Marzine and the Far East

It was a good time to talk about addiction and how it helped Marzine construct her comeback in the mid 1960's, where she learned to be mentor and muse to a new generation of story tellers.

From the early experiments with reefer, to the unrivaled lascivious delights of absinthe, Marzine was already familiar with hallucinogens. (Culminating in a full-blown addiction to opium, having tried it on while on her journey around the Orient in the late 50's, after her husband was murdered.) She gave up on America and found herself with the means to emigrate to China, where she spent many an hour on the floors of an ornate rug, staring down at the shadow left by an opium pipe.

She was haunted by visions of four armed bandits and demigods offering redemption, while she struggled to find meaning out of the hollow beetle shell of her mind. If she dared to peel away the layers of haze in her heart, she might have found universal truth. But when she would found it, it was normally hard to describe or transmuted into another language entirely. Rarely did infinite wisdom come in her native tongue, rather in a seemingly made up language, forever on the brink of comprehension.

Hershel's visits were few and far between, normally casting a tone of judgmental shame over the proceedings.

"Your not what I made you, your squandering your talent and imagination,all in the name of mourning. You never mourned me Marzie, you just kept on, why should this one be any better?"

He plainly stated, after fading away in a spiderweb of smoke emanating from the adjacent chamber and tossing his hat, landing squarely on her jaw for her to see when she awoke hours later by the proprietor, telling her it was time to go home.

Marzine found in opium the love that she never found in humans, at least for very long.

Marzine's monstrous band tours the east coast.

Marzine’s Moonstruck band sold out Sardel’s Crab Shack on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi for the third night straight.

The humidity and sea salt in the club made the strings on Gantry's stand up bass curl over, creating a different pitch when he played it at a certain angle, that inspired the Turfula pluck a little harder on her harp, winking her one eye to Marinze on the banjo, sending the band into darker territory than they were used to.

During one show in Texarkana, Turfula's fake eyeball tumbled out into the crowd. It rolled onward towards the back of the shitty little dive, when a kind soul picked up the eyeball, gave it a spitshine with his hankerchief, and tossed it to a waiting Turfula on stage who caught it and instantly launched into "Herhsel, Black Jack and the train who made him."

In Tupelo, MS they burned through a incendiary set where legend has it, a young Elvis Presley was in the audience. Later on that night, they swam in the Gulf of Mexico, caught crab and then slept on a barge. The next day they had an impromptu jam session with a young Elvis Pressley, home on a weekend pass from the military.

Elvis would later refer to this experience while shooting "Blue Hawaii."

The tour then took them to Brooklyn, where they opened up for Woody Guthrie at a small show just outside his Mermaid Avenue home. She smoked and joked with Woody, as Marzine is taken by his sense of storytelling, is enraptured in the way Woody manages to recapture the lost spirit of a dying America. Woody would go on to famously coin Marzine as having a temperament that's "As sweet as apple pie and as dark as molasses."

That night Marzine saw the power of her music and saw the strong-armed political war machine her guitar could become, if only she would let it. The meeting changed how she approached music from there on in, and her next series of shows were pro-union affairs.

12 years pass by. McCarthy and his commission on Unamerican Activities opened a file on Marzine, after discovering the connection between her and Woody Guthrie.

This led to Marzine being eventually roped into the whole red scare phenomenon. While not exactly having to testify for the committee for non-American activities, she felt the heat of the backlash, as protesters turned out in droves, as she was once seen with Guthrie after that show in Brooklyn. But this was before the demise of her first husband, a pre folk hero and union organizer, who helped Dylan find his sound in the coffee shops of Greenwich Village.

Edward Martin was killed in early 1960 of mysterious circumstances as many historians now believe that Ed was killed by J.Edgar Hoover's flunkies. As a union organizer, Ed's office was a frequent target of anti-Communist groups. Prior to his death, his office had been broken into and vandalized several times. Marzine was on tour at the time, and her husband’s sudden death removed her from the public spotlight for the next 12 years.

My first Victrola

Listening to the Carter Family on the Victrola, father with his fat thumb on the dial. The combination of voices nudged up against each other sounded like the working class talking to god himself, as my father stoically stood, eyes staring out at the rails, tapping his right foot.

How I chased paths with the Carter Family, took umbrage in the doors forged by them ten years prior knowing I was ten years too late. Growing up it was they who I looked up to. My Father and I were always singing a Carter tune. I remember when we bought the first Victrola after Mom died, I could hear all the voices around the lone microphone. The dust in the grooves, the lost voices that time left behind. The almost schizophrenic way I viewed the world, I never knew the difference between father's stories & what had really happened. He played like the record like a kid, waving the floppy railroad hat around, while outstretching his arms, inviting me to dance. In the movie of my life, he is forever rising over the camera, tossing his hat into the ring, throwing caution to the wind in everything he did and lived. I moved out west in the early 1960's, trying to ride a resurgance in country and folk music, but it was too late was almost over at that point. No one wanting to hear about our legends anymore.

