The New Cosmic America:

Kurt Marschke of Detroit's Deadstring Brothers on playing "American music" - and what it's like to be garageless in the Motor City

Forget the Hard Lessons. Forget SSM. Hell, forget about Johnny Headband, too. The real best Detroit band you've never heard is none other than the Deadstring Brothers: sublime alt-country the way it was made before they had a term for it, by people with names like Parsons, Robertson, Jagger and Richards. Their second album, Starving Winter Report, is a simmering stew of roots and rock'n'roll, channeling monolithic achievements like Exile on Main St. with an edge of Motor City adrenaline and a down-home country heart. It's good, timeless stuff - a record that could have been recorded just as easily during the post-hippie roots revival of 1970 as in the summer of 2005.

The Modern Pea Pod spoke with Kurt Marschke, the lead singer and songwriter of this promising band, as he geared up for a US tour with outlaw country heir Shooter Jennings; probably the Deadstring Brothers' highest-profile US gig to date. The interview came soon after the unexpected cancellation of a date at Lansing, Michigan's now-defunct Temple Club, the latest in a series of obstacles to the band's home-state breakthrough. But with Americana acts from Blanche to Loretta Lucas strengthening their foothold on Detroit music, the time seems imminent for the Deadstring Brothers to get the local attention they deserve. And take it from us, this is one bandwagon well worth jumping. Modern Pea Pod: So I was a little disappointed to find out that your show in Lansing last week got cancelled, because of the closing of the Temple Club.

Kurt Marschke: Yeah, well, our touring year's kind of coming to a close, so to be honest we weren't really too upset. It sucks for anyone up there who's gotten turned on to the band, though. I mean it's a town that we should and would really like to work a lot more than we do; it would be nice to start working markets closer to home, instead of 5000 miles away from Detroit. We've been working England for about two years, and we don't even have much of a fanbase in Detroit, let alone other markets like Lansing.


MPP: Right. You guys are a Detroit band, but if you just went by the local press, you'd have no idea. And both of your albums were released in the UK before they came out here, correct?

KM: Yeah, the first record had distribution in England, so we went there. Then we just kept going back and the crowds kept getting bigger. When we got the Bloodshot deal, them having a stronger thing in the States gave us the opportunity to tour here, really for the first time. With the first record [on local label Times Beach], we had no distribution, no promotion, and so it just didn't make sense for us to tour. I mean, we were just out here with press and distribution, and it was still hard getting people to show up! (laughs) So I mean, with Detroit, you can't really blame the city because we never play there. We play maybe two times a year in Detroit, but the rest of the time we're usually busy doing other things.

Also, I think just the fact that we started playing Detroit in 2003 - I mean it was kind of ridiculous, because that was the height of the whole ["garage rock"] movement there. All these bands had hype and press going on internationally, and then here comes this country-sounding kind of thing...I don't think it made much sense to anybody.

MPP: Did you feel the need to set yourself apart intentionally from the rest of the music going on in Detroit, just because it was that one sound getting all the press?

KM: No. We didn't do it because we wanted to be different and we didn't do it because we wanted to fit in. That's always the first question we get from press overseas: why are we doing what we're doing, coming from where we're coming from? It's just what happened. If you want to try and jump into a scene like that, that would not have been very credible. So we just did what we did. We weren't gonna get much press in Detroit when we began, and now we've been on tour like two, two and a half years, and the local press still doesn't get us. But that's okay. I mean that scene is closed now. Anyone that got in is in. And anybody who thinks they're gonna get in to that thing anymore is naive.


MPP: Speaking of having a different sound, what struck me about the Deadstring Brothers right from the beginning is that music critics always like to bandy about Rolling Stones references, but very rarely does the band actually sound like Sticky Fingers or Exile on Main St. You guys actually sound like that to me. Was that a conscious thing?

KM: I think it's a conscious influence from a lot of records from that era. Not just the Stones, but the whole era. Even early Dylan, when he first went electric and it was like this white guy's take on rhythm and blues. Gram Parsons, Nashville Skyline, The Band... That whole time in the late '60s and early '70s when everybody who had a clue just did an about-face and started focusing on songs and trying to make good albums instead of just being proficient musicians. So it wasn't a conscious attempt to sound like Exile or whatever, it was more like I was trying to sing like I was in The Band or something...the Stones thing was kind of a near-miss, I guess.

And then there's also the thing with the pedal steel guitar, which is more of a hardcore American country influence. The whole outlaw movement, the exodus from Nashville with Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings and those guys...that whole idea is fitting for what we're doing, I think.

