Rude Astronauts (16 page)

“Put this on,” she says, handing me the disc. “You’ll love it!”

I took it out of her hand, saw that it was on a label I had seen a couple of times before, Centennial Park Records, a little Nashville company which had started up a couple of years earlier and hadn’t put out anything special. The “A” side was an old Bob Dylan, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” The “B” side was “Sea Cruise,” the Leiber and Stoller classic. The band was something called the Mars Hotel.

I gave Heidi this look, y’know, that Hiroshima was God’s gift to pop music. “Trust me,” she says. “You’ll eat it up.” So I cued up the Dylan song and segued it in after the next couple of ad spots. I didn’t expect anything special, right?

I dunno. What can I say that hasn’t been said before? It was fantastic. I could tell that the band, whoever they were, were only three guys: a vocalist on guitar, a bass player, and somebody on synth doing piano, percussion, and pedal steel. There’s been a million bands like that and a million people have done Dylan, most of them badly. But these guys made “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” sound like they had just written it. Very fresh, stripped-down. Unpretentious. They played like they meant it, you know what I mean?

So I look up and say, “Who are these guys?” Heidi just grins at me and asks, “Where do you think they’re from?” I glance at the label again and say, “Well, they’re obviously from Nashville.” She just shook her head. “No, they’re from Mars.”

Alan Gass; former station supervisor, Skycorp/Ucho-Hiko Arsia Base, Mars:

Well, it’s no secret that life at Arsia base was rough. Always will be rough, or at least until someone gets around to terraforming Mars, which is wild-eyed fantasy if you ask me. But even if you disregard the sandstorms and scarcity of water, the extremes of heat and cold and … well, just the utter barrenness of that world, it’s still a hell of a place to live for any extended period of time.

I guess the worst part was the isolation. When I was station manager we had about fifty men and women living in close quarters in a cluster of fifteen habitats modules, buried just under the ground. Most of these folks either worked for Skycorp or the Japanese firm Uchu-Hiko, manufacturing propellant from Martian hydrocarbons in the soil which was later boosted up to the Deimos fuel depot, or were conducting basic research for NASA or NASDA. The minority of us were support personnel, like myself, keeping the place operational.

A lot of us had signed on for Mars work for the chance to explore another planet, but once you got there you found yourself spending most of your time doing stuff that was not much different than if you had volunteered to live underground in Death Valley for two years. For the men working the electrolysis plant, it was a particularly hard, dirty job—working ten- or twelve-hour shifts, coming back to the base to eat and collapse, then getting up to do it all over again. The researchers didn’t have it much easier because their sponsoring companies or governments had gone to considerable expense to send them to Mars and they had to produce a lifetime’s worth of work during their two years or risk losing their jobs and reputations.

The base was located in a visually stunning area, the Tharsis region, just south of the equator near the western flank of Arsia Mons. When you went outside there was this giant, dead volcano looming over you, and on a clear day you could just make out the summit of Olympus Mons way off to the northeast. But after a few weeks the novelty would wear off. You’d become used to red rocks and pink skies, and after that what would you have? There was never any time for sightseeing. After awhile you started looking forward to the next big sandstorm, just to watch this giant swirling red curtain coming toward you like the wrath of God. (
Laughs.
) You wouldn’t spend much time watching because the wind could shred your suit in a minute, but at least it was exciting.

Anyway, one night I had just come off my shift in the command module and I was walking back to my bunkhouse through the connecting tunnel, which was called Broadway. I was beat, and I didn’t feel like going to the wardroom because I wasn’t hungry—not that the food was particularly appetizing anyway—but the way to Module Five took me past the wardroom, Module Three, which we called the Mars Hotel. I had just walked past Three when I heard a guitar being played and someone singing.

I really didn’t notice it at first, because I figured it was coming from a tape, but then I heard another guitar joining in and someone else beginning to sing, and then there was an electronic piano chiming in. But the second guy couldn’t sing and the piano was a little off-key, and suddenly I realized that I wasn’t hearing a tape.

That stopped me in my tracks. I don’t know if I can describe that feeling of puzzlement and wonder. It was like a rare bird had just flown down Broadway. I mean, which was stranger? Seeing a rare species, or just seeing a bird in the first place? I backed up a couple of steps, wondering if I was hallucinating, and looked through the open hatch.