"Listen to those voices, Marzie, listen to them soar." Pop would say, while waving his arms up to the sky, as I pushed my imposing spectacles up my long nose,laughing because I felt freed by those voices; It was like I had been listening to a single note played off key for my entire life, and now the entire spectrum of sound had been introduced to me the moment he delicately pointed the needle at the start of the record, “Your going to miss me when I’m gone.”

From the old railroad songs Dad would sing to that first song on the Victrola, he gave birth to something that would never die in me, even after two marriages, a breakdown, addictions, and salvation. Even in my darkest hour, he’d be there for me, pulling up the kitty flower patch quilt to the tip of my chin. His comforting tenor, whispered tales of hammers, lost loves, galloping trains and shrewd industrialists. At home Mama was sick, was always sick, stern and mostly angry. I never knew why.

Dad was always kind, soft and larger than life. He loved her no matter how sour or sick her mood was. Pale pallor, “like chicken soup”, he’d say, on his way out to work, kissing her deserted forehead and swinging his lunch pail.

When I took that trip down to the river when the icebox shorted, to pull the chain containing the locked box of dairy products and coming back to see the pale of her face change to white, reflected by the spilt milk, the bottle shattering after I dropped it. How I cried and Dad took us away. I guess he did everything for me. I think that’s why Mom was mad all the time. She knew I meant more to him than she did. Like when he spent the last of the monthly wages on a guitar for me. The brand logo “Martin” shining back through the fog of tears on my glasses, after coming in from the cold, to beef stew and a face that showed no love to Father, coming from Mother.

Hershel Jacoby, or how Marzine came into this earth.

Hershel Jacoby was born in Abiline, KS on a scalding hot day in 1906. As a child he would watch the trains pull in and out of town, while sitting on the front steps of the courthouse. By the age of 12, he knew every engine and cargo capacity of every train that rode the rails within a 30 mile radius of Abiline.

Union Pacific hired him, after finding him stowed away behind the rear coal car. He was in the process of fixing the rear axle, by affixing a wad of chewed up black jack gum to serve as a temporary fix while the train passed a hairpin turn. He was rewarded a medal of honor by the mayor of Abiline. Hershel was, by all accounts, a candy freak. He eventually returned to riding the rails after a series of ill-advised financial decisions. A handshake by Hershel was never complete without his trademark chortle, where he'd open his loud black mouth, stained by the ever-present black jack gum.

In 1928 Calvin Coolidge visited Abiline, KS where he met Hershel, by then already a hero of the rails. He was one of the first rail heroes who logged in 4,000 hours per year on the road.

With all of the pay and legend, he squandered all of his money is a never-was candy company. The 1920's was a boom for candy invention, Reesus Peanut Butter Cups and the Butterfinger candy bar were invented in 1923.

Herhsel was a partner in a failed candy company, Marzine's, named after his only daughter. Marzine's mother died of TB in the 1930's, leaving Marzine to inherit a candy company steeped in debt. Many of their candy brand names were, Marzine's, a smarmy combination of grape tablets filled with chocolate.

By 1937, the Roundtree company managed to successfully market Smarties, blatantly ripping off the Marzine company's Marzine's combination of fruit and chocolate.

Nevertheless, Marzine's went bankrupt, sending Hershel into a tailspin of debt, resulting in his return to the rails, after a brief retirement. Hershel's body was never found in the Columbia River, where it was assumed he plummeted to, as his boot was last seen on the other side of a quarter mile extension bridge, on the other side of the Columbia River Gorge.*

Hershel became a legend in Abiline, and he never left the small town, despite meeting the President of the United States (while on a failed tour of reelection.)Some said that the meeting acted as a bad omen that Hershel would never shake off.

Marzine, his only daughter, was born in 1927, one year before the president's arrival. Marzine took up music took up music at a young age, and like her father, another trend would usurp her own work. The rise of rock and roll in the 1950's robbed Marzine of her chance of success, and in so doing put the legend of Hershel to a screeching halt.

* This boot now lies in a museum in Eastern Oregon, Purported location of where Hershel fell, as noted by the outbreak by children named Hershel.

Marzine lacks a muse, and finds it at the bottom of a green bottle.

Marzine's career had fizzled slightly. The band broke up four years prior, leaving Marzine with the task of filling an entire set's worth of songs, stories, and tributes. She hashed her way across a series of gigs in flea-ridden flop-houses, through the dusty plains to the new west, and entertained the likes of shanghiers, bootleggers and other scabbards fresh off of boats and crime sprees.

Gaining clarity and discomfort, she made her way through two bit towns like Rambler's Peak, MI, Barstow, CA, and Carlton, WY. At a gig in Astoria, OR she actually broke down on stage, stumbled out into the audience, and launched into a shambolic homage to her befallen father.

