Mark Berube


Sometimes it rains CDs. As one who purports to know a little something 
about acoustic music and is willing to plunk down my dime to express my 
opinion, songwriters offer, send and beg me to listen to their musical philosophies. 
There are periods where no one clicks. Then, out of the fog of hundreds of 
earnestly sincere singer/songwriters bemoaning their lost loves and eager to 
impart the wisdom of their "coming of age," a cool breeze of bracing cynicism 
cuts through the mist. With lyrics wrapped in sarcasm, clever rhyme schemes and 
bouncy melodies, someone expresses my point of view on a whole array of 
subject matter better than I ever could. The talent of some performers will 
sneak up on the listener, insinuating itself into the subconscious. Then, suddenly 
it explodes in the frontal lobe, like a rising 98-mile per hour fastball too close 
to a batter's head.

It's one thing to point out situations that range from mild annoyance, to apprehension,
 all the way to pure rage, in terms that blister paint off walls. Angry expression 
can be edifying, but taken straight up, it can also be very uncomfortable. To do it 
with a sense of comic irony and appear to not break a sweat with the effort, is 
an achievement worth noting.

All the above strives  to explain how recently, the musings of one Mark Berube 
pressed into my awareness with a joyous jolt. 

I first encountered Mark when he was a steady performer in the late 1990s at the 
open mic at The Fast Folk Café with his friend and collaborator, Scott Wolfson. 
He always exuded the air of an old soul. Last year, at the Acoustic Live booth 
showcases at Falcon Ridge, when he played his ode to the Karate Kid, found on 
his 2005 release Suspicious Fish, "Mr Miyagi," I jumped to offer an appreciative 
response and an offer of a feature. Someone who pairs words such as "Mr Miyagi" 
with 'conspicuously soggy" and "beef stroganoff" with "wax on and wax off" is 
going to get my attention.  A cornucopia of absurdity and surreality like this 
makes one wonder where it all comes from…

To begin with…
Mark Berube was born in Northampton, Massachusetts With typical archness, he 
stated, "When I was one, my family took the plunge and moved far, far away to 
Easthampton, Mass. I spent the next 20 years or so there attempting to grow up."
He didn't play music at all until he was about 18. A friend of his dad's had an old 
electric guitar with a giant tube amp. He remembers, "It had this great old crunchy 
tone to it. I was at his house and he was playing it. He just gave it to me and said, 
'borrow it, learn to play it and come back and play me a song. So I took it home 
and I found an old book of Beatles tunes. And I got books of tunes by Dylan, 
the Who, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Lou Reed and learned how to bang 
out a few chords on it. For a long time I just played it casually. I wrote my first 
song around then and fortunately at this point, it is confined to the dustbin of history. 
I would write smatterings of things here and there, but I really didn't take it all 
that seriously until after college."

From Groceries to "Master Thespian"
Mark did not go to college immediately right out of high school. In a brilliant slacker 
move, he spent three years working in a supermarket, managing the night shift for a 
time. [Great experience for grounding in life on the lower rungs]. He had performed 
in a couple of community theater productions &endash; musical reviews . Although never 
much of a musical theater person, he "flat-out" enjoyed the acting portion. He decided 
that if he was going to do anything beyond a blue-collar  existence, that this would be it. 
He spent a couple of years at a community college in Holyoke, taking some acting 
classes, seeing what it was all about. It felt like the right thing to do. His plan was 
to go on to UMass and continue studying there. 

A friend in the theater program at UMass was applying to NYU and told him, 
"If you're going to be an actor, you have to be in New York and especially at NYU. 
They have a great program. You're right in the middle being taught by professionals." 
So Mark auditioned for NYU was terrified. Packing up and going to NYC seemed 
simply absurd. He auditioned from a monologue from a play that he had written. 
He figured that if he messed it up, they would have no idea. He says. "I got in. 
Fortunately I had some writing in me and that improved my chances. I think 
the red sneakers I was wearing helped, too."
The friend wound up not going, because he didn't have the money and stayed at UMass.



