Mark Stone and Medicine Ball are in their second decade of delivering original, highly eclectic music from the often overlooked music town of Providence, Rhode Island. Mark was involved in the early stages of the formation of the first Terrastock festival in Olneyville, Rhode Island and Medicine Ball appeared at the first two Terrastock festivals in '97 and '98. I had a chance to sit down with Mark on my No Soap, Radio program over WNTI-FM in Hackettstown, NJ on October 2, 2000 to discuss his career and discover the real story behind the beginnings of the "Terrastock Nation."
First of all, I'd like to thank you for postponing your honeymoon to chat with us! You just got married Saturday. Congratulations. I guess if we hear beeping in the background, that's the wife in the driveway with the car loaded up ready to go?!
Mark: I have to tell you, as much planning as went into that first Terrastock, it pails in comparison to planning a wedding! That was a lot more work.
Could you give us a little rundown on the band's beginnings for new listeners. You've been around for about a dozen years?
It is a dozen years. We started rehearsing together in the spring or '88, playing out live in the spring of '89, had a lineup change in the beginning of '91 that brought Evan Williams into the band – he had previously played in Plan 9 and just recently we brought a friend of ours in on keyboards, Stephen Twining. He's been playing with us for about a year, but he isn't on the forthcoming album because the tracks were done before he came into the fold.
You celebrated your tenth anniversary at the first Terrastock?
It would have been the second one out in San Francisco in early '98.
Many years ago in Cincinnati, I believe I probably met Evan when he was touring with Plan 9 on their Sea Hunt tour. I saw the band at Bogart's and talked with Eric [Stumpo] and Debbie [??] after the show and I believe Evan was still with the band. So here we are full circle over a dozen years ago speaking about his latest band, Medicine Ball. Is he the only one that was in a band that released material?
Evan is the only one who was in a band of note. Don Sanders, our guitarist and Bruce Moravic our drummer and I went to high school together and have been playing together in one form or another since about 1982, [laughing] so I've been hanging around with the same guys for twenty years!
Are you all from Providence or did you gravitate there and settle down in the area?
Well, the three of us went to high school in Barrington, about 15 miles out of town and Evan is from south county down around Naraganset and Stephen is from down there as well, so we're all native Rhode Islanders.
When I think of the music in my collection from bands around Providence, I think of Plan 9 and yourselves and another band that played at Terrastock, V. Majestic. While the music of those bands has its own style, is there any particular "scene" in Providence or type of music that's most popular?
If there is a "scene," I'm not really wise to it. If it is, it might be taking place outside of my notice. Certainly, there might be local bands playing in a style that I'm not really partial to: emo bands are doing well, but that style doesn't appeal to me.
Has the music scene in Providence changed at all in the dozen or so years that you and V. Majestic have been playing and with Plan 9 before that?
Closer to when we started, there was not really much going on at all. There was a time in the middle part of the '90s when the city had a fabulous music scene: Six Finger Sattelite are from here, The Velvet Crush were from here, Combustible Edison were based here in town, Small Factory were based here in town and those four things were all over the musical map. So, there may still be something going on here, but that would be unbeknownst to me at the moment.
Is there a sense that national bands working their way through the Northeast on their way up to Boston, that Providence is being unfairly overlooked, or is there not a good club scene there?
There are several clubs here in town ranging in size from 150 up to a place like Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel that's 1500 capacity. Most things could play this town. There's the local arts papers, The Providence Phoenix and The Boston Phoenix both owned by the same company, but when you compare the Providence and Boston listings, most bands seem to skip this town.
It must be frustrating?
It is.
When you play out, do you find yourselves gravitating towards Boston, or do you have a strong local following?
It's kind of funny. We don't have much of a profile at all at the moment. There was a time going back to the years I mentioned before when there was a fan base and shows were well attended, but I get the sense, and this may not just be in Providence, that people aren't going out as much. For myself, now that I'm 35, people in my peer group that used to go out and see music three and four nights a week, don't do so anymore and I'm not really sure who's coming up behind us to take our places. I'm not seeing that group of kids that are in their twenties going out to see music every night. There's tens of thousands of college students here – Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence College – and they don't seem to be going out to see any independent, underground rock music to any great extent.
I'd like to discuss the progression of the music over the years. Someone just called and asked who it was I was playing, it sounded great and I said that's Medicine Ball and he said, "Medicine Ball!? I've got all their records and I didn't recognize any of that!" [Mark chuckles.] I think he was thinking of Medicine Ball Caravan or one of those '60s bands. Your name was developed independently of that?
