Episode 30 of Hooked on Creek features my interview with Mark Mercier from Max Creek.
In this episode, Mark talks about his childhood introduction to music, his memories of joining Max Creek and his experiences performing in the band. Mark also talks about the meaning behind his song Said and Done, the influence of the Grateful Dead and John Archer’s important contributions to the band.
This episode features the following live Max Creek performances:
- Hard Love performed on December 27, 1996
- Said and Done performed on July 1, 2000
Transcript of episode 30
You’re listening to Hooked on Creek, a podcast celebrating the music, history and fans of the legendary jam band Max Creek. I am your host, Korre Johnson, and you are listening to episode 30.
Thank you for tuning into this very special episode of Hooked on Creek featuring my conversation with Mark Mercier. Mark has been playing keyboards and singing in Max Creek since 1973 and in this episode, Mark and I talk about his childhood introduction to music, his memories of joining Max Creek and his experiences performing in the band. We also talk about the meaning behind Mark’s song Said and Done, discuss the influence of the Grateful Dead and talk about John Archer’s important contributions to the band — and really, that just scratches the surface of what’s included in our conversation.
You can get more information about this episode and read an entire transcript of my interview with Mark Mercier on the Hooked on Creek website. Just go to hookedoncreek.com. And while you are there, click the contact link and let me know what you think. Alright, now let’s get started.
Korre: Mark Mercier, welcome to Hooked on Creek.
Mark: It’s great to be here. Thank you so much for doing this for us. We really appreciate it. You’re doing a great job, Korre.
Korre: Take me back in time. So when you’re a teenager, when you’re roughly 18 years old in the late 60s, what type of popular music around you is influencing your perceptions of what musical style you want to pursue? What were you listening to at that time?
Mark: I pursued what my parents taught me, which was like big band, pop music, Fly Me to the Moon — stuff that jazz players actually play now, but this is what they knew. But pop music, boy, I tell you what a fantastic time in music that was. It was changing. Since the 50s and mid 50s, all of a sudden you had rock and roll come in. And I remember the Beatles coming when I was in junior high school. They didn’t come to Maine but I remember when the Beatles came to New York. And this type of music was just all of a sudden it was more than music. It was a social experience.
It transcended just listening to music and dancing. It was something that all of a sudden spoke to society. It spoke to me about the way things were. And of course in 1968 we had the Vietnam War going on and my older brother got drafted. It was something we were all conscious of. But music was changing and evolving and you had all this natural talent out there. It was unbelievable.
And I remember the big band that I was into when I was a senior in high school were the Mamas and the Papas with John Phillips. And the harmonies — all of a sudden there were all these live harmonies that they had with Mama Cass and everything like that. And this is what we were really into. This is something that really hit home and then Crosby, Stills & Nash. And all of a sudden you had these flavors of country come into the whole situation. It was a terrific time in music. Like I said, it was more than music. It was social. It was societal. It really spoke to every aspect, right down to the protest movements. It’s wonderful, wonderful stuff. It was just fresh. It was exciting.
Folk music — we used to have hootenannies and that’s where the protest element came in. I remember when I was in high school, a freshman in high school, my older brother who was a far better singer than I am, sang in one of the coffee houses at the high school. And I just thought that was a greatest thing to be able to get out, drink coffee and listen to people sing and play guitar. It was just wonderful stuff.
Korre: One area I’d like to learn more about from you is during your childhood, what types of exposures to music you had and how you ultimately found your way to playing piano?
Mark: I didn’t really find my way to play in piano. I was forced. I lived back in the day — I was in Maine — and we had to take piano lessons starting in fourth grade. And we were allowed to stop after sixth grade if we wanted to. So both my older brothers took piano lessons and my youngest sister and I did. And I was the only one that just kind of kept on going through junior high school, just because, I don’t know, it’s just what I did. Did I have a huge interest in it? It was fun. It was a part of me, but no, it’s just something that I did. And change doesn’t come easily to me. So once I was hooked into taking piano lessons, I was like, “OK. I’ll just keep on taking piano lessons.”
