There was too much stainless steel in the bar to make me feel comfortable. I prefer bars of wood and stone, places where they have signs to remind the patrons not to wear motorcycle club colors and not to carry weapons. I live in the woods and this was Philadelphia. But it didn’t matter. Later, the Deadstring Brothers would play upstairs and I was eager to see them. Their latest album, Cannery Row, has been in constant rotation for me since it came out earlier this year. It is an album that is one of the year’s finest releases. It has a simple, poetic beauty to it that deepens with each listen. It is good early morning music or late night music, depending on which side of the sun you spend your hours with. The Deadstring Brothers have put out five albums now, most with the superior Bloodshot Records, with a sixth on the way this coming April. Before the show I was to sit down with Kurt Marschke, the lead singer, guitarist and songwriter for the Deadstring Brothers. Kurt has been the focal point of the band since its inception, though he now has a steady partner in crime and like-minded musician in the Deadstring’s bassist, Jeremy Mackinder.
I drank and waited and listened to the traffic on the street.
Jeremy entered the bar and stretched. I introduced myself and offered him a drink.
“I’ll take a whiskey,” he said. “Our damn van broke down. Fuel injection went. So we had to rent that thing, strip down to the essentials, and haul ass to get here.” He pointed to a minivan parked alongside the curb with its blinkers on. Jeremy is not a small man. Tall and thick, that minivan must have been awful for him to ride in.
“To hell with that thing,” he said. “Can’t get comfortable in it.”
I grabbed us drinks and handed him his whiskey.
We toasted.
“Kurt will be here in a moment. He’s unloading.”
We leaned against the bar and talked.
Later, Kurt came down from the soundcheck and we sat at a table on the sidewalk. He didn’t order beer.
I put the recorder out on the table and told him I wasn’t much of a question-and-answer kind of guy. We’d have a few, talk and see where it took us.
Kurt laughed.
“It’s been driving me crazy,” I said, “that you guys have put out this phenomenal record and just get dogged in the press.”
“It’s not dogging,” Kurt said.
“No? All those ridiculous Stones comparisons?”
“Well, that. People are just kind of hung up on that thing. But that’s just lazy journalism.”
“Absolutely,” I said.
“But there’s been no unfavorable reviews.”
“How could there be? It’s a hell of a record.”
“It just has a lot to do with where we are as a band. Different journalists would give it a different kind of attention. But, that said, none of the records have gotten beat up.”
“No. But do you think you’d get a different kind of press if you played the game a bit more? I mean, here you release an album that is like a short story collection, the way the songs play off each other. About all these people struggling against horrible odds. Most people don’t want to hear that.”
“Is that what that record was about?” Kurt said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Me either,” Kurt said.
We laughed.
“Look,” I said. “On the way down here I listened to your first album. In ‘I’m Not a Stealer’ you’ve got that line about leaving town. Now, in ‘Oh Me Oh My’ on Cannery Row, you write a similar thing, a similar sentiment, but it’s very different. You’ve got characters on this new record.”
“Yeah, but this was also my perspective as well. This was me living in Nashville and kind of creating characters around Cannery Row, this loft I’ve been living in. I was creating characters out of stuff that was going on. But that record, in many ways, was the most autobiographical I have ever been. Of course I’m still using a ton of metaphors and what not. But see, we were really short on time to make the record. We had five days. Most of that stuff was written on the fly. There was a lot of being under the gun and having to write something so that we could record it tomorrow, you know?”
“So you reached for what was right there,” I said.
“I did. A lot of that was why I said to myself, ‘I have to do this now, about what is going on now.’ I wrote the song, ‘Cannery Row,’ first. It was the platform for the whole thing. The whole record came from that one idea, writing about that one area. Living in this one area. That was the catalyst to keep me focused under such time pressure. There’s other things in the record beyond just that area. But that was the starting point. I had to get it done and I couldn’t fudge it.”
“It doesn’t sound like you did,” I said.
“See, that area is a historic area, a bunch of old brownstones all owned by these two brothers. It’s going to become an anomaly because it’s getting built up around it. Because of the convention center. Gentrification. I had that whole area, Cannery Row, that unique little area and community and that’s what I used. And some of it is dying out.”
I sat back and drank. I thought of the farm where I work as a farmhand and how the guy who built it in 1760, a farrier, now wouldn’t be able to afford to buy the house he built doing the same work. I told Kurt as much.
“But that’s everywhere,” Kurt said.
“It is. But it also means you’re losing something, too. That’s what I appreciated about Cannery Row so much was its accuracy of description. Of nailing down what it feels like, and means, to struggle in a life that is dying out. That’s being consumed,” I said.
Kurt drank from his vodka and tonic. He sat back.
“Part of it was development as a songwriter. Getting to know the craft a bit better. This was the fifth record for me as a writer. Some of it might be a bit of maturity as a writer.”
“Talk about the craft of being a songwriter,” I said.
“I’m not good at talking about that,” Kurt said.
An ambulance sped by.
“It’s like writing a short story,” I said.
“Well, that’s how I approached writing that record. I realized that I could step into a character’s head and shape verses around it. And I felt that I could do that in any type of song. Four verses around a person or a place or a subject,” he said.
“You don’t think that’d get monotonous? The same technique over and over again?”