The "Big City"
Mark spent the first week afraid to go out after dark. He went around in the 
daytime and got to know the Village, Washington Square. This was in 1989. 
At that time there was graffiti everywhere and there were vagrants lying in the street. 
At NYU, he did studio work with Playwrights Horizons, an affiliate, up on 42nd Street. 
He'd take the subway up to 42nd Street and walk the stretch out to 10th Avenue 
which, he says, was "an incredible  cultural experience…  Today it looks like Disneyworld. 
Back then it was a mess of drugs, prostitution and crime…  I was just one of these 
corn-fed kids from all over the country plopped into the middle of New York City 
to study theater.  It's a very quick education being dumped in the middle of this place 
after being a naïve New Englander from nowhere. "

Mark spent a couple of years at NYU studying acting, 
leaving with one year left to go because the money ran out and the his debts were 
piling up. He took some time off. One year turned into two, two into three and he 
never went back.

While he was studying theater, he started to pull the guitar out more and 
incorporate music into the pieces he was creating. Wordless scenes were created to 
music. More and more, his instructors encouraged him to use his own music.

The Scott and Mark Show
From here, Mark describes the beginning of his march into the acoustic singer/songwriter 
world this way:
"I met Scott Wolfson at college. He was this big Simon and Garfunkel nut. We'd end 
up singing together on stuff and we started incorporating that type of material. He 
and I performed a version of the Bacchae by Euripides. The director deconstructed 
it and created vignettes out of the entire piece. Scott and I were instructed to stand on 
either side of the stage and musically declaim loudly this piece of text about Dionysus 
while a hot-looking dude with long hair was doing a striptease in the background and 
a group of women were flailing and writhing underneath him. While Scott and I were 
learning this piece, I started snapping my fingers and making a rhythm out of it.  So 
we made a song out of it and took it into the director. He said 'That's brilliant. We're 
using that instead of the other thing.' So we opened at the top of the show with this 
a capella thing to the lyrics of Euripides. We also created more music around other 
bits of lyrics. Scott and I started writing more stuff like that. We incorporated more 
of that stuff into the shows that we were doing."

The two started shifting more to music. Mark found it difficult to work with other 
people on the production of his plays. He couldn't seem to get his vision realized.  
He says "The plays got shorter and shorter, until they were songs. What I was writing 
became these 3-minute nuggets of life. Scott and I started looking for other outlets 
for them. The theater company I worked with was in Tribeca and I noticed the 
Fast Folk Café had these open mics. So I said, 'Hey Scott, let's go to this joint and 
check it out. The first night I went in there, someone was on stage singing this very, 
very sad and serious song. The place was rather quiet. Another person got up and 
played some very serious, sometimes folkie, sometimes singer/songwriter very serious 
tunes. I was terrified, because I was going to go up there and sing about a beeper 
in my pants. This was not going to work for these people! I thought 'I don't know 
what I'm doing here! Andrew Kerr [exuberant, madcap performer &endash; check the monthly 
feature for November 2002 in the Acoustic Live web site archives] was hosting 
that night. Grinning, he introduced me as, 'Our next fabulous performer…' with me 
thinking these people are absolutely going to hate everything that I do because not 
one person before then had done anything with even the slightest bit of humor in it…  
So I sang 'The Beeper Song,' an old song I haven't performed in many years. 
It was basically a one-joke song about: 
'I've got my beeper set on vibrate and I keep it in my pants so when you call it 
makes me happy. 
I sang the song and people laughed and they applauded. It was an enormous validation. 
People can patronize you with polite applause even if they don't like something, but 
people generally don't laugh unless they actually think it's funny. People tell me, 
'you should go into stand-up comedy.' I respond, 'No… that's hard. After every 3-minute 
song they'll applaud, no matter what, but if you tell a bad joke and there's no laughter 
there, there's nothing.' Which is one of the main reasons &endash; people don't believe me when 
I say this &endash; that I really don't try to write funny songs. I don't at all &endash; I never have. 
I really just try to write stuff. If it comes out funny, it comes out funny."



