Marking time

Barnicle waits for his chance

by David Ritchie

Last year's demo from Marc Barnicle was better and more accomplished than most finished CDs. At the time, he was so knocked-out by Jeff Buckley that the tape could've served as a tribute -- six smart songs anchored by great acoustic guitar work with a finished sound rarely achieved on demos.

So it's surprising to find the Worcester musician using a full band for his recently completed second demo. The stylistic choices, different on each song, reveal an artist with a great ear for arrangement; the acoustic is replaced by layers of well-crafted electric and National steel guitar. The result is a radio-worthy collection of six originals that he describes as "more me."

But there is that last hurdle before radio play -- not a hurdle so much as door you gotta hope will be opened by an enlightened individual with a suitcase full of money. And Barnicle's done his part to kick in that door. He has talent, a great attitude, and a good idea what he wants. After recent discussions in Worcester with Interscope Records, it appears that Barnicle's not only label-worthy but also label-sophisticated.

After a serious automobile accident two years ago, the threat to his life and livelihood (he sustained head injuries and swallowed glass, damaging his vocal cords) seems to have given his life immediacy and focus. He was able to join the tour supporting Mary Lou Lord's major-label debut, Got No Shadow (Sony/Work). With that band he had the opportunity to perform on HBO's new music show, Reverb, as well as on the Conan O'Brien show. After having spent years playing cover tunes in bar bands, Barnicle was having a great time performing original music on tour behind an artist and a record he really liked.

It was an education as well; Barnicle describes the experience of playing the South-by-Southwest music conference in Austin as "like being in a certain form of hell that you look forward to your whole life; and then you have to do it, and you just kind of stand there and go, `Fuck, look at this man, there're like 7000 bands in this joint.'"

Blues vocalist and harpist James Montgomery obviously thinks a lot of Barnicle, keeping him on as guitarist but also hiring him to produce a new record. Montgomery's style is rooted heavily in Chicago (Junior Wells, James Cotton, Muddy Waters), and his main influence is probably the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Barnicle sees Montgomery's upcoming recording as a chance to open up to some new styles -- still live blues but more ambient and sparse, using the last Dylan record (produced by Daniel Lanois) as a template for sounds. Barnicle describes the goal as "the excitement of space. Instead of having it full of all this arranged stuff and horns and bells and whistles, I want to take him and see what he'll do if I strip away everything and make him just sing." Then he laughs. "It'll be an interesting experiment anyway if not for a good record . . . all his old fans will want to beat me senseless. But . . . we'll see."

But back to Barnicle's own projects. The past two years have seen him doing what he calls blood-and-guts work on songwriting and focusing on showcasing those songs. The first demo tape got him into the much needed management deal with Invasion Group in New York, which already had such "fringe bands" as Mercury Rev, Pharaoh Sanders, James Blood Ulmer, and Bill Laswell. With that company, Barnicle believes it is the right team to understand the eclecticism of his music.

The new songs were cowritten with partner David Werner, a seasoned veteran whose "Cradle of Love" was picked up by Billy Idol. Barnicle plays guitar and sings. Marty Richards is on drums, Sean Hurley bass, and Roger Lavallee engineered the project at Tremelo Lounge, in West Boylston. Barnicle can hear what he wants a song to sound like, but it's Lavallee with whom he credits achieving it. "He runs around like a maniac and we sit there laughing at him. And next thing I know, there it is: I've got the tone I want. So he's the secret weapon. People don't realize how talented he is."

Thanks to the studio trickery involved in layering Barnicle's guitar and vocal tracks, Lavallee's talents are required in front of a microphone when they play live -- something they'll be doing more and more. Keep a lookout for off nights at the Plantation Club (Wednesdays or Thursdays) where they plan to get their performance chops ready for several Manhattan shows in February.

For now, the demo songs are being shopped around to a number of labels in New York and Los Angeles. Interscope, in fact, came to a Worcester showcase to see the band at the Plantation Club in December. Despite a gig that everyone describes as phenomenally successful, negotiations for a record deal are tricky, especially during a merger (Interscope just took over A&M and Geffen). However, the latest news is that the deal has gone to the next level, with Interscope management examining the demo over the holidays.

Barnicle had a few worries before the showcase. The music he'd be playing was what he'd been working on at home, songwriting he describes as a "trippy kind of folk." Many in the audience, however, would know him as the guitarist for, among other things, Wilbur & the Dukes, gigs that honed his guitar playing as well as his singing but bore no resemblance to what he was doing independently: "I never even listen to that kind of music."

The audience was genuinely responsive even though the music is quiet and moody at times. Barnicle's fans were finally getting a chance to hear his own music. But at the same time, there are pressures now that never existed before: negotiations with labels, worrying about label budgets, recouping funds. Having a management team to handle all that allows Barnicle to stay focused on the music. "It gets to a point where you just have to go `ah fuck it,' y'know, I write songs." The songwriting and the demos have always been funded by playing cover songs and blues gigs, but this is clearly the first time in his career that he's been able to focus on his own music.

Talking with the Interscope representatives after the show, Barnicle got the chance to stress his concerns about exposure and longevity. "This isn't Matchbox 20 or a band like Hootie . . . I don't want to try to be something I'm not. I don't want to go out there and try to sell a billion records off of a couple of cheesy pop songs. . . . It's not the kind of artist I am."

The formula for success that the major labels have developed has a focus on the big hit, often at the expense of a potentially promising future. "They don't want to develop careers, they're afraid to do it. . . . Where are the Dylans, Claptons, Steve Winwoods, Van Morrisons, Bonnie Raitts, or whoever of the future? Where are they, I don't see them." Barnicle's a fan of Sheryl Crow's, and "there's no more talented guy on the planet than Beck," but you have to search beneath the mainstream to find most of the artists he thinks have staying power: people like Ryan Adams of Whiskeytown, Elliott Smith, Richard Buckner.

Buckner's lyrics inspired Barnicle to experiment in a new direction, sort of stream of consciousness. "He has this almost Kerouacesque thing where he'll run a line into the next line . . . there's the rhyme in the middle of the next verse. Kerouac's poetry or any of his books are kinda like that as well. . . . It seems like he's not editing himself, so I started to do a little bit of that as well." The results can be seen in "Truth and Oil," a song he points to as definitive as far as the direction he's heading.

His voice on "The Fragile One" sounds a little like Freedy Johnston's; and "Describing a Girl" (one of the strongest songs on the new demo) recalls XTC at their best and tells the story of a woman, sick of leading her uniformed life, walking out of an unhappy working-class world.

Barnicle is quick to mention Nick Drake and Jeff Buckley as influences, and John Lennon and Ray Davies are in heavy rotation in his car stereo. The new songs are loaded with a lot of layered atmospheric guitar, which he acknowledges is the influence of Daniel Lanois (producer of Emmylou Harris and U2 as well as Dylan).

Former frontwoman Mary Lou Lord seems more like a kindred spirit than an influence; she, too, is rooted in folk-rock and interested more in songwriters with staying power than in whatever the new sensation might be. And like her, Barnicle understands what the music business has become, which worries him more than a little about the kind of exposure he might get in the hands of a major label.

A hit single changes public perception in a rather dramatic way, and if handled poorly, all people talk about is the sophomore slump (as Counting Crows' Adam Duritz points out, if you make a misstep at the beginning, no matter how great a songwriter you become, you never get that "Cougar" out of your name). Barnicle is in this game for the long haul. He's doing smart things, and with any luck he'll go places. This is a guy who understands the sophisticated marketing realities of the music business and yet, amazingly, he's not cynical -- just savvy.