Mark Rubin: No Tourists Allowed
Mark Rubin by Todd V. Wolfson
Part Two
“The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.” – Wendell Berry
“In Yiddish we have a phrase, ‘de nomen est omen,’ the name is an omen,” Mark Rubin declares. “Don’t go to a doctor named Dr. Slaughter. But the guy named Dr. Dick is probably a urologist.” We are discussing language, specifically, how it’s used to describe music, but also the greater ramifications labeling can have. In the background, Hank Jr.’s football theme buttresses the commercials between plays on the TV at Waterloo Icehouse, a droning contrast to the topic at hand.
“Words have power,” Rubin reflects. “Words have meaning and meaning has context. They have weight. Words like ‘nigger’ and ‘kike,’ they mean something. There’s a reason why someone reading those letters would have an emotional response to it. The same way I have a response when I hear the word ‘gypsy,’ one of the most foul misuses of a word ever perpetrated. If you can call something blues, you can then put it in the blues category, and put it on the blues ghetto.”
“I think I first became aware of this problem, this idea of language and labeling and the way it can destroy you, or it can make you, when I worked with a guy here in town called Roosevelt T. Williams,” he recalls. “That was his name, [he was] Mr. Williams to me. When I met him he was 88 years old. He was a piano player and he sang American songs. In his repertoire, besides his own original material, were tunes by Willie Nelson and Irving Berlin, but they called him Gray Ghost because it was a cute little blues name. And they called him a blues piano player. So by calling him a nickname, that wasn’t even one that he particularly liked, they could then not call him ‘Mr. Williams.’ Simply due to the tone of his skin he couldn’t be a pop musician or be a great American songwriter. What he had to be was a blues musician because that’s the box we have set up for old black men.”
He stops and shakes his head. “It’s wrong on sooo many levels.”
The power to self-define then becomes crucial, as he describes:
Mark Rubin by Todd V. Wolfson
“When I first started playing in the Mexican American community, I worked with Santiago Jimenez Jr [and his band]. I heard a lot of white people tell me about their music and tell me about their culture. I’d be damned if I’d ever heard it from any of them. So I asked them, ‘What do you call your music? Cause I’d heard it called all these different things. They said, ‘Eh, we used to call it conjuno, which just meant group, but people don’t know what we mean, so we call it Tex Mex, ‘cause it’s a mixture of Texas and Mexican music. Like us, we’re Tejanos.’ By naming it, they own it. If someone else names it, you don’t get to own it. This is where a guy like David Grisman is a genius, he calls it ‘Dawg music. ‘He owns it. This is where Bill Monroe is a genius. He calls it ‘bluegrass music.’ Danny Barnes is doing the same thing, he’s got his FolkTronics. He names it, in other words, he can control it.”
“[But] if you’re so culturally illiterate that every time you see a white guy with a banjo, therefore it is bluegrass, then Bob Schneider wins the best bluegrass band in Austin award for 8 years running,” he continues. “So this is a degraded and culturally disconnected society. A third world nation culturally, and it does so simply by use of its language. I firmly believe that there’s a direct correlation between the misnomering of culture and the misnomering of everything else. Because if you can call waterboarding ‘not torture,’ if you can just change the meaning of the word ‘torture’ – the only way they can get away with that is because they made the word bluegrass meaningless enough to now describe Chris Thile. It’s not Chris Thile’s fault, I’m not faulting the artist. But Bad Livers never played a note of bluegrass. Not ever, not once. But it kept being a term that got put on us.”
To Europe and Back Again
Despite the Livers mistakenly being labeled as bluegrass, with Rubin’s own lifelong connection to the music, one assumes he would have found his way deeper into the bluegrass scene. Although he had Nashville aspirations when the Livers were shelved in 2000, this wasn’t to be the case. “One of the reasons I didn’t go into bluegrass music here in the states is because I’m Jewish,” he says frankly. “You don’t get to be in bluegrass music if you’re Jewish. It’s an ugly, dirty little secret that I don’t mind exposing. You couldn’t do it if you were black, I doubt you’d be able to pull it off if you were Catholic either. As much as we like to think of the United States and people as being open, bluegrass music is W.A.S.P. music. It’s the music of the economic and cultural disenfranchisement of once powerful Southern white voices. That’s what it is. I am from Stillwater, Oklahoma and I speak the way I do, but I don’t go to church. And I don’t go to their church. So even though I’d be very welcome to come play a festival, I would not be entirely welcome in traditional Nashville, there would be no doors open to me there. Now of course people reading this will probably say, ‘That’s not true, There’s plenty of Jews’, well, check yourself. Let’s check that out. They may be people of Jewish descent, but they’re not practicing Jews.”
