Old Man Markley: Bluegrass with punk spirit and huge flavour

Interview by Megan Cole

Old Man Markley may share the Fat Wreck Chords label with some of punk’s greats, but these guys aren’t punk. What punk fans have been able to get behind though is the band’s contagious energy and incendiary live performances. Meanwhile, the band is also gaining favour with bluegrass fans, earning them a #8 debut on the Billboard Bluegrass chart with the release of Guts n’ Teeth. With seven members, Old Man Markley fiddle player Katie Weed tells us how things go beyond just playing in band and start to blur the line between music and family (and every family loves homemade cookies).

What is it like touring with so many people? Seven people is a big group.
Pungent. It’s pungent. But most of the time it’s a real blessing because there are so many of us that, rather than being too many cooks in the kitchen, there are so many people around to do stuff like loading in and out. Instead of three people carrying tons of gear, there are seven or eight of us. Right now our washboard player is still at home, he and his wife just had a baby last week. He’s not with us right now, but in general there are so many people to help with things and that makes it a whole lot easier. It’s also fun because we are in tight quarters, of course, but you can go and get coffee with six different people if you want a break. It’s like being part of a soccer team; I just walked by a bar that was playing the World Cup so I guess I am thinking about teams. Sometimes we are more like a sports team than a band.

Does it ever get that family vibe sometimes?
Oh yeah, and for a whole bunch of reasons. I see that in tons of bands we’ve toured with, too, just spending that much time with somebody and having the kind of job where you don’t go home at the end of the night. You just work and then spend all day with the people you work with for weeks and months on end. It feels like a family, and also Annie [DeTemple] and Johnny [Carey] are married and have been together since they were basically kids, like 14 years old. Johnny and Joey [Garibaldi], our bass player, have been best friends since they were eight years old in elementary school. There’s tons of history between a lot of members of the band, and at this point I think I see the band more than I see my family.

What kind of stuff do you guys like to do together when you’re not on stage?
It’s such a mix depending on where we are, but that’s also what’s so great about what we do because we get to travel. On this tour, for the first time ever, I think we are going to visit a farm. We’ve played a festival at a farm before, but it’s kind of weird how this came to be. The woman who travels with us and does merch, Ashley, really likes Instagram and is super into animal pictures and has her own hashtag, #dogsoftour, and she started following this woman who is really into animal rescue somewhere on the east coast of the US. This woman posts little videos of herself singing little songs to chickens, cows, cats and goats; animals that I guess she has rescued from slaughter or something. Ashley follows her on Instagram and reached out to her and said we were going to be coming through her city, and Ashley loves watching her videos and asked if she wanted to come to one of our shows. The woman has also asked us to come out to her farm and sing for the animals. So, that’s one thing we’re doing together on this tour outside of just playing typical shows for human observers.

Do you guys go out for food together a lot? Or do you prefer to shop at grocery stores and make stuff on the bus?
It’s an awesome mix and I think we’ve learned from years on the road, and I think of this band in terms of the phases we’ve gone through with how we eat. These days, sometimes every day, or every other day, or sometimes once a week, we’ll hit a Whole Foods and stock up on stuff that we always have, preferably local organic food that we can keep with us on the bus. So if we are hungry we aren’t eating gas station food, because so often when we’re on the road for hours the only places we’ll stop are at small towns or truck stops and the food options are limited. I remember when we used to eat exclusively at Subway, but now it’s much better, especially in the US. Whole Foods are everywhere and we’ll go to the salad bar and the deli and stock up on kale and have sandwiches made. If we’re lucky the venue will feed us. It’s becoming more and more common that punk venues in the middle of seemingly nowhere have really conscientious food options and stuff that is healthy, which is great because we have a bunch of vegans in the band, and vegetarians, and it’s kind of across the board with food preferences.

I heard that you guys are pretty keen bakers and bake for others?
We have this fun thing we’ve been doing ever since our second 7” came out back in 2011, Party Shack, there is a line in the song where “the proof is in the pudding and the pudding is 80 proof,” so we made this bread pudding recipe for whisky bread pudding and there’s a whisky sauce for it. That was really fun and we got a kick out of it, so we made it a bunch of times to test it and then that became a tradition, so all of our 7”s now, if you buy them from us, they’ve included a recipe card insert. So the latest 7” is called Stupid Today, so the recipe is for Stupid Stew, which was awesome and really fun. The one before that was Blood on our Hands, so we did Bloody Marys. We also started this tradition of bringing cookies to Fat Wreck Chords in San Francisco, and I have family in Northern California and so does Joey, so sometimes if we have enough time we do an acoustic in-store thing at Fat Wreck Chords and we started bringing cookies to get people to not only come out to our show, but also to that afternoon show. Probably they came because the label provided free beer, but I like to think the cookies helped.

They can’t hurt.
We’ve also mailed cookies to Fat Wreck Chords a couple times, especially around Christmas time. This year we mailed them an actual Christmas list because some of us wanted Fat Wreck Chords sweatshirts and some CDs of other bands we like on the label, so we put some cookies in there to sweeten the deal.

What kind of cookies do you make? Are they generally the same kind, or do you mix it up?
It totally depends. When we went up to San Francisco we had a different merch girl and on one of our tour stops she had bought a cookbook of vegan cookie recipes, so we made mostly vegan cookies because she had the recipes for them. We made these rosemary shortbread cookies that I really liked; they were so good. I think we might have made those non-vegan because my parents don’t by margarine anymore. We had some whisky chocolate cookies of some kind that we wouldn’t let the kids eat because there was whisky in the icing, so the booze didn’t get baked out. I’m sure we did something kind of boring like chocolate chip because we had them on hand.

Old Man Markley‘s Down Side Up is available now through Fat Wreck Chords. Their North American tour dates can be found at their website.