= Bands Like Rush

Today I speak with Keyboardist Steve Mauk from the west coast prog rock band Mars Hollow.

This is the third band from the indie label 10T that I’ve interviewed. The first two – Elf Project & Fluttr Effect – were simple accidents. One band I had sought out, the other was referred to me by a friend. The fact that both were on 10T was ironic – but when I went exploring the 10T progressive/experimental catalog I discovered several other “Bands Like Rush” that would be perfect for the site. So I contact a few more of them – Mars Hollow is the first from that latest batch

Steve and I discuss the differences between the prog music scenes in Los Angeles & Mexico (guess which is the better place for prog). We also discuss the oddly traditional route they’ve taken to starting the band – recording an album with a top producer, “shopping it around”, then performing out live looking for a break.

Ben Sommer:  Hi, I’m here with Steve Mauk from the band Mars Hollow.  You guys are from San Diego area, correct?

Steve Mauk:  Actually, LA area.

Ben Sommer:  Oh, good.  Well, West Coast, the left coast.  Good to have you on the show, www.BandsLikeRush.com.  Why don’t you just start out and just give me a little bit of background about yourself and the band and how you get started.

Steve Mauk:  I met Jerry Beller who is the drummer in our band, and it was back in the spring of 2007.  He put an ad in Music Connection, which is a classified music paper here in LA, and he was looking for a progressive rock keyboard player.  He and our bass player, Kerry, had been playing in a Emerson, Lake and Palmer tribute band, and they had also played with Ryo Okumoto, the keyboard player for Spock’s Beard.  He had a side project called Code Red, and so they were playing with him.  But that project, I guess, ended, so Jerry was looking to start his own progressive rock band, so he found in the ad and Kerry and he and I started writing together and really kind of clicked and we started looking for a guitar player.

But Kerry had to take a little bit of time off, so we actually ended up through more classified ads finding another bass player in this very, very gifted and talented guitar player John Baker.  So we just started writing together as a four piece, and then as chance would have it, Kerry was able to come back into the band again.  At that point, we were calling ourselves NEXT and we recorded a demo of three songs.  John, the guitar player, has a studio, so we recorded three songs there, and we put them up on the MySpace page.

At that point, we got in contact with Ronan Chris Murphy.  He is the producer, who has done a lot of great work, a great guy too, and he had remixed all of the King Crimson catalogs and he has worked with Terry Bozzio and Tony Levin and on and on progressive rock luminaries that he has worked with, so we felt extremely fortunate to find him and to have him interested at all on working with us.  So yeah, it’s just exciting and he added a lot of great inspiration and good advice, and we started pre-production and then went in and recorded an album with him.  We actually recorded that last March or March a year ago.

Ben Sommer:  Yeah, with Tantalize.

Steve Mauk:  Yeah, that’s right.  So when we finished the album, which was in about November, we started shopping it around and we were lucky enough to find 10T Records, and we ended signing with them in January.  It has been great ever since, and 10T has been great.  They have gotten the record out there for us, and it gotten a lot of good response.

Ben Sommer:  Oh, that’s cool.  So it’s interesting.  I told in the email that I’ve already interviewed two of your co-mates on 10T.

Steve Mauk:  Yeah.

Ben Sommer:  Totally unplanned, the Elf Project and Fluttr Effect, and then I actually sent an email to a few of those guys I interviewed.  Carl Schultz from Elf Project emailed back.  I was asking for more leads on good bands to be interviewed and he said, “Just through the 10T’s roster and see what you like.”

Steve Mauk:  That’s cool.  I listened to that interview, too, and it was great.

Ben Sommer:  Oh, the Elf Project one?

Steve Mauk:  It’s very interesting. Oh, yeah, yeah.  It was really cool.

Ben Sommer:  Yeah, thanks, thanks.  I mean, I dig all this music in 10T.  I mean, I haven’t been listening to the non-progressive.  I’ve listened mostly to just all the progressive bands that are on the label, but it seems like they’re picking quality stuff, and frankly, with most people I think I probably never heard of.  So that’s kind of the mission behind the site is with people, the only name they know which is Rush and their ilk and introduce them to lesser known bands who are just as good and interesting, but just don’t know how to start here.