Partial transcript of an interview with the Mars Hotel, originally broadcast on NBC’s The Today Show, July 27, 2022 (Note: this interview was taped and edited in advance in order to contract the time differential during Earth-Mars transmissions):

Judith King, host: “So how did you come up with the name for your group?”

Tiny Prozini, lead guitarist: “Um … which of us are you asking?”

King: “Any one of you.”

Joe Mama, synthesizer player: “During that last nineteen-minute delay we thought it over and decided that we wouldn’t tell you that we used to be called the Mars House of Ill Repute, but the record company made us change it because it was too long to fit on the label.”

Gary Smith, bass guitarist: “You shouldn’t ask Joe straight questions like that, I’ll warn you right now.”

Mama (to Prozini): “I told you we should have used a different name. Now we’re going to have to answer that question for the rest of our lives.”

Prozini: “Look who’s talking. No, it’s … (
Laughter.
) See, there’s two reasons. One, the wardroom here is called the Mars Hotel. It was once called the Mars Hilton, but somehow it got shortened. Second, there’s an old album by the Grateful Dead, whom we all admire, called
From the Mars Hotel
. The wardroom is the place where we’ve always rehearsed, and we’ve all been influenced one way or another by the Dead, so it sort of came natural.”

Smith: “After we started jamming together and people here at the base started coming to listen to us during their off-shifts, they tried to stick us with names.”

Mama: “Things like, y’know, the Tharks, the Mike Mars Blues Trio, John Carter and His Bare-Ass Barsoominans …”

Smith: “Worse things, when we sounded bad, like Dryheaving Sandworms …”

Prozini: “Eventually the name that stuck was the Mars Hotel Band, which sort of made us sound like a Ramada Inn lounge act that plays bar mitzvahs. (
Laughter.
) Before long the last part of the name was dropped and we became just, y’know, the Mars Hotel.”

King: “I see. And when did you start playing together?”

Mama: “When we got sick of Monopoly.”

Prozini: “Please forgive him. The steel plate in his head …”

Smith: “Tiny got us started, though he won’t admit it.”

Prozini: “Oh, I’ll admit it! I just didn’t want to take all the credit.”

Mama: “Don’t worry. You won’t.”

Smith: “Oh, hell. If nobody will give you a straight answer, I will! (
Laughter.
) Tiny and I were shooting the breeze one night in Module Six, our bunkhouse, about the things we missed out here, and one of the things was live music. We’re both from New England—he’s from Massachusetts, I’m from New Hampshire—and as we talked it turned out that we had both gone to the same places where you could hear live, acoustical music. Bluegrass, blues, folk, rockabilly …”

Prozini: “I’m telling the story, so get lost. (
Laughter.
) And it further turned out that both of us know how to play guitar. Well, I knew Joe here had a portable Yamaha synthesizer that he had smuggled out here and was hiding in his geology lab …”

Mama: “Hey! I told you not to say anything about that!”

Prozini: “Don’t worry about it. You’re famous now. Anyway, I managed to pull some contacts on the Cape and get a couple of guitars shipped to us on the next Mars-bound ship, and once we roped Joe into the combo, we started playing together in the Mars Hotel. And it was just like that.”

King: “I see. From what your audience here on Earth has heard so far, you principally cover songs other people have written. Some of them quite old, in fact. Why aren’t you writing songs of your own, about Mars?”

Prozini: “Well, uh …”

Smith: “We’re lazy.” (
Laughter.
)

Mama: “Actually, I’m working on composing an epic twenty-hour opera inspired by old
Lost in Space
episodes. It’s tentatively entitled ‘Dr. Smith Unbound.’”

Prozini: “You’re a sick man, Joe.”

Gary Smith; former lead guitarist, Mars Hotel:

That was a pretty ridiculous interview, as I recall it. We had just heard that “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” had cracked the Top Forty in the US and Canada, which we had never dreamed would happen, when we got a request from Skycorp’s PR office that we do an interview for
The Today Show
. We didn’t take it seriously because, really, we didn’t take any of it seriously. “We’re music stars? They’ve got to be kidding!” That sort of thing.

