Features

The Ringer: A New Mark Karan Goes Solo (Relix Revisited)

Mark Karan was on the East Coast this past weekend joining the Donna Jean Godchaux Band at Laurelton, PA’s A Bear’s Picnic this weekend (he’ll do so again on Friday at the Bella Terra festival in Stephentown, NY). The previous weekend the RatDog guitarist performed in his native California with his Bob Dylan cover band, The Ghosts of Electricity, which also features Stu Allen (JGB), Robin Sylvester (RatDog), Greg Anton (Zero), Mookie Siegel (David Nelson Band, RatDog) and Pat Nevins (Workingman’s Ed). As a result, we’ve decided to dip back into the archives for this October 2009 feature on Karan.

Photo by Bob Minkin

Mark Karan is sitting on his Marin County front porch, wearing a black cowboy shirt with pearly diamond-shaped snaps, black jeans and black-rimmed rectangular glasses. His hair is black and tousled. He’s got a graying chin beard and soul patch. A silver ring dangles from his left ear. Around his neck—below the scar—hangs a silver dog tag. It’s inlaid with the red and blue steal-your-bone logo of RatDog, the Grateful Dead offshoot for which he’s played lead guitar for 11 years. He’s easy in his own skin. He seems at peace.

Karan’s new album, Walk Through The Fire, was supposed to be a Jemimah Puddleduck record. But those guys are professional sidemen, with day jobs that make it hard to get them all in the same room, for months at a time. It took four years to get four cuts almost in the can. And spending five months having your throat bombarded with Hiroshima-level radiation and chemotherapy can make a guitar-picker—impatient isn’t the word. It’s more like unwilling to put things off any longer.

Karan grew up in San Francisco and Half Moon Bay. He sang in the San Francisco Boys’ Choir, which had a summer camp retreat. That’s where he met his first longhaired, folk-singin’ guitar player. Between that and seeing The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, he knew he’d found his life’s work. He moved to Marin in 1974, played in bands and did session work until it dried up in the late ‘80s. He moved to L.A. and worked with singer/songwriters, sometimes filling in as a ringer when, say, a band’s regular guitarist just wasn’t nailing it to tape. He played with Dave Mason and Jesse Colin Young, with Delaney Bramlett, with The Rembrandts (likely best known for the Friends theme). He did commercials, too—his husky singing voice was just right for 1980s roadhouse beer ads. He battled the booze demon—and he won.

Oddly enough, it was through his session work in L.A. (and friend John Molo) that Karan got the call in 1998 to audition for The Other Ones, the first incarnation of the post-Garcia Grateful Dead. He assumed that he wouldn’t get the gig—he tends to freeze in auditions—so he approached it as just an opportunity to have fun jamming with his childhood heroes. They hired him, but bassist Phil Lesh was still interested in Steve Kimock. “In classic Grateful Dead fashion,” Karan says, “rather than deciding on one or the other of us, they went, okay, well, screw it—let’s take ‘em both.”

It was, he admits, “really awkward.” Two lead guitarists were sharing space not just with Weir, but with saxophonist Dave Ellis, who was also running leads. They often weren’t sure where or when to play.