My family was pretty musical though. My dad was a radio and TV broadcaster up in Portland, Maine, and had a background in music from his mom, my grandmother. And he took piano lessons and could improvise and just was a great player. And so he taught me how to play a couple of things. And of course when you take piano lessons from when you’re a kid — from John Thompson, Teaching Little Fingers to Play, right up through book four, book five — you’re playing like the Spinning Wheel or you’re playing all of these pieces that everyone played when they took piano lessons.
But my dad played ragtime. He was a great ragtime player. And the first thing he taught me was how to play Twelfth Street Rag. And it’s kind of a catchy tune. And there’s a little bit of syncopation to it because to move the right hand and the left hand together at the same time was kind of an effort to learn. But of course, when you’re in the fourth or fifth grade, your brains are like little sponges. You know, you can absorb this stuff and you can do it a lot easier than you can when you’re as old as I am now. And so, I can’t remember not being able to play that tune, but I’m sure there was a time when I couldn’t do it. But you know, it just was one of those things. So that was kind of like the first exposure to piano I had.
But I just kept going through high school and I found out that you could actually get girls by playing music. So in junior high during music class I got up and I played, I remember, it was the theme song to I think it was McHale’s Navy. I can’t remember. And you know it was one of these junior high school music talent shows. “OK. Get up there and do something again.” So I played this thing and everyone was like, “Wow, that was great.” And all of a sudden, girls were talking to me. They never did before. And so I decided maybe it wasn’t a bad idea to keep on going with the whole situation. Little did I know back then that actually girls really used piano players to be able to talk to the guitar player, but that’s the way it goes.
And then I started to accompany choruses and everything in high school and the rest is kind of history. I wasn’t really intentional about going into performing. I was either going to be a music teacher or a math teacher. And I was accepted to University of Maine math department. But just on a lark, I applied to University of Hartford-Hartt College and came down to Hartt because I wanted to get out of Maine. And ever since then I’ve been trying to get back. Kind of interesting.
Korre: So Mark, you joined Max Creek in 1973. The band officially formed in 1971. Can you tell me about your introduction to the music of Max Creek or the members of Max Creek at that time and sort of what led you to ultimately joining the band?
Mark: John Rider was the first person I met at music school at University of Hartford. We came down to Hartt and my parents of course dropped me off, kicked me out of the car and put me in a dormitory room. And I sat there wondering what to do next. And there was this guy moving in down the hall with his family. So I decided I’d better go say hello. And it turned out it was John Rider. So he and I were the first people each other met at Hartt College. We were both at Hartt in music school and we of course were dorm mates, right down the hall from each other. So we got to be really friendly. And we joined a fraternity together. And sophomore year we decided to room together.
We both moved off campus into a house that was populated by fraternity guys. So we were together in the same bedroom. And he was all of a sudden getting into this music like Bob Dylan and stuff like that. He just introduced me to all of this stuff I never knew anything about. And then he met up with Dave Reed who was a guitar player — who was also a trumpet major at Hartt, like John Rider. And the two of them formed this band. And I just listened to what they were doing. And it kind of hit home to me.
I didn’t really catch it until it was one evening at Saint Joseph College. And they were doing a live show — a dance. I guess they called it dances back then. And all of a sudden I found myself moving to the music. Now, if you know me well, I don’t dance. I don’t dance well. But all of a sudden this just took me and it took me places. There was something extra about the music, something over and above — just the notes being played that just grabbed me. And that was my first introduction to the music. Then I used to go every Thursday night to this bar in Hartford called the Rocking Horse and dance to Max Creek. And boy, I wanted to be part of this more than anything in the world. I used to sing harmonies from the audience. It was just such a wonderful time.
What happened is Dave, who was the guitar player, got appendicitis. His parents were Christian Scientists so they didn’t believe in taking him to the hospital. His appendix, I believe it burst. Or anyway, he got gravely infected. So he wound up going into the hospital. They finally relented and took him. Max Creek had several shows that John wanted to play and since I was his roommate and we had played together on several occasions, he knew that I could probably handle learning some music in a hurry.
So it was over Christmas vacation. And I came down to Hartford and learned some of their songs to play this gig. And part of the way we learned the songs is I would write it down, but I wouldn’t really remember how it went. So what I had to write down was like the introduction. If the introduction went “bum, da, da bum, bum da, bum” I would write “bum, da, da bum, bum da, bum” on a piece of paper and that was my notes to learn how to play the song. And of course the gig wasn’t very successful. But all it takes is a few times to learn the music and I had it down. It was just terrific to be part of the whole situation. Then when Dave came back, I just was like the man that came to dinner. I just never left.