Mark Rubin by Todd V. Wolfson
Remembering the incident that made it clear to him that the bluegrass establishment wasn’t going to welcome him with open arms, he says, “I bounced this idea off some people on a tour bus, at IBMA where I was hanging out, and a guy – a very famous bluegrass singer who I’m not going to embarrass – he said ‘Well Mark, we’ve already got us a bass playing Jew’ [referring to Mark Schatz]. He was saying it kind of like a joke, but he wasn’t joking. At that point when that door is closed to you, and I do mean closed, there’s no point picking a fight on that one.”
“Because in some respects, he’s right,” Rubin reflects. “If this music comes from the Church of Christ and of the Southern Baptist convention, [then] it’s music that comes from these peoples’ hearts. It’s one of the reasons that I like it so much, it’s so pure and so authentic. And I have no problem singing gospel music, like I say I’m down with Jesus, he was a fine upstanding Jew, it’s just the guys that follow him around that kind of give me the creeps. I work regularly with practicing Christians and it works out real fine, Ricky Skaggs and Danny Barnes high among them, because they happen to be practicing Christians. They actually behave Christlike.”
Rubin shares another anecdote: in 1996 he was trying to arrange a tour with concert promoters in France for his aforementioned long-time friend and musical collaborator Jimenez Jr., for whom he had produced a record. The promoters’ excitement faded when they found out Rubin intended to come along as the bass player. “They go, ‘Oh Mark, but of course you cannot come. I mean, I can get a white bass player here in France.’”
He pauses to let the point sink in. “In other words, this music business that we’re in, it has rules. And if you’re going to be playing Mexican music, you damn well better be a beaner,” he says, angrily spitting the last word out. “Like Ray Benson told me years ago, ‘It’s not the best guy for the job, it’s the right guy for the job.’ So the French want to see a bunch of brown guys playing music. Bluegrass doesn’t need another Jew. These are hard, painful lessons that I learned about some of the most important music in my life, to realize that I wasn’t going to be able to be involved, on a very fundamental level. So that’s what forced me in some respects into the ghetto of Jewish music. And in Europe they feel pretty guilty about what they done to us, so they’ve kind of made room for us at the cultural table.”
Always sensitive to language, Rubin dislikes the word klezmer (“’Klezmer’ means bum, it’s just like jazz, it’s just as disgusting a word, but somehow it just got put on there and now it’s not going to change.”), instead saying he’s, “Been spending a lot of time in Europe under the auspices of playing Jewish Ashkenazi dance music.” In 2000, he started working with Frank London’s Klezmer Brass Allstars, a brass group from New York City, who participated in a cultural intersection program with Boban Markovic Orkestar, a Rromani brass band from Serbia. They would do three tours with the band, and as Rubin describes:
“We went from Croatia to Latvia to Hungary, all these places on the map experiencing all these deep experiences, but at the same time [we were] traveling with Rromanis and seeing that, basically, they were treated like black people were treated in Mississippi in 1956. That was an eye opener. I had noted the dichotomy between, oh, they really wanted the gypsies up on stage, but they don’t really want them hanging around, which was something that happened to the Jews. The Jews were really famous for being bankers and being entertainers, those were the things they could do [legally]…It’s this love/hate relationship that Europe has had with these two different communities.”
Rubin then had the opportunity to be part of an EU-funded project called The Other Europeans that set up an ongoing cultural dialogue between a group of Jewish musicians and a group of Lăutari musicians. “It’s been amazing,” he says of the experience. “I spend about two months out of every year over in Europe work shopping with these guys in Vienna, Krakow and Weimar, Germany. Then we do concerts and lectures and demonstrations. It’s like a fairy tale story for me. It doesn’t pay too well, but the life dollars you get from these encounters and making these relationships with these musicians – it’s just otherworldly.”
