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Mallman brings 'The Heat'
Mark Mallman brought his "crazy keyboards" to St. Cloud for a night of rock music, story telling and other shenanigans
By John Behling
Published:
Monday, September 22, 2003
Mark Mallman's brown sport coat looked passive as he walked through Java Joint before Thursday's performance.
The 29-year-old Minneapolis musician has graced Twin Cities clubs and publications first as a member of the glam-rockers "The Odd," (which was featured in City Pages "Picked to Click" poll, 1998) and then as a solo act starting with 1998's "The Tourist."
Mallman's coat covered a brown tee shirt with a badly eroded insignia. He wore faded jeans and black shoes. It looked like a performer's "Business casual."
After a brief chat backstage, Mallman's band, "The Heat," started to sound check and forced us outside to sit on a damp concrete wall.
University Chronicle: So any good St. Cloud stories?
Mark Mallman: There should be. We've never been able to stay up here and party, because for whatever reason we've had to get back ... and sometimes it's just so frightening that we want to get out of here as fast as possible.
UC: You're afraid of St. Cloud?
MM: Not afraid of it. It's just so wild ... sometimes it's just like, Holy S-t.
UC: Is it?
MM: It's a college town so it's a certain type of "wild" here. College wild is like, you never know what's gonna happen. Like when we play New York, or in the City ... even in Milwaukee or even Chicago ... But man it gets crazy up here. When we play the Carpet it gets crazy, but it's always fun. It's always fun."
Mallman is preparing for a nation-wide tour to support a live album coming out Tuesday. Mallman will be touring without most of "The Heat," only taking along bassist Pony to play drums. The guitar and bass will be played pre-recorded from an amplifier.
"It's very very simple, it's like a play. With a rock show you can never plan what happens," Mallman said. "With tracks you can time out exactly what you want to happen where. I've done enough live shows to know what I want. The problem for me is controlling myself on stage."
Last March at Playplace, Mallman played a solo show, nearly in the dark. Under only the softest blue lights, Mallman played guitar, keyboard, several sequences and synthesizers and a Fisher-Price record player. During the entire show a loop of cricket noises played in the background at varying volumes.
Hearing Mallman prompt the soundman "More crickets for this song. Less crickets for this song," is mostly what I remember from the show. Non-sequitor outbursts, rambling stories, frequent interruptions and chaotic interludes dominate every Mallman show. And like the crowd that packed into Java Joint Thursday night, I love it.
But I can see why Mallman wouldn't. Perhaps the naked honesty of his songs forces him to distance himself from the material. His orchestral piano ballads about personal demons (he has called "The Tourist" a pro-suicide album) evoke either Elton Jon or Ben Folds but neither reference does his shows justice.
When thundering through "Who's Gonna to save you now?" off his same-titled 2002 release, the music demands the respect that Mallman wants for it. But, the big question is, would it still be the same without his outburst? Would it be the same if he didn't turn to his guitarist and say, "That was your moment to shine. Do it again. Do the solo again," like he did Thursday night. It was then that the once humble sport coat caught a vibrant glow from the stage lights and his stage persona floated through his self-constructed madness like a game show host reporting on a hurricane.
Would it be the same if he didn't mambo to the back of the stage and dance, facing the drummer, to the beats in his head after exclaiming "I have to do something, and I can't do it from the back of the stage."
Listening to his 2002 release "In the Red Bedroom," I try to picture Mallman's live performance sans antics. I'm still trying to picture it, but as I wait for that image to develop I think I'll stick with Mallman's last thoughts on his new live format.
UC: That's f--ing interesting.
MM: It could be.
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