Mark Rubin: No Tourists Allowed
Mark Rubin by Todd V. Wolfson
PART ONE
If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home. – James Michener
It’s a chilly, drizzly Monday evening in Austin, a few nights shy of Halloween weekend. At the Waterloo Icehouse on the north side, Hank Jr. is emphatically seeking reassurance that we are, “Ready for some footbaallll!?!?” on T.V. Sitting across from me at a shellacked table speckled with neon beer sign light, Mark Rubin is scanning over my list of hyper-planned out interview questions, which have long and graciously gone out the window.
“Playing in Europe?” he says, with his light Oklahoma drawl. “I’ll just tell you this. In America, we have football, and there they have orchestra. That’s all you need to know. High school orchestras over there can whip the Austin Symphony with their eyes closed. They believe that music and culture are human rights. We think they’re something you should pay for and do for a hobby. As long as football is in the high schools and orchestra is not, we will be a second class nation mark my words.”
Rubin, who even describes himself on his blog – Chasing the Fat Man – bio as, “an opinionated loudmouth,” doesn’t mince his words. “I try really hard not to have an opinion about something that I’m not pretty well educated about,” he explains at one point. “A big problem I get into is when someone asks my opinion I have a tendency of giving it to you. I will tell them precisely how I think and if I say something crappy about somebody I have no problem saying it to their face. A lot of people aren’t used to that. But life is really short. We don’t have time for this crap. People are dying every day. Just because I say I think that’s a stupid move, ‘That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen you do,’ that’s based entirely on love. That’s because I care. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t have an opinion.”
Mark Rubin
A stubborn rebel with a finely tuned sense of justice, Rubin comes armed with that quick-to-bite wit that comes from being an outsider, the essential self-protective survival skill for those that get perpetually labeled “not one of us.” But independence from the confines of any particular scene has driven him to perpetually seek out authenticity in the midst of commodified cultures. Rubin is then fighting on the outposts to keep that genuine American heart beating. Best known to many as the bassist and foil to Danny Barnes in Bad Livers, he has been involved in a plethora of projects too numerous to name here, but even a perfunctory glance at his bio reveals a list that draw from wells as local as Texas swing (Ridgetop Syncopators) to the Middle East (1000 Nights Orchestra), from instructing at Klez Kamp to supervising film soundtracks (Richard Linklater’s The Newton Boys). He has also made tracks across Europe as a champion of Jewish music, and has now felt called back to his home soil in latest project, a sly Americana duo with mandolin player and vocalist Silas Lowe called, in his true sardonic fashion, Fat Man & Little Boy.
It should be noted, I’m catching Rubin at an uncertain time. Tonight, he’s in a lot of pain from a shoulder injury he sustained while in New York City to play some gigs with Andy Statman (“One of my heroes for as long as I’ve been playing music,” he notes). He lifted his bass over a turnstile Greenwich Station and tore his rotator cuff.
Although he explains the success rate for this surgery is about “80 to 90%,” ”The fear that you have when you have an injury like this is, will I ever play again?” Rubin explains. ”And it’s on the table, I’ll be completely honest with you, that’s an open question today. Will I be able to play in the same sort of aggressive way for which I’m known for playing?”
It would be a shame if not, since watching Rubin nimbly blitz the bass is a thing of savage beauty. He’ll know once the healing and rehabilitation process takes effect, and is looking at a couple months recovery time. But the flip side of the unfortunate injury is the support he received. Being a musician ain’t exactly a lucrative gig for most, giving little wiggle room for the unexpected, and Rubin was faced with the question of how he was going to pay for the surgery and its associated costs. Forgoing the usual charity gig route, he decided to simply set up a donation link on his blog. Within thirty-six hours, he had raised the money he needed.
“I had gotten donations averaging a hundred dollars an hour for 36 hours,” he says. “The inherent goodness of people will surprise you. I had contributions from Canada, London, Berlin, Weimar, Germany, Chisinau, Republic Moldova, Krakow, Poland. Places I can’t pronounce, people I don’t know, and finally the one that capped it was I got a hundred dollars from a lady in Osaka, Japan who I gave a lesson to in Germany two years ago. On the one hand, I felt sad having to go out to the public that way, but then to find out that I had such a supportive community, probably more supportive than I am aware of in my daily life – it’s sad that it takes tragedies and difficulties to illustrate that to you, but it’s very warming and heartening to know.”