After the gig, Marzine sat with feet dangling off the dock, the Pacific nipping at her toes, taking buoyant tugs out of a flask, and humming an old seafarers tune.
She heard the foreboding boot taps on the dock, and felt weary in the creaks that followed. She felt like she could fall into the creaks, like one would fall into a fevered dream.

"This ought to help, sounds like you lost your muse."

Marzine's eyes moved around to the man, whose shadow met her own, bathed in gentle moonlight. She looked up, and managed a response.

"Well I'd be oblidged to thank you, but frankly, sir, you don't know what's happened, and how could you?"

The glint in the man's eyes worried Marzine, but the phantasmic green glow of the bottle he offered danced in the moonlight and she felt drawn to it.

"I picked it up in France, just a few months ago, it's real inspiring, they call it Absinthe."

It carried with it the same ecclesiastical spirit as the first time she stood on stage and hours later she was in his rickety cot, fumbling around for her bra strap as the room took in swathes of emerald light. They cast their temporary love into small little places at the back of their minds, and as the undulations retracted and shouts could be heard throughout the moorage, their places exploded, engulfing them in backwards gasps, thrusted palms and thwarted cries.

Afterwards, as they rocked gently in each other's arms, Hershel looked on from a junk boat in the harbor, a murky green vessel which shimmered before it faded into the black night.

She never saw her sailor again after that night, and at the end of her life, as she gradually fell away from her memories in a humble facility in upstate New York, she'd drift back and wonder if she hadn't invented the whole scene.

Marzine's Moonstruck Band - "If you ever come back"

And in the bowels of hell Joe awoke, not knowing where he was. It was an eventual fall, being as it was towards the end of a particularly bad period. After the second divorce, feeling this one a little harder than before. He still saw the sport in it, even if the chips were stacked against him. He still believed in his powers, especially when favors where cheap and the beer was plentiful.

At Hannity's tavern, which happened to have the only existing copy of "If you ever come back" by Marzine's Moonstruck Band. So rare was the record, that the local vinyl press created a copy that only the bartender could play. The original hang on the wall, above the baseball bat that would be used in the event that the record was ever taken.

He'd spent the past three years at the bottom rung of a particular favorite local bar. Whenver he heard a particular song, and he would ask for it, as he did everything else he eventually regretted, over and over again, almost relishing in the feeling that would inevitably rush out of him, when the song ended, and he had to stop, turn around and go again. It was just that easy and simple. By his fourth week, he'd heard the tune probably a thousand time, each time a little different. A different affair, girl, year, drink, problem.

Everything in Joe's universe grew, swelled and fell in this same way: Plotlines, bankruptcies, businesses, hemlines, panties, affairs they all congealed and exploded, the avenues of chaos blown asunder when the tragic piece of reality would come and take that special little thing away. The needle stuck on the last audible pause of the record skipped until he would order another and put his empty class to the bartop. "Again."

Night Shift at the Root Cellar

It was at night when the real pain would come. Marzine sprawled out underneath the stars, the straw patches itching at her back. She'd see her father in the patterns of stars, and the tales would well up in her again. She'd see Hershel rounding cirrus minor, tipping his hat and disappearing behind the little dipper in an explosion of struts and electric sawdust. Dewey eyed, she'd lean out of bed, and seek solace in her guitar. The crickets acted as the string section as she stomped her foot onto the rotted-out floorboards of the barn.

She'd made an arrangement with the owner, letting her sleep in the barn in exchange for three mornings a week, as a pourer of coffee to the borders in the the white boderhouse, and three nights a week as a canner in the root cellar, often until the stars would fade, and Hershel would retire again into the great elastic highway of the Milky Way Galaxy.

She wrote half of her songs in this way, the legacy of her father beaming down reams of ebullience upon his expectant daughter. Her own life lived through his past, a life too big for one lifetime. It would be one of these visions that would eventually lead Marzine to the massive dark shadow of breakdown, madness and chemical dependence. The stars were a playground for Hershel, a spiralling netherworld where his legacy would torment his daughter until the day she died, broke, drunk and staggeringly alone.

Marzine Gets Her Band Together

Where Marzine eventually creates her band, with Turfula the harp player. (With an eye-patch and a protruding jaw, she can chill the spine of all but the most drunk lad in the saloon.) Gantry on the stand up bass keeps things respectable, despite a brutal addiction to pain killers after the draught lost his wife in June.

Jeb plays the spoons, and washboard, occasionally revealing the singing saw from behind the crimson curtain. Marzine, while on her smoke break, writes songs with shards of charcoal, puffing on her chesterfield, journaling Hershel's journey from the corn fields to the bottom of the Columbia river gorge. She's had one of her stories published, in a wry little pulp, one only sold in the seediest of malt shops and juke joints.

The gig last week was encouraging, though a few of the beer bottles hurtled didn't make it through the mesh curtain and plopped Marzine square in the forehead. It hurt like hell, but at least there was an audience.