Korre: What were your first impressions of Scott Murawski at that time?
Mark: Well, Scott wasn’t in the band when I joined. He had been in the band and I hadn’t heard him. I don’t know why. But he got kicked out of the band because he was only 16 and was caught drinking a beer at the Rocking Horse. And so they said, “If you bring Scott, you can’t play here anymore.” So Scott was like, “You guys are going to have to wait.” And then I joined the band after Scott. And then there was one rehearsal that Scott came to in a basement, in a little house that Bob, the drummer, rented. And Scott came down to listen to one of the rehearsals and we were playing Casey Jones. And Scott was sitting on the cellar steps with a friend of his, Dave Duda, who we still know to this day. And when we came to the chorus, “And you know that notion still crossed my mind” at the very end, I heard this high harmony coming from the stairs and Scott was singing it. I was like, “Man. This is great. This guy is fantastic.”
Then I heard him play guitar. And it’s like, we got to get him back in the band. So we asked him to rejoin and we just shut up about his age for a while. But I was blown away by his musicianship. And, he again was a trumpet player. He learned guitar as kind of like a sideline. So that’s how he knew Dave and how he knew John — from taking trumpet lessons with Dave.
Korre: In those early years of the band, how did the improvisational approach to playing music initially get infused into what you guys were doing?
Mark: I remember a night at the Rocking Horse, and I was still in the audience, and they were doing a song, I think it was Sunshine Go Away Today. And all of a sudden, in the middle of this song, they went someplace else. And I don’t know what struck them to do it, but they did. And everyone was just absolutely wrapped. It’s like, “When are they going to get back to the song? Where are they going? This is really cool.” And they just reacted to the musical moment and built a little section of the music and then gradually turned around and came back on the song. But that was the first time I ever heard them jam. And to be able to have the freedom to express yourself like that in the middle of a song was just something fantastic. So it kind of like gained steam as we went along.
And then we used to go from song to song without stopping and trying our wings as far as, “OK. Well, how are we going to do this? How are we going to make it happen?” And we invented a few parameters. OK, so there’s imitation. There’s key changes. How are we going to make key changes? We discovered back then you can’t make a key change without the bass player because he’s the one that determines the root of the chord. But at the same time, we like predetermined some places we could go. But that was like a springboard to the whole situation.
And since then, it’s been free form, but we use whatever technique that we have at our disposal to make it happen. It’s imitation. We go back and forth with call and answer. Development. We actually use classic forms. We used the fugue form a couple of times. We would make a statement and then do an exposition, kind of like classic form — Mozart or something like that. We would use counterpoint. I was big on counterpoint. I’m an organ player — church music. And that was my major in school. So counterpoint is just something that kind of like falls under my fingers. So we used a lot of stuff like that.
But every time we did something, it led us someplace else. It wasn’t quite as technical as jazz. I wished I had learned a lot of technique the jazz players know in terms of chord structure, in terms of how to improvise with your right hand. Some of the jazz idioms, they’re absolutely fantastic things. I think my one regret was not taking the time back when my brain was a little more supple to be able to learn this stuff. So at least I can say that at the age that I am at, I’m still learning new things because I’m starting to attack it now with a vengeance. And we’ll see what happens.
Korre: At this time, what level of awareness did you or the rest of the band have in what the Grateful Dead were doing? Because they were certainly blazing a trail in improvisational music. And I would imagine some of the fans of Max Creek at that point in time were familiar with Grateful Dead. Was the Grateful Dead influencing some of the decisions the band was making or was it not part of the mix?
Mark: Oh, yeah. It was very much part of the mix — the whole improvisatory thing, the way they jammed together. Yeah. I mean, we loved the Dead. We learned an awful lot of Dead tunes. But here’s a caveat. The thing we took home from the Dead was we learned them in our own way. Yeah, we use some of the idioms of the songs, but sometimes we approximated the idiom and then use our own technique to kind of like throw it into the recipe, put it in the pot, stir it up and then see what came out that was a little bit more Max Creeky then it was Grateful Deady. You know what I mean?
