Description
A common misconception about MARS is that their music was meant to be
dark and nihilistic. That’s not totally wrong: When their guitars
sawed noise, rhythms lurched heavy and words came in howls, listening
could be a harrowing experience, as suffocating as any of their
apocalyptic No Wave counterparts. But the quartet’s work was also
energetic, joyful and buoyantly melodic. After all, they started by
jamming on tunes by the Velvet Underground, pretty much the ur-band
when it comes to sounding both dark and bright. As much as MARS
stretched and remade that model into new wiry shapes, the spark of
brightness sustained.
It’s easy to hear when listening to this set recorded in the summer of
1977 at a series of shows put on by the late Terry Ork at the Village
Gate, a renowned jazz club in Greenwich Village. All eight songs have
an urgent bounce, which is clearest in the caffeinated energy of the
vocals, usually delivered in the pungent wail of either Sumner Crane
or Connie Burg. Mark Cunningham’s rubbery bass and the chopping
guitars of Crane and Burg shoot flares as if they were running a
fireworks display. Add Nancy Arlen’s nonstop drumming – roughly
echoing Mo Tucker if she had extra limbs and Live at the Village Gate
becomes a dizzying rush of tunes that zooms by in a taut 24 minutes.
Though Mars hadn’t even recorded at this point, they were already what
Burg called “like a machine in a way – a really out of control
machine.” Most of these songs were honed when the band was called
China, a name they changed a few months before this gig after
discovering other, potentially litigious groups bearing that moniker.
In face these songs were so far along that when Mars did start
recording, only “3E” would survive, none of the other seven would ever
see the dank light of a studio. That’s a shame, but it’s also hard to
imagine a studio capturing the same spilling ecstasy of what Mars
managed live – from the chugging pre-Feelies slash of “Cry” to the see
saw sway of “Compulsion,” to the absolute rhythmic mastery of “81
Warren Street,” with its slipping beat like thread darting through the
eye of a needle.
What would become the a-side for Mars’ first single, “3E” plays out
much differently here from what it later became. Cunningham’s
insistent bass and Crane’s hyperactive yelps are firmly in place, but
this version is longer and looser, not as tightly wound as it ended up
on record. It’s all the more exciting for it, as the band seems ready
to collapse at any moment, only to steer the teetering ship back to
safety every time. Like much of Live at the Village Gate, it’s a
perfect manifestation of what Burg often said she hoped for Mars. “I
wanted to see how far it could go and still be called music.”
-Marc Masters
