“My life has been two roads consistently converging into a rather exciting, and, at times, rather messy, one life adventure. One road is my career as a singer-songwriter, and the other road is my career as a therapist,” says Marcus. “This timeline details the road I’ve taken as a musician.”
So if you’re interested in the longer version, here’s the backstory in his own words…
I was born in 1953, to two wonderfully neurotic Jewish parents of Eastern European descent, who had found their way to Dallas, Texas. I was the younger brother of Steve, four years older, who was introverted, a bit of a brainiac, fascinated by the sciences and politics, and didn’t want to have a lot to do with me. As I young kid, I was extroverted, but geeky, lonely, quietly emotional and isolated – and the chosen companion of my lonely mother. I practiced classical piano, read comic books, listened to the radio, and watched the neighborhood kids play sports. My family was George Castanza’s family meets Woody Allen’s. To diffuse the tension at home, I became an entertainer.
It wasn’t an easy role for me, but being with people was preferable to being alone and wrestling with my demons in the quiet. But the thing is, I’ve always really liked to be left alone. This messy dynamic has continued throughout my life and career: I love being with people, but I struggle to be authentic in their presence. I love being alone, but I have a hard time embracing my solitude. You find these themes all throughout my lyrics, and solving this quandary became much of my life’s work as a songwriter, and as a therapist.
1965- As I was about to turn 13, I was at an all-time low. Insecure and depressed I remember looking out my window at the stars one night and asking “Could God be out there waiting for this lonely boy?” From that point on, I always seemed to be seeking something more than this world had to offer.
1966 – I saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show and my head exploded with an alternate vision of where my life could go. The next week I straightened my hair, bought “Beatle boots” and got my first electric guitar and amp. Six weeks later I played my first gig at a 7th grade party. I cranked my amp up to 10, girls noticed me and I knew I’d found my niche. That same year, I became a “bar mitzvah”, became “a man” spiritually speaking, and was one of the first in my synagogue to chant the entire Friday and Saturday services in Hebrew – it was brutal but somehow meaningful. I recall being fascinated both by the melodies and the spiritual significance of the worshipful words. I was seeking, as well as entertaining, I suppose. And always music was the common denominator.
1966-67 – This was such an exciting time for me. I became enamored with the onslaught of British Invasion groups that followed the Beatles: the Stones, the Kinks, the Who, the Yardbirds, and, later, the Jeff Beck Group, Cream, and Pink Floyd. I jammed with my drummer endlessly, experimented with feedback, in step with the new culture of lifestyle music emerging. It was unbelievably liberating. I became drawn to the mystical, psychedelic, and introspective lyricists of the day, like Pete Townshend, Todd Rundgren, John Lennon, George Harrison, and eventually, Joni Mitchell. I played in various bands throughout middle and high school. My school notebooks were full of sketches of stage set-ups for whatever band I was in, and early attempts at lyrics.
1971 – My senior year in high school my best friend and I stopped doing any drugs, which we told ourselves we were using primarily for “spiritual exploration”, explored eastern spirituality, listened to the Moody Blues, searching, always searching.
1971-75 – I moved to Austin for college, and played in various original bands, including one that was inspired by eastern spirituality, Morning Star, with my friend from high school. After being dumped by my high school girlfriend, now fiancée , who ran off with my best friend, I wrote the first of many confessional songs to come, expressing my renewed ambivalence about being in relationships, fueled by this most recent betrayal. And so my solo career was born as I joined in the emerging music scene in Austin while majoring in music, philosophy and psychology at U.T. Austin.
1975– 77 – Moved to Nashville for graduate school in psych. I had been on the singer-songwriter route for a few years during this time, and on a parallel path pursuing a career in psychology. I developed a following as a confessional singer-songwriter among the psychology community, starting playing more and more gigs in town, and felt the time was now to pursue music full time. I quit my Ph.D. program three years in, right after I earned my master’s degree and had accepted a V.A. Traineeship. I was well regarded in the program and they were pissed at me for taking a leave.
