Mark Karan was on the East Coast this past weekend joining the Donna Jean Godchaux Band at Laurelton, PA’s A Bear’s Picnic this weekend (he’ll do so again on Friday at the Bella Terra festival in Stephentown, NY). The previous weekend the RatDog guitarist performed in his native California with his Bob Dylan cover band, The Ghosts of Electricity, which also features Stu Allen (JGB), Robin Sylvester (RatDog), Greg Anton (Zero), Mookie Siegel (David Nelson Band, RatDog) and Pat Nevins (Workingman’s Ed). As a result, we’ve decided to dip back into the archives for this October 2009 feature on Karan.

Photo by Bob Minkin

Mark Karan is sitting on his Marin County front porch, wearing a black cowboy shirt with pearly diamond-shaped snaps, black jeans and black-rimmed rectangular glasses. His hair is black and tousled. He’s got a graying chin beard and soul patch. A silver ring dangles from his left ear. Around his neck – below the scar – hangs a silver dog tag. It’s inlaid with the red and blue steal-your-bone logo of RatDog, the Grateful Dead offshoot for which he’s played lead guitar for 11 years. He’s easy in his own skin. He seems at peace.

Karan’s new album, Walk Through The Fire, was supposed to be a Jemimah Puddleduck record. But those guys are professional sidemen, with day jobs that make it hard to get them all in the same room, for months at a time. It took four years to get four cuts almost in the can. And spending five months having your throat bombarded with Hiroshima-level radiation and chemotherapy can make a guitar-picker – impatient isn’t the word. It’s more like unwilling to put things off any longer.

Karan grew up in San Francisco and Half Moon Bay. He sang in the San Francisco Boys’ Choir, which had a summer camp retreat. That’s where he met his first longhaired, folk-singin’ guitar player. Between that and seeing The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, he knew he’d found his life’s work. He moved to Marin in 1974, played in bands and did session work until it dried up in the late ‘80s. He moved to L.A. and worked with singer/songwriters, sometimes filling in as a ringer when, say, a band’s regular guitarist just wasn’t nailing it to tape. He played with Dave Mason and Jesse Colin Young, with Delaney Bramlett, with The Rembrandts (likely best known for the Friends theme). He did commercials, too – his husky singing voice was just right for 1980s roadhouse beer ads. He battled the booze demon – and he won.

Oddly enough, it was through his session work in L.A. (and friend John Molo) that Karan got the call in 1998 to audition for The Other Ones, the first incarnation of the post-Garcia Grateful Dead. He assumed that he wouldn’t get the gig – he tends to freeze in auditions – so he approached it as just an opportunity to have fun jamming with his childhood heroes. They hired him, but bassist Phil Lesh was still interested in Steve Kimock. “In classic Grateful Dead fashion,” Karan says, “rather than deciding on one or the other of us, they went, okay, well, screw it – let’s take ‘em both.”

It was, he admits, “really awkward.” Two lead guitarists were sharing space not just with Weir, but with saxophonist Dave Ellis, who was also running leads. They often weren’t sure where or when to play. “I remember one show where Steve and I were both going, ‘Are you gonna go? Am I gonna go? I don’t know!’ And Phil turned and looked at both of us and yelled ‘somebody play something!’” Karan laughs, heartily. “And he was right, you know? We were both sitting there paralyzed.”

The Other Ones led to RatDog, which never really had a lead player. Today, it’s difficult to imagine the band without him. Though he’s got Karan on retainer, Bob Weir “thrives in a band environment” – so RatDog runs as a band, rather than with the front man handing out charts and assigning parts. That’s why Karan feels at home. He’s a “band guy,” too.

Karan likes to think of Jemimah Puddleduck as a band ( “all for one, one for all” ), even though he’s the frontman and the writer of songs (and checks). It just happens to be a band of hot-shit ringers: Molo, bassist Bob Gross and keyboardist JT Thomas. Puddleduck has that roots shuffle-and-funk blues, with cowbells, organ and Karan’s melodic leads and truly soulful singing. You can hear influences not only in early Dead (and in the Dead canon that Karan’s been playing for over a decade), but also in Gram Parsons and Little Feat and The Meters and the Staples Singers. They cook. But it’s hard to get them into the studio.

When he was diagnosed with throat cancer in July, 2007, Karan kicked into fight mode, trying acupuncture and alternative healing along with chemotherapy and the radiation that caused his neck to erupt in third-degree burns. Kimock filled in for him on the next RatDog tour, but by February, Karan was back onstage, bald and cowboy-hatted at The Dead’s Obama rally. Though it seemed quick from the outside, it was a major ordeal.

It changed him.

“When I got diagnosed, I was very resistant to it initially. I told the doctors repeatedly how wrong they were, and that it wasn’t cancer – they’d see. They were wrong. Which kind of nutshelled me in a lot of ways in my life prior to cancer. Kind of a control freak. Kind of always right. Kind of pissed off when people didn’t agree with me or do what I wanted ‘em to. And post-cancer, post-diagnosis, when they said, ‘I’m really sorry, man, this is what you’ve got,’ I felt something shift in me. And I felt a sense of calm come over me. I was like, ok, it is what it is. I’m not here to die. So now what? Moving forward, now what? And post-cancer, that’s my whole deal with life.”

So, Puddleduck can’t get enough time to make a record? Bring in Bramlett, Bill Payne from Little Feat, Mike Finnegan (who played with Hendrix), the Rowan Brothers, Jackie LaBranch and Gloria Jones from the Jerry Garcia Band, The Persuasions, and whoever else is around and wants to kick down.

The result is an American roots rock record – New Orleans-inflected blues, funky-tonk Wurlitzer and an occasional departure into the psychedelic wilderness – like on “Love Song,” a pretty straight number that finally sprouts bounding bass, melodic guitars scrumming, whistles and shuffles and shakers, so that it sounds like you’re laying in a sunny meadow listening to the grass grow. There are a few covers – Joe Jackson’s bitter/sweet “Fools In Love,” the Dead’s “Easy Wind,” and a haunted duet on Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” with Bramlett, who has since died. The originals have mostly been in Puddleduck’s rotation.

Puddleduck is evolving, too. Karan’s been planning to tour behind the record, but Molo’s booked, so Wally Ingram (CSN, Eric Burdon) and Carlo Nuccio (Tori Amos, Buckwheat Zydeco) will play drums. Thomas is touring with Bruce Hornsby this fall, so now Karan must look for a keyboard player. It seems to be becoming more his band.

Karan was upset for a second – but now he’s excited to change it up.

He’s taking it all in stride.