But Rubin felt like there was a piece of himself that he was neglecting during this time. Despite being, “kind of a known guy” in the musical circles he traveled overseas, “I was completely ignored here in the states. I had bands playing all the time but none of them were at the same level [as Bad Livers], so people would come to me and say, ‘So what have you been doing?’ As if you’ve dropped off the face of the earth. I go, ‘I’ve been dancing in moonlight with gypsies.’ That doesn’t mean anything to them. ‘I’ve played Serbia.’ They can’t even point to it on a map. [They say] ‘Oh, I never saw you at Rockygrass,’ so they just assume that you don’t even exist. I had this long talk with Barnes about this, he said, ‘Man, I know you’ve been working really hard, but nobody knows you’ve been working really hard. I know what you’re doing is really worthwhile, but you haven’t tended the garden around here.’”
That rang true for Rubin. “The whole time I’m in Europe, I’m having these intercultural dialogues and we’re talking about European this and European that and I’m thinking, ‘I am not a European. I’m a kid from Stillwater, Oklahoma. This is not really my authentic voice.’ … So in this analytical nature, I talked to myself, ‘What do I really like? What are the things that are genuinely American? What are those things that appeal to me and make me insanely happy for no reason whatsoever?’ And then I started picking around with this guy Silas Lowe.”
Silas Lowe and Mark Rubin aka Fat Man & Little Boy
They’ve Suffered For Their Art
Rubin met Lowe when he was hired to do a piece on local old-time music for The Austin Chronicle in 2007. Lowe had just moved to Austin, and, “In the conversations with him I realized he was a smart cat and was a good musician with a similar philosophical bent to music. [There were] some interesting corollaries in our personalities too, we’re both pretty well hated by everybody else who knows us [laughs]. The relationship I have with Silas is eerily reminiscent of the relationship I have with Danny Barnes.”
As Rubin describes, the group was started, “on a dare,” after Lowe took Rubin to a bluegrass night at Hole in the Wall, an Austin bar that’s a live music institution of sorts, about three years ago:
“I sat in the back drinking beer with Silas and after it was all over, we went to some other bar and I looked at him and I said, ‘Was I being punked? I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but you’ve got to be kidding me.’ Four groups of four or more people, a total of nearly twenty people, had invested time, money, energy and effort to create four sets of music that were so bad it was comical. Like as if it was a joke. That kind of fed back to how disappointed and embarrassed I was about what I thought the legacy of Bad Livers had been. I remember watching them, I was looking at the level of musicianship, and the level of craft was so degraded and low that I looked at Silas and I said, ‘With my mediocre talent and skill I could go do that and do it better.’ This happens to a lot of musicians, they’ll see something and go, ‘I can do that.’ And he says, ‘Well fine, go ahead and do it then. And I say, ‘Fine I’ll go ahead and do it. Alright come over to the house.’ We spent precisely twenty minutes working on material and we booked a gig. And Silas said at the gig, the first gig we played together, ‘We’ve got six emails invested in this gig right here.’ “
The Atomic Duo!
They intended to create performance art, billing themselves as an old timey brother duet reminiscent of Depression-era string band acts, to satirize musicians that take traditional music, and themselves, so seriously, while completely missing the heart and intention. But their best-laid plans didn’t quite pan out the way they intended:
“After doing about six or seven gigs, we really screwed up because we were trying to play badly, purposefully badly, and some of it sounded really good. So I had a meeting with him about six months into it, I said, ‘Look here sucker, we’re either going to have to suck or not, we’re going to have to make a decision.’ So we kind of begrudgingly decided, ‘Well, we might as well be good then.’”
