Mark Karan Talks New Record, New Band & Battling The Big C

Mark Karan has some miles on him, that’s for sure, in the way that journeyman musicians always do. He’s played some of the most famous stages in the world while endearing himself to one of music’s most sensitive fanbases. He’s worked with legends, and toiled in obscurity. He’s had mortality shoved in his face, following successful treatment of throat cancer which came frighteningly close to killing him.

Karan’s best-known association remains the years he spent alongside Bob Weir in RatDog, but even before the time he was earning national acclaim as a member of the extended Grateful Dead family, he was, the musician notes, already a “fully formed me.” Having spent much of his career as a sideman, Karan is once again returning to his own music and there’s a new album on the way, along with a still-forming band that Karan wants to build from the ground up.

Read on for what from Karan amounts to a new chapter, including his thoughts on not being invited back to RatDog and what surviving cancer taught him about life and music.

JAMBASE: I was at the 8/13/75 tribute show with David Gans, and you, and everyone at Great American Music Hall a few weeks ago. It looked like you were having fun up there.

MARK KARAN: I definitely was having a ball. It was a lot of people that I have some degree of musical history with, and that venue is one of my all time favorite venues to play. The show was great. It’s kind of funny – I really didn’t have much of a connection to that album when I was a kid. I’d been on the bus from about ’66 right until about Blues For Allah came out, and that’s actually right around where I lost the band. I heard the album and I was like, what happened to that rag-tag bunch of wild men that were taking rock and country and blues and going for it? This stuff is all foggy! But I love this shit now.

JAMBASE: So you were a Dead guy from way back?

MK: Even today, as much as I love the Dead, I sometimes hesitate to even call myself a Deadhead because I love so many different kinds of music. Sometimes with Deadheads, and this is a relatively common thread, there’s almost a singular appreciation for that band and that music, and that’s never where I’ve been at. I adore everything they did, they wrote so many amazing songs. But that’s not all where I live.

JAMBASE: Do you stay on top of current music?

MK: I haven’t paid a whole lot of attention to what’s going on in current music, but the cream always rises to the top I feel like. And I know what’s cream for one guy is definitely not for another, but for me, I really like Alabama Shakes. I’m a huge Wilco fan. I like to read magazines like Paste and Mojo and find interesting sounding bands that have descriptions that intrigue me, chase them down, and see what’s out there. I definitely don’t spend all of my time listening to old Crosby Stills Nash & Young, and The Band and the Dead. I love all that stuff but a lot of newer stuff I really like too.

JAMBASE: Who else do you follow?

MK: As is often the case in these interviews, I can think of all these musicians and bands, and then the moment I’m asked to come up with names, I can’t think of a single one. [laughs] There was this gal St. Vincent I was reading about in Mojo, and she sounded really cool and I started listening to her stuff, and now I’m digging in a little deeper. Apart from Wilco and the Shakes, I love Jack White and what he’s doing most of the time.

JAMBASE: So what are you working on these days? I know when we set this interview up you mentioned a new album and maybe even a new band.

MK: Mostly I’m concentrating on my record. I don’t have the band now but I am eventually looking to a goal of getting a bunch of guys with me who are committing to going a little deeper. I’m doing a lot of stuff around my own music with a variety of players, and that can be stimulating and exciting in its own way, but I’m a fan of really getting to know a group of people and getting your communication and unspoken telepathy together. You can read each other and go unexpected places.

I think what this means is that I’ll be working with less known players. Known players, busier players, they get called on to do a lot of things and can’t commit. So I want to find some guys interested in really getting to know each other and getting deep into the songs I’ve written and write songs together and develop an identity as a band. That’s really what I felt RatDog brought to the party as opposed to some other iterations of post-Grateful Dead bands. We developed a language and sound as a band that, love it or hate it, was a thing. So I want to seek out younger, lesser-known players that have the time and inclination to do this as a career and not just a hobby or project.

JAMBASE: Tell me about the record.

MK: I’ve been working on this record for the last few months, and I’m probably about two-thirds of the way through. I’m getting ready to launch some kind of crowd- funding campaign to help with it. I didn’t do much touring behind my last record because many of the folks I was playing with I just couldn’t get. I had John Molo on drums and he’s always booked. I’ve layered in Wally Ingram and JT Thomas, these folks are just always busy. It’s time to see if I can find similar excitement with the less-known players as I mentioned.

JAMBASE: Are these new songs you’re working on for the record?

MK: I’ve been working a lot with Deb Grabien, who is a wonderful lyricist, songwriter and novelist. Some of the songs are new, and when we come together some are more or less written, or they’re half-written and we’ll sit down and flesh out the words or hammer out some more of the music. Some of the songs have been in my repertoire for a while. Three of those will be on the record, and two more are songs I wrote quite a while ago in the mid-1990s but that never really had the opportunity to see the light of day.

Other tunes on the record come from fellow writers and musicians, many of whom are my friends. One that’s different is a song by David Grissom, whom I don’t know but whose songs I was hipped to by Banana (Lowell Levinger) from The Youngbloods.