Steve Mauk:  It’s very, very cool.  And the 10T guys, Jeff and Steve, they’re great guys and I think they really believe in the bands that they sign in and they don’t have a huge roster, so they are able to really put a lot of effort and personal pride into each one of the bands that Dave Scott signed and they’ve really worked hard for us to get our name out there, and I can’t say enough good things about them.  We have been extremely fortunate with our relationships and with finding Ronan and then being signed by 10T and since then we have been super lucky.

Ben Sommer:  That’s cool.  I’m curious on 10T, so it’s just this small indie label these days.  You hear so much and you read so much about everything on changing the industry and labels, what are they good for?  Of course, that’s usually targeted with the big labels because we know what they’re good for is re-compensating artists and playing fair and all of that jazz.

Steve Mauk:  Yeah.

Ben Sommer:  So indie labels still have a good rap, but when you described your path, you got a band together, you got a good producer, you recorded an album, and you shopped it around.  That sounds so old school.  What is 10T?  What is an indie label doing for you now versus what you could do on your own?

Steve Mauk:  I think you very rarely understand the art and science of getting reviews with getting the album out there to the people that matter and know how to review albums.  They really got it out there and they got a real great buzz going, and they know how to coordinate that right in terms of when the product is going to be available at retailers, and it all kind of has this coordinated marking the gap for that.  I think if you had done it a lot of times, you, in theory, could do it yourself as a band, but it’s really you’re relying on their expertise to know how to kind of time the whole machine and get the word out there.  They are experts at doing this.

Ben Sommer:  Right, right, and I assume that they’re raping you financially as a big label would.

Steve Mauk:  No, but I also have to throw in there that this is definitely not a business to get rich and that’s for sure.

Ben Sommer:  Yeah, well, and in this, you’re not alone by any means.  I don’t think I’ve interviewed anyone yet who either isn’t fully employed, has a day job or like voluntarily underemployed, so that they can do their music and attend to the kind of situations, so you’re calling from work.  You just clocked out, I guess.  Where do you work?

Steve Mauk:  Yeah, I actually work at movie studio in the LA area, kind on the Hollywood area doing print stuff, so yeah, we all have day jobs.  It’s definitely a labor of love because you got the record company out there pitching records, but it’s not big business by any means.

Ben Sommer:  Right.

Steve Mauk:  It’s a real labor of love.

Ben Sommer:  So the music is interesting.  My gummy tick, and I wish I were this person who could “sounds” like this that the other kind of like a real high fidelity music key.  But I’m reaching for sounds that I’ve heard before when I was seeing you guys.  Your keyboards are really dominant, not dominant, it’s just they’re not subservient like they are in most rock or prog rock, which maybe calls it out.  But what are your influences?  I know I hear like kind of on one of these tunes I listened to in MySpace, geez, I forget the name of it.  It sounds like half between Genesis and Yes playing live, but with a lot of improve and riffing maybe.  I maybe hearing it wrong, but what kind of music influences you and gets you guys excited?

Steve Mauk:  Oh, well, you are definitely hearing it right.  Back in the 70’s, I was listening to anything I could get my hands on that was progressive rock, but probably my biggest influences were Emerson, Lake and Palmer.  I just absolutely love those guys.  I wanted to be Keith Emerson so bad, and he made me want to practice keyboards and make weird sounds on a synthesizer.  I just loved their music and still do, and probably a real close second to that for me was Genesis.  I was just completely enamored by ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ and ‘Foxtrot’, so those are my two real big influences.  But I also really sought out any other bands where the keyboard is really dominant.  I love Carl Barat.  So those were my biggest influences with a lot of Yes.  I love that band.  And in the band as a whole, the guys in the band, they all have a lot of different influences.  The drummer, Jerry, loves Rush.  He is an encyclopedia of progressive rock.  I mean, he knows so many bands and he’s just fluent in so many different styles and so many different bands, but he’s a real Rush fanatic.  The bass player loves Emerson, Lake and Palmer, but he also loves Todd Rundgren.  He’s got really an eclectic taste and our guitar player likes Steely Dan and Maha Vishnu Orchestra.

Ben Sommer:  Cool.  That’s a nice mix.

Steve Mauk:  Yeah, I simple kind of potpourri, I think, of influences, but they’re all firmly rooted in the progressive rock, that is for sure.

Ben Sommer:  Yeah. When you guys recorded, I’m serious when I say it sounds almost like a live album, a bit of a raw edged.  The fellow who produced it, what his is name again?