But we always thought if we could play a Grateful Dead song and play it our way, that’s what the Dead would want us to do. It was just kind of interesting. And this is what they did. I mean, they took Love Light, which they didn’t write it. They took Fade Away. They didn’t write it. A lot of these songs, they took, they made their own. And a lot of people attributed it to the Grateful Dead, but they didn’t write these songs. They were a garage band. So they kind of did it in their own way. And that gave us permission to do even their tunes in our own way.
But at the same time, I’m famous for bringing in cover tunes to the band. And I insist that we do them like we do them. We don’t do a cover tune verbatim. And playing verbatim not only is like uncreative, it’s a lot of work to learn how to play these cover tunes exactly the way that they did back then. It’s like no, we don’t want to do that. We were too lazy. We were having too good a time with the music. So I think that’s why we kind of went the direction we did.
Korre: 2021 is the 50th anniversary of Max Creek and I’m wondering when you’re up on stage and playing, how do you know when you’ve had a good show? Is it something you can feel in the music or something you see in the crowd?
Mark: Boy, I tell you, you don’t, it’s just kind of interesting. You bring your mood with you when you go on stage. You could be on stage and you’d be like, “Boy, I really got to go to the bathroom” or, “Oh, man. I just had a fight with my girlfriend before I went on stage.” You look out, the crowd is having a good time, but you’re just not feeling it. And then you listen to it later on and it’s like, “Whoa. That was a really good show.” You know? And then on the other hand, you can be up on stage and you can think this is the best show we’ve played like since 1978. So then we climb off stage and someone comes up and says, “Boy, you guys kind of sucked tonight.” It’s just like, OK. Whatever.
So, I mean, sometimes you and the wavelength the audience is on is not the same. But sometimes it is. And when things are clicking and you look out and all of a sudden the whole scene becomes a unit. It’s one. It’s not the band. It’s not the audience. It’s not individuals within the audience. It’s not Scott on guitar. It’s like Max Creek and the audience — and that’s a world. It’s a universe right there in the place. And I don’t think that you can help but feel that when it’s happening. There’s just kind of like a flow to the whole situation. It’s timeless. It’s like, “How long did that night last?” “Well, I don’t know. It seemed like it lasted forever. But then it was over really quickly. But boy, I don’t know how long it was.” So that’s kind of like how you know when you’ve had like an exceptional show.
Korre: One of the ways I view your contributions to Max Creek is through this lens of Mark as the storyteller. And I don’t know if it’s fair or not to put you in that box, but I oftentimes engage with your songs from that starting point. And your contributions to the band on a songwriting perspective, too, is impressive to me. And I’m curious for a song like Said and Done, where does the inspiration of a song like that come from? Or maybe there’s a story behind that song that you’d like to share?
Mark: Oh, boy. The song is really three songs. I’ll tell you what the inspiration was for Said and Done. Scott Murawski was going to songwriting wise kick my ass. We had a show as a duet booked in Providence, Rhode Island, that he was bringing in a new original tune. And by God, I had to bring a new original tune, too, or else I would like look like an idiot. So, I had this song that had like all these different parts to it. And I put them together. And there was a chorus. And then there was a bridge. And then there was this story. And I didn’t know exactly how to do it. And poetic wise, it was just a bunch of strings put together.
What I get fascinated with, with that song, was it’s like “the something of the something will something of the something will effect that of that” and using the word “of” and just like going down the line. And how one part of the song affects the other part of the song, impacts the other part of the song. And it’s like, “The children OF our children, will shiver in the chill OF the shadow OF the master.” You know? And that to me was a really interesting songwriting technique. But there’s three different songs in there. There is a song about — I had a conversation with someone about power. It was this girl that I knew down in Providence, Rhode Island, she was very upset. She said, “Don’t, you know that America is ruled by old white men?” And she was just mad as hell. And since then, she’s been proven to be right. I mean, I should be mad as hell, too. And should have been by then.
But I’m like sitting there thinking kind of like the Kurt Vonnegut thing where there’s a cave in the hills where all of this stuff is operated by this big machine — but not this big machine, by this committee of guys that climb up into the mountains and they sit down and they talk to each other and make plans for society. And what are the ramifications of that? And then, how does it end? Does it end like the Roman Empire when they can plan all they want to, but when the barbarians are coming through the gate, boy, I tell you, you’re done for.