MPP: So you have no problem admitting that your influences come out of the late '60s and early '70s. A lot of bands these days really shy away from being called "retro."

KM: Well, there's so much room to write songs using the platform of American music, like bluegrass, country, blues, all that stuff. That era didn't last long because it became unfashionable, but they left us a whole lot of room to do shit. We have our own studio, we can do whatever we want. And nobody can say it ain't cool because it wasn't cool when it started. It's like they left us this car, and now we can just cruise around and see what it's like.


MPP: You make a good point in that the Americana thing will probably never be trendy. You might notice little surges of interest in roots music, but you could hardly call it a discrete "movement," the way garage might have been.

KM: No, I don't think you'll ever see a big rush for it. I mean to play that kind of music, honestly, you're going to have to know how to play. It's not like rock where 16-year-olds can play it, they just need to learn a few chords and start bashin' out riffs or whatever. So I don't think it's ever going to be hip or cool like that. But we played around south this summer, and you can certainly see that there's a lot of people making American music in America. People eat it up, they really enjoy it - there's certainly room for it. It just isn't going to be very mainstream, that's all.

MPP: Now were you always into this kind of roots-oriented music? It's not something you'd necessarily expect a teenager to get into.

KM: Oh, I was turned on to that music as a little kid. All that Dylan and Band stuff, American folk and country...but also Michael Jackson. It was just across the board between country and rock and pop.

MPP: What about the Deadstring Brothers? How did this band come together?

KM: Well, everyone was in other bands when I started out, and I was just playing solo with accompaniment by a piano and steel guitar. It was mostly a lot of covers: Dylan, Willie Nelson, Buck Owen. Then I'd just add a guy here and add a guy there, and before we knew it it was a five-piece band. We started recording, and then in January of 2004 we went over to England. We went there actually three times that year, then in 2005 we went I think two or three more times. We've been to England eight or nine times since January of 2004.

MPP: Why do you think you get such a good reception overseas, as opposed to in the US?

KM: I don't really know, to be honest. I mean even those people are confused a little bit sometimes - their Americana thing is a little less rock'n'roll than ours is. So we'd tone our shows down a little in the quieter venues, and make it like this introspective thing mixed with a fuckin' party thing. Sooner or later people do get it, but it's not always the easiest thing to get. I think you've just got to keep at it.

MPP: Now you mentioned that you guys have your own studio. I was wondering how that works for a band like the Deadstring Brothers; you don't strike me as the kind of people who need a lot of studio time, crafting with a ton of overdubs or whatever.

KM: Well, we recorded the first album in my house, so that was the "studio" for that one. We've always mixed at a bigger studio, but the tracking for that one was done at my place. Now it's in a building by itself, so it's more of a real studio as opposed to being a home studio. And we actually work a lot faster now that it's not in the house; for the next album I want to do a quicker, kind of "performance-y" vibe.

Not that those first two records are overproduced or slickified at all - it's more that I was just learning to record. I wasn't much of an engineer, so I had to experiment just to figure out how to do it. But as I get better at that aspect of it, I don't want to take more time, I want to spend less time working on the records.

MPP: You guys will be spending most of this month touring with Shooter Jennings. How did that come about?

KM: Basically, he heard the band on the radio, satellite radio or whatever, and he found out who we were. He told me he'd heard a song and just said "holy shit, what is this?" And he'd mentioned us in the press when he was talking about the state of the music industry...he's not a big fan of the current Nashville thing, obviously, and neither are we. So the label found out and contacted people, and we ended up setting up some dates in the summer. We all got along really well - the bands have a lot in common, and not just musically. There are some, uh, similar lifestyles at work there, too. (laughs) So we set up some more shows for later in the year, but it takes a while to get that stuff ironed out. There'll probably be around 15 dates.


MPP: And what about after that? Are you getting ready for the third album yet?

KM: Actually, we've already started recording in-between tours. We're just tracking demos, but a lot of the time with us the demos end up being formal takes. So by the first of the year, the record will be written and probably tracked. Whenever we're not on the road, I'm always working.

MPP: Do you have any idea where it's going yet, compared to Starving Winter Report or the first one?

KM: Uh, the second album was more of a rock thing, because we'd been touring. So I guess it'll be the same kind of direction, just getting better at it. We're just trying to write better songs.

The Deadstring Brothers will be touring the Eastern and Midwestern United States with Shooter Jennings through the middle of November; the brief tour will end in Detroit with a show at the Magic Stick, on November 16. For details, check out their tour page.

Official Site
Buy Starving Winter Report from Amazon
See Also: Another inspiration?