Steve Mauk:  Ronan Chris Murphy.

Ben Sommer:  Right, did he have you guys just do take after take live, or did you guys record it in parts or what?

Steve Mauk:  Yeah, well, it’s interesting that you ask that.  One of the things that we felt pretty strongly about all of us is that we didn’t want to record to a click track, even though if you’re recording to a click track, of course, it makes certain things easier.

Ben Sommer:  Yeah.

Steve Mauk:  But we just didn’t want to that sound, so we just did these takes live in Ronan Studio.  They’re long songs and we had a limited amount of time, so we couldn’t do too many take.

Ben Sommer:  Yeah.

Steve Mauk:  But we did them a few times and pick the best picking from what we did, and then we came back and overdubbed a few parts and John did the vocals.  We recorded the vocals, but one thing we also didn’t want was we didn’t want a ton of overdubs and a sound that we couldn’t recreate live, so what I mean, when you hear that, when we play live, that is what we sound.  All the parts are there.  It’s not like, “Oh, well, we can’t do that because that was an overdub.”  I mean, we pretty much can pull off the whole thing live, which is really satisfying because some people listen to the record and go, “Wow, do you guys really play all that live.”  And it’s like, “Yeah, you know, we do and that’s what makes it fun and challenging at times.”

Ben Sommer:  Yeah, I think, not having just the guitars as your only kind of filler pallet to choose from really helps.  But yeah, otherwise, you’re rearranging the songs for live performances, which kind of sucks because you have a vision that you made you put it down on tape one way or your doing it like Rush does and sing it like you can do that forever since they want another sync phase or they have like triggers up to wazoo and sometimes even have a keyboard player backstage filling in parts to try to recreate the studio song.

Steve Mauk:  And we definitely can’t afford that.

Ben Sommer:  Yeah, well, I mean, these days maybe you could.  The technology is so cheap.

Steve Mauk:  Well, that’s true.  That’s true.  Yeah, that is true.

Ben Sommer:  I’m looking at your website at MySpace site.  It looks like you just played as some place called Mexicali Prog in Mexico and you’re playing it at Prog Day in Chapel Hill.  Tell me about what happened in Mexico and what’s coming up in North Carolina.

Steve Mauk:  Well, there is a guy in Mexico that used to organize a Baja Prog, and actually he’s doing a kind of private show and he found us, I think at our MySpace page, but he asked if we could come down and do the show in Mexicali, so we’re really looking forward to it, and we’re packing up all the gear and hitting the road, and then we’re going to make the drive from LA to Mexicali.  He’s coming up in a few weeks here and do that gig, and I guess he’s got a real nice venue for playing.  So we’re really excited about that.

Ben Sommer:  How long a drive is that?  I’m just curious.

Steve Mauk:  It’s going to be about a 4-hour drive, and from what we understand, through the desert in August in Mexicali.  We’re ready.  We’re going to make sure that the van has air-conditioning.  That’s for sure.

Ben Sommer:  Yeah.

Steve Mauk:  We’ve talked about that a little bit.  And then, on Prog Day, we got asked to play at Prog Day, which is one of the Prog Festivals, and we’re really looking forward to doing that with Muffins, one of the bands playing.  It’s a classic prog band from way back when, and that should be fun too.

Ben Sommer:  You’re going to drive there, too?

Steve Mauk:  No, with that one, now, we talked about it.  We actually did talk about trying to make it into a road trip, but nobody could get off of work that long.  I think that was the biggest limiting factors, so we’re going to fly out.  We’re trying to coordinate how to get our gear there and we’re making all those travel arrangements, and then we’ll be there.  It’s over Labor Day weekend, and it is real cool.  It’s outdoor.  I think outdoor festival where everybody sets up tents and it just looks like a whole lot of fun.  We’re really, really looking forward to doing that, too.

Ben Sommer:  That’s great.  I think those kind of experiences are more in demand now with not just live gigs at bars, but kind of festivals and events, especially with everyone stuck in there and holding iPods, jam the tunes where they don’t give as much concert experience as they used to.

Steve Mauk:  Well, and the other thing too is we’ve done a few shows, if you’re in LA that have been really fun and I think good shows, but to get a group of people together that are all into prog and appreciate that kind of music, that’s what the festivals I think are all about.  I mean, we’re just really looking forward to these two gigs that we’re playing there.  Everybody is going to be there, not by chance, but because they’re lovers of the genre and that’s going to be really satisfying to play to people that loves the music.

