Friday, April 5, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.
Down at the 5th Street Pub, they like their Boston LOUD. "Turn it up!" one of the boozehounds shouts when "Smokin'" comes on the radio. It's not long before another chap is singing squiffed accompaniment to Pink Floyd, and when it comes to bar chat, no one here spares the F-word. It's 8 o'clock on a Wednesday night.
"There's never a dull moment here," Mark Huff says, grinning above his first beer and his -- what, fourth? fifth? -- cigarette. "There's always a fight going on or something." Sure enough, one senses a lurking redneck menace beneath some of the faces lining the bar, like toxic waste buried too close to the surface; one beer over the line and clearly an ass-kicking could break out.
Nonetheless, this is Huff's kind of place, Christian leanings and all. He comes here regularly, sometimes with the boys in his band, the Inflatables, sometimes after a day in the recording studio, sometimes after his day job selling guitars at Vesely Music. Despite the bad-cliche neon beer signs and the dino-music on the speakers -- Coming up, a Doors four-play! -- there's a certain rock 'n' roll vibe in places like this, not to mention raw material for a songwriter who keeps his ears cocked.
"I listen to people," Huff says. Any overheard trifle could get a song rolling. "You hear a lot of weird phrases in a place like this. It can make for interesting songs."
And for Huff, interesting songs are what it's all about. Writing and performing them is, in many ways, what he lives for, or at least what he can't imagine living without. A native Las Vegan, he started playing music at 9, has been in bands constantly since 19, and started writing songs in earnest at about 26.
Now 34, he's an old hand, touring bars and small venues around the West, running his own indie record label, Exodus Records. "He's the hardest working guy in local music," says writer Geoff Carter, Scope magazine's chronicler of the local music demimonde. "He's always got two or three projects going."
Huff has two self-issued CDs to his credit, "Happy Judgement Day" and "Truth Is Chaos" (available in local music stores), containing about a dozen and a half of his songs, although he's written a few more than that. "About 200," he guesses, "although people have only heard maybe 50 of them, 40 of them."
His sound? "Rootsy," is how he describes it. "Real songwriterly." Heartland rockish. "He seems to be guided by the spirit of Bob Dylan," Carter says. Indeed, Huff opened for Dylan at Bally's in 1992, a career highlight.
"Mark Huff? I think he's crap, and he owes me money," snorts Rob Catalano, lead singer of the local band Opera Beggars. "No, I think he's great. He's one of the few people in town in my experience who've stuck to their guns."
Nothing faddish for Huff; for instance, "Truth Is Chaos" was made in 1992-93, when grunge still ruled the Earth, but there's nary a whiff of Seattle on it. "I think he's earned a lot of people's respect for his professionalism," Catalano says.
As befits a guy who collects copies of Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" and is deeply concerned about religious faith and social issues, Huff's song list is noticeably thin on breezy ditties and hey-little-girl numbers. It's like he feels he ought to, you know, say something.
Sometimes the titles alone tell you what he's up to: "Rehabilitation of the Heart," "Watch Out Where You Fall." A lot of his songs are concerned with moral shortcomings and the breakdown of values. "If money were mountains you'd learn how to climb," he sings in "Too Much of Nothing," while "Conversation" finds him wailing, "The house has been corrupted/From the bottom to the top/When's it gonna stop?"
Serious stuff, maybe, but why not? Plugged your headphones into pop culture lately? Lotta crap out there. Songs with the lyrical complexity of bumper stickers, Coolio glossing on "Gangsta's Paradise," Green Day singing about being bored and stupid. When's it gonna stop?
"A 30-minute TV show or a three-minute Green Day song takes you away from how important a 'Grapes of Wrath' or a Mozart piece is," says Huff, whose own musical heroes range from Dylan to seminal bluesman Robert Johnson. "How many kids are reading 'Grapes of Wrath' today? Zero!" And while he knows songs won't stop a carjacker from jacking a car, or bring an absent parent home, or get a kid into Steinbeck, it's what he has to contribute.
"Songs don't change the world," he says, midway through the threatened Doors four-play. "But what they can do is pull you into an area where you can be more introspective about what's important."
Anyway, 50 years from now, when he's geezed out and wondering what it's all meant, he'd like to think it meant something. "You're trying to hit people's nerves, whether it's a happy nerve or a sad nerve. That's what it's all about."
If all that makes you want to shake him by his social conscience and shout, Lighten up!, well, he does. "The bottom line is, I love to play, man," he says, a grin forming under his halo of, yes, Dylanesque frizzy hair. "I'm a ham. I love to play songs and perform for people."
