by Allen Steele
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 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 a 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 on the Mars base,” Lewis recalls.
She was impressed by the tape, however, and after extensive double-checking with Skycorp, she established that Tiny Pronzini, 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 he had gained some respect among connoisseurs of acoustic bluegrass, blues, and rockabilly, was close to bankruptcy. “Since a virtually finished product was already in my hands, I felt like we had little to lose in cleaning it up and releasing it,” she said. With DeWolfe acting as the group’s agent, the company got permission from 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 Pronzini, “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.” Pronzini 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 bin 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 happens 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 grass roots 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 WNGT 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 one concert appearance.”
Which was precisely the problem for Centennial Part 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 Mohammed,” 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 Skycorp 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 retu
rn 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 LA to cut another album and then do a concert tour.
Alan Glass:
I’m not sure that they wanted to stay, but I don’t think they wanted to go, either. Mars gets under your skin like that. It seems like a terrible place while you’re there, when you’