On a Saturday night at the Mermaid Lounge last month, Burnversion are conducting a musical exorcism. James Marler’s tortured whine is almost like Kurt at his most despairing and Bob Warner’s guitar—alternately lugubrious and screeching—is almost like nothing you’ve ever heard.
Likewise, Mark Brill’s thunderous drum rolls crop up from a trance state. Brooding, dark, sinister, cathartic.
“We’re just going for the death rock chicks,” Marler laughs. “We’re less brooding now. And more religious. That’s our new thing—we’re into life.
Guitar reveries notwithstanding, Burnversion have won some rewards for their brooding. After taking a year off while Brill played with James Hall, Burnversion came back with a vengeance, releasing a raw but impressive debut record last year and taking off on their first extensive tour in April.
Considering how close they came to breaking up, it’s a miracle that they’ve made it this far. In fact, the Burnversion story is filled with enough serendipitous events and fortuitousness turns to make Gavin McLeod green with envy.
Marler and Warner met up as students at Tulane and decided to put together a band. Brill, a friend of a friend and wannabe drummer, saw a drum kit at their place one day and asked if anyone played. Marler and Warner, in need of a drummer, lit up and asked him to jam. The rest is, well, the rest.
Marler came up with the name Burnversion, which he insists—for the record, at least—doesn’t mean anything.
“The greatest part is in the interpretations,” he says. “We knew this crazy guy when we spent a summer in Colorado. He was really crazy, and he got into our faces about our name one night. He was like, ‘Burnversion. That’s so cool because it’s about burning the King James version of the Bible, right? And that version’s bullshit.’
“And like five years ago, I was talking to the Crash Worship guy after one of their shows and I told him our name and he said, ‘That’s a cool name, man.’ But I think he thought I said burned virgins, you know? Kind of more like what they do, the whole sacrifice thing.” Burnversion had been playing pretty regularly in New Orleans for about three years when they underwent their mid-life crisis: James Hall.
“His first gig in town was with Burnversion,” Brill says. “He played acoustic guitar and he had this narcoleptic drummer.”
Hall, the former vocalist for Mary My Hope, had recently emerged from a self-imposed exile to start performing again. Just when he was starting to get serious about his music, Hall had a falling out with his drummer. “He went and played a show with just [guitarist] Lynn [Wright] and [bassist] Grant [Curry], and it was excellent,” Brill recalls. “I don’t think he’s ever been better than that. And I was like, ‘While you’re looking for a drummer, let’s jam.’ And we did. Then he asked me to fill in on a couple of dates because they already had them scheduled. Then he asked me if I’d be the drummer, and I was like, ‘Well, I’m already playing with Burnversion.’ But things were fucked up with us. We had plateaued for a long time.”
Brill says part of the problem may have been that they had a second guitarist at the time, which wasn’t working out. Brill says that may have been one of the things keeping them on their plateau.
So Brill joined Hall’s band and Burnversion broke up. Librarians and archivists may recall Brill’s bare torso and eyeliner-free face on the cover of the August 1993 OffBeat as part of James Hall’s band.
Was there any bitterness, tension or vitriol amongst the once-devoted bandmates? “Yeah,” Marler and Warner chime in simultaneously.
Brill takes offense. “Wait a minute, this has to be clear,” he says excitedly, challenging his portrayal as the evil Burnversion-er. “The week after I told James Hall that I’d join, I quit his band. I rethought it because James [Marler] was like, ‘Let’s jam one more time and see how it feels.’ We did and it was great. So I told James Hall, ‘I gotta see what goes on with Burnversion.’ I get back, and one of these guys doesn’t want me”—Marler and Warner flash sheepish grins and start picking lint from their shirts—“so we broke up right then and there.”
Brill spent about a year with Hall before his dissatisfaction with his role in the band came to a head while on tour. “So he fired me for quitting,” Brill says.
Brill, who’s still good friends with Hall, says it was mostly a case of failure to communicate. “Anyway, that was it. It was fun and everything, but let’s just say I’m happier now,” Brill says. “And luckily, these guys were still in town.”
Since Burnversion broke up, Warner had moved back to Connecticut and Marler was jamming with Chris Wassel from Nipples of Isis. As luck would have it, Brill and Hall parted ways the very same week Warner happened to be in town for a visit.
“I was a little freaked out at the time,” Brill says. “I did want to play again, but these guys were playing with Chris Wassel, the best drummer in town. Thank God he flaked on them.”
With the band back together, they set about reestablishing themselves locally and trying to record a CD. The resulting 11-song disc is as powerful and unorthodox a document of local stuff to come along in ages, transcending easy description and running the gamut from lilting acoustic meditations to Jesus Lizard-like epics.
They recorded tapes over the course of a few months on a four track. Then they learned a lesson about the recording business. “We took it to this mastering guy, but he did a real quickie job mastering it, which means they put a lot of compression on it and gave it quick fade-ins and quick fade-outs so it sounds very professional,” Warner says.
“But he didn’t do it right,” Marler says of the mastering. “We weren’t trying to be lo-fi or anything, he just didn’t do it right and we didn’t have any more money. It’s that simple.”
“A lot of the stuff we were doing, especially at around that time, was really dynamic,” Marler continues. “It’s real quiet for a long time, then slam on distortion and the drums get louder, cools out, goes back. There’s a lot of those kind of dynamics. And if you do a stock mastering on a really kind of cheap recording, it sounds like crap. It just sounds very homogenous, just really bad.
So what did the band do with their shittily mastered tapes?”
“We just didn’t master,” Warner says. “You don’t have to master it, man. We just took the cassette tapes and taped them onto DAT.”
Having a CD out also allowed the band to take on their next challenge. “Before we broke up, we just weren’t ready to tour,” Brill says. “Then afterward, we had to get an album out and all that stuff done and then we’d be ready for it.” Ready or not, in April they embarked on an 11-city tour that was, you guessed, really lucky. Even their more Spinal Tap-like experiences worked out for the better.
“We played at a coffee shop in Manchester, Connecticut,” Warner says of a show near his hometown. “It would be like playing at the True Brew downtown, but it gets even weirder.”
“And we were supposed to play for three hours,” Brill laughs.
“And it was just us,” continues Marler. “We came in and were looking around and it was kind of nice, you know. My mom and dad came and were sitting down. All the lights are on. It’s just this completely embarrassing thing. I’m looking at my mom and dad and playing this, like, squalling guitar. It’s just ridiculous.”
Thanks to the skate punks and Marler’s mom and dad, the show was a success in spite of itself. “We sold tons of albums and we made more money than we made at any point in the tour,” Marler says in retrospect.
“Pretty much, every night was a pretty good night,” Brill says, positively astonished. “It was amazing. I wouldn’t expect it again, but it was nice for your first tour.”
So what was the most memorable part of the tour? “We partied with the Prince of Peru in D.C.,” Marler says. “That was a highlight.”
“It was at my brother’s frat house,” Warner says. “He took us up to the roof and like all of a sudden it’s booming bass and all these ladies are barbecuing for us! It was like three in the morning. We’re on a rooftop checking out all of Washington, D.C. And then the Prince of Peru comes over and takes out a quarter bag and he just fucking rolls it. So we got bass, chicken and a big spliff.”
“And we got the Prince of Peru laughing,” Marler says, going, ‘God, I’m so stoned …’”
