How did it even begin? It began roughly thirteen years ago. I was fourteen and staying with my Grandfather on a farm in Iowa. I was living in Maine, but came to visit him for the summer like I had done for most of my life. MTV was the only thing that made me feel remotely normal. And yes, they did actually play music videos. I saw the video for the song "Sorry About the Weather." It was the only time I saw it. I thought it was so completely cool that I committed the singer's name and the album name to memory. Upon my return to Maine at the end of the summer I was able to track down the cassette tape
"It's Only Time" at
Bull Moose Music in Brunswick. (There was still just one store at that point!)
There were several of us in high school that ended up getting that album and listening to it a lot. It is still a great album to listen to. From the visual of pieces from a 'rotting puppy corpse' flying through the air in "Musta Been Jo" to the cool way Mark pounded on his acoustic guitar in "Drinkin' and How," there was such much *stuff* in that album. To this day I still sometimes play the song "Wanna Run Away" with my friend Chris Beth.
I think I picked up "Let the Wretched Come Home" sometime during my junior year of high school. I played that tape to death. I even played a cover of "How Does It Feel?" for a demo I sent off to the Berklee School of Music. I spent a lot of time just driving around the backroads in Maine listening to that tape. "High Above the River" was one of my favorites.
And then what? Who knows? Those two albums stuck with me, of course, but Mark Curry was by no means the only music I listened to. I'm sure he made it into my tape deck often enough, but probably became less personal to me as my music library grew. A lot happened to me between high school and the next conscious moment I remember thinking about Mark Curry. From high school to a failed attempt at college, to Boston for a year, to Iowa for another and then back to Maine. I bet it was at least four or five years until I learned anything new.
Who hasn't wasted time searching fruitlessly for something on the internet? I must've killing time between classes or something. I typed in Mark Curry into google and came up with a page of him playing with a band. In retrospect it was probably "Ten Pin Trio," but I can't remember for sure. The bottom line is that I knew there was a band as well as a third album.
Several more years and I have a wife, two kids, a *really* lame job and a degree in math and physics that needs to be put to use. This past February I find myself biding my time at my job waiting to hear back from several graduate schools I've applied to. About the same time I receive my acceptance letter from UCDavis, I find myself searching for Mark Curry again.
I must've been sitting in front of the computer feeling bored, uninspired, something... I typed "Mark Curry" into google to see what came up. And I found practically nothing. While the occasional tab would turn up, any posting I could find resembling a fan essential boiled down to: "I loved this guy's stuff; where the hell did he go?" So I searched... It didn't help that the comedian from "Hangin' with Mr. Cooper" is also named Mark Curry.
Why I kept looking I'm not sure of. There are two things I can think of: 1) This guy is just way too good of a singer-songwriter for the possibility to exist that he is not making a living doing it! and 2) I am completely estranged from the side of myself that was once a singer-songwriter and my search for Mark Curry is really a transferred search for myself. Hmm...
I stumbled onto a couple of interesting things. First of all, Mark has this connection to
NOFX that I didn't know about. Not only is his brother the guitarist for NOFX (Aaron Abeyeta AKA El Hefe), but Mark also wrote and sang on a song called
"Perfect Government" on the NOFX album
"Punk in Drublic". Second, I found perhaps
two or three other postings that amount to "What the hell happened to this guy?" Thirdly, there was a connection to Sacramento and the California Punk Scene in general.
About twenty pages into google, I stumbled across a single posting to an altcountry message board. The message was something like, "Does anybody remember Mark Curry? He's coming out with a new album soon." I signed on to the message board so I could get the poster's email address. I emailed and, lo and behold, he *knows* Mark Curry. His name is Brian (names changed to protect the blah blah blah) says that Mark rolls through town roughly once or twice a year, but in general keeps a pretty low profile. It is my first sign that Mark still exists. Brian ends up sending me a burned CD of the Ten Pin Trio album "Down in My Alley" and also includes the "Find a Friend" EP.
To be continued later, but if you've made it this far, he are a couple of relatively recent photos I found...
http://www.rattracks.com/rattracks/ftour121.html
http://www.rattracks.com/rattracks/ftour133.html