Everything has an arc, has a bell curve. So that was part of the inspiration. One part was my brother who was just a spectacular singer, a great musician and just an unbelievable human being. He died of AIDS in 1992, back at the beginning of the epidemic. And, I was very sad. I’m still sad to this day about that situation. I really am. His musicality meant a lot to me. It’s very inspirational. So that’s the part where, “I thought you were there.” And then of course, there’s various relationships you’ve had in the past. That ended in various ways. I’m a huge fan of the bittersweet. Without the darkness, you are not able to see the light. So you got to pay attention to the darkness because out of that comes wholeness, comes fullness. So that’s what that song is about.
Korre: Thank you for that. In my conversations with Greg Guglielmo, he told me about some interactions Max Creek had with Phish back in the late 80s. I’m wondering if you have any memories of interacting with members of that band back then.
Mark: Interaction wise, we kind of knew them. They came into the dressing room of the Living Room in Providence, Rhode Island, and they sat down with us. And I can’t remember whether it was during the break or after the show or before the show. But they said, “We are interested in how you did what you did to get where you are.” And I think they actually took notes. So they used us maybe as an inspiration of how not to do it. I don’t know. That’s always a possibility because God knows we did a lot of stuff wrong.
But they kind of like took a few notes. And you can tell in their organizational and musical process that they kind of like took what we did, but they took it to the nth degree. They took it — they really got up to their elbows in the mix and really paid attention to detail on all situations. God love them. They are spectacular, detail-oriented people and they have done what they’ve done through inspiration, talent, and a lot of hard work. They really have.
Korre: Were there times over the last 50 years when Max Creek’s future was in doubt? And if so, what do you think kept the band together through those times?
Mark: The future is in doubt every day. Always was. Scott had decided he didn’t want to tour because he had a family and his wife was pregnant with twins. He wanted to be able to be there for her and for the children. He made the choice that perhaps that was more important than playing a gig in Scituate, Massachusetts. So we actually stopped playing for a little while, but I never really had the impression that we were going to stop forever. This is too much of a family. Dysfunctional as it is, it’s a huge family.
Really, we can’t perceive of ourselves any other way than doing this. You can try leaving if you want to, but you’re drawn back to it. And we’ve actually had a couple of roadies quit, walk away in a huff, “You fricking guys.” They walk away and then I talked to them three or four years later and they go, “You know, so far I have never had as good a time as I have working with this band.” And it just stays with you. There is an X factor that lives inside you, that calls to you, that is part of you. And no matter where you wind up, it’s always good to get back home. So that’s what Max Creek really is.
But the future is always in doubt. I mean, you never know. One of us could drop on the sidewalk at any time. Hopefully not, but it could happen. And any one of us could decide my heart’s just not doing what it should, so I should probably quit because I’m going to have a heart attack. Anything could happen. Anything could happen. But that’s part of life. That’s part of reality. You never really know what’s going to come around the corner at you. But you just go on with the faith that you feel like you’re in the right place that you should be, right at the moment.
Korre: I’ve had the privilege to talk with a lot of people to learn about the history of Max Creek, but one person I’m not too familiar with is John Archer. I understand he was a sound engineer for the band for many years. Can you tell me about his role in supporting the band?
Mark: He didn’t support the band. He was part of the band. That’s when we decided to pay John Archer as the sound man — as a member of the band. John Archer was a fraternity brother of John Rider and mine. And when we moved off campus in 1969, 1970, John Archer was in the room next to us. And his favorite album was Santana Abraxas. And he used to blare Abraxas. John Rider and I would vibrate out of our beds to the sound of Santana Abraxas.
Well, he got interested in sound. And I don’t know how he did it. This was maybe before my time in the band. But when the band was on stage, John Archer was always interested in making them sound as good as they could to affect the people in the audience. Started out with some gold custom columns and then we had an Ovation amplifier and two Ovation speakers. We took them apart. But it was like music back then — sound was in its infancy. First time I was at a concert, I heard Jefferson Airplane and they were playing through Voice of the Theater speakers, which are speakers in back of the movie screen with great big horns and everything. It was totally unintelligible.
