Manda and the Marbles: Shy Loudmouth
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in Amplifier,
March-April 2005
It was in Columbus,
Ohio, sometime in the mid-’90s when local band Dick, Jane and Sally was
hired
to play at a frat party and took the opportunity to break up in the
process.
“It’s a long story,” explains Manda Marble, who was playing guitar at
the time,
“but I ended up getting into a verbal altercation with the people
there. And
the rest of my band, they said they had enough of me and they couldn’t
take it
any more.”
Well, not everyone. Taking
guitarist Joe A. Damage with her, Marble switched to bass and formed
Manda and
the Marbles, whose latest album, Angels
With Dirty Faces (Sickhouse), finds them looking beyond the
walls of
fraternity houses with a sound reminiscent of the punky, keyboard-laced
guitar
pop of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Though Marble bristles slightly
at the
mention of the words “New Wave” – “That’s, like, twenty years ago” –
the album
features a pair of covers from 1979 (which was 26 years ago, for those
keeping
track): a chorus-only runthrough of the Fast Cars’ “Kids Just Wanna
Dance” and
a version of the Avengers’ “Cheap Tragedies” playing dress-up as “When
You Were
Mine.”
Thank Mark Slak for
those: Marble says that her drummer, who’s a fan of “Seventies punk
hardcore
stuff that I can’t even listen to,” is the one who brought the songs to
the
attention of the band, while Damage is the resident ’80s metalhead. As
for her
own tastes, Marble admits, “I’ve been getting into, oddly enough, jazz
and big
band stuff, which is nothing like what we play, of course."
That
onstage/offstage dichotomy shows up in other ways as well. “I’m
actually kind
of a shy person,” says Marble, who admits to a small degree of
stagefright
resulting from the piano recitals of her childhood (before she was, to
the
dismay of her parents and her piano teacher, ruined by rock ‘n’ roll
just like
so many before her). “So whenever people find out that I do this,
they’re kind
of shocked. But I guess if you really get to know me, I’m kind of a
loudmouth.”
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