Zack Fischmann - Marmalade Mountain Interview
Are you originally from LA? What was your childhood like growing up? When did you first begin to fall in love with music, more specifically the guitar? Was this something that was relevant around your household growing up?
When I was a child, I had a recurring dream that it was a rainy night and I was frantically holding onto my parent’s hands as we rushed across a busy city street. I later learned that we had gotten into a bad accident when I was two or three in New York City, so I think this may have been my very first memory rather than just a dream. The city is about an hour drive away from where I was born and lived in Norwalk, CT. We moved to Orinda, CA when I was three to accommodate my dad’s new job at Levis headquarters in San Francisco. I remember my older brother’s friend falling off his bike in our driveway during the 1989 earthquake. My parents divorced soon after the move, and my dad rented a house in Oakland by the time I was five. I split time between my mom’s house in affluent Orinda, and my dad’s house in Oakland. My first musical memory is from listening to the Les Miserables soundtrack with my brother and giggling when they sang “Master of the house? Isn't worth my spit! Comforter, philosopher and lifelong shit!”. Later, on a road trip, I remember my mom listening to Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. II and explaining to me that Dylan invented the “white boy blues”. I loved the raucous feeling of “The Mighty Quinn (Quinn, the Eskimo)”, and the intimacy of “Tomorrow is a Long Time”. She was also a huge fan of The Kinks, The Band, and Bruce Springsteen. My father was much more into The Beatles, Randy Newman and Tom Petty.
He played a bit of guitar and would spend hours practicing “Stray Cat Strut” by Brian Setzer and “Gloria” by Them over and over again. His parents lived in Los Angeles, and whenever we made the six hour drive from the Bay Area, he would put on Full Moon Fever by Tom Petty. I liked how Tom’s voice came on to inform the listener when Side A of the cassette was done and it was time to flip the tape. It made me feel like he was in the car with us. The first time I truly obsessed over music on my own was in middle school when I got my hands on the self-titled Sublime album. I wrote all the lyrics to “What I Got” on my binder, and then worked my way through their other albums. I loved the laid back atmosphere of 40 oz to Freedom and how it felt like I was hanging out with the band when I listened. When I was 15, I was a misfit, so I bought my first pair of Converse All Stars and rocked a faded pink button-up shirt I bought at a thrift store. I was one of three kids in my entire high school wearing Chuck Taylors, so they were a bold statement. I remember a cute girl with a Ramones hoodie asking me if I was in a band, and I liked how that felt. I told her I was. The truth is I didn’t know how to play an instrument, and I didn’t even have one, but I knew what I needed to do. I started sneaking my dad’s guitar into my room to practice the chords I’d seen him playing for “Gloria” until the transitions were fluid. I remember picking up a friend’s bass guitar soon after and not being able to distinguish the notes, but I liked the idea of the big strings and that there were fewer of them to have to learn to play. Besides, I was terrified of singing, so I decided I’d be a bassist.
What would you do for fun growing up? Who were some of your earliest influences in your more formative years? When and where did you see your first concert and when did you realize you wanted to spend your time pursuing music?
As a kid, I spent a lot of time playing sports, video games, exploring the hills around my town, and picking blackberries in the summer. I remember playing basketball with a counselor named Rocky everyday until my mom picked me up from after school care. I also played football and wrestled. I was never good enough at sports to warrant any attention, and the same was true when I picked up skateboarding as a teenager, but I could whoop my brother’s ass in most video games. When I was sixteen, my buddy Richard lent me Energy by Operation Ivy, and I must have listened to it thousands of times. I sang every word and loved the walking bass lines that Matt Freeman played and that same syncopated guitar rhythm I knew from Sublime. That’s when I realized there was a genre for people like me: ska, especially ska punk music. I got every ska CD I could find. My stepmom bought me I Just Can’t Stop It by The English Beat and London Calling by The Clash for my birthday one year. When I was still 16, I went to my first local show with my high school girlfriend at the Danville Grange Hall. I dyed my hair black so I wouldn’t look like a square, and we watched a local ska punk band called Link 80. Everybody looked older and cooler than me, but I was determined to fit in. I remember the guitar player in the opening band had big spikey hair, his name was Chris. That summer, in 2001, I transferred to a different high school. I met a girl named Maya in my math class who would drum her pencils on her desk. I invited Maya and everybody else I knew who played music to come over and jam. My friend Carson said he had recently met a guitarist and singer, so he invited him. It was Chris from the Link 80 show. Our first rehearsal was 10 people crammed in my bedroom improvising ska songs. We had two bass players. It was a complete mess, but it was really fun. Chris called me afterward and suggested we do it again, except with just Maya on drums and me on bass. He also wanted to drop the ska sound. I was bummed about it, but he was the singer, and he was older and cooler than me, so I went along. I suggested the band name Dismembers.
When and where did you play your very first gig and what was that experience like for you? Did you participate in any groups, or projects prior to MM? You’ve been releasing albums and singles that date back in ‘09 with the earliest project entitled, “Marmalade Mountain Dreams”. Tell me about writing and recording this album and working with folks such as Camden Rose, Tasche De La Rocha and Kyle Raquipiso.