Ben Sommer:  Right, so gig in local, do you do a lot of it?  What’s your idea or a plan or strategy like do you have a radius that surround LA you gig in or what?

Steve Mauk:  It’s funny.  You see, we kind of have like slightly differences of opinion in the band of how much we should be playing the local area, and one school of thought is that if you play a lot, if you’re playing, you build a following and you kind of tend to believe that a little.  When you do a show and there are people that come up and say, “Oh my gosh, where did you guys come from?  When you are playing again?”  And you think, “Well, if we do this enough, you know, we could really build a following, but LA is just a really hard city to build a following in.”

Ben Sommer:  Why is that?

Steve Mauk:  I don’t know.  I don’t know why that is, but I think especially in genre of music that we’re playing.  I don’t know.  I’m not sure why that is.

Ben Sommer:  Not that I know anything.  I’m a dope who just reads about how to have success versus achieve success but this guy, Martin Atkins, he’s kind of guru, a marketing guru.  I just bought his book about touring, and he is very blunt and frankly profane, but he’s like, “Move the hell out of LA.  Move out of New York.”  These are big markets where no one cares because there are a million different bands.  I mean, that’s it.  You’re just drowning in good music.

Steve Mauk:  Well, that’s funny because Ronan actually told us the exact same thing, and I’ve heard other people say the same thing, too.  It’s like if you really want anybody to listen to you, you’ve got to get out of LA, and I think that in New York, it’s probably the same thing.  I think it’s also partly because people are just jaded.  They’re just bombarded with so much from music to clubs to whatever it is.  There are just so much distracting people.  Shows are fun, but when you do the shows, you’ve got to get people out there, so a lot of people that shows end up being people that you know and that you’ve asked to come and it becomes more of a kind of like a family affair.  It’s like you’re playing for your friends and for some new people, but to build a following, that’s a tough thing.

Ben Sommer:  It pays to be a big fish in a small pond when you’re trying to start from scratch.

Steve Mauk:  Yeah, I think so.  I think so, but that doesn’t mean we’ve done our last show in LA.  I mean, we’ll continue to do them, but we spread it about, and trying to make each one count and have a reason to do it, so that’s kind of where our heads are around now in terms of playing locally at least.

Ben Sommer:  All right, so is your next gig the August 7th gig down in Mexicali?

Steve Mauk:  We are there in, yehey, Mexico!

Ben Sommer:  I will give a shoutout to everyone on the podcast and Twitter, et cetera.  I’m not sure if I have any readers in Mexico yet, but any prog hippies who are thinking about trailing you down in the van there.

Steve Mauk:  You know that’s cool, and I guess, from what I understand or I’m learning, Mexico has a big prog community.  I mean, there are a lot of Mexican people into prog, so I didn’t know that.

Ben Sommer:  That’s odd.

Steve Mauk:  I think it’s really cool.

Ben Sommer:  It is cool.  I mean, did you happen to see the Rush documentary that came out recently?

Steve Mauk:  It is on my list.  I’m really looking forward to seeing it, and I was actually going to see it this weekend once I’m able to.  So anyway, don’t spoil it for me, but what are you going to say?

Ben Sommer:  Well, I was just going to key off what you are saying.  I don’t know if it is about Central or South America, but they tell the story about when they did their big album in Rio.  When they went to Rio, and they actually showed footages of the fans, I mean there was like a 100,000 people like screaming and bouncing up and down.  I don’t know what it is about South America and progressive music, but it seems that in Central America, that’s where it’s at.  Odd.

Steve Mauk:  It’s so cool, and of course, Europe, I think, is way into prog or has been, in a lot of ways, more than they are here in the States, so it is good to know that it’s alive and well in a lot of our Latino, it makes me feel good.

Ben Sommer:  Yeah, me too.  Cool.  Well, thank you so much for talking, Steve, and good luck and well, keep in touch with us, okay?

Steve Mauk:  Well, thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Ben Sommer:  Thanks for listening.  You can find out more about the band at their website, www.marshollow.com and become a fan on their Facebook page at www.facebook.com/marshollow.  We conclude with another full track from their self-titled debut.  This one is called ‘Midnight’.  Take care.