Yes. I found out about all those things many years later. There are many bands using that name. I know for a fact there's a hardcore band out of Florida using the name and I think there's a folk band out in the Midwest using the name as well.
For someone asking what the music was like, I'd generically call it something like "Dead-meets-Sabbath with power punk overtones."
[Mark's laughter turns quickly to choking and coughing] Well, that's good enough, although I wouldn't say that about ourselves. I'm no fan of the Dead, although there are elements of that in our early material.
I was thinking of things like "Roomus De Gloomus" and "Spoken Broken" from Science Secret Stars having that sort of sleepy, laid back jam quality.
Yes, with the Hammond B3 organ it definitely has elements of that.
And Planet Freakout is a little more bombastic, with heavier, minor chords like on "Ease," but at the same time, you've explored the power punk strains with tracks like "Hide This For Me" and "Chicken O'Clock," "Big Yellow Man" and "Short Fast Women." Your forthcoming release makes another 90° turn towards jangly, Byrdsian pop like on "Jet Black" and "Hot Love" recalls the Paisley Underground. So that's where I'm coming from with my classification. I wanted to ask about this seemingly kitchen sink approach to your releases.
I think that's one of our strong points. Don Sanders, Evan and myself all write the material and we've always had a policy of "whoever writes it, sings it" and we have three distinct songwriting styles. So on any given record, you'll hear any one of us singing on a variety of tracks and the songs can be all over the place stylistically, but I think that's a strong point that'll give the band longevity. But I can see how it might be confusing to folks because the albums don't necessarily have a cohesive sound. The songs definitely have a disparate nature amongst the individual tracks on an album and across the albums as a whole, but there was never a time when we said to ourselves, "OK, let's move in this direction." Although they certainly are distinct from one another. For instance, Planet Freakout is probably our most overt punk kind or record and that's definitely our roots. Don and I come from hardcore bands in the early '80s, so punk rock is definitely where we came from. The whole process of writing and rehearsing and releasing a record takes so much out of you – so much concentration, that by the time it's finally out there, you find yourself shying away from it, not by choice but by default. There was never a band meeting where we said, "OK, let's try and move this in a different direction this time." You just out of necessity start going somewhere else from what you had just done, because by the time the whole project is done, you're well and truly tired of the songs and you want to move on to something new.
Your albums are about two years apart, so you have spent time polishing them and living with them….
But now we're going on a gap of almost four years, but that's a money thing more than anything else. We've pretty much had to record and release our records ourselves.
Is Load [which released Planet Freakout] your label?
It's not. That originally came out on our label, Irregular Records, but it wasn't selling that well so we asked for the copies back from the distributors we were working with and Load re-released it. They are a local label here in town with a bit of a higher profile than our little vanity label did. We relaunched it and that helped sell a few more copies, but I still have quite a few left.
You also put out a split single with V. Majestic?
Yeah, we brought that with us to sell as a keepsake at the second Terrastock. They were exclusive tracks which we put together as inexpensively as we could: it's in a plain wrapper and the labels are plain with the xeroxed cover. We thought it would be a nice impulse buy at the merchandise tables for two bucks, like a candy bar at the counter, but that didn't really pan out. We sold some, but not as many as I'd hoped.
Does the latest release also reflect the input from the three writers or are there more band compositions?
Basically, the way we work is that one of us will bring in a song that's fairly well evolved and the rest of the band will flesh it out from there. Certainly no one tells the others what their parts are going to be so the arranging we do as a band. Someone will bring in a song and from there we'll proceed to work on it for months and months and months [chuckling.]
Is the new one on a release schedule yet or are you still shopping it around?
I believe we're still on a relase schedule. We've been talking pretty seriously with somebody and we're looking at a release at the beginning of next year by a label in [New York City] who've put out material by like minded, Terrascope-y type artists.
Does it have a title other than a generic "Medicine Ball?"
We're working on a few titles, but nothing has stuck yet.
I'd like to go back and touch upon an idea you had back in '97 to organize a music festival as a benefit to one of my favorite magazines, Ptolemaic Terrascope. You were personally instrumental in starting this whole "terrastock nation" scene jumpstarted with the first Terrastock Festival in Providence in 1997?