This fall saw the release of The Atomic Duo (Rubinchik Recordings), the group’s first record, which also marks the first American folk recording with Rubin since his Bad Liver days. It features Rubin on resophonic guitar, fiddle and vocals, and Lowe on mando, man-jo (aka “melody banjo”) and vocals. A collection of songs that both Rubin and Lowe brought to the table, it was recorded live over the course of three hours at producer George Carver’s house, giving it an organic charm free of overdubbing or productive slick. Although it features blues, rags, ballads and waltzes from our collective past, it’s not washed in sepia and draped in calico. Instead it’s strikingly vibrant, capturing the warm-blooded immediacy in these timeless pieces. Rubin describes the selection process for the tracks:
“When I met Silas, I knew he was a mandolin player, so I tried to point him towards some mandolin music that I thought he would like. For instance, ‘Easy Winner,’ ‘Tanners Rag,’ ‘Take These Lips Away and ‘After the Ball.’ [Whereas] tunes like ‘Blues in the Bottle,’ ‘Milwalkee Blues,’ ‘Sitting on Top of the World,’ ‘Memory of Your Smile’ – these are tunes I’ve been singing my whole life, songs I’ll still be playing twenty years from now. But what’s fascinating about young Silas Lowe, and why I think he could just be a genius – you know what he did? He came over one day and he cloned my 80 gigs of music off of my laptop. He started swimming through there and finding stuff. If he found something that caught his ear, like a Blind Blake tune, he would work out his own arrangement on the mandolin. Then he would come and play that for me. Now bear in mind, I never heard the original, or I may have heard it once a long time ago, [but]I never really studied it. I just approached it that my friend Silas came to me with a song.”
“It’s a more naturalistic approach to music,” Rubin continues. “Some of my great heroes were Bill Monroe, Charlie Poole, Uncle Dave Macon, Big Bill Broonzy, guys who knew a song and altered it to fit their own personality. I think that’s what ended up happening [with Silas]. Some of them are just folk songs laid out the way they are, but if you had heard the original ‘Rope Stretchin’ Blues,’ it doesn’t really relate at all to what we’re doing. The original ‘Turpentine Farm,’ I’ve never even heard it in my life. ‘Going to Germany’ is a full jug band [number], there’s five or six musicians on that track. So in my guitar playing I’m trying to edit the best of the different kinds of instruments in it. Trying to distill it down to where we’re not trying to mimic an old sound or an old approach, we’re just trying to take what’s a classic piece of music, I like to say, ‘a song for the ages,’ and infusing it with our own experience and musicianship to breathe life into it and make it present.”
Noting that he’s labored over past albums much more, Rubin feels, “It’s the best sounding record that I’ve been involved with in a long time. Number one, I didn’t produce it, that’s why [laughs], I was smart enough to let somebody else do that, but secondly, it was just zero agenda except, ‘Hey this is some cool music, let’s have a good time.’ The record has enough clams on it to make chowder. But that’s not the message people are getting. Some people that I know that have known me a long time, and who ought to know better, tell me that they like that record and play it a lot.”
Fat Man & Little Boy by Max Minor
So the conceit that started the band has dropped away. “I feel kind of weird because we’re dressed up kind of goofy,” Rubin says, refering to a photo on the back of the album sleeve which features him and Lowe suited up and holding their instruments stiffly, with dour expressions. “This is a joke picture, back when we were doing our performance art thing, so we wore this dressy getup and we have this kind of stilted look in our face. I like it ‘cause we look mildly retarded. [But] we decided not to wear getups or pretend like it’s another time. You know, the whole O Brother,Where Art Thou? routine. It’s a trap that people run into, and I hate it … [Instead] just though our own personalities, our own musicianship we’ve developed an approach. I really look forward to my new concept. As Silas likes to say, ‘Most bands have terrible material, and they play it badly. Then there’s a lot of bands that play really great, but play terrible material. We’ve got the best material that ever was and we play it pretty terribly.’ That’s our conceit.”
“I know some great songwriters, and the same thing with Silas,” he continues on where they would like to evolve from here. “So we’re thinking, why don’t we take material from people that we know and respect and do the same thing? So lately in our gigs we’ve been doing tunes by Don Walser, Danny Barnes, Steve James. We do a tune that Silas learned from The Hunger Mountain Boys. These great songs are just grist for this mill. I really want to see what we do with contemporary material that speaks to contemporary experience, but that just happens to be in this classic way. I think that’s a more interesting conversation then dressing up and pretending you’re a brother duet act.”
