Album Review : Roger Marin Band : Silvertown

Nov 16, 2010 Album Reviews
Posted by George Douglas

Silvertown shows up on Wikipedia as being part of Niagara Falls, Ontario. I’ve heard Roger introduced as being from the Falls as well as from St. Catherines or Thorold, and if you’ve driven in that area lately you know it’s hard to tell where the individual towns end and another starts. I think that’s called urban sprawl. Roger’s previous two albums had a little more twang to them than this one…there’s still some twang but there’s a lot of rock and roll and an urban feel to it too.

The cover of this CD shows the band standing outside the Silvertown Chinese Theatre and by their attire and courtesy of a couple props they are trying to convey Grauman’s Chinese theatre from Hollywood. There’s even a couple of palm trees in the picture; I don’t know if palm trees grow in southern Ontario. I do know there’s a few in Port Dover, the hometown base of Fred Eaglesmith, in whose band Roger labored as guitarist/pedal steel player/bus mechanic. In Dover they take the palms into a nursery each fall and replant them in the spring. Roger is wearing a Homburg, holding a cane and has unfastened polka dot suspenders, a wide black clip-on tie and handkerchief on a white shirt that gives him a cross between a Charlie Chaplin and a Stan Laurel type look. Bass player Phil Bosley has abandoned his ubiquitous black tee shirt for a white button down shirt and grey sports jacket. Matty Keighan has a black tee but compensates with a sports jacket that can’t cover his ripped knee jeans. New guy guitarist Mike Tuyp peaks over Rogers shoulder and is too hidden for me to convey his sartorial choices.

The Grauman’s theme is continued with chalk outlines of RMB’s members hands (instead of the hands in concrete) on the back cover. It states that the album was recorded and mixed by Matt Kieghan and Roger Marin Band and was mastered by Matt. Kudos on that boys – the production sounds as awesome and better than many big studio efforts I’ve heard.

Track one – You Hate Yourself puts me in mind of rolling around town in a buddy’s car on a weekend night listening to Foghat and Aerosmith on the 8 track. It’s a co-write with Texas co-writing slut Mark Jungers who has also penned songs with Adam Carroll, Scott Nolan, Brock Zeman and probably dozens of other partners. I first heard RMB (there’s no the before RMB) do this song in Bellows Fall Vermont this past June. There’s a key part of the song where they all scream, onstage only Phil did, so when I put the CD on driving home it sounded strange to hear all the voices. It was a hell of a rock and roll scream though…right up there with the one in Won’t Get Fooled Again.

Long before Americana became part of my musical lexicon, I liked Springsteen and John Mellencamp a lot and thought of Bruce as the urban and John as the country side of that coin. The title track of this CD – Silvertown, sounds like a co-write by those two guys. Roger released this song online as a preview to the CD, and it really caught my attention. I would have (and did) buy the album on the strength of this song alone. Thankfully the rest are really good too

Thirteen or fourteen years ago I heard Blackie and the Rodeo Kings’ first album, High or Hurtin’ a tribute to Willie P. Bennett. I immediately had to hear more and see the man himself. I searched on a very new World Wide Web (before Google!) and tracked him down playing in a band with some guy named Fred J. Eaglesmith who turned out to be from the same part of Southern Ontario as I am, and then I went to see the band at a weekend long festival near Port Dover. Roger was brand new in the band then. There’s been hundreds of Fred shows and weekends since then and I started travelling to Vermont, Texas and across Canada to see shows and meet up with friends from all over the world that liked this kind of music. Willie P. died way too young in February of 2008. The Christmas shows in Port Dover in 2007 were Mr. Bennett’s last with Fred’s band. Roger, who had gone off on his own a couple years before, was opening the shows solo and sitting in with Fred’s band that weekend. He told of a late night call from Willie where he’d answered the phone to hear him say “ Roger…write this down – Whiskey take me off the shelf. You’re welcome”, click. The song as presented here is great, and lists Mark, Joy Junger and Adam Carroll as co-writers.

I first saw Adam Carroll (and Hayes Carll and Chris Knight) in Bellows Falls, Vermont, in 2004. Friends thought I was crazy to travel that far to see a bunch of folks they’d never heard of. I made friends and saw music that changed my life that weekend, and when I got to Texas a couple of years later I saw Mark Jungers do a set at Gruene Hall because he had a song on a Fred tribute album. Scott Nolan was there that weekend too and a few years later he said “When I met Roger Marin and made friends with him I immediately became friends with about 200 other people scattered across this continent.’ I know what he means.

The first album is called Roger Marin Jr. The second is High Roads and attributed to Roger Marin. Silvertown is by Roger Marin Band, and it is very much a band album. It Brings Me Down penned and sung by Matt K. is about the road. It’s as bright as his smile and as cool as that beard of his. Phil checks in with Bring It Home which lists the various vagaries of living the life of a travelling musician, but also acknowledges that he loves it. Roger has always been egalitarian in sharing the mic with his bandmates onstage, and it’s cool to see them singing their own songs here. Phil recently made and met a challenge of writing and recording 30 songs in 45 days, I listened to several of them on Facebook and was very impressed. The album closes with How Ya Doin’ Tonight which is a cowrite with Erica Poley and former RMB member Rod Standish. The song switches from Roger’s daughters singing those words spookily over a languid drum beat, to Roger speaking some lyrics to James Standish freestyling rap style and back and forth throughout the song. It’s a cool way to end this excellent album which is available on CD BABY and iTunes. You can find Roger on line here.

Tags: adam carroll, Fred Eaglesmith, Mark Jungers, Roger Marin, Scott Nolan, willie p. bennett