But we lived through the invention of the equalizer — the multiband equalizer. It’d be a preamp and amplifiers situation, stereo on stage. Oh my God. You know, you could actually play in stereo. Inputs, effects — we bought these little effects units. Reverb unit. We bought what was called an Echoplex and it was a reel-to-reel tape repeater that you could talk into it and it recorded your voice. And then it played it back on a series of heads. So you had an echo of yourself and John Archer loved this stuff.
And he renamed himself Master of the Machines, Maurice of the Machines. And that was his persona. And he was part of the band. His mix defined us. It really did. Some of the old mixes just were incredible. I mean, he really had an intuitive ability to know when to turn things up, turn things down. And it just was such a pleasurable thing to listen to when he mixed the sound.
He wound up leaving the band because he was developing tinnitus and didn’t really want to live the rest of his life listening to a whistle at 2,500 and 3,500 cycles per second in his head for the rest of his life. And he got married. He had a love of the Civil War, so he wound up moving to Gettysburg and writing a book — writing several books — and being a guide for the Civil War battlefield. But he was definitive as far as our sound is concerned. He really was the road manager of the band for a long time. Even though he’s kind of a shadowy figure, he was such an integral part of the whole thing.
Korre: So given the wide songbook that Max Creek has available to perform in front of an audience, I wonder now in 2021, are there any songs the band plays that are particularly nostalgic for you or that bring up certain memories that when the band plays is something special for you?
Mark: It depends on the night. Different things shine on different nights and it’s totally unexpected when they do, sometimes. You can go about deliberately making some song into a special thing and it doesn’t turn out the way that you expect it to, but all of a sudden you turn around and something happens and it becomes a very special thing.
I would say some of the older songs. John Rider’s song Crystal Clear is an old country tune that he wrote. It’s always great to do those songs. Bob Gosselin was a heck of a songwriter and he wrote Morning Star and he wrote several songs that we do to this day that are very special. They really are. It brings tears to my eyes to sing Morning Star. It’s such a great well-written song. Is it an earth-shaking-meta song? No, it’s not. But it’s just a lovely tune that is very definitive of the way we are.
Korre: Tell me about Bill and Jay and the flavor they add to Max Creek.
Mark: Bill has more energy than you can shake a stick at. That guy is absolutely fantastic. He has got very great ideas about what should happen sometimes. And he’s very energetic in terms of how he implements this. And God love him for that. He really has injected a huge amount of energy into the band. And creatively, he can sit and look at our strong points and know how to market them. He’s fantastic. We never had anything on Spotify before Bill. We never thought of doing anything virtual. He brought us into the 21st century. We would still be recording on cassette tapes if it wasn’t for Bill. He just has a lot of imagination, a lot of energy. He is a very smart guy, very positive — always smiling.
And Jay is an incredibly cosmic person. We had a percussionist, Rob Fried, who really was one of the definitive aspects of Max Creek — his percussion playing. And when Rob passed away, we didn’t have that. And Jay added it back in. I mean, Jay has the ability to hit a triangle right at the right space. It’s just the weirdest thing. It just blows my mind to talk to him a lot of times. He’s just incredibly cosmic. He’s just tuned into something that sometimes I wish I could access. He’s just amazing.
So the two of them really have breathed an incredible amount of life into this band. They really have. And I’m grateful that they agreed to play with a bunch of old guys. They weren’t even born when we started the band. That’s kind of interesting, to get a fresh perspective. But musically speaking, they’re kind of timeless. They can get along with the old stuff and yet they bring fresh influences in that really inspire us a lot. So I’m glad they’re here. I really am. I don’t know what we’d do without them,
Korre: As of this recording, we are 112 days away from Camp Creek, if I did that math right. What is it about Camp Creek that makes that event so special to the band and to your fans?
Mark: It’s a family gathering. It’s a chance for people to come home. It’s a chance for people to live together and be together for good or ill for three days, maybe four. And it gives us a chance to show them who we are, which sometimes takes some time. You do a three-or-four-hour show and sometimes that doesn’t give you enough time to really show people what you’re feeling at the moment. So Camp Creek gives us that ability because we’ll play a six-hour set.
