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

“I remember one show where Steve and I were both going, ‘Are you gonna go? Am I gonna go? I don’t know!’ And Phil turned and looked at both of us and yelled ‘somebody play something!’” Karan laughs, heartily. “And he was right, you know? We were both sitting there paralyzed.”

The Other Ones led to RatDog, which never really had a lead player. Today, it’s difficult to imagine the band without him. Though he’s got Karan on retainer, Bob Weir “thrives in a band environment”—so RatDog runs as a band, rather than with the front man handing out charts and assigning parts. That’s why Karan feels at home. He’s a “band guy,” too.

Karan likes to think of Jemimah Puddleduck as a band (“all for one, one for all”), even though he’s the frontman and the writer of songs (and checks). It just happens to be a band of hot-shit ringers: Molo, bassist Bob Gross and keyboardist JT Thomas. Puddleduck has that roots shuffle-and-funk blues, with cowbells, organ and Karan’s melodic leads and truly soulful singing. You can hear influences not only in early Dead (and in the Dead canon that Karan’s been playing for over a decade), but also in Gram Parsons and Little Feat and The Meters and the Staples Singers. They cook. But it’s hard to get them into the studio.

When he was diagnosed with throat cancer in July, 2007, Karan kicked into fight mode, trying acupuncture and alternative healing along with chemotherapy and the radiation that caused his neck to erupt in third-degree burns. Kimock filled in for him on the next RatDog tour, but by February, Karan was back onstage, bald and cowboy-hatted at The Dead’s Obama rally. Though it seemed quick from the outside, it was a major ordeal.

It changed him.

“When I got diagnosed, I was very resistant to it initially. I told the doctors repeatedly how wrong they were, and that it wasn’t cancer—they’d see. They were wrong. Which kind of nutshelled me in a lot of ways in my life prior to cancer. Kind of a control freak. Kind of always right. Kind of pissed off when people didn’t agree with me or do what I wanted ‘em to. And post-cancer, post-diagnosis, when they said, ‘I’m really sorry, man, this is what you’ve got,’ I felt something shift in me. And I felt a sense of calm come over me. I was like, ok, it is what it is. I’m not here to die. So now what? Moving forward, now what? And post-cancer, that’s my whole deal with life.”

So, Puddleduck can’t get enough time to make a record? Bring in Bramlett, Bill Payne from Little Feat, Mike Finnegan (who played with Hendrix), the Rowan Brothers, Jackie LaBranch and Gloria Jones from the Jerry Garcia Band, The Persuasions, and whoever else is around and wants to kick down.

The result is an American roots rock record—New Orleans-inflected blues, funky-tonk Wurlitzer and an occasional departure into the psychedelic wilderness—like on “Love Song,” a pretty straight number that finally sprouts bounding bass, melodic guitars scrumming, whistles and shuffles and shakers, so that it sounds like you’re laying in a sunny meadow listening to the grass grow. There are a few covers—Joe Jackson’s bitter/sweet “Fools In Love,” the Dead’s “Easy Wind,” and a haunted duet on Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” with Bramlett, who has since died. The originals have mostly been in Puddleduck’s rotation.

Puddleduck is evolving, too. Karan’s been planning to tour behind the record, but Molo’s booked, so Wally Ingram (CSN, Eric Burdon) and Carlo Nuccio (Tori Amos, Buckwheat Zydeco) will play drums. Thomas is touring with Bruce Hornsby this fall, so now Karan must look for a keyboard player. It seems to be becoming more his band.

Karan was upset for a second—but now he’s excited to change it up.

He’s taking it all in stride.