Mark
Christian, Merle Jagger, Landlords of the Cornfield, What's In A Name?
Mark
Christian, Merle Jagger, Landlords of the Cornfield, What's In A Name?
Take
a little bit of Merle Travis, a touch of Buck Owens, mix in a Rock guitarist who
played on a Berlin (“You Take My Breath Away”) record and received an invitation
to join the band, was a session player for Moon Martin, The Monkees, Robert
Palmer and The Village People (also served as a songwriter) and you have a
pretty highly regarded and eclectic guitarist. Los Angeles guitarist Mark
Christian who is also a well-respected producer and sound engineer now has
people whispering his name respectfully in Country Music circles as his band
Merle Jagger causes ears to perk up with their original songs “Hillbilly No. 9,”
and
“Ranch Party,” as well as their cover of Earl Scruggs’
“Randy Lynn Rag.”
Mark Christian explains how the band’s name was
determined, “The Merle of Merle Jagger is actually Merle Travis. Merle Travis
was in behind the calculated science of my band name.
Merle Travis was the first Country guitar hero. He wrote “Smoke, Smoke,
Smoke That Cigarette,” and he wrote “Sixteen Tons.” He was the Bruce Springsteen
of the 40s. He played a Bigsby tremolo (guitar). He was playing with a thumb
pick and he would pick the guitar like a banjo. He played all of the bass lines
and the guitar lines together at the same time.
Chet Atkins admitted he got everything from Merle
Travis. He basically stole his style. He applied it to what he was doing and
then everybody else followed. Pretty much the whole Chet Atkins thumb picking
thing was basically started by Merle Travis.
I figured I was a Rock guy trying to play Country. I
figured the guitar hero of Merle Travis meets the bad boys of Rock and Roll, The
Rolling Stones and I came up with Merle Jagger. There were some runner-up names
like, Gringo Star. I also wanted to have a band name like Jethro Tull or Elvis
Costello. I wasn’t sure if people were going to get what I was doing. I wanted
people to be intrigued by the band name and that would lead them to the music.
The t-shirts sell really well. I was absolutely not going to do the Mark
Christian Band. It was not going to happen.”
To date Merle Jagger has released one album, but another
is on the way. The current one, Rancho Los Angeles derives its name from the
Country music scene in Los Angeles past and present. Yes you read that
correctly. As Christian started preparing himself to transition into becoming a
Country artist he noticed that a lot of the musicians he was studying were from
Los Angeles.
“I realized the reason the Country music scene was here
(in the past) was because people thought they were going to record a hit record
and then get into a western. They thought they were going to be a cowboy singing
star, like Will Rogers, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and that is what was attracting
people here at the time. When I was a little kid I remember there were western
themes everywhere. We wore the snap shirts to church and we wore the snap shirts
to school. We wore cowboy hats and we had Winchesters. We played cowboys and
Indians and my parents had all the western movie soundtracks. It was a really
big deal.
In the early millennium in Los Angeles a big Country
scene was beginning to take over the town and I thought it is still the Wild
West here. I researched and found out that in the late 1800s Orange County, the
San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles County were pretty much owned by ranchers.
There was Rancho Cucamonga, Rancho Burbank, Rancho Pico and I thought well since
the Wild West is still here and everyone is still making Country music, how
about Rancho Los Angeles? That is how
I came up with the CD title. The title and the music are all tied in. The whole
idea is tied into the Los Angeles music history.
The record did so well and it is still doing very well.
You know the old saying, my record turned out to be “Dark Side of the Moon,”
well “Dark Side of the Moon,” as you well know wound up in the Billboard Top 100
chart for something like thirty or forty years. My CD has not been in the
Billboard Top 100 chart for thirty years, but unlike any of the CDs I have done,
including the ones that had great big record deals, it still is carrying a lot
of momentum. When people hear it for the first time they think it came out
yesterday. I am still getting airplay and I am still getting gigs and we still
play the same songs at our shows, not all of them,” he says.
As a child, although Mark Christian’s parents were not
professionally employed in the music business, he was exposed to a wide variety
of music at home. His father who had grown up as an orphan in Albany, New York
and had played the tuba in street bands, during his own childhood, listened to
Classical music and film soundtracks when his son was growing up.
Mark Christian remembers, “When I was a kid they had all
that music from, How the West Was Won,
Mary Poppins and all the classic
films of our time from the sixties and the seventies.
My mom was really into the Blues and she loved forties Swing music.
Neither one of (my parents) were into Rock and Roll or Elvis Presley. They were
into Johnny Cash, they loved Tom Jones, they loved Chet Atkins and my mom loved
Roy Clark’s singing.
My mom was trying to do something artistic with me as a
child to get the ball rolling. The piano lessons failed, the flute lessons
failed. At the time guitar was really big, so they bought me a guitar and
immediately it soared into playing constantly every day. I soared past my guitar
teachers and started playing Beatles’ songs. One of the first riffs that I
learned when I was ten years old was the “Paint It Black,” intro on the guitar.
They were worried that I was going to get too much Rock influence.
At the time Rock music was not respected musically like Jazz and
Classical was. It wasn’t until the seventies that Rock music became very
intricate with bands like Yes and Genesis. You had to be a really educated
musician to be able to play that kind of music. Back in the late sixties there
were the Monkees and the Beatles.
They bought me Chet Atkins records and Roy Clark
records. They were trying to expose me to Country and Bluegrass.
We would watch the Hee Haw TV show and
my dad would say why don’t you learn how to play like that?”
Mark Christian grew up forty miles south of Los Angeles
in a town called Orange, which is adjacent to Disneyland and borders Bender to
the north and the El Toro marine base to the south where his father was
stationed as a marine. Christian says
there were other influences that were just a byproduct of where he grew up, for
instance, one of his neighbors was José Feliciano. Stars like Jackson Browne
emerged from Orange County and Mark Christian recalls that the guitarist for
Quiet Riot and the drummer from Autograph were both from the high school that he
attended.
