lot of shit: being yelled at by the Breeders stage crew, opening for Rush, being yelled at by angry people, being dicked over by Nirvana?s management, playing with Kiss and watching a drunk Ace Frehley stagger through the set. Just what the hell was going on in your mind when all of this stuff was happening, and what was the one truly bizzare ?rock experience? that the band had that you will always remember?
Mark: I suppose the state of mind it approaches would be the equivalent of being a fireman : long hours of near total boredom punctuated by short periods of frantic chaos.
All the events at that time just confirmed to me that anything, no matter how bizarre, can become somewhat routine : The headliner's singer doesn't want anyone in the band standing within a 20 degree radius of the stage because he feels he's being "scrutinized", Slovakian security thugs want to kick your ass, Gene Simmons invites you to his birthday party, an audience rips up the floor covering a hockey rink and throws it at you, a janitor's closet is pointed out to you as your dressing room at an arena. Probably the most stereotypical rock n roll moment everyone secretly wants to participate in is the traditional pointless destruction of material goods with no consequences, if for no other reason than a tribute to the ghost of Keith Moon.
Once in Sioux Falls, Trent Reznor invited us to take part in the total destruction of a large dressing room after a show. It began as a kind of contest to knock all of the exit signs in the room off the ceilings and walls by throwing full bottles of vodka at them. There appeared to be an endless supply of these full bottles of vodka, and the signs proved fairly tenacious in their ability to hang on by the smallest pieces of conduit. The bottles having finally being exhausted and completely smashed, the furniture was then recruited and hurled at the hapless signs. One last sign remained and was then taken down by three crew members who launched a remaining couch at it. The house security were held at bay by a variety of road management types, who explained that what was going on inside was private. Really, it wasn't that bizarre, but deeply satisfying and absolutely cathartic. Even Dale threw a bottle. It was a good time.
Brian: ?The Silent Treatment? seemed to be an overlooked release that showed that you certainly had a degree of influence over the Melvins records that you were on. Who is the drummer? Didn?t you play everything else? How was the reaction?
Mark: It was just a bad deal, badly handled. It got uniformly good reviews and people liked it, but there were issues with the label, and it fell through the cracks. I'm still trying to resolve it. I worked hard on that project and am proud of it. Chad Bamford who worked on Stag, tracked it, and Joe Barresi mixed it for me. They got some superlative tones on that. It has a great density to it. I did everything on it except the drums, which were played by an old friend named John Evans from El Paso. I actually played in my first band with him in 9th grade, We always wanted to do that as kids, so I'm glad we finally got to. One day I'd like to see it on vinyl. It deserves it.
Brian: I am making a big jump but how did you ended up in Austin? And you sometimes play in the ?rock band? Sunn. How did that come about, and are you still playing with those guys?
Mark: I moved back to the US from London in 2001, spent a couple of years in El Paso, and then moved out to Austin. I'd been here a few times on tour and always had a good time here, so it was always floating around in my mind as a possible place to live. It's just about the size of town I can handle, having done my time in various megalopolises.
I did a few tours with Sunn0)) in 2006, in Europe and the also the US, with Boris, Earth, and Celtic Frost. Greg Anderson is an old friend, and his band False Liberty played a show with Clown Alley in Olympia in 1987, so we go all the way back. I haven't known Stephen quite as long, but he's a good friend also. The tour in Europe with Earth was really a gas, and one of the best times I've had on a tour. Sunn is really the perfect band for this post millennial era. They have this great quality of gravity that is completely suffocating to be in the middle of. I used to think the Melvins got pretty extreme at times when I was with them, but playing with Sunn is like what happens to planets inside black holes. I would think to myself, this is what anti-music sounds like, and find that really comforting, considering the state of it these days. They are the only band I would ever do any bass for again, because there's nothing beyond that. That's as big as sound gets without using explosives. I was really just a guest for a few tours, but I would go out with them again anytime. Every show was a medieval science fiction apocalyptic Auto da Fe. I'd love to produce them at some point. It would be like producing anti matter. With wine, and fog.
Brian: Here is your chance to plug whatever it is that you want to plug. Have at it. Future releases, stuff you produced, whatever?
Mark: I took a fair amount of time off from music and started getting back into production and playing again a couple of years ago. I did a CD with a band called Woodgrain in Austin , and am about to start on their second one in a couple of weeks. It's prog rock with 2 keyboards, so that's a new thing I haven't tried producing. It sounds like Phillip Glass on a lot of weed and beer through big guitar amps, with the smell of chicharrones wafting over...
The drummer from that band is also playing with me in my new band called County Bucks, which is a straight up rock band with dashes of Texas psychedelia and Mississippi swamp action tossed in. We are playing a Southern Lord show during SXSW called Power of The Riff. It's just our third show, but I think we're going to try this on for a spell. We've got an hour and a half of material recorded that we are wading through to get out at some point.
I have a new solo album coming out presently that has been about 10 years in the making. Chad Bamford, who I mentioned earlier, mixed it in LA in October and brought it back to life for me. I tracked it five years ago, and just let it sit until I could get back to it. The drummer on that is Cully Symington, who has since been playing in Okkervill River with Roky Erikson, and also the Lanagan/Afghan Wigs thing Twilight Singers.
It will be available from Southern Lord as a download only, and is called "The Value of Decay". I play mostly everything on that also, except the amazing violin solo. It's conceptual and epic in scope, and meant to be listened to as a whole. It's pretty dark.
I also did a couple of sonic sculpture pieces on CD a few years back that are still floating around out there somewhere. One was called "Iraq", and the other was called "Gate". They are really ideal for encouraging unwanted guests to leave, or clearing an unruly crowd.
My wife is an animator, and worked on the movies Waking Life, and Five Obstructions by Lars Von Trier among others. We made an animated short called "Get With The Program" that just got into the SXSW Film Festival, so I'm officially a screenwriter now . I did the score for it also. We're going to do more of those.
Brian: Last question: are you still trying to achieve Punky Meadow?s never before duplicated tone on all of those Angel records? How much further do you think you?ll have to go? Maybe a wig and some blush? What do you think?
Mark: There are some things that are just not going to happen : Jobs are not coming back, politicians and bankers will never get their comeuppance, people are not going to stop putting their dogs in costumes, and the P. Meadows tone will never be duplicated. It is a good idea for a stomp box : The Meadows Tone. It could have a two way switch : Appear, and Disappear.
The one to shoot for is on "Chicken Soup" on Helluva Band. The whole record has some great tones on it. The songs are something less than great, but no worse than anything Kiss ever put out. The Japanese, as usual, are ahead of the curve. They are reissuing the Angel catalog on super fancy shm-cd. I'll probably pass... I saw them once with Blue Oyster Cult. They did actually appear out of nothing. The stage lights came on, and there they were !
The blush and wig would never work with a hat, for me personally, but it's never too late to experiment.
After just checking up on him, I never realized one of his earlier bands was called The Cherry People.
More proof of his singular genius.
LINKS:
County Bucks:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/County-Bucks/164050430297372?v=wall
Mark and Jennifer Drummond Deutrom:
http://www.thebatcabinet.com/TheBatCabinet.html
"Dream on, Deutrom! You're never EVER going to touch this!!"
Source: http://introvertedloudmouth.blogspot.com/2011/02/mark-deutrom-is-still-trying-to-top.html
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