by Allen Steele
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.
Salvador “Sal” Minella; chief dietician, Arsia Station:
I think their best moment was on Christmas night in ’21, when they played for the beer bust we held in the Mars Hotel. Everyone knows what they sounded like that night, because that was the performance that Billy DeWolfe taped and brought back to Earth.
You know that DeWolfe was the one who smuggled Gary’s and Tiny’s guitars out there, right? Well, DeWolfe was a pipeline for all sorts of things. You sent him a message asking for something and arranged a cash transfer from your bank account back home to his, and unless NSAS or Skycorp caught him he would make sure that it was loaded into the cargo lander of either the Enterprise or the Shinseiki when it left Earth the next time. You might have to wait nine months or more, but if Billy could get it for you, he’d do so, with only a slight markup.
We had long since arranged for eight cases of Budweiser to make it aboard the Enterprise in ’21, because the timing was that the ship would arrive just in time for Christmas. Al Gass had already arranged with Skycorp for some freeze-dried turkey to be sent out, but Billy and I had figured that the crew would appreciate some suds more than the turkey. Christmas dinner and the party afterward would be held in the ward room, and I managed to twist Tiny’s arm into getting his band to play after dinner.
To make a long story short … well, you’ve heard it already. It was a damn good show. We drank beer, we danced, we had a good time. We forgot about Mars for awhile. You can hear a little bit of that in the background on the tape, but a lot of the stuff was edited out, like Joe playing a weird version of “White Christmas” and that sort of thing.
About halfway through the evening, I spotted Billy DeWolfe standing near the stage, which we had made out of a collapsed cargo pallet, with a cassette recorder in his hand. I don’t think the band noticed what he was doing—and if they did, they wouldn’t have cared—but I wandered over to him and said, “Hey, you trying to steal the show or something?”
Billy just grinned and said, “I’m only getting something to show the folks back home what they’re missing.” I remember getting a kick out of that. Never stopped to consider if the son of a bitch was serious.
Billy DeWolfe; former Skycorp/NASA deep-space pilot:
It wasn’t my idea at first to record the Mars Hotel so I could take the tape to a record company. It’s just that the trip back to Earth is as long as the trip out, and since the command crew doesn’t get to ride in the zombie tanks like the passengers, you have to find things to entertain you during that long haul. I made the tape so I would have something to listen to while I was standing watch, that’s all, so it pisses me off when people say that I was trying to rip off the band.
I didn’t consider taking the tape to a record producer until much later. I had been listening to it over and over, and at some point it occurred to me that it was too bad that people on Earth couldn’t hear the Mars Hotel. Then, the more I listened to it, I realized that it was a really good tape. There was hardly any background noise, and what there was sounded just like the audience sounds you hear from any recorded live performance. I thought it was as good as any CD or tape I had ever heard. By the time the Enterprise rendezvoused in LEO with Columbus Station, I had decided to contact a cousin who lived in Nashville to see if he could provide me with any leads to the record companies there.
Why didn’t I ask permission from the band? (Shrugs.) I was embarrassed. I knew none of those guys were into this for the money, or even to be heard beyond Arsia Base. They wouldn’t have given themselves the chance to make it big. But I wanted to do them a favor by trying to give them that chance. Hey, if doing somebody a favor is criminal, I plead guilty.
Gary Smith:
Did we mind what Billy did? Of course we minded! (Laughs.) We bitched about it all the way to the bank!
Excerpt from “Martians Invade Earth!” by Barry O’Connor; from Rolling Stone, June 21, 2023:
DeWolfe was turned down by every major record company on Nashville’s “Music Row” before he approached Centennial Park Records with his tape of the Mars Hotel. Indeed, company president and producer Saundra Lewis nearly ejected the space pilot from her office as well when she heard that DeWolfe had not been authorized by the group to represent them. She also did not believe that the tape had been recorded on Mars. “My first thought was that it had been recorded in a basement in Birmingham, not in the wardroom of the Mars base,” Lewis recalls.