Dismembers had our first show at my mom and step dad’s house while they were out of town when I was sixteen, or seventeen. I remember feeling nervous as hell when a bunch of city punks with patches and studs all over their clothes showed up. We played the only three songs we had, and then played them again. Everybody loved it, except for my parents who found out I’d had a party while they were gone. Within a year, Dismembers was playing regular gigs at the same venue Operation Ivy used to play, the legendary 924 Gilman St. in Berkeley, CA. We also played regularly at a crust punk hangout in Richmond called Burnt Ramen, and an independent record store in San Francisco called Mission Records. I was getting attention as a bass player in the punk scene, and other people were asking me to play with them. I think this was the first time anybody took any real notice of me for anything, and I was very proud. I played in a bunch of other bands from there: Weak Leads, Tulsa, Shakey Bones, People Eaters, Meth Teeth and probably some others I’m forgetting.
The first band I led and wrote songs for was Shakey Bones, which started after some wild adventures hitchhiking around the USA and learning about folk music from a New York City busker named Feral Foster. These are all stories for another time, but after Shakey Bones broke up, I moved to Portland, OR to start over. This was in 2009. In Portland, I bought a Tascam 424 tape machine and started teaching myself how to record music. I loved working with tape, and I got all the tools to keep the heads clean and demagnetized. I started recording everything I could, which is how Kyle and Camden and Tasche got involved. They were my friends and they were around, so they were on my recordings. I named my project Marmalade Mountain after the jumbled mess of songs I was producing, the fruit I picked every day, and the looming snowy peak of Mt. Hood. I put the first Marmalade Mountain song, “okokokokokok” (I don’t even know how many “ok”s there are in the name), on MySpace and it quickly started getting attention. Kyle played in my favorite band in town, Meth Teeth, and within a couple weeks they asked me to record and eventually join them. I worked on an album with Meth Teeth called Everything Went Wrong for the newly ascending label Woodsist Records, all while I finished my own recordings that became Marmalade Mountain Dreams.
2011 saw the release of another full length album, “Slow Life” that featured tracks such as “I Wanna Go Back”, “Walk Away”, “Somebody To Love” and “Life’s Mystery”. Can you tell me about the overall approach to this record and what you ultimately wanted to achieve and express with this material?
By the end of 2010, I moved back to Oakland and started working on the material that became Slow Life. I bought a sampler and started recording on my computer. I tried all kinds of new stuff that I thought was a pretty big leap from Marmalade Mountain Dreams, but now I see it as a fairly natural evolution. Some of my favorite recordings from that era actually aren’t on the album because they have so many samples in them, but at least one piece with sampled material made the cut, it’s called “I Wanna Go Back”. I think Slow Life is about growing up and feeling the weight of adulthood for the very first time.
Jumping ahead to your most recent LP “Strange Angels” that was released last summer. What was the overall process and approach to this album and how did you approach the material that maybe differs from your previous works? I’d love to know more of the backstory to tracks such as “Allergies”, “Bad News”, “Memories” and “Complicated Man”. Seems you had a solid group of folks to help bring this album to life with the likes of Nate Mahan, Rachel Goodrich, Trapper Piatt and so many others!
After a record deal fell through around Slow Life, I took a huge break from making albums to go back to school and build a stable life for myself. I did this for about a decade, but I always had a nagging feeling that I was leaving something important behind. In 2017, that feeling got the better of me, and I moved to Los Angeles to focus on music. LA has a much different scene than anywhere else I’d lived, and pushed me to step up the “professionalism” of my work. I met session players, pop stars, producers, and seasoned touring musicians. I wanted to try making a more professional sounding record, but I still wanted it to feel real and personal. I started tracking new songs in my home studio, but I couldn’t get things to sound the way I wanted, so I hired some people to help complete the project. I spent three days recording at New Monkey Studios (Elliott Smith’s old studio) with my old pal Nate Mahan from Shannon and the Clams. My new friend Rachel Goodrich became a huge part of the record too – she plays bass on “The One”, a bunch of stuff on “All I Want is You”, and contributed all over the record in other ways. Trapper Piatt played drums on the New Monkey sessions, and is one of the two drum tracks on “Many Years Ago”. My friend Chris Hackman also played a major role helping me track drums and bass and taking care of a lot of production duties. “Allergies” and “Memories” were performed and recorded entirely at home by me – probably in a day, or two. “Bad News” started at home, and then Chris Hackman helped me get drums and bass on it. “Complicated Man” was recorded at New Monkey, and finished at home. I actually ended up incorporating a lot of tracks from my home recordings into the studio recordings to give them a more casual and homey feel. I’m still not convinced pro studios are necessary for the kind of music I make, but every recording is a different process for me.
As summer draws to an end, what else does the rest of 2023 look like for you? Any shows, projects, or tours in the works? Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?
I’m mostly taking a break from shows at the moment, but I’m working on a ton of music and releasing new songs every month. I’m actually really excited about a session with some of my favorite players in LA this week! I imagine these releases will turn into an album at some point, but I’m less worried about that and more focused on consistently making music. I’m also working on all kinds of different merch designs which is really fun. If you want to support the music, order something, it really goes a long way! Make cool shit and keep it human, the robots are coming. Thanks for having me and reading this far!
