DB- What else had you been doing from a musical standpoint, both during and prior to that?
MK- I’ve always had original bands I played with that were trying to get out records. I played with a really cool singer/songwriter named Sarah Baker for years. I was also in this really weird satirical band called Bandaloons that was kind of doing what Weird Al was up to before he came along. Meanwhile I was constantly playing in bullshit bar bands and on demos to keep my rent paid because I’ve never been a day jobs kind of guy. I’ve always supported myself with my music. At times I played music that I didn’t care about all that much but it kept the wolves away from the door so I could go out and play the music that I loved to play.
DB- I’m sure Jemimah Puddleduck falls into the latter category. How did that come about?
MK- There’s a guy out here who has a Grateful Dead-oriented radio show that comes out of Santa Barbara. He called me and asked if I wanted to do a Mark Karan and Friends kind of thing at the Ventura Theater opening for Merl Saunders. I said sure and I called John Molo and see if he was interested. He was into it and then I called a couple of other friends I enjoyed playing with. We all got together at the keyboard player’s house and threw up a couple of mikes in the room just so we could listen back to what we were doing. I showed them a couple of tunes that I’d written and talked about some covers we could do. Then we just jammed for the afternoon and had a blast. The whole time we were thinking that this was going to be a one-time thing. We all went home with copies of the tape and by that night we were talking to each other on the phone, saying, “This is not Mark Karan and Friends, this is a band that needs to be something that we keep doing because this is too good.”
DB- It must be a challenge juggling schedules in order to get out and play.
MK- More than you know. Phil has been working so much that John has been unavailable. But he came home from the Phil tour quacking at high decibels about getting a good high-quality web site up that involves some real effort. Of course at the time that he ends up getting less busy with Phil I end up getting busy with Ratdog. Then you have to throw in the additional thing that our keyboard player is doing stuff with the old 70’s funk band Mandrill and once in a while he goes out with the Pointer Sisters. This is a priority in terms of musical expression and fun and something that we all want to be part of but at the same time we’re all doing other stuff that’s important.
DB- I can tell you that although she hasn’t heard your music, you may be my fourteen month old daughter’s favorite band [Jemimah Puddleduck is the name of a Beatrix Potter character]. How did you arrive at that?
MK- Back in high school I had this friend Billy Armstrong and we had a band that we were putting together and just kicking names around. I think Billy A came up with it, and I just cracked up. I just loved saying it, I loved the way it felt rolling off my tongue. So when we decided to take this on as a band I dubbed it that old name which I had floating around in the back of my mind.
DB- Is there going to be a Jemimah Puddleduck release any time soon?
MK- I think the first thing that we’re going to put out there is a live disc. We’ve been trying to get the shows out through the trading community as much as possible for free. That’s what the scene is all about. But there are those who don’t have access to that. So we have multitracked versions of our live shows and I think we’re going to go out and pick the best version of songs and put together a compilation. That way we won’t have to rush the studio process, which we’re slowly working on.
DB- Describe the band’s music.
MK- I don’t know what to call it. I’m a blues freak and a r&b freak and I grew up listening to the Dead and the Beatles and Quicksilver. So in terms of my own input it’s an amalgam of all that stuff. A lot of it is more or less blues-based but rather than sticking to the twelve bar format and when we get to the solos going around a couple of times in a blues progression and coming back to the song, it’s more like we’ll do the song, get to the solos, and then go to Mars for fifteen or twenty minutes. It’s similar perhaps to the early Grateful Dead approach, the Live Dead era. Which, given my age and when I was into the band the most, that’s the stuff that was most influential to me. I mean, God, the Dark Star on that record [Live Dead] is like, HELLO! (laughs) So it’s an opportunity to play really good songs, it lets me sing and it allows us to go to some unexpected places musically.
DB- Why don’t you say a bit about the players. I’m sure many of our readers know John Molo.
MK- Let’s just say I’ve been very fortunate to play with a drummer with the caliber and heart of John Molo. He’s a genuine thrill and always good for a surprise or three. Bob Gross is our bass player. He’s an old buddy of mine. We played blues gigs around town together for years and I’d come to find out he’s a total Deadhead. He was thrilled when I got the Other Ones gig. We’ve always clicked musically. We harmonize well vocally and I’ve always liked his feel as a bass player. The keyboard player is a guy named Arlan Schierbaum and he’s just a fucking loon. He grew up doing the prog rock thing. He’s really into the classic vintage keyboards He’s got several B-3’s, lots of Leslies, and a ton of Wurlitzer electric pianos. With Jemimah Puddleduck he plays B-3 and Wurlitzer electric piano. No synthesizers or anything, it’s all the organic stuff. All the furniture. He runs his keyboards through all these guitar stomp boxes, so he comes up with the most bizarre fucked up sounds and textures without having to resort to synthesizers. It’s really cool. He definitely brings a unique thing to the mix.
DB- Since you’re describing the musicians you’ve played with, I’d like to hear your thoughts on two notable bandmates, Phil Lesh and Rob Wasserman.
MK- They’re very different bass players certainly. Playing Grateful Dead music with Phil was ridiculously cool because no one does it quite like he does. He has a very defined and unique approach to melody and rhythm that really takes you to that place. I don’t know how else to put it. Rob’s style is very different. He’s much less aggressive, not as much a driving a force on the bottom. But he’s very exploratory and adds a really creative approach to the bottom with his melodicism and of course the texture and tonality of a stand-up as supposed to a bass guitar.
DB- Speaking of Wasserman and Ratdog, when Dave Ellis left, how did that alter the nature of the band and its music?
MK- Well I love Dave, he’s a great player but truthfully it opened up a lot of a space having one less player. One reason I enjoy the line-up of Jemimah Puddleduck is that there’s only four of us. Having only four people on stage you can get pretty busy and still hear everything. So in that sense there’s more room now but Bobby’s pretty attached to the sound of a saxophone. We’re getting together with a guy [Kenny Brooks] for this next little run to do a little playing. I don’t know how it’s going to pan out. I know Bob’s married to the idea of having that extra voice in there.
DB- How has the group’s sound evolved during your time with the band?
MK- Some of these songs that are classics came along after I had pretty much stopped listening to the Dead. I was totally hip to Weather Report Suite but I didn’t know from Terrapin, I never heard the song before [site editor’s note- !] It was like, “Wow, okay, this is cool.” It was that same way with Sailor/Saint which I didn’t know. The thing that I notice about Ratdog now which I’m really getting off on is that Bobby is such a songs- oriented guy that sometimes he doesn’t let the jams go as long as I would like. What I’ve seen as time has gone by and the band has continued on, is that it feels to me that he has gotten more confidence in us, that we might be able to offer something interesting in terms of the jams. I think his fear is that without someone as brilliant at Jerry that twenty minutes of music might get a little redundant. I think he’s beginning to trust that we all have something interesting to contribute that will keep the music interesting and the people interested.
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