It speaks to the roaming trajectory Rubin has cast over the years in his rangy career. He approaches music the way one should approach travel, with open eyes and open ears. For Rubin, the two experiences are inextricably interwoven. “ ‘You want to see things and see how the world really is, be in a band,” he reflects. “Because you don’t get the first class accommodations, you get the same kind of accommodations that people in your own economic strata get. That’s whenyou really find out what the world is like. You sleep on somebody’s couch in Hungary or see what a border crossing in Serbia is like – that will change how you think about your own country quite a bit.”
This extends to a more philosophical level. The antithesis of what could be described as “cultural tourism,” Rubin has followed where his innately curious nature have led him, and when he wants to play something, he dig in deep and tries to understand it. The driving question is, “What are my intentions?”:
Mark Rubin at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival 2008
“The motivations that drive consumerist America have to do with consumerism. For instance, ‘I bought the right hat, I bought all the instruction books, I joined the club, I spent all this money, I bought the instrument, hey, I’m in now.’ One of the problems with the United States and its relationship with the rest of the world is that the rest of the world is not a consumerist world. They don’t believe in conspicuous consumption the way we do. There’s this idea that Americans believe that their wealth doesn’t make somebody else poor, when nothing could be further from the truth. There are only limited resources on the earth, and I think that if you’re going to approach someone’s culture this way, ‘Well I can just pick and choose whatever I want to do, and it’s ok because I’m just visiting, and I’m an American so I can do whatever I want’ – its imperialistic. There’s nothing I find more ignoble.”
It’s an idea he’s approached from several angles on his blog: “My major ballywick has to do with context. I think that’s sorely missing from our society right now. People don’t take time out for a moment and consider the ramifications of their actions. If they did, I think they would be kinder and gentler and more forgiving and more involved in their own communities, rather than doing, what the Buddhists say, spewing confusion. Our society is designed on keeping everybody in a confused state. We’re at the point now where if people want to have a genuine cultural experience they have to make it up.”
Oklahoma Roots
Rubin credits his father for installing this profound understanding of the well-tread adage, “Be a traveler, not a tourist.”
“’He said, ‘The most disrespectful thing you can do is to be a tourist in somebody else’s town. When you go someplace, rather than showing up with a list of things you want to do, keep your mouth shut, keep your eyes open, and see what’s going on. See how people are dressing, how people are acting, how people are talking, that will answer everything you need to know. You’re going to have the best experience by going to a place to do that. If it’s set up for the tourists, don’t go there, just ignore it. Never be a tourist.”’
“In his life, he liked to extend that further,” he continues. “’Never be a dilettante.’ If you were going to go and do something, then you were going to go and do it. You’re not going to play at it, you’re not going to play like it. You’re going to do it, and you’re going to honor whatever that is. That was a crazy, big time, major component of my upbringing. For instance, when I decided not to go to college and I wanted to be a musician, my family said, ‘Well that’s fine, but if you’re going to do this, you better damn well be the best at it.’ Which, number one, Jews are not failures. You know – ‘The goyem are looking, don’t screw up, they’re looking!’ [laughs]. That’s a big part of my life, ‘Don’t fuck up, we’re the only Jews in town!’ So you’re constantly on guard. And the other thing was, ‘Don’t screw around at it, just go ahead and do it to the best of your ability and take it as far as you possibly can.’”
Rubin was born in Stillwater, Oklahoma, a town located in the prairie northeast of Oklahoma City. His mother was an English teacher and his father was the director of international student affairs at OSU, with a hobby as an announcer for the Cowboy marching band, . His parents had both been in concert band when they were in college, and had originally moved to Stillwater when his father became executive secretary of the Kappa Kappa Psi Marching Band Fraternity. Although Stillwater is politically conservative, the agricultural engineering program at OSU attracted an international student body that exposed Rubin from a young age to a multi-cultural perspective:
”I was on one hand introduced to the world through these international students who cooked weird food and spoke in weird languages and listened to crazy music, and on the other hand I was basically living in the buckle of the Bible Belt and was a practicing Jew. That’s a dichotomy, that’s something you have to wrap your head around. It’s kind of like being the only black kid in the neighborhood. Only black kids probably had it a lot worse than I did.” The family would drive every Sunday to attend religious school at a synagogue in Oklahoma City, but even in that community, ”I was considered kind of a weirdo because I didn’t show up for Hebrew school like everybody else did on Tuesday because my family didn’t feel like driving the 120 miles. I lived a lot of my life on I-35.”
