I got thrown into this because I owed Steve a favor. He asked me if I had heard of a band called Railroad Jerk, and would I want to review their album or interview them. I'd heard of them, but didn't want to interview them because I think those kinds of things are dumb. I suggested I go on a blind date with the band so they're be less pressure on me to do a good job. I figured- they'd know as much about me as I knew about them. Which was nothing. I contacted the band's publicist, Paul at Matador Records, who sent me a press kit and their last two albums, One Track Mind and The Third Rail. But then I fucked it all up by reading a dozen or so other interviews and falling in love with their low-fi/high-brow melange of blues, country, folk, punk and pop. I was supposed to drive down to NY to see them play at Tramps, but a bout with the flu kept me in bed for a week. But I did have the opportunity to meet with singer/guitarist Marcellus Hall at the Limbo Cafe.

Paul lent me his tape recorder and had given me a press photo to flag Marcellus down with, but I actually recognized him while I was counting out 25 dimes to pay for my pot of Darjeeling. I told him, "I'm Danielle," instead of asking, "You're Marcellus?" We sat down and right off of the bat, he asked me more questions than I asked him. I told him about Northampton, MA where I live and go to school. "Are you a lesbian?" he asked, without skipping a beat, after I told him of Northampton's sapphic notoriety. This honest curiosity earned him major props.

When I inquired of the band's beginnings, he asked, "Didn't they send you a press kit?" When prodded, he told me about meeting bass player Tony Lee at a 1989 party in New York. Tony liked a demo Marce had made. "We were interested in rap music and blues music and the simplicity of those types of music." They decided to put a band together, rounded up a drummer and a guitar player, and started playing around. Not too long after they started, some Matador guys saw them performing at the Pyramid Club, and signed them after the show.

"We usually tell people that they saw us playing on the subway, but that's a lie," he told me, adding, "You're the first person I told that to." When I asked him what made my interview different, he said, "as an experiment, I decided to tell the truth." Railroad Jerk was released in 1990. "The first record was pretty primitive. We didn't know what we were doing- we thought we did but we didn't. But we wrote good songs. I still can't listen to those records because they sound like crap to me." The critics thought it was a really good album, "and we thought, 'yeah, of course it is.'"

Their early success was rather unusual and lucky, as Marce concedes, but at the time, they hadn't realized that. Everyone and their uncle thinks they should form a band just because they share a fondness for the Clash, the Velvet Underground, and the Sex Pistols. What made Railroad Jerk special? "I was very serious about doing something better than everybody else. I knew that we could do something better." "A lot of those bands, they're following the rulebook of making music..." Railroad Jerk got together wanting making something different and new, but that's "a double-edged sword because all the critics seem to be confounded by our music." "'We can't describe it, it's so weird, it's a mixture of every type of music,'" he mocked, imitating a critic. "It's not that crazy."

When Marcellus is not jerking around, he illustrates for the likes of the New Yorker and NY Press, New York's coolest free weekly. He showed me some photos of Squirrel Nut Zippers, a 1920's banjo outfit he was working on an illustration of for the New Yorker.

Halfway through the interview, I excused myself to go to the bathroom. When I returned, I told him, "I haven't eaten very much this past week, but what I did eat, I just threw up." He wasn't too grossed out by that.

He pulled out a 7" record- Marcellus Hall- More 4 Track Recordings. "That's for you."

When I told him that I worked at a cybercafe, he inquired if it would be possible for him to go to one of them and send his girlfriend an email for her birthday. I remarked that it was a very easy thing to do, but wouldn't he prefer a card? He wrinkled his nose in disgust of the triteness of my suggestion. He asked if he could email a picture, I told him yes and that made him happy.

RAILROAD JERK LINKS