I moved to the country, outside Nashville, and lived in a cave carved out of stone under a log cabin in a setting called Tanglewood. I got free rent for cooking (actually, my soon wife-to-be did the cooking J) for a music professor. It was the perfect place to woodshed. While writing, I saw veterans at the V.A. in the usual internship rotations, continuing to hone my chops as a therapist. On any Friday afternoon, I literally tore off my tie to jump into the tour bus to travel around the Southeast for gigs in the original band I wrote for, Brenda Linton and Shadowfax, returning late Sunday night. Around this time, I recorded an album of pop-rock songs produced by Waylon Jenning’s producer, who lived in one of the cabins at Tanglewood. That summer, I took a couple of months leave from my band when the producer flew me to Seattle to play synth on the reunion album of Goose Creek Symphony, a psychedelic-country band from the 60s and 70s, who, unbeknownst to me, had a large cult following.
1979 – Recorded a solo album. When I didn’t anywhere with the Nashville record companies, I moved to L.A., and lived in the Beachwood Avenue, Hollywood hills garage of the one guy I knew there. I was a newlywed, my wife was still in Nashville, and I worked part time doing research at UCLA. The rest of the time I was writing on a rented grand piano in that garage. A friend introduced me to Jimmie Spheeris, a ‘70s style singer-songwriter, who had a loyal following in the Southwest and Midwest, and was opening for the Moody Blues, among other artists.
This was a pivotal point in my career. I was taking a brilliant keyboard player named Paul Delph’s place, quickly became Jimmie’s songwriting partner, and began touring with Jimmie as a synth player. This association led to further touring and writing with both Paul and Jimmie. Paul’s band, Zoo Drive, which included ex-British rock stars John Goodsall (Brand X) and Ric Parnell (Atomic Rooster), became Jimmie’s full band, along with your truly. We ended up going on tour—Jimmie, Zoo Drive, Toni Basil (of “Hey Mickey” fame), and me. We affectionately called that “the faggots and junkie tour”, as Paul and Jimmie were gay, and, well, there were a few addicts in the mix. It was a bit crazy – somewhat stereotypically in the rock-n-roll sense, and I was one of the two relatively “normal” guys that was supposed to hold the thing together.
1981-83 – One day, I’m living in Venice Beach near Jimmie, playing my synth, when my landlady hears me playing and says: “You know, my roommate at Brandeis U. and I always wanted to hire a synthesizer player to record an electronic music album for plants.” That morphed into a concept album and out of that a new band was born – the 80s synthesizer duo Allwaves – Paul Delph and I.
We recorded tracks in killer studios with a generous budget. Co-produced with my fellow ex-patriot friend from psych graduate school, Mark Shifman, the album was One More Day. It chronicled a guy who was alienated, insecure, and full of longing to connect (rather transparent what inspired this), who lives in a bleak black and white world, and goes through a life-transforming trauma, ending up being able to see and hear the world like a quantum physicist would—everything animated, and connected from the molecular level up to the macro-level. We never did arrive at what it was that caused this “transformation” in our character, but it was definitely of “spiritual” origins. That was the place Paul and I connected – a longing for something more and a belief that there was “something out there”, to quote Peter Gabriel (More Than This). We were quite ambitious conceptually, flying by the seat of our pants, and it turned out to be one of the best things either of us ever did, mostly because we didn’t really know what we were doing.
During a break in the recording of Allwaves, Jimmie was asked by the Moody Blues to open for them on their tour in America and Canada. So Paul, Jimmie and I toured with the Moodies – or the Bloody Moos, as Paul and I liked to call them, a tour that concluded with us opening for them at Madison Square Garden.
1984 – When we got back from the tour, I started shopping a record deal for Allwaves. That dream blew up rather decisively when Paul was lured away from the band by a publishing deal along with the understandable temptation to commit full time to Goodsall’s band, Zoo Drive. This was a devastating blow to my plans for Allwaves, and around this time, we were writing and touring independently. I couldn’t get a deal for Allwaves on my own, and my wife and I wanted to raise a family, so I decided to have a life and moved to Albuquerque, only to find out my wife was pregnant. Paul and I patched things up eventually, and I began going back to LA on weekends, every six weeks to write with Paul and record in “The Magic Bus” on a deserted beach in Malibu.
