One Night
My memories of Marcellus Hall date back to 1996, the year I got out of college and went to work as an office boy (technically, a “staff assistant”) at The New Yorker. I’d get in early, put the newspapers out on the newspaper racks, distribute the mail. My boss, Bruce Diones, would come in at eleven with such a scowl on his face, it took me several months to figure out he was a wonderful man. I got to meet Arthur Miller that year. Old-timers like Joseph Mitchell, Brendan Gill, and Andy Logan (who’d become the magazine’s first female Talk of the Town reporter, two hundred years earlier) were still coming into the office; and whenever proper assistants left the magazine, or went out on vacation, Bruce would slip one of his staff assistants into their slot. In the course of the same year, I got to work in the fiction department and, for a long time (maybe six months?), in cartoons, covers, and illustrations.
Marcellus—an unusually gifted young illustrator—was already a go-to-guy for the art editors. It didn’t hurt that he looked a bit like the young Robert Redford and played in a band: Railroad Jerk. The band was great. I got to see them just once (at Brownie’s?), but I remember the show itself vividly and still listen to those then-new/now-old RRJ records.
Railroad Jerk had one foot in the soil of the Dockery Plantation and the other in Einstürzende Neubauten, a third foot in Dylan, fourth and fifth feet in Captain Beefheart and Television, new wave and no wave and they just didn’t sound like they gave much of a fuck about sounding like anyone else. (At the time, I thought Beck, who’d come after RRJ, sounded like them.) Did I already mention how good they were live? Also Marcellus was not the wordiest guy in the world when I met him, but his lyrics were word-drunk and joyous and witty. ("Thought it was a twist-off / I’m totally pissed off!”) Uplifting, without being stupid, which isn’t the easiest trick to pull off. It was in the liner notes to a RRJ album that I first encountered Psalm 33:3: “Play skillfully, with a loud noise!”
They must have broken up soon after I saw them, because Marcellus came out with a new band—White Hassle, with RRJ’s Dave Varenka on drums—and new songs (like “Life is Still Sweet”) that stuck in your head like railroad spikes.
Anyway, I left The New Yorker and took an editing job at FEED—a magazine which couldn’t have been much more different from TNY except insofar as, sometime after my arrival, Marcellus Hall started to do all of FEED’s illustrations. (I have an original somewhere: two gladiators, squared off, with the magazine’s logo drawn on a flag on the arena wall.) Then a bunch of shit happened—I moved to California—and while I was out there I saw that Marcellus was now making music under his own name: The First Line, an LP, in 2011; the Afterglow LP (credited to Marcellus Hall & the Hostage) in 2013.
Fast-forward to 2019: I’m back in New York, working on a book that’s going to need illustrations. Marcellus Hall is the first artist I think of. He’s still drawing. Still making music. Still living, as far as I know, on the Lower East Side. We reconnected, and this year—when I decided to start Moistworks back up—Marcellus was one of the first friends I asked to chip in. I had a few drawings that I’d seen in mind (we’ll be featuring those, too, sometime soon), but as we got to talking we had the idea of posting a work still in progress and Marcellus settled upon a song.
This, the earliest sketch, sounds very much like an old field recording:
I asked Marcellus, “Were you outside when you recorded it?”
“Definitely,” he said. “In fact, I have a recollection of riding my bike across the Manhattan bridge and singing this plaintive melody into my voice memo app.”
A few weeks later, on October 29th, in the basement of an old tenement building on Avenue B—a practice space he’s been renting since the RRJ days—Marcellus played the song through with his band, the Following Guests. (Damon Smith’s on bass; Mike Shapiro’s on drums; Marcellus is playing guitar and harmonica.) They start slow, then switch the rhythm. The lyrics barely exist at this point, but there’s a hint of a bridge (at around the 3:05 mark), and a lovely chord progression: I-ii-IV-V with an achy F#m after the E (Marcellus uses it with a capo on the second fret, so it’s a D shape on the E, an Em shape for the F#m, etc.), then a B7 he holds for longer than you might expect, giving the song even more of an ache and echo of the longing / lingering expressed in what’s going to turn into the chorus…
OK. It’s February, 2019, and we’re in Marcellus’s bedroom on the LES. He’s trying to shoehorn that plaintive melody into what he’s starting to think of as a Cajun shuffle (it sounds, to me, like a calypso). There’s interesting stuff happening, too, with the chords. Like a cruciverbalist trying to work out a puzzle with the fewest number of black squares, Marcellus always tries to cut down the number of chords that he’s using, and here—ditching that lovely I-ii-IV-V progression—he’s jumping between just two: a G and a D7 (or F# and C#7, because his guitar’s out of tune). The bridge is much more clearly articulated, and the lyrics are starting to snap into focus, with Marcellus flipping through various notebooks, trying to emulate the simplictity of Chuck Berry songs like “The Promised Land.” (He’s also got Paul Simon rattling around in his head.) The words are still jumbled, associative, but a lot of what he’s singing ends up making the cut. A few months later, in June, the FG’s play the song out, for the first time, at Hank’s Saloon.
A year’s gone by since that bedroom recording and the FGs are recording at the Creamery in Brooklyn, with Jeff Fettig at the controls and Joachim Kearns sitting in on electric guitar. (Seungah Jeong takes some photos, including the one I’m using on MW’s homepage.) The lyrics are set down to the “na na nas,” the Cajun swing’s more pronounced and, for the chorus, Mike’s come up with a drum pattern that recalls the rumba Milt Turner plays on Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say.” The whole thing’s simpler and more complicated, at once. The guys add a few overdubs and Marcellus double-tracks the vocals—the bridge he’s being toying with is gone—but that first, plaintive melody from the Manhattan bridge is still the heart of the song. There are small things (the timing of the introduction, etc.) he wants to fix later this year, when the band mixes this song and finishes work on a couple of others. The end result will be Marcellus’s 3rd solo album, which may or may not have a title yet (I haven’t asked). I’m looking forward to hearing it—and even more to the night that I hear it played live—but in the long meanwhile, this is as close as any of us are going to get.
—Alex Abramovich
