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Spider Webs
In the nick of time, Mark Griffin resurrects MC 900 Ft. Jesus.
He's that guy with the crooked grin, filing away records in the corner of the store. He's giving you that sly, sideways glance, the bemused look of a kid who's found a new diversion. You don't know whether to ask for the help you obviously need, but soon you have no choice. He steps up and fires salvo after deadly salvo of shapeless banter, and you're trapped, caught in the web of Mark Griffin, the original Killer Inside Me. The scene is the former Dallas independent record shop VVV Records, where Griffin worked for nearly a decade. This was the birthing ground of MC 900 Ft. Jesus. "When you work in a store like that, you know how you get so sick of it?" asks Griffin, whose resurrection as MC 900 Ft. Jesus occurs Friday night at Trees, after seven years in the musical grave. "And there's so much stuff there that sucks? You get to be a real snob and you hate just about everything. I kept saying to myself, 'I can do a better record than this,' over and over again, and finally it just dawned on me, I should put my money where my mouth was and try to do one." Griffin was classically trained on the trumpet and had spent years in two seminal area bands, the Telefones and Lithium X-Mas, but it was at VVV, where he worked from 1983 to '91, that he first refined his personal artistic vision. During the late-'80s industrial revolution he turned his ears to Ministry, Front 242, and Tackhead, as well as explosive hip-hop like Public Enemy, and scores of lesser-known beat generators laying down their grooves on 12-inch wax. "I was listening to all these records," he says, "and I'd see things that I liked, and think, 'Y'know, this could be like one dude in his bedroom who made this record.' " So Griffin became that dude, thanks in part to the record-label connections he made while working at VVV. He also became one of the first white hip-hop artists who didn't suck. It may have been novelty that possessed MTV to air "Truth is Out of Style" and the ultimate MC 900 mission statement, "Killer Inside Me," but it was Griffin's intriguingly daft, psychotic character study that carved out a niche for him. Jesus' roll culminated with One Step Ahead of the Spider; the lead single/video, "If I Only Had A Brain," even landed on Beavis and Butthead. Spider was also Griffin's busiest and most adventurous album musically, as he enlisted a stellar supporting cast in drummer extraordinaire Earl Harvin, pianist Dave Palmer, saxophonist Chris McGuire, and bassist Drew Phelps. The year was 1994, and all was right with Jesus' world.
Then, abruptly, the story breaks off. MC 900 Ft. Jesus disappeared down a rabbit hole, as suddenly as the Oral Roberts vision that inspired the character. "I did three albums in the space of four years, and then when we started working on this [new] one, and we went into the studio [in 1995], I just felt like I just didn't have any new ideas at that point," says Griffin. "I kinda just wanted to set it aside for a while." And so he did. Mark Griffin was still around, playing trumpet in VVV buddy Neal Caldwell's band the Enablers "for beer money," and doing sound design for the Kitchen Dog Theater stage troupe. But 900 Ft. Jesus was nowhere to be found. "I kinda rode this crest," says Griffin, who signed up with American before the Spider album. "In the mid-nineties, all the majors were just buying up all the alternative stuff, looking for the next Nirvana or whatever. And just about the time I begin working on a new album was when [American] was dropping bands left and right. "What happened with me was that my contract guaranteed me two albums, and they had already advanced me a huge sum of money to start working on a new one, but then they decided to get rid of all their bands. So they never officially dropped me, but I haven't heard from them in six years either." Griffin has actually extended his ride on the MC 900 Ft. Jesus trust fund by working out a deal with Nettwerk Records -- which had released his debut, Hell With the Lid Off -- to reissue both that album and 1991's Welcome to My Dream. "I'll get a little cash upfront for that; that'll definitely keep me going for a couple months," says Griffin, "but it's definitely getting to the point where I'm gonna have to put out a new album or get a day job. Probably both actually."
After so many years of idleness, Griffin's task is twofold: reshape his ever-evolving musical vision and get back in touch with his inner 900 Ft. Jesus.
MC 900 Ft. Jesus started out as just Griffin on his own, with help from DJ Zero, whom he met when Zero "would come in and scour the [VVV] used record bins." The product, and the two-man live show, was very much electronic. Then, as he set off to tour with Nettwerk labelmates Consolidated, he started gradually expanding his lineup. "That's actually what set me off in a jazz direction," says Griffin. "We were all kinda sittin' around listening to electric period Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock from around that period, and I was really into the Mahavishnu Orchestra stuff." Griffin hooked up with Harvin and mates, and MC 900 found himself presiding over a land of muted trumpets and swirling jazz motifs, years before Tortoise made jazz fusion cool again among the indie crowd. "The Spider album was sort of culmination," says Griffin. "That may have been about as far as me, not really a jazz musician, could take that. Maybe that's a component of why when we went into the studio after that, it sounded like we were just rehashing the same ideas. It was really just my own directionlessness." Now Griffin has come full circle, making music by himself again, inspired by a new generation of electronic music. "What I've been listening to these past few years has got nothing to do with what I was doing in the past," he says, citing Lisa Germano, German dubsters Pole, and the abrasive Finnish duo Pan sonic. "I've been trying to figure out how I can twist old MC 900 into something that would inspire me musically these days." And just who is old MC 900 anyway? "MC 900 Ft. Jesus is this nebulous concept that allows me to go off on any crazy direction that pops into my head, really," Griffin says. "It really changes from song to song, but there are certain themes that keep on popping back up--the inane silliness, the real threatening and crazy kind of personality. Some of those ideas came from various nuts that I've met in my life. Crazy people and my encounters with them." Armed with a hard drive's worth of new material Griffin characterizes as "experimental ... kinda quiet and mysterious and just turned down a few notches," the MC will instead lean heavily on his Spider- and Dream-era material for the trifecta of shows he has planned. The first will be Thursday at the Mercury in Austin, followed by gigs Friday and Saturday at Trees in Dallas and Dan's in Denton. Griffin will be joined by Harvin, Palmer, McGuire, bassist Dave Monsey, and guitarist Phil Bush. The results may go a long way toward deciding the future of MC 900 Ft. Jesus. "I'm still kinda plugging away at the record and trying to figure out what the hell I wanna do next," says Griffin. "I've got another show with Kitchen Dog Theater right after that [Reckless, which opens Nov. 17 at McKinney Avenue Contemporary], so I'll get back to it around the holidays and either set up a tour of Europe or just buckle down and try to finish an album. "That's one thing I'm really happy about. If I decide to wake up one day and do something about it, I can do it. If I don't feel like fucking with it, then I don't."
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