Rubin views the ultimate aim through his analytic lens:
“We’re just trying to have a living experience. That was a filter I learned from working in Europe all this time. How can you take this music, this Jewish music for instance that was wiped out in the Holocaust and that was completely assimilated by the time it came to the United States, how can you go back to that and try to make it vibrant and alive and mean something to you in a modern age? It’s a difficult process. But for American music, it’s pretty darn easy because, for me, you just get up and you reference all the things you like about acoustic and American music and then you throw out all the parts that you don’t like. Then you get another guy who does the same thing and then you create your little sound. I hate to say it, but that’s kind of how Bad Livers got rolling. It was just that we were focusing in on those things we liked the most and editing out the things that we didn’t like.”
In many ways, this project brings back memories of the Livers for Rubin, with the sardonic humor (early taglines for the duo included, “Come see why no one comes to see us,” and, “We’ve suffered for our art, now it’s your turn”), lively stage banter, and the enjoyment that comes from playing with folks that get it:
“This reminds me eerily of how Bad Livers first started off, with no expectations, no limits. Silas turned to me the other day and he said, ‘You know playing with you is the only time that I’ve never had to edit anything that I do.’ I’ve never once said anything but complimentary stuff about what he does and I’m not making it up, because I really like what he does. If he wants to show up at the gig with a guitar and play guitar all night, I’m not going to bat an eye. I showed up with a fiddle one time, I played fiddle all night long, he didn’t say a word. This reminds me of the time I showed up at a Bad Livers gig with a tuba. That’s what I played all night long and nobody said a word. Because that’s not that important anyway, what’s important is getting your needs met in the moment.”
Fat Man & Little Boy (with George Carver and Steve James) - CD release party at Fiddler's Green, by Clay Levit
As far as his future hopes for the project, Rubin isn’t putting too much on it. He doesn’t care about record sales or booking gigs, although he admits, “We’ve deluded ourselves into telling ourselves that this is an art project, that’s how we’re able to hold on to this detachment from it.” He does say, “I have a feeling that in every town in America there’s ten or twenty dudes that would really like what we’re doing. And if I could just get my record to those guys and if I could just hit the road every once in a while and just play for those guys, I would be completely thrilled, that would be all that I require. I’m real proud of it, and I’m just so happy and edified to see that other people like it as much as I do.”
They have indeed attracted some like-minded musicians to sit in, including Steve James, Doc Hamilton, Alan Wooley (Rubin’s former bandmate from his pre-Bad Liver days in Killbilly), and Betse Ellis (The Wilders, who Rubin describes as, “One of my favorite violin players on the face of the earth.” ) “What I’ve found is if you resonate life and love and joy in what you’re doing it will attract people who are interested in life and love and joy. We’re envisioning a tour right now where we’re gonna go to every town where we have friends that play music who just want us to come and play with us,” he explains.
It’s plain to see why so many want to jump on stage with the duo. Rubin and Lowe’s infectious relish for the source material, often spiked with a loving irreverence, creates an environment where it’s futile to resist that fun suction. This easy going musical attitude is reflective of a renewed simplicity and joy in Rubin’s philosophical approach:
“Once again I learned the lesson that I must have forgotten before. The Native American kids I grew up with, they used to say, ‘Great spirit wants you to be happy all the time.’ Not just happy but deliriously happy. And if you’re not deliriously happy all the time, that’s on you. That’s your problem. And I’m beginning to understand that the more that I play music and the more that I work with musicians. You know, the death trip. The unnecessary complexity, strange agendas, all this stuff – this is all a death trip, it’s all based on fear. Who cares what material success you have in the world? It doesn’t bother me because I’m striving to win the battle every night.”
“Danny [Barnes] made this analogy one time: this is archery,” he continues. “I know when I’ve hit the target or not. That’s an internal thing. And you’re not always going to hit the target, but by god you’ve got to have a great time while you’re doing it. ‘Cause life is short people, it’s shorter than anybody can imagine. You cannot have regrets and you cannot be self-editing and constantly in this position of trying to create something out of nothing. I think that goes back to what I was talking about with intention, motivation. Here I am again, learning my motivation is love for this material, and the joy I receive from playing it in the company of good friends. That was my motivation and that needs to remain my motivation if I’m to be successful. My version of successful is the look of joy that’s on my face every time I play. People have been sending me pictures of us playing and I don’t remember ever being so happy and smiling all the time.”