It was on this stretch of highway and in those Stillwater streets he began to absorb the local musical culture. ”What’s on the radio from 6am to 10am every morning? Bluegrass gospel,” Rubin recounts. “When you would go into your community and they’re having a picnic or a soccer game and they have entertainment, it’s going to be a country band. My parents were big dancers, which is one of the reasons why I was so attracted to dance music in the first place. They used to square dance and polka dance, so they hired a local bluegrass band to come down and play for the square dances. Ever since I was a little baby, I would be seeing these bands. My father, to his dying day, played baritone horn in a community band. This idea of communal music making and music which is native to where you are has always been really important in my family.”
Dallas, Texas 1987, playing in a punk band called Bedrockers
The family moved to Norman when his father took a job with the Hillel Foundation there. Rubin describes the move as, “The difference between night and day.” The town was close to Oklahoma City, which had an active reggae scene that exposed Rubin to Jamaican music, as bands like The Itals, The Melodians, Justin Hinds, and Freddie McGregor rolled through OKC in the early 1980’s. He also became involved in the punk rock scene, immersing himself in bands like The Dead Kennedys, Black Flag and Minutemen. By the time Rubin was a junior in high school, he’d already pre-enrolled in OU, but in his spare time, he would tag along with bands, and even had a stint as a roadie for The Flaming Lips at one point. At the time, he says, ”I didn’t really identify myself as a musician, just a big music fan. I played tuba in high school and elementary school, but that’s not exactly a punk rock instrument. I picked up [electric] bass just for fun about high school time.” Rubin began playing in local reggae bands, and never completed a college degree (”I like to say I have a B.A. in LSD from OU,” he notes dryly).
Oklahoma’s Native American culture also left an indelible impression on Rubin, whose adopted brother was a fancy dancer at pow wows his family would attend every other weekend. When he moved to Dallas in 1987, he was in for a culture shock. ”Man, that’s a white town. Where are the brown people with the cool food and the fun dances?” Being poor, Rubin found himself living in the African-American and Mexican neighborhoods in economically segregated Dallas, which further broadened his musical horizons.
All of these diverse experiences combined help shape a world view which Rubin describes as “analytical”:
“I’ll meet these kids from Philadelphia or Boston or New York. They’re fifth generation Jewish American. They’ve lived in an environment where Yiddish was spoken regularly, where Jewish culture, custom and context were just part of everyday life. Hell man, I was in Stillwater, Oklahoma, this was completely not my experience. So when I go out and seek culture that belongs to my own community, I’m looking for it through a completely different filter. They look at it because they’re in it. I like to say that, the man who’s on fire, he doesn’t know if he’s on fire, or if the house is on fire, or if the whole world is on fire. All he knows is, he’s on fire. So people that are in those communities, they have no idea that it isn’t like that someplace else. Looking back at my own cultural heritage, I think I was able to bring a new perspective to it. I’m not going to say it’s not an authentic experience or a more authentic experience, or a more culturally rich experience, I’m just saying the way I came to was not just a cultural and emotional way, but also from an analytical way, the way you would look at it from the outside. That’s been a long part of my history, being able to work within cultural and musical contexts, trying to live within them authentically, whatever the hell that means, while also recognizing it’s not mine.”
Bad Livers, 1991 by Ewolf
A Band of Proud Misfits
“People ask me, ‘What was the secret?’ And the secret was that there was no secret,” Rubin says of Bad Livers. Formed in Austin, Texas in 1990, the band often gets written up as a bluegrass/punk hybrid, but that is hardly an accurate portrait. Barnes and Rubin, joined in the first six years by Ralph White on fiddle and then by Bob Grant on guitar and mandolin, plus whoever else jumped on for the ride, were united by a shared love of American music, and a punk rock stubbornness that refused to play nice.
