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Karl
Mullen looks out at the audience sitting spread before him inside Club Cafe's
darkened lounge. In broad strokes, what he sees is exactly the same as what he
saw from his onstage vantage a year ago, five years ago, fifteen years ago:
faces, eager, waiting. In fine detail, though, he sees something different. Once
upon a time he was accustomed to crowds of faces his own age -- accompanied in
more recent years by the corollary faces of young children. But the hundred
pairs of eyes staring back at him tonight belong to people in their 20s, 30s,
40s, 50s. They have come in pairs, in groups, alone. They are dressed in rich
semi-formal evening wear, and they are dressed in rough jeans and flannels. In
short, they do not fit a demographic.
Each
of them, Mullen knows, has a unique story to tell. And if he could get behind
their faces into their brains, he would find that each of them sees him, and the
group of musicians onstage with him, a little differently.
There's
the professorial-looking woman in the front row who's been captivated by
Mullen's growly, gravelly poetry ever since he led the punk band Carsickness two
decades ago. There's the bunch of thirty-ish preps at the bar: ex-Brownie Mary
fans who discovered this band's rocking rhythm through osmosis when guitarist
Rich Jacques joined a year and a half ago. There's the affectionate couple
seated smack dab in the middle of the room who came to applaud for fiddle player
Megan Williams, formerly of the Fuzzy Comets, as loudly as possible. And there's
the bespectacled young man standing at the back shaking his head in wonder that
Mullen has reinvented his band -- formerly called the Ploughman's Lunch, and at
various times ascribed to genres as wildly variant as ska-punk, Celtic folk and
roots rock -- yet again.
As
many perspectives as people fill the room, and this makes Karl Mullen happy. It
means, among other things, that his music is art that speaks to the eternal
human condition -- not just an entertainment product that can be easily sold to
a large mass of same-thinking consumers. It means that the spectrum of people
who'll buy Mullen's new album Mercy Me With Curses will be as diverse and
colorful as the sounds and words and pictures that make up the record itself.
(See album review.)
It
also, according to conventional wisdom, means Mercy Me won't make a ton of
money. Because the central paradox of the commercial music industry today is
that the less definable an album's potential audience is, the less likely it is
that any of the major record labels -- which tend to see music not in melodies
and lyrics but in targeted demographics -- will consider it marketable.
But
this particular musician isn't thinking about that right now. He's smiling at
all the faces. "I'm Karl Mullen," he tells them, "otherwise known
as Karl Mullen" -- a few laughs reach his ears from those who understand
that just last week this act was still called the Ploughman's Lunch -- "and
this is the best band in the entire world."
Typical
rock & roll hyperbole? Sure. But Mullen says it with the sort of offhand,
matter-of-fact certainty no cocky young rocker could ever pull off. And as a
jaunty acoustic guitar lick, a jovially inquisitive electric guitar squeal and a
puppy-dog-rollicking drumbeat quickly weave through one another into the air so
effortlessly that every eye in the joint misses the moment when the musicians
started moving -- and as Mullen croons the opening lyric "This one's for
keeps" -- it's hard not to think at the very least this might be the best
band in Pittsburgh.
 A
correction, though: Exactly three eyes in the club do, in fact, catch the exact
instant the group begins humming and strumming. Not three pairs -- three
individual eyes. They aren't human. In fact, they're not even flesh and blood.
But they're the most diligently attentive eyes in the audience: three robotic
video cameras, discreetly panning, tilting and zooming from their unobtrusive
ceiling mounts just above the audience's heads.
If
you were to follow the cameras' wiring back through the walls, you'd end up on
the second floor of the building, the part of Club Cafe the audience never sees.
You'd pass through a closed door into a tiny room, just big enough to hold three
men and three intimidating high-tech consoles.
First,
the equipment: On the left, a 32-channel sound mixing board, an exact twin of
the live concert board downstairs. On the right, a Trinity video switching unit,
with four color monitors arrayed around a central computer control screen. In
the middle, a stack of digital recording devices, built to capture crystal-clear
sound and video onto multi-track DAT and ADAT tapes.
This
is the kind of stuff you'd find in a professional television studio. It has no
business being in a little cabaret on Carson Street. And yet here it is.
And
here are the men wielding it: Barney Lee at the audio board. Clay Kisker at the
video board. And Marco Cardamone sitting behind and between them, watching both.
Call
them audiovisual engineers if you will, but do it in grand, ornate capital
letters. Because they're not mere techies. They're the masterminds behind this
club -- this stylish, 21st-century, anomalously high-tech club -- and also
behind Merging Media, the nascent music empire that hopes to put Pittsburgh back
on the national music map for the first time since Rusted Root.
That's
a pretty ambitious scheme. And while it'll be some time before Cardamone and
company determine their success or failure, they know one thing for certain:
Merging Media couldn't have gotten started on the right path without Karl
Mullen's new album as the company's first record release.