We started out in Granby, Connecticut, with a little backyard campout. Actually started before that with parties in Rhode Island with people that used to bring tents so they wouldn’t have to drive home. And we moved it to Granby, Connecticut, and that was our first Camp Creek. Then we moved to Maine and hooked up with these incredible people in Maine to put on Camp Creek up in Maine. We stopped doing it for a little while. And then I started doing it. This is my chance to throw a party for people. It was just terrific stuff. Boy, we did. We could throw a party and make sure everyone had a great time and listen to music that they wouldn’t normally be able to listen to. I brought in African bands. I brought in bagpipes. I brought in all of the stuff just to give you a real pallet of music that you can listen to over the course of the thing. But mostly it was a chance for people to get together and camp and be with each other for three days.
I mean, really it’s one of the defining points of Max Creek to be able to be with everyone. There was a time we could drive through the campsite and I would know the names of almost everybody there. My mind doesn’t operate quite as well these days, so I can’t remember a lot of names. But I know faces. I know people. And it’s like all of a sudden, all these friends are gathering together then they’re here to listen to music and have an experience under the night sky. And again, it’s that big cosmic unit that I was talking about, that big universe that you get a chance to have every now and then. And this is our opportunity to have it.
Then we realized that when we played a festival, it was usually somebody else’s festival. And the only way to be stars of a festival was to throw your own damn festival. So that’s one reason why we liked the idea is that we could throw a festival and by God we were the stars. Don’t try to stop us from being that way. We had a chance to strut our stuff on stage. And sometimes other bands — if you were part of like əkoostik hookah’s festival, you didn’t have the opportunity to show them who Max Creek really was, and this gives us a chance to. And I would say that’s one of the things that makes it special for us. Maybe that’s a selfish way of looking at it, but boy we had a great time every time it happened. I’m looking forward to see you at that one.
Korre: That’s right. And so fans of this podcast might’ve picked up that I’ve never actually seen Max Creek, but this year I’m going to Camp Creek. And I’m wondering, Mark, do you have any advice for me?
Mark: By all indications we’re going to have a great time. This is an exceptional venue, too. I think you will like the venue. We love the venue. Great place to be. It really is. So expectations wise, I don’t know. Go around and say hi to people because that really is where it’s at. And I’ll tell you you’re pretty well known in our crowd. So, you know, you got a lot of friends there.
Korre: I hope so. I hope so. With things opening up now in the pandemic, I know you guys have some shows lined up this summer. I’m wondering what message do you have for fans of Max Creek who have been waiting so long to see you?
Mark: Come back. Come back. But that said, don’t take anything for granted because one thing the pandemic shows us is that boy things could fall like a house of cards at any point. And still can. I mean, who knows when we’re going to get a fifth wave or sixth wave or something. Enjoy it while you can. Be careful with each other. Take care of each other. That’s what the pandemic was all about — is taking care of ourselves, not doing quite as much balls against the wall partying, taking care of each other and being considerate of each other, giving a shit about each other.
But come back and enjoy the music. Because I tell you, the few times that we have played, it’s been inspirational. It’s been creative. It’s everything it’s always been. Even the old ground is new sometimes.
Korre: Well, Mark, thank you so much for talking with me today. It really means a lot to me that you joined me on the Hooked on Creek podcast.
Mark: This has been my pleasure, Korre, really. Thank you for doing this. This is fantastic that you’re doing this. And plus, it enables people to kind of like get into things that they wouldn’t normally know about the band or the people involved. It’s nice to be a little more in depth about things. Thank you for allowing me to talk at you for a little while.
Korre: All right. Take care.
Mark: Bye-bye.
I really hope you enjoyed listening to my conversation with Mark Mercier. It’s really hard to express really what an honor it was for me to have him on this podcast. Alright, now let’s end this episode with a little music. This is Max Creek performing Said and Done live at Sterling Stage in Hannibal, New York, on July 1, 2000.
That concludes episode 30 of Hooked on Creek. If you are curious, during the introduction to this episode I played a portion of Hard Love performed by Max Creek live at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel in Providence, Rhode Island, on December 27, 1996. And as always, let me know if you have suggestions for future episodes or recommendations on people to interview for this podcast. You can get in touch with me via the contact link on the Hooked on Creek website at hookedoncreek.com or via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Just search for Hooked on Creek to get connected. I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for tuning in.