On my first trip driving back to L.A., I pulled over, took a nap, and had a dream that Paul was desperately trying to reach me. When I called him on a payphone, he told me some horrible news: The night before, on the 4th of July, Jimmie Spheeris had been hit on his motorcycle by a drunk driver and killed. I came in to town to write, but ended up just comforting my friends. It was the end of an era, Jimmie was dead and Paul and I’s mutual bands had broken up. I suppose as a way to work through all of this, Paul and I became more prolific, as well as best friends, mourning these losses.
1985 – My daughter was born! Life changing to say the least. I kept making L.A. trips while also recording in a studio I’d set up in ABQ at a storage unit.
1994 – In the ensuing years, I dedicated my time to my family and my therapist career. I continued going to L.A. to write with Paul regularly as well as continuing to record in my ABQ storage unit. Around this time, I found out Paul was HIV positive. It was devastating. All of his friends were either finding out they were positive, or beginning to die. Our writing took a turn at that point with titles like “Momma Don’t Cry,” “My Heaven,” “Breath of Life,” and “Mad at God.”
It became obvious that we were writing and recording an album that documented our coming to terms with his illness and facing his death. The album was titled, A God That Can Dance, after a Nietzsche quote: “I could believe in a god that could dance.” Even as he was hooked up to IVs and other machines on rollers that kept him alive, we worked on the album. We finished just before he got so sick that he had to move back home to Cincinnati. I spoke to him the day before he died to say goodbye. He didn’t want me to fly in. He told me, in somewhat of a morphine stupor, that we’d keep recording—that he’d send me files from heaven.
1996 – Paul died and I felt lost musically. Our collaboration was something I counted on; it gave me purpose as a songwriter. I continued writing, and even recorded an EP with a new songwriting partner, but I put most of my energy into my family and my therapy career.
Somehow, I suppose inevitably, I ended up gigging as the “singing psychotherapist,” giving lectures on men’s mental health, and playing singer-songwriter style confessionals to increasingly bigger audiences. These shows were special event gigs for groups that were trying to do something positive—social change non-profits/personal growth events, etc. Those performances kept me afloat and intrigued. The audiences were, because they were committed to some higher purpose, rapt audiences, often listening to every word, and ready for meaningful conversation as well. I’d found a niche, but I still felt relatively rudderless without Paul, and saw no real way to get my personal music out.
2000 – My daughter is now 16 going on 25, vulnerable, beautiful, and surrounded by partying adolescents and a drug culture that was not kind to it’s participants. She ended up getting a bit out of control, met a Christian girl, started going to church – which I could barely tolerate, being a card carrying liberal Jew. At any rate, this led, much to my surprise, to both my wife and I having conversion experiences that led us to faith, even though we were very much square pegs in a round hole culturally, in a church. I played in worship teams during this stage, as well as continuing to write and record. I felt a kinship to Bono in U2 in his trying to live his faith in an honest way and the sentiments her communicated in lyrics like “I have climbed these city walls/only to be with you”. My love songs now had renewed meaning and my seeking had led me to a specific spiritual focus.
2010 on – Never having stopped writing, I hit a point – my own personal “Three Mile Marker”, and knew I had to do something more significant musically or I’d just go crazy. I went in search of a way to find some inspiration to get music out there again, and reinvent myself as an artist. I started taking classes online with the Berklee College of Music. I studied music production using Logic and enrolled in several songwriting courses. This eventually led to my first release in years, my solo EP, The Three Mile Marker.
2015 – At this point, as this website is finally ready to roll, I’m recording my second solo record, “The Eyes To See”, which is a less produced, more raw expression of me as an artist, both musically and lyrically. At last, I’m beginning to find my voice, my style and my musical direction. I’m much more comfortable in my own skin, as a man, as a musician.