Good thing, because when it comes to playing for love or playing for money, so far, the choice has been made for him. He doesn't sell guitars because he prefers to. Touring, once you rent the van, pay the band, buy gas, give it up to Motel 6 -- well, it's break-even at best.
As for running his own label, let's just say he needs more red pens than black to keep the books. "I've just been going over our tax stuff," he sighs. "We lost a lot of money last year, and about the same amount the year before. I must be crazy."
Mark Huff unplugged: It's a cool Saturday night at Enigma, the Fourth Street coffeehouse-culture spot where Huff, guitar and harmonica at the ready, is about to perform solo.
"We'll play one more song and then bring on the fabulous and sexy Mark Huff," announces one of the Opera Beggars, the first act.
"I thought he was sexy and fabulous," another chimes.
"He was," the first guy says, "but that was years ago."
Years is right; although Huff backpedals from any suggestion that he's acquired elder statesman status in the Las Vegas music scene, he's got more longevity than most.
"He's one of only a handful of original scenesters left," Carter says. Most of the people he was performing with a decade ago have dropped out, pulled away by jobs or families.
"But I haven't found anything to take the place of trying to be a songwriter and performing and making records," Huff says.
At Enigma he goes for neither sexy nor fabulous but seems content with pretty-goodness. Spontaneity is as important as music in a situation like this, and although he will later judge his performance sloppy and tentative, he comes off as loose and comfortable as an untucked shirt. It helps that he knows many of the 20 or so listeners.
Finishing a song containing the word "mockingbird," Huff huffs to a guy in the front row, "Why did you laugh every time I said 'bluebird'?"
"You said 'mockingbird,'" the guy responds.
"That was just a test to see if you were listening," Huff says.
In short order he is, rather curiously, pondering the appearance of Edward G. Robinson in "The Ten Commandments." Still strumming, he does a credible Robinson: "Where's your Moses nnnowww?" Whose bit of casting genius was that, anyway? "I guess I could look it up in ... um, the Book of Stupid Things."
Oh, and he sings, too. His handwritten song list makes the rounds, the audience choosing selections. "I don't sing very well," he says a few days later, "but at least I belt it out there."
"I've seen him play for two people, and he's like a madman, doing everything he can to entertain them," says Catalano. "And I've seen him perform for 1,500 people and give everything there, too."
"He's vastly underappreciated," says Carter, whose father liked Huff better than Dylan at the Bally's show. "He hasn't had the recognition he should have."
Back at Enigma, he's eyeballing the guy in the front row again. "Why do you laugh every time I say 'bluebird'?"
The bookcase in Huff's living room has a shelf dedicated to volumes by and about Bob Dylan, whose face also looms on posters throughout the small, wood-floored Sixth Street house. Also on the shelves: Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Rimbaud and three of his eight copies of "Grapes of Wrath." On the radio: Howard Stern. On the couch: Susan, the missus, a high school teacher. So what's it like being married to a musician?
"Hellish," she deadpans. Like many a good romance, theirs began at Kinko's, and it was love at first sight. "He was kind of a jerk," she recalls. Six months later they were an item. Maybe it was the many things they have in common. "I'm anal-retentive, he's not," she says. "He's a real dreamer, and I'm not." Being a guitar widow "can be frustrating," she says candidly. "But it works out."
Huff, meanwhile, is back in his music room, musing about success pursued and success perhaps never captured. The hardest-working dreamer in local music, he's got plans in various stages of viability: He's working on a deal to get his CDs into Europe; his publisher is trying to hook him up with a bigger label; he's thinking that this summer might be a good time to solo tour up the West Coast, or maybe revisit the fabled coffeehouses of Greenwich Village, another career highlight.
Is his optimism ever tainted by self-doubt? That question's straight out of the Book of Stupid Things, man.
"Every day," he says. "Almost on a daily basis." What if success only comes, Bonnie Raitt-like, in his later years? What if, gulp, it comes Woody Guthrie-like -- which is to say, mostly posthumously?
"You try to keep thinking that the next time you pick this up," he says, lifting a guitar and strumming it, "you'll write the one that really hits." Strum. "Even if I'm not successful, I'm going to keep doing it." Strum. "I've been thinking that if I just keep doing it I'll be content, because I'm content when I do it."
Strum.
He performs at Enigma again on April 27. If you go, remember not to laugh when he says "bluebird."
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