She was impressed by the tape, however, and after extensive double-checking with Skycorp, she established that Tiny Prozini, Gary Smith, and Joe Mama were, in fact, active personnel at Arsia Base. Even though the Mars Hotel had no track record, Lewis decided to take a gamble. Centennial Park Records, while it had gained some respect among connoisseurs of acoustic bluegrass, blues, and rockabilly, was close to bankruptcy. “Since a virtually finished product was already in our hands, I felt like we had little to lose by cleaning it up and releasing it,” she says. With DeWolfe acting as the group’s agent, the company got permission from the Mars Hotel to release an edited version of the tape as an album, entitled Red Planet Days.
“We were surprised that a tape of one of our sessions had made its way to Nashville,” says Tiny Prozini, “and for a little while we wanted to strangle Billy. But we figured, ‘What the hell, maybe it will even sell a few copies,’ so we gave in and signed a contract.” Prozini leaned back in his chair and shrugged. “But we had zero expectations about it. I even said that we’d find copies in the cutout bins by the time we got home.”
Yet when Red Planet Days was released and the single was sent to rock and country stations in the U.S. and Canada, there occurred one of those unanticipated surprises which happen in the music industry once every few years. In hindsight, it can be explained why the album took off like a bullet; it was released at the time when the public was beginning to rediscover the acoustic grassroots sound. This was particularly the case on college campuses where students, sick of several generations of formula hard rock, were once again listening to dusty LPs recorded in their grandparents’ time by Jerry Jeff Walker, Howlin’ Wolf, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. A new band which had that old sound filled the gap. Yet there was also the fact that this was an album which had been recorded on Mars, by a group that was still on Mars.
“It added a certain mystique, no doubt about it,” says Lewis, “and I’ll admit that we marketed that aspect for all it was worth.”
Within two weeks of its release, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” was added to the heavy rotation playlists of every major market radio station in the country, and Red Planet Days was flying off the shelves in the record stores. By the end of the month, Centennial Park Records went back to press for a second printing on the disc, the first time the company had ever done so with one of its releases.
“It’s the damnedest thing I ever saw,” says WNHT Program Director Ben Weiss, who is credited with being the first New York City radio manager to add the Mars Hotel to his station’s playlist. “No one even knew what these guys looked like. Not on
e concert appearance.”
Which was precisely the problem for Centennial Park Records. The company, which only months before had been on the verge of filing under Chapter Eleven, now had a runaway hit. Unfortunately, neither a follow-up album nor a concert tour was possible, for the band was thirty-five million miles away. It was a record producer’s nightmare.
“Naturally, we had to bring the mountain to Mohammad,” says Lewis …
Gary Smith:
I can’t say that we were overwhelmed by the news that the disc had become a hit. In fact, we were sort of underwhelmed. For one thing, it seemed like a distant event, and not just because of the miles involved—none of us even had a copy of the CD, because it hadn’t been pressed by the time the last supply ship had left Earth. During a transmission from SOC someone had held a copy up to the camera for us to see, but that was about it. We had never heard it played on the radio, of course. In fact, we barely remembered what we had played that night. So it was no big deal. It was almost as if we hadn’t made the tape.
We were going back to being space jocks by then. The novelty of playing together was beginning to wear thin, and there was a lot of work that had to be done at the base before summer, which is sandstorm season there. But I also think we were unconsciously defending ourselves against this celebrity status which had been thrust upon us. Not that it wasn’t fun to play music, but somehow people had started pointing fingers at us, saying, “Ooooh, superstars!” We hated that shit, and we wanted to get away from it.
But, y’know … (Shrugs). That wasn’t the way it worked out. About a month before the next cycle ship, the Shinseiki, arrived in Mars orbit, we received a priority message from Skycorp, signed by the CEO himself. It told us that our contracts had been terminated and that we were to return to Earth aboard the Shinseiki. It turned out Skycorp had struck a deal with Saundra Lewis and a Los Angeles concert promoter. Skycorp was scratching our contracts so we could come to L.A. to cut another album and then do a concert tour.