But, deep down inside, when we actually got around to doing the interview, the question that we dreaded the most—although none of us really discussed it—was the one we got about why we weren’t writing our own songs. When you watch the tape you can see how we avoided answering that completely, with Joe’s remark about
Lost in Space
being the closest we came to giving a reply. But we had answers for that.

One, of course, was that we liked playing the old stuff. It was what made us feel good, what took our minds off the hellhole conditions out there and so forth. That’s really how the Mars Hotel got started in the first place. None of us aspired to be professional musicians. We didn’t even care if we had an audience or not, although we didn’t mind when base personnel started gathering in the wardroom during our sessions. An audience was something that was thrust upon us, just as fame on Earth was thrust upon us by circumstances beyond our control. It just started with the three of us sitting in the Mars Hotel, trying out things like “Kansas City” or “Police Dog Blues” or “Willie and the Hand Jive”—we were out to entertain ourselves, period.

But secondly—and this was what we didn’t want to admit—none of us could write songs worth a damn. Not that we didn’t try. At one time or another each of us said, “Hey, I’m going to write a song about Mars,” and that person would disappear for awhile, think think think, y’know, and come back to the other guys with something. “Here’s a song, let’s try it.” And it would always turn out as some hackneyed, pretentious bullshit. Metaphorical nonsense about raging sandstorms and watching Phobos and Deimos rising and how I miss you, my love, now that we’re worlds apart. Boring shit, not at all the kind of thing any of us wanted to play.

After awhile we just gave up, saying to ourselves and each other, “Screw it, I’d rather do ‘Johnny B. Goode’ any old day.” But our failure to produce anything original that said something about the human condition out there really gnawed on us, though I kept thinking that there had to be a good song somewhere about watching the sun rise over Arsia Mons. But it really bugged Tiny, who was probably the most creative of the three of us, who worshipped Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan and Robert Hunter. I know for a fact, because one of the guys who shared his bunkhouse told me, that he secretly kept attempting to write songs, late at night when he thought no one was watching. I kinda felt sorry for him. It was like masturbation—an ultimately futile attempt to scratch an un-scratchable itch.

Alan Gass:

After Tiny and Gary got those guitars—I think they bribed Billy DeWolfe, who was one of the regular pilots for the Earth-Mars supply runs, into smuggling them aboard the
Shinseiki
—and they put together the band with Joe, I had to keep after the three of them constantly to do their jobs. Tiny and Gary were both miners—“the Slaves of Mars,” we called them—and Joe was a soil analyst in the geology lab, so they all had important industrial functions to fulfill, and it was my job to make sure that Skycorp got its money’s worth from them.

As a band, they were pretty funny to watch. Gary looked normal enough, since he would just stand there wearing his bass. But you’ve seen the pictures of Tiny. He was literally a giant. Six-foot-four, three hundred pounds, almost all of it muscle. Sometimes he wouldn’t even bother to sit in a chair, but would lie on the floor with his guitar resting on his huge chest, playing along with his eyes closed.

Joe was the strangest of the bunch. He looked a lot better in the pictures you’ve seen, if you can believe that. (
Laughs.
) His Japanese and American bloodlines had crossed to produce one freakish-looking individual: narrow, squinty eyes, jug ears, too tall and skinny with his hair cropped so short that he was almost bald. “Joe Mama” wasn’t his real name, but I don’t think anyone knew his real name. He would put his mini-synth in his lap and as he’d play—looking like he was typing, the way he held his hands—his eyes would narrow even more and his mouth would hang open and his head bob back and forth as if his neck was made of rubber. If you didn’t know better, know that he was an MIT graduate with a near-genius-level IQ, you would have sworn he was an idiot.

The funniest thing, though, was how they sounded when they were rehearsing in the Mars Hotel. It was a big steel cylinder, you’ve got to remember—very bare, hardly any furniture except for some tables and chairs and a couple of data screens suspended from the ceiling. As far as acoustics go, it sounded like they were playing in a tin can. The sound would reverberate off the walls and make them sound louder than they really were, and you could hear them all over the base. At first a few people minded, but once they got good—believe me, they were just awful at first—people stopped complaining and started coming by to listen. After awhile, I stopped being strict with them about keeping their hours on the clock. Their music was like a little piece of Earth. God knows they were good for morale.