“No. I don’t,” Kurt said. “Stories are stories. Once you move into telling stories as opposed to just writing a hook people can move around to that opens up a whole other thing. Look. I kind of lost sight of the thing about songwriting after the first record. We were touring a lot and when we were playing I noticed that people in bars don’t want to sit and listen to stories. They just want to be made to feel something. After that first record then, I moved into an area of writing that would be more appropriate for playing in bars. I just didn’t have any of that material written for Cannery Row. I had to look at what I had as a songwriter, but these weren’t things that would work out on our other records. Or bars. And it didn’t matter. We had to get this done.”
“You can do anything when you have an open slate,” I said.
“Exactly. We were fearless about what we could do. We’re basically doing exactly what we want to do and what we think is right. Doing the singer-songwriter thing? We’re just not plugged into that.”
“No.”
“But this is the most organized we’ve ever been. We knew Cannery Row was going to be what it was and we’re set up through 2014. We just finished up our next album, a honky tonk record. All covers. That was part of the plan, too. Do something different and interesting. We’ve been playing so many honky tonks and playing honky tonk songs and there’s always been that in our sound, that we figured it’d be fun to go out and now record an album of honky tonk covers.”
“Did that affect your songwriting?”
“It would have to. You live those songs. I think it would be a big influence,” Kurt said.
“How so?”
“I don’t know yet. I haven’t done much writing since we finished those sessions.”
“No?” I said.
“Not really. I can’t write on the road. I need silence and space. I don’t work well in all that chaos. There’s days when you think, ‘I’ll never get to be alone anymore.’ I write better if I can take the time out. I keep dreaming of installing a cocoon in the van so I can get that quiet,” Kurt said.
“Good luck,” I said. We laughed and I excused myself.
I went to the bar and got another round. When I came back Kurt leaned forward on the table and folded his hands on top of each other.
“This new record you’ll like,” Kurt said.
I sat down.
“Don’t see why I wouldn’t,” I said.
“It’s got the same musicians as Cannery Row but we recorded it down on Music Row. In the belly of the beast.”
I laughed and shook my head.
“We had an incredible engineer. The sound is wonderful. It’s like the engineer and the room were made for each other. It’s something. We’ve never undertook something like that before. But, thinking about your question, I would hope to continue to develop. Work on this craft. Stylistically it doesn’t matter, but the craft does. I am drawn to that freedom of music, you know, especially in popular art, of that era from the mid-sixties to the middle-seventies. That’s what the Deadstring Brothers have always been pulled toward. That was the most freeing time for art, that ten year period. It was a renaissance for music. When everything got completely wide open. That’s the reason I started this band. Think of all those guys in the sixties and seventies, all part of the same movement. When Chet Atkins had a stronghold on Nashville, you couldn’t do much else. The outlaw movement grew out of that. They left town and came back and you couldn’t touch them. They had control of their careers. Nobody could tell them who could be on the record or who couldn’t. That’s the model for this band from the start to the finish. We’re going to have complete control. The freedom to do what we want to do. I’m not going to write by the numbers. It’s going to have to be a songwriter writing the fucking song. You know? Dylan didn’t write by the numbers. Waylon, Kristofferson, Billy Joe Shaver, Prine. Many more. Beautiful songs, they wrote beautiful songs and they did it on their terms. And they did it within a form. Forms that I love. Prolific and consistent. They all were.”
“It’s an obsession. Writers have to do it,” I said.
“Yeah. As a songwriter, I’ve felt better on the last two records, especially Cannery Row. I’ve felt like I was going somewhere. Because if I wasn’t developing, I’d just stop and go do something else. But Bloodshot gave me this deal, this way of being a published writer. I have a BMI and every record I make is registered. There’s a legitimacy to that. A respect to that. I take that very seriously.”
We spoke for some time about serious art, about what it takes to make it and what good craftsmanship is. We spoke of woodworking.
“My problem with a lot of the mass produced art,” I said, “and I mean art in the general term, both music and literature, is that it doesn’t face how people live through it. What I appreciate about Cannery Row is that there is a hard confrontation with how people get through the day. But no one wants to hear how the working class makes it through. It’s almost bullheaded to make the stand and write about those truths.”
“But most people that write that way aren’t writing that way because they learned to write as a business. There’s so many talented song writers out there writing real music. So much of it. It makes it inspiring. I could go on and on about it. You know what I am talking about. You don’t need the pop marketing to have a career in music. And if you feel you need it and are successful you should question why you are successful.”
“That music won’t last,” I said.
“No. But a lot of other music won’t either. It will only last as long as people appreciate it.”
“Some songs will last. In two hundred years they’ll still be partying to Fats Domino,” I said.
“I hope. Maybe.”
“Don’t you want to write a song that will last? An immortal song? To beat the gods?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I want to write about what’s happening right now. What’s right here in front of me. I don’t decide if it lasts.”
Kurt paused and drank and looked out over Chestnut Street.
And he said, “I would worry that if I started thinking about sitting down to beat the gods I’d fuck up what I do creatively.”
“How?”
“Because too much ego would get involved. Ego, especially the male ego, can make very bad art. Arrogant art. It’s semi-embarrassing to think that way. And I don’t want to beat the gods. I just want to be able to flow with it. To not push against the universe. I want to slow down and see it,” Kurt said.