Because
how can you build a world-class music business without a world-class piece of
music?
A
few weeks after Mullen's Club Cafe performance, a roomful of eyes is once again
upon him. This time, though, the tables have turned somewhat: Instead of being
larger than life onstage, Mullen's face is reduced to the size of a 13-inch
video monitor. Actually, it's displayed simultaneously on four monitors. So in a
sense the performer has managed for once to surround his audience.
Then
Marco Cardamone presses the fast-forward button, making the Irish songwriter's
image zoom along in a comical high-speed dance toward the next part of the
recording, and it becomes clear that while in performance Mullen is the master
of his own destiny, in the video editing room it's the tech-heads -- namely,
Cardamone, Lee and Kisker -- who now shape and polish his image for the world to
see.
They've
taken some 16 hours worth of video footage and edited it down to the 18-minute
promotional documentary that's now screening in front of them: song clips from
the two-night Club Cafe show inter-cut with talking-head interviews with Mullen.
"We're
new to this whole thing," admits Cardamone, Merging Media's president and
CEO, "but it's fun working with Karl. He's a very interactive sort of
guy."
Lots
of adjectives jump to mind when the average Pittsburgh scenester thinks of
veteran songwriter and all-around music guru Karl Mullen: passionate, artistic,
political, ubiquitous, well-connected, poetic. Leave it to an Internet
entrepreneur like Cardamone to settle on interactive.
A
year ago, Merging Media -- an intimate, artist-friendly music company that seeks
to vertically integrate the businesses of management, promotion, performance,
recording and distribution through both Internet and radio -- was just an idea
that had been stewing in Marco Cardamone's head for a while. He was still the
head of the Pittsburgh branch of the Internet design company that had achieved
national success and fame as USWeb and later changed its name to marchFIRST. And
Cardamone was financially set for life, having sold his earlier graphics company
Electronic Images to USWeb in 1997 for $65 million in stock.
 What
he and USWeb comrades Lee and Kisker were not was spiritually fulfilled.
"We
had a passion for music," Cardamone says, "and we wanted to turn that
into our business. We wanted to leverage our assets into an industry we felt we
could make a difference in."
Himself
an amateur musician with plenty of professional friends in the industry -- most
notably Lee, who for 17 years prior to partnering with Cardamone ran
Pittsburgh's popular AirCraft recording studio -- Cardamone saw the new Internet
technology of the late '90s as an opportunity not just to make money, but to
build a new kind of music business. It would be able to treat emerging artists
with the respect and attention they could get from a small record label, while
providing the same sorts of integrated, cross-media services that a major label
would offer.
He
began laying the groundwork in March 1999, when he and Lee bought the
then-defunct Club Cafe, formerly a jazz venue, and started pouring money into
it. They renovated all summer, paying equal attention to the sophisticated,
upscale interior design and the state-of-the-art audio/video recording
facilities, and opened in September of that year.
To
help guide the club's artistic direction, they hired Jay Koval as general
manager. Koval had eight years under his belt as a waiter in Cardamone's
family-owned four-star restaurant Cafe Allegro (right across the street from
Club Cafe), and Cardamone knew him as someone with both valuable bar-management
experience and a lifelong appreciation of great music.
In
the venue's early months, Pittsburghers weren't sure exactly why this revamped
Club Cafe should be a destination. "We've taken some risks with the
diversity of our acts," says Koval. "People know what Nick's Fat City
is, they know what the James Street Tavern is, they know what the 31st Street
Pub is. But Club Cafe -- one day we've got Roger Humphries playing jazz, the
next day we've got Too Tall Jones playing rock, the next we've got a
singer-songwriter circle."
But
Koval's vision of the club's schedule reflects Cardamone's ultimate vision for
Merging Media. Never mind the genre, Koval says: "We want to offer quality
acts. I know it sounds crazy when you're talking about a little 110-seat
nightclub like this, but we want to affect people."
One
thing Koval knows isn't crazy talk: The first act to fill the club with a big
audience was Karl Mullen's band, the Ploughman's Lunch.
That
was in October 1999. By April 2000, Cardamone was confident enough in his
business plan for Merging Media to start engineering the buy-back of his South
Side office complex from USWeb/ marchFIRST. Two months later, he and his
partners were once again their own bosses. It felt good.
"There
was more corporate pressure before," says Kisker, now Merging Media's
director of content development, when he remembers the USWeb days.
"Checkpoints that had to be made -- 'Did you meet your numbers?' It was the
corporate drone thing. Now we set our own destiny. If we don't want to do
something, we change course."
In
June, Merging Media acquired Insider Radio, a small Pittsburgh-based company
that produces a nationally syndicated radio talk show called Internet Insider.