Personnel-wise, I had some help getting started on the record and I was able to go into this beautiful studio overlooking Stinson Beach, where we stayed for a week and finished a lot of it. Waking up every day in a California beach house like that was this amazing environment, and I was able to bring people in. I brought up JT to play keyboards and it’s always a treat getting to play with him. Bob Gross from Jemimah Puddleduck was in. We got everything down and now I’ve gotten to get into the fun part where you start to add frosting to everything.

JAMBASE: When will we get to hear this?

MK: Now that I’m moving to a crowd-funding model, I’m not really sure yet how the release is going to play out. So often before we were dealing with record labels, and now we’re not dealing with the same kinds of timelines and deadlines and things that we used to. They would give you the time and explain what needed to get done by when. That was helpful to focus the work sometimes – open ended can be a little too open-ended sometimes. But I also really appreciate being able to lay stuff down and explore it and live with it for a bit and then decide, maybe a week or two later, that it needs something different or that you want to go back to the original part. I like the ability to creatively massage the project.

JAMBASE: I want to ask about some of your other affiliations. Will Jemimah Puddleduck ever return again?

MK: Yeah, I think very much so. You know I had so many people tell me they loved that band’s music but for whatever reason they just couldn’t deal with the name. They thought it was too silly and made an association that the band’s music must be silly. So eventually I was like, alright, fuck it, what’s in a name anyway? It exists more or less as Mark Karan’s Buds. It’s essentially the same concept with a similar songbook and good, greasy grooves.

JAMBASE: You’re a regular among Bay Area bands and play a lot with bands that are heavy on Dead or at least Dead-influenced. But do you ever feel like you get pigeonholed as a Grateful Dead guy?

MK: I’m never going to reject the Grateful Dead stuff because it’s been very good to me. Bob [Weir] is a friend of mine. I played with him for nearly 13 years. I’ve gotten to be friends with Phil [Lesh], and I worked with Mickey [Hart] for a year back in 1999. We don’t hang out a lot but we’re cool, and I don’t have any negative feelings about the Dead. I was already a full-fledged me when I met all those guys. I like doing my own stuff.

I’ve also been working for a year now with a young band called Go By Ocean that includes Danny Eisenberg, my keyboard player in the Buds. It’s kind of an indie rock band, and that’s a thrill for me because I’m actually quite a fan of indie rock and pop. I really like to have my fingers in a lot of pies. If I were able to support it I’d have a hardcore blues and soul band that did only that. I’d have an indie rock band. I’d have a psychedelic band. I have an Americana, very songs-oriented band and I’d do all of those things on a regular basis.

JAMBASE: Is there much left to say about your time in RatDog? Do you reflect on it a lot?

MK: I don’t know that there’s a whole lot left to say. I really appreciated my time there and learned a whole lot and made a lot of friends. I’m incredibly appreciative of that. From what I’m seeing musically, it looks like Bob is ready to do some other things with other people, and when he wants to do RatDog he’s working with Steve [Kimock]. I won’t lie, that was a real disappointment when I heard that. But it’s also his band, and he’s been a friend to me for a lot of years. The only thing constant in life is that things change. I miss the boys, but I’m pretty damn happy in general. I’m making a ton of music.

JAMBASE: Do you stay in touch with your fellow RatDog alumni?

MK: Kenny [Brooks] not so much because he lives in Brooklyn, but every once in awhile we’ll email and connect. Jay [Lane] I see a lot more often. He and I were close in RatDog and he lives right in San Francisco so I see him and speak to him quite a bit. Occasionally I get to reconnect with Jeff [Chimenti] and it’s always a warm communication. He’s so busy these days. Pretty much everything Bob or Phil wind up doing he ends up being a part of, so he’s got a lot of irons in the fire.

JAMBASE: If you don’t mind my asking, how is your health these days?

MK: It’s excellent, and thank you for asking. I’ve had the doctors give me the extremely rare and uncommon assurance that I don’t have anything to worry about. My ex-wife didn’t tell me this at the time, but when I was diagnosed and going through treatment, the doctors gave me a 10 percent chance of even surviving. The fact that I’m still here years later is an amazing gift. It’s huge.

JAMBASE: Did going through that change you as a musician and songwriter?

MK: Oh, definitely. My song “Walk Through the Fire” was written about that time and it’s really one that kind of barfed itself out of me in what felt like 15 minutes, completed. It wasn’t the sort of song I generally wrote, either. But yeah it changed me. It changed my music and it changed my life.

I feel like I got two real life lessons coming through the cancer. One is acceptance, which means, in life, to accept things is not giving up or sloughing something off, it’s, things are what they are. You can be angry and resentful and rail against them, but our mission as humans is to take what things are and see what we can do that’s positive. Why not focus on what’s working?

The other lesson was self-love, and being committed to self – valuing myself and being OK with who I really am. I always had some of that but getting sick has a way of driving that point home. It shows up musically in the way I’ve been able to throw myself into my music. When I play now I’m in the moment, and I don’t give a fuck if I make a mistake. I want my spirit to fly free.