Actually, the program notes are incorrect in attributing the idea to me. In fact, it was Bob Jazz from V. Majestic who actually came up with the idea. It started off as a pretty modest idea. The gallery where the show was held, The Rogues Gallery was a pretty run down warehouse in a seedy part of town that local bands played at. His idea was to have a modest little show with bands like Medicine Ball, Cul De Sac from Boston and V. Majestic do a low key thing to raise awareness of the magazine and sell a few copies of the music. I think he envisioned it as a sort of record release party. But from those humble beginnings, it took off to become what it is today with annual festivals and all. I didn't actually get involved with picking any of the bands. I think Phil [McMullen, Ptolemaic Terrascope editor] and the labels [particularly Flydaddy, based in Providence] and Bob may have had a hand in all that.
Was this the first time you had actually met some of these bands?
It was the first time I actually met ALL of them. Except for Cul De Sac, who we've played with over the years and V. Majestic and Hovercraft who were here in Providence, most of them were unknown to me as people. I have records by plenty of them, but I didn't know any of them.
[Mark proceeded to share with me his experience at the show, most of which he actually missed as he was sort of a "roady extraordinaire" busily getting hammers and lugging equipment and helping bands get set up and loading them in and out of the club.]
Do you think the idea has grown way beyond your original concept?
I have to admit, I'm not really up on what's going on at the upcoming festival in Seattle [November 3-5th] or what went on in England last year. I don't own a computer, so I'm not visiting the Terrascope's website and I don't even know who's playing. We weren't invited to either of those and I've been busy getting married, so I haven't really been paying much attention. I'm sure Bevis Frond [headed by Ptolemaic Terrascope publisher, Nick Saloman] and Alchemysts will be playing….
You opened for Bevis Frond during their '98 tour?
Yeah. We flew out to San Francisco for the second one, which was a one-off for us and on our way back east we hooked up with them and opened for about 7 or 8 shows on the east coast and that was great, great fun.
Did you have an opportunity to do any other live gigs out there – make it a working trip?
No, we just flew out there with our various wives and girlfriends and we made it a bit of a vacation. I had the opportunity to show my fiancee the city and we did sell a lot of records to the local indie stores out there.
You were just married on Saturday. Are any of the other guys married?
Yeah, Don, who's sitting here with me, is and Stephen Twining, our new keyboard player is as well.
Do you think that as you go forward, beyond the upcoming release, the band will continue to take a similar approach and assemble almost a greatest hits-style package and explore several different styles of music at once?
For the material we're working on now, which is a long way away from being ready for the next record, what we'll be doing a bit differently is that I will be singing the lead vocals on all of the songs, written by me or not. We want to try that. As far as the songwriting is concerned, we will continue to reflect our different songwriting styles. We've done four records that way and we want to try something else and see if we can bring a different element to it. That will add a bit more cohesiveness to the release. I'm proud of our previous records, but I'm very aware of the fact that some of them sound like compilation records. I know that has worked against us. We're not easy to classify; we're not part of any scene or subgenre of music that quickly comes to mind. I know when we send our music to talent buyers for clubs, who may only listen to the first couple of songs, that it may not be readily apparent to them how to put us on a bill. So, in some ways it has probably hurt us. I think it makes for more interesting records, but it makes us more difficult to classify and it hasn't helped us have a "career" of anything to speak of.
You all have "day jobs?"
[Chuckling] Oh, absolutely. Don owns a business, I have a job, Bruce is a letter carrier. Yup, we're all very busy.
Yes, I understand. I've been working on a book project to write a compendium of all the bands that played at the first three Terrastocks and I've interviewed several participants like this because I'm very excited about this little niche of music. And all of the bands are just regular folks like us with day jobs who travel around to the shows and sell their records at the merchandise stalls and some even own their own labels or stores like Windy & Carl who I interviewed last week on my show. So, I'd like to thank you for taking time to talk and clarify the Terrastock situation. I'd like to touch briefly on your other work in composing film soundtracks. You've supplied the music to two films. Is that something you'd like to explore in the future?
We'd love to have more work like that. It was a very positive experience. We talked out the story of the film with Guy Benoit who directed the film. Making the film was his responsibility and shooting the images and making the score was ours. The original idea was for us to record the music live, but that never came to pass. We went into the studio and recorded the music and he synched it up with the images. I'd still like to attempt to play it live.
I wish you luck with your forthcoming release. Is there any way for the fans to get in touch with you to get copies of your releases or to just say hi?
We have a website that has merchandise and songs you can listen to at www.medicineballmusic.com. We'd be glad to correspond with the listeners out there.