The show, an advice forum for casual Internet users, began on KDKA radio in 1994
and is now carried in 300 markets nationwide. Between the on-air broadcast and
the interactive website that's its online counterpart, Internet Insider reaches
an estimated 50 million people a month.
"There's
lots of potential for crossover," Cardamone says casually. You've got to
hand it to the man, he's got a talent for understatement. He's launching a
company that plans to sell music online, starting with Karl Mullen's; great
idea, says the critic, but with all those websites already out there, how on
earth does he expect to get anyone's attention? Well, yeah, buying a radio show
that already reaches 50 million Internet surfers a month just might offer some
potential for crossover. Can anyone say -- ka-ching?
Even
in Karl Mullen's own living room he can't escape the constant gaze of dozens and
dozens of intent faces. But even more so than when he's onstage, in his living
room we can safely assume that he likes being pored over.
Because
he didn't just invite these stares -- he created them.
Painting
after painting hangs on each of the white concrete walls that surround him as he
sits drinking tea. Paintings of faces: sharp faces, blurred faces, mellow faces,
glaring faces. Yet almost all of them are thin, smooth-headed, bony -- as if
they're the reflection of Mullen's audiences through the structure of his own
face. In a slightly surreal way, the spectacle is a low-tech mirror of the
variant Mullen-monitors that fill the Merging Media video suite.
In
fact, Mullen's whole artistic career since he emigrated to Pittsburgh from
Dublin 24 years ago has been a kind of low-tech mirror of the Merging Media
concept. He's a musician who plays the guitar, the tin whistle, the harmonium; a
poet who writes, sings, orates; a visual artist who paints with tea, mud and his
own blood; a manager of the commercially thriving Rosebud/ Metropol
entertainment complex by day and a resident of the art-for-its-own-sake Spinning
Plate Artists' Lofts by night. If the word "multimedia" had been
coined back in the Steam Age instead of the Electronic Age, dictionaries
probably would have printed a picture of Mullen next to the term's definition.
It's
his mature, experienced hand with every aspect of the music scene from
production to promotion, as much as it is his great album, that makes Mullen the
ideal test project for Merging Media as the company announces its presence to
the world.
For
all his organic earthiness, though -- for all the super-low-budget, one-take
live records he's made in the past -- there's nothing rough-sounding about his
new album. Moody, textured and at times downright edgy, yes, but not rough.
Mullen spent $35,000 to land star Irish producer Kevin Moloney, who's worked
with U2 and Sinead O'Connor, and to record Mercy Me With Curses at Mr. Small's
Funhouse, the comfy Millvale studio co-owned by Liz Berlin of Rusted Root.
"This
time out," says Mullen, "we're saying it's as good as, say, Wood's
last record. We're not saying it'll get the same sales or distribution, but it's
as good." 
Mullen
admits he has little idea whether or not Merging Media, an infant company made
up of visionary but music-novice media professionals, will be able to do things
for his career on a national level. But he likes their ideas, he likes their
confidence in his work -- and what the hell, he always likes working with smart,
do-it-yourself types who are trying something creative and risky.
"Are
we really in the age of Internet-savvy consumers," he wonders, who will
pick up on a multimedia approach to music distribution? "I don't know. But
I do know that since we've gone online with our mailing list, we've found that
we've picked up a much younger audience -- a lot of young women, 23 to 28. If
you'd asked me on paper, what's our main demographic -- well, I don't know what
I would have said, but I don't think it would have been that."
Marco
Cardamone isn't surprised that the music world emerging online doesn't quite
resemble the industry that veterans have grown to expect. "There's a great
deal of disorder and chaos in the music industry thanks to new technology,"
he says. "Napster specifically, and the Internet in general. There's great
promise to it, but also great uncertainty. When there's chaos, there's
opportunity -- but we don't want to join the ranks of the deceased."
A
mere 11 months ago, the Internet economy was at the pinnacle of its hype, with
tech stocks continuing to reach astronomical levels. Then in March investors
began coming to their senses, and stocks started crashing. "I know a lot of
companies," says Cardamone, "friends of mine, who went out last year
and raised $10 million with half-baked business plans and PowerPoint shows. They
did all their marketing and setup, and then this year found they couldn't get
their second round of financing."
Thanks
in part to a simple serendipity of timing -- Cardamone wasn't able to devote his
full attention to Merging Media until he'd already seen the carnage that struck
down many of his would-be peers -- he was forced into building his new company
with his own fortune rather than that of venture capitalists. In retrospect,
he's glad it happened that way. "I'd much rather ride the curve up than
have started at the top and ridden it down," he says. "What this
timing does is put you back to the basics: building a self-funded, grassroots,
up-by-the-bootstraps, real business."