2009 has been a tough year for Rubin. Besides the injury he’s been through a divorce, a home foreclosure, and buried sixteen friends (“a couple of them by suicide”). But he maintains, “I got to tell you, this is the happiest I’ve been in my life. What is it man? Sitting down and playing some good old American music with my buddy Silas. It’s just an expression of complete pure joy.”
Reflecting on his surgery, Rubin concedes that even if he doesn’t play bass again, it will be ok. “For me, the instrument itself just doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s like, where’s the music? What’s the music living in? What can I do to propel the music forward? And if that means picking up a fiddle or a tuba or a bass or whatever, I’m not trying to impose my own view on that. I’m just trying to be quiet and listen. Do like my dad said, keep your mouth shut, keep your eyes open, then when you formulate something good, add to the conversation.”
Love Versus Fear
Throughout our two-hour conversation, Rubin would often mention the names of his musical heroes (Bill Monroe, Charlie Poole, John Hartford, Mississippi Fred McDowell, for starters), who have inspired him to find his own voice in whatever musical culture he’s traveling in, while celebrating those elders’ work. “I hope to bring something to my conception of music that has a cord that runs through all of those forms, that I have a sound an approach that’s identifiably my own, however, it honors whatever custom or tradition I’m working in,” he explains. It’s a difficult and vital balancing act. But for Rubin, it ultimately comes down to very simple terms of intention – love or fear. He mused at one point:
“I had a conversation with this guy the other day, and he was saying, ‘Well I have to go work with that guy, he’s the only banjo player in town; And I go, “Well, he’s a douche bag. So you’re telling me you have to go play with an unpleasant person. You’re making this conscious decision because you want a banjo player?’ In other words, that’s not a musical decision, that’s not a love-based decision. That’s a fear-based decision. And Bill Monroe didn’t create bluegrass music by making some fear-based decisions. He knew exactly what he wanted to do, he by-god created it and there it is.”
The threads all tie together, in a cultural conversation about how we can move forward by honoring our past.
“We as Americans have a shared cultural literacy and cultural heritage that too often is eviscerated and just not presented to people,” Rubin explains. “I think people would feel better about themselves [if it was]. A lot of us feel depressed right now, a lot of us feel really down trodden, like we can’t do things, like we’ve been taken out of the system, that our vote doesn’t count and our opinions don’t count. But the fact of the matter is, we Americans are a resilient people. And we have a deep and rich cultural legacy that, I think, if we were more in tune with, we would be a more powerful people. And when I say ‘we,’ I mean us, the little people. I’m not talking about the people who run the structure here. This is why Woody Guthrie was so radical. Art has the ability to do this. I don’t mean to force an agenda or some kind of construct on it, but I think we have a lot to be proud of, as long as we recognize the inequities that we have also created. And I think that’s an outcropping of what [Fat Man & Little Boy] are doing with our music here. I hope.”
As Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath, “How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?” There are many painful stories and subtexts to face in our history, and Rubin enlightened this writer on a couple tonight, from the origins of the word jazz, to the real story behind the song “Going to Germany” which is about how black soldiers were sent over to Germany to step on land mines during WWI. It might seem easier to tune it all out with TV static. But history is full of maddening repetition, and these fearful times seem to provide nothing but sad proof of just that as we are rapidly being forced to confront the dark side of the American dream.
But maybe it’s about time we redefined that vision. Our cultural legacy can then be our salvation, especially when we look at examples like Bill Monroe. He renamed his music “bluegrass,” grasping it away from the snobby elite that decried it as “hillbilly music,” bringing dignity to his art. By similarly owning our shared story we can perhaps travel out of the death trip and onto a different path. Call it love, call it enlightenment. Define it how you will. Thankfully, we have guides like Rubin to take us there.
Mark Rubin by Bill Ball
Recommended Listening:
Fat Man & Little Boy on KAOS radio (LMA)
April 2009 interview (Klez Kamp podcast; hear more of Rubin’s thoughts on Jewish music and identity)
As of this publishing, Rubin has had his surgery, and his recovery is coming along fine thus far.