Living so close to Hollywood, Mark Christian says they would often go to see Larry Carlton perform, because they knew him from the hit records that he played on.
“Then we would see in the
LA Times that he (Carlton) was doing a solo stint at Donte’s in North Hollywood.
We would drive up there and start hanging around with all of the session player
people. We figured out really fast
that if you looked at the back of all of the records back then the same
characters kept showing up on records that were being recorded in Hollywood.
That was an incentive to become more educated on your instrument, because there
was a future for you.
I thought if I spend a
couple of years in college studying music and if I learn how to read and study
Jazz, I can go to Hollywood and get a real gig. That is what was happening back
then. The music business was
starting to dwindle and the session business (also) started to dwindle.
I got into it at the end and I did a lot
of spectacular gigs and I made a lot of money (on session work). It was the late
seventies and we were aware that a lot of people were playing on the hit
records. Back then you could see Yes and Deep Purple and you could see really
gifted players laying it down hard. We wanted something that they had. We either
wanted to be a Rock star, a Jazz star, a session player or some kind of
significant force in the big party that was going on in Hollywood,” he recalls.
A friend of mine had met the producer for Stevie
Wonder’s 1970s records and he said hey we are looking for young guys to back up
a Country singer, so my friend called me up and he said, I think we have a real
gig. Come on up. I went up there and I got an apartment and I started working
with Bob Margouleff who had produced Stevie Wonder’s
Talking Book and who later produced
Devo and some other big projects (Billy Preston, Jeff Beck, Depeche Mode, Joan
Baez, and Stephen Stills). He is a pretty famous guy. He was instrumental in
creating the polyphonic synthesizer in the seventies. He produced all the key
songs for the Key Of Life. For the
classic Stevie Wonder music he was the recording engineer and producer,” says
Christian.
That first gig in the studio led to Mark Christian
appearing on records of numerous famous artists, including the ones mentioned at
the beginning of this interview. He credits the band Berlin for steering him in
the direction of ‘90s Grunge music (even though they were more New Wave), which
led to Mark Christian forming the band The Big F. The Big F was immediately
signed to a record deal and they released one album on Electra Records and two
for Chrysalis Records. The band self-produced their music. When the Grunge music
scene started to die, so did the agreements with the music labels. It was during
this time that Mark Christian also gained a reputation as a pretty good
producer.
“All of a sudden people started calling me up to produce
(their music). I became a producer / musician with a goal to producing something
that would get me back into a recording contract, because that was the ultimate
reward. I got to play with Cher and I got to play with Steve Perry. There is a
huge list. It was great to see how the other half lives, what kind of people
they are, what kind of personalities they have and how they became successful,”
he says.
As the 1990s drew to a close, Mark Christian decided to
focus on the Country music scene. He developed a friendship with some of the
musicians in Dwight Yoakam’s band through Christian hiring them to play on some
of the albums he was producing.
“The Dwight Yoakam guys told me that if I wanted to play
Country, I wouldn’t be taken seriously coming from Rock music. That is not the
case nowadays, as you see people crossing over Kid Rock and Steven Tyler, but
back then it was still taboo. I started Merle Jagger to advertise myself as a
Country musician. I also went back to studying and I studied all of the old
classics. I reinvented my guitar playing.
“It is very challenging on the guitar to play like Chet
Atkins or Jimmy Bryant or Don Rich. It is a real challenge still and everytime
that I pick up the guitar. I marvel at the decision that I made to do this,
because it is a chore. Every year there is another guy, a legendary Country
guitar player that I have to study. The list goes on and you have to tear apart
the Youtube videos and figure out what they are doing that you aren’t doing and
then move on to the next guy. That is really fantastic fuel for my band, because
my band was primarily created on the premise of instrumental music and
celebrating this music.
When I got into this music at the time Vince Gill was
pretty big and the Dixie Chicks and George Strait, Alan Jackson and this music
had a lot of amazing players. That is kind of moving away. You are not hearing
this anymore. You are just hearing generic people making generic statements. For
the last ten years the gap has not been as wide as it is now. There were people
in the middle who crossed over. What is driving the music scene in LA and Austin
is the anti-Nashville thing. The Outlaw Country thing is getting huge and bigger
than I have ever seen it in the last ten years. I am starting to hear tracks
come out of Nashville with programming, no drummers and no bass players, just
programming. When are electric guitars, steel guitars and pedal guitars going to
disappear? I am predicting in the next five to ten years the Nashville Pop thing
will become its own entity and it will no longer even be considered as Country.
The music of Waylon Jennings and Sturgill Simpson, Drive-by Truckers, Lucinda
Williams are going to be the big selling tickets, because people really love
Country music. The gatekeepers in Nashville have slowed that sound down and they
are trading it in for something else. What is interesting about this is a lot of
these people who drive these Indie Outlaw Country scenes are young people. You
would think that people over the age of fifty are the only people who would be
interested in George Jones, Buck Owens and Waylon Jennings. That’s not true. It
is the young people and that is what they are into. What I find fascinating is
when I was young it was all about Led Zeppelin and The Who. Now young people
don’t even listen to Rock. It doesn’t exist. They listen to Country.
You are going to see this blowup in the next five to ten
years and you are going to see real Country come back as a mainstream art form.
A lot of the people who are driving the Country scene in LA are in their
twenties and that means the next generation that is coming up are going to be
influenced by them. This is going to be going on for a long time,” he says.
Towards the end of 2015 Merle Jagger will be releasing a
new album titled, Landlords of the
Cornfield.