In
addition to finishing the preparations to launch Mullen's album, Cardamone's
team is busy forging relationships with entertainment professionals in
Pittsburgh as well as New York and Los Angeles. "Songwriters and label
people from out of town," says Kisker, "they walk in and go, 'What the
hell's in Pittsburgh? Come to New York and do this.' But by the end of the night
-- after they've seen a show at Club Cafe, eaten dinner at Cafe Allegro, met the
artists we're working with -- they're asking if we can work together."
The
Merging Media team is also furiously collecting the best recordings to come out
of Club Cafe over the past year. "We're putting it all together as a
package," Cardamone says: "Here's what we look like as a
next-generation music label. Here's the kind of artist we represent,
potentially. Here's the kind of service we can offer as a live recording
venue."
And
at the root of it all lies a determination to show the world that Pittsburgh is
a place the music industry should take seriously.
"A
lot of people in town were prognosticating the scene was drying up,"
Cardamone says. "Ignorantly or not, we found the opposite to be true: There
is a lot of musical talent in the city of Pittsburgh. We'd sensed that when we
decided to open Club Cafe, and now the club has confirmed from a very
on-the-street, brick-and-mortar level that there's a lot going on.
"Ultimately,
we believe Pittsburgh has the potential to be another Seattle, another Austin.
Will we get there right away? Will we get there alone? No. It'll be a half
engineered, half organic process. What we're doing is creating a context -- an
organic goo -- and seeing what grows out of it."
Cardamone
rattles off a few names of local acts he expects to be working with in coming
months: singer/songwriter Bill Deasy of the Gathering Field; torch singer and
sometime circus freak Mandy Kivowitz, a.k.a. Phat Man Dee, of Margalit and the
Liquitones; avant jazz group Opek 15. And he suggests there are several more
he's got one level down in his brain.
His
colleague Kisker suggests in turn that those or any artists could do worse than
to throw in their lot with Merging Media.
"You're
not going to find a nicer guy then Marco," says Kisker. "Anyone who's
ever worked for him will tell you that. He'll give you the shirt off his back,
and the $100 bills out of his pocket. And that attitude trickles down through
the company. It's a good team."
He
grins. "You work your whole life in order to not have to work with
assholes. And I think I've found the group of non-assholes I want to work
with."
Karl
Mullen plays live on WYEP 91.3-FM at 3 p.m. on Wed., Nov. 22. He performs at
Club Café, South Side, with Pat Kilbride on Sat., Nov. 25; call 431-4950 for
more info. Mullen's CD release concert, featuring his full band, is at Rosebud,
Strip District, on Sat., Dec. 1, with opener Sarah Harmar; call 261-2221 for
more info. The band returns to Club Café on Sun., Dec. 2, with opener Jennie
Stearns.
INPGH
editor Stephen H. Segal's last cover story profiled the Pittsburgh Poetry Slam
team [July 26].
CD
Review
Mercy
Me With Curses ***3/4
 Listeners
already familiar with Karl Mullen's primal, visceral songwriting will be
overwhelmed upon hearing what it sounds like coming through a subtly textured,
polished, big-sounding production job that would do Peter Gabriel proud. And
listeners who've never heard Mullen's work will simply be overwhelmed by how
gloriously, achingly beautiful it all is. Beginning with an ode to joy titled
"Standing, Waiting," Mullen's lyrical and melodic hooks -- in this
case, a plaintive, repetitive cry of "From the cradle to the grave"
that builds in tension toward a final, blessed release -- embody all that makes
simple something different and better than simplistic. But while the tunes are
simple, their arrangements are decidedly not, and it's a pointed irony that this
first album on which Mullen has abandoned his long-standing band name of the
Ploughman's Lunch (hoping to leave behind the group's Irish-folk baggage) is the
most vitally band-centric of the six records he's released in the past decade.
Virtuoso drummer Tom Compton shuffles soulfully through the old-school R&B
number "This Old World" even as sax stalwart Don Roehlich, who's been
with Mullen since the beginning, conjures days of Motown yore with his most
fluid, tear-jerking turn ever. Track five is the big one, the could-be radio
hit: "Mercy Me With Curses," a pained, poetic,
down-here-under-the-stars ballad that sees guitarist Rich Jacques conjure up a
classic Edge-style chime effect that gives the truth to the chorus lyric "I
can't get you out of my head." Mullen saves the best for last, though: the
masterpiece "Sing Out," a reinvention of his once wildly thrashing,
ten-year-old ska-punk song "History of the World" into a slow, slow,
slow four minutes of borderline avant-garde reggae-chant driven by Megan
Williams' hauntingly dissonant violin and tinged with harmony singer Jennifer
Goree's most ethereal vocal to date. Big-name producer Kevin Moloney may have
cost Mullen a chunk of money, but if he's responsible for pushing the band to
this level of brilliance he was worth every dime.
Contact
Marco
Cardamone, MERGING MEDIA, 412/481-7600 or mardamone@mergingmedia.com
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