On His Own
From there, although continuing to collaborate with Scott on some songs, Mark began 
to write more on his own, building a greater repertoire. His first CD, Shut Up, So I Can Play 
was recorded live at the now-defunct Sun Music Company on the upper East side 
of Manhattan. The initially unrelenting  enthusiastic audience applause prompted his 
good-naturedly sarcastic response that became the CD's title. While  Mark states that 
his playing on this recording seems too fast, I find the torrent of barbed wit on this to 
be a delirious romp. The machine-gun strumming and waterfall of words are exhilarating. 
His song, "I Don't Wanna Smell Your Butt," (an appropriate double-entendre) is a riotous 
joyride,  especially  for someone such as me who finds cigarette  smoke abhorrent, along 
with the odor that clings to smokers' clothing (proximity in an elevator is 
particularly unpleasant)  

"…Your glands smell, your cat smells, your car smells, your wife smells, 
this bar smells, your whole life smells and now I smell too… 
thanks a lot!…" 

He says it's his most downloaded song on iTunes.

On Suspicious Fish, he forays into more serious territory. The ode to the current 
illegal occupant of the White House, "The Look on Your Face," is as well-expressed as 
anything currently being stated or sung, 

"Dictators for Democracy, living above the law…
 forget the constitution, don'tcha know that we're at war… 
Be a good American and show some blind trust,
 it isn't torture as long as it's done by us…  
People say what would Jesus do? I think when the rent comes due, 
he's got a big surprise for you… 
I'd love to see the look on your face on your first day in Hell…"

Even Mark's love songs have a bit of sarcastic bite. "Sleep" is, overall, a sweet paean 
to his lovely wife, Carolann Solebello (of Red Molly) and how he feels at peace with 
her by his side as he slides into slumber. However, that peace gets compared to a 
(perhaps a bit exaggerated) version of his hellish childhood, suffering torturous pranks 
at the hands of his younger brother. Thus, we learn that he'll:

"Never worry that you'll kill my hamster 
Never worry that you'll put the corpse next to my head
 Never worry that I'll wake up / to find my 
toenails painted red…"

When the audience picks itself up off the floor, they find that they've been treated to
 a very warped, but effective declaration of love.

This same love also gets declared in another way. In all of the lofty phrases penned 
by poets and songwriters, what gets left out is a basic animal essence. Playfully working 
around the subject of unadorned body odor, in his song, "I Like the Way You Smell," 
Berube dives into the primordial ooze. Some people he notes, 

"give off a screamin' bad aroma that's enough 
to put every living person in a coma, 
from Edmonton, Alberta to Tulsa, Oklahoma… 

While he acknowledges the modern amenities, like the way his main squeeze sings 
and dances, he's got a "jones" for her "awesome odors and fantastic pheromones…"
That's clever enough for me.
Mark says that his singing voice, a bit nasal and confined to the lower register is more 
suited to acting, but that rich  baritone seems perfect for his chosen direction of assault on the 
vicissitudes of modern life.

The Source
As we talked about the source for his expression we turned to his theater work. 
His plays, as he states, were "heavily influenced by Beckett &endash; very absurdist and a bit surreal, 
so there was humor that came across in that. There was weird shit going on onstage when it 
was just me abstracting what was going on in my head &endash; the horrors of the universe. When I 
turned the visions into songs, they had to shrink a little bit. They had to become more narrowly 
focused and a bit more personal. There's still a lot of surrealism and 
absurdism in the songs that I write. What you write about is the same no matter what form it 
takes &endash; whatever the topic is in your head &endash; how we all struggle to get through life without 
offing ourselves and everyone we know. It's just a matter of taking smaller chunks of it and 
putting them into those songs."

Whatever the roots of his impulses, Acoustic Live is very happy they're there and 
we're rooting for Mark to keep it coming.

Web site: www.elizabethrecords.com/website/mab_bio.shtml

Upcoming performances include:
Friday,  Oct 14    8pm      Indigo Coffehouse  AberdeenPavilion   1208  Route 34 South
             Aberdeen,  NJ 732.566.6233

Saturday,  Oct 29    9pm      Postcrypt  Coffehouse   St.  Paul's Chapel
                 ColumbiaUniversity   NYC   212.854.1953