“Whatever people told us to do we did the opposite,” Rubin recalls. “People told us Bad Livers would be a stupid name. People told us never to work with Ralph White. I was told point blank never to work with Danny Barnes. And I was thinking, ‘Huh, if everybody tells me he’s useless, well a lot of people think I’m useless. So that’s just the guy to find.’ In our career we would hear about other musicians, ‘Oh that guy, he pisses everybody off,’ and me and Danny would go, ‘Hmm. We need to meet this guy.’ We ended up meeting some really amazing musicians [that way], guys like Erik Hokkanen and Steve James, who had reputations for being art over friendly. At the time we shuttered, we were talking about doing a record with the fiddle player from Sun Ra’s band. You don’t get those sorts of opportunities unless you make the sacrifices that have to do with not making the sacrifices.”
They signed with punk rock label Touch and Go to release their first album, Delusions of Banjer. They freely covered Motorhead, Thelonious Monk and The Stanley Brothers. They opened for The Butthole Surfers one night and The Dillards the next. And although many fixated on the novelty of that (an early single of a “Lust for Life” cover didn’t help matters), the band didn’t go out there with a gimmick. By giving themselves complete musical freedom, they simply kicked aside the usual parameters and assumptions that spring to mind when an audience sees acoustic instruments, particularly a banjo, on stage. As Rubin explains:
” ‘I’m not going to do what the people at Bluegrass Unlimited want me to do. I don’t give a shit what No Depression has to say about it. If y’all want to talk about it that’s fine. We’re going to continue to do it, talk amongst yourselves.’ That was the core nexus for nearly a decade of Bad Liver performance. We thought that was natural, but other people found it refreshing … Because we were acoustic, because we came from American sources, and because we were kind of snot-nosed and go-to-hell in our attitude, little aspects of the Bad Liver diamond could meet others’ agendas. We were never invited to the party, we were never let in the door. But the jamband guys saw what we were doing, and the punk rock guys really saw what we were doing. I remember once a guy come up to Danny, and he said the funniest thing, ‘cause it was true, he goes, ‘Man, somewhere up in the middle of all that, there was some really good bluegrass banjo-playing.’ Without ever having to pander to any one audience at all, just doing what we thought we should do, and just being so happy about that, that created some positive energy and that moves you down the road.”
But having that open agenda didn’t mean that the band didn’t have a call to arms. One the contrary, the band was deeply concerned with how artistic endeavors, particularly those of traditional Southern music, could be a source of empowerment. Rubin describes their “raison d’être”:
“We were trying to bring dignity to the disenfranchised. To bring dignity to poor people and to people that don’t have voices. To display to the greater community that there is great dignity and there is great honor in these cultures which have been cartoonified for fun and profit.”
Mark Rubin & Danny Barnes
For ten years they slogged up and down the highway asphalt, crammed in a van and sleeping on couches. Fueled by that shared mission, it nevertheless was a difficult way to barely make a living. Bad Livers went on an extended hiatus in 2000. Barnes had moved to Washington state in 1997, and as Rubin explains, “It was one of those kind of things were Dan goes, ‘I want to go do a solo tour,’ and I go, ‘You go right on ahead.’ And then I didn’t hear back from him again until 2008, ‘Hey I think I got a gig!’” Rubin is referring to their headlining slots at Pickathon and Hardly Strictly bluegrass in summer of 2008. “[But] you know that in the eight years that Bad Livers didn’t play, not one person ever asked me what happened?” he says sadly. “That says a lot. Not one fan, not one journalist. Nobody asked. I find that to be kind of strange.”
Although often cited as influential, for Rubin the resonating ripples of the Livers’ good work definitely remain a question mark. He often feels their stated mission went unnoticed. Mentioning disdainfully, “You got your whole hillbilly scene and your alternative this and your alternative that and your punk country and all this stuff,” I was curious if he was worried that would be their legacy.
“Oh absolutely,” he admits. “In 2000, I was personally sick because the bands that came up in our wake I thought were just terrible. I don’t mean terrible musically, I mean terrible culturally. I felt like they were using the door that we had opened to basically reinforce these negative stereotypes and that they did not have an honor or a dignity, but quite the opposite. They were rube-ing it up, being cartoonish and being base. I think I’m coming off like a condescending intellectual, like a tea-sipping Yankee New Yorker, but the fact is, it was tea-sipping Yankee New Yorkers who put together these terrible bands. Not just new Yorkers by the way, plenty of kids from the Midwest got it wrong too. I thought that the legacy of Bad Livers was to lower the bar, to have cheapened and demeaned Southern American culture yet another click.”
“I think when you ask me this question my mind goes to Jerry Garcia for a second,” he continues. “I was never a fan of The Dead. That had more to do with the people – kind of like Christianity, I like Jesus just fine, it’s the people who follow him around that got me scared, same thing with The Dead. As I got older and I’ve listened to some more of The Dead and I’ve read a lot of stuff [about them] I realized that the guys in The Dead, they listened to some great music man. Those guys were into American music. Once they had the ear of the public, they did everything they could to shine that light back onto the people that they were into. But their audience never snapped to it, they never snapped to this idea of an American cultural legacy. Like, okay, we’re jamming out and everything, but the nexus, the core, is a shared American experience. That you should listen to Fred McDowell, you should listen to Blind Lemon [Jefferson] and you should listen to Gus Cannon and you should listen to Bill Monroe.”
“I remember watching a documentary about bluegrass music and they interviewed Jerry Garcia and asked him, ‘Well, do you still want to be a bluegrass boy?’ and he just looked at the camera and he said, ‘I still want to be a bluegrass boy today.’ He had this childlike wonder in his face. And I thought, for a sensitive person, to have gone as far as The Grateful Dead had, and to be so wildly influential, and then to realize how awful and wrong that went, based on what your original intention was, and everyone is saying, ‘Jerry, you rock, you rock,’ and you’re going, ‘No no no listen to this Gus Cannon 78′ – That will drive a guy to heroin.”
“Using that analogy though, I don’t want to say that Bad Livers had anything to do with that sort of cultural legacy,” he further reflects. “I could never even imagine, ‘cause I don’t have the bank account that shows it [laughs]. But that’s how I thought, I felt like I was going to have to guard against my own disappointment in what I saw as all of the good work that we tried to do in trying to enlighten people about their own culture and their own circumstances and to take pride in it, was just completely ignored in the wake of the novelty of what we were doing … I’d be on stage and the Saxon Pub and people would come up to us and go, ‘Oh we love that song you do,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah that’s the Stanley Brothers, you should check them out.’ Well they’d come back two weeks later and say, “Yeah, I got that record, I don’t like it, I like your version.’ And you’re thinking, ‘Boy I’m screwing up.’ I’m personally not doing my job right, because what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to find the core, the essence of that music and highlight that. And most people are just looking at the outside. They’re not delving further in to the heart of it.”
But Rubin, cautious about sounding too optimistic, does feel recent years have shown him, that at least to a few switched-on folks, the miles logged were not in vain. Even if he will remain unsure of their legacy, he has been approached by folks as diverse as Yonder Mountain String Band to Bill Frisell who credit the Livers with opening their eyes a little wider: “I think only recently I’ve met enough people and seen enough stuff that I would go, ‘Yeah, oh hey that was inspired by us? Wow. I’m proud of that.’
“I got to tell you, showing up at String Summit this year was a real oh-ho moment for me,” he recalls of the Livers slot at YMSB’s festival. “It was a chance for a lot of people, and in some cases people that weren’t even born when we were making our records, to come up and say how moving and important it was, and how that led them onto a journey that found them other things. Like I wish everybody went out and bought a Don Stover record, I really do. In fact I think anyone reading this right now, at this moment should stop what they’re doing and go over to i-Tunes and download you a Don Stover record, I recommend you start with Things in Life. I can pick up the guitar or mandolin and sing you every song on that record. If I could have found a way to repay Don Stover with respect before he passed I would have done it, but I can’t, so what I’m going to do now is try and get his message out.”
Bad Livers at NWSS 2009 by Bill Ball
Recommended Listening:
Bad Livers at Cicero’s on May 4, 1991 (LMA)
Bad Livers at Northwest String Summit, July 17, 2009 (LMA)
Mark Rubin with The Bing Bang Boys, July 7, 2003 (LMA)
Klezmer Project on KUT radio, June 2, 2004
Check back soon for part 2, where we discuss why Rubin didn’t end up in Nashville, his travels in Europe, and the story of Fat Man & Little Boy, how a performance art act turned into one heck of an Americana duet…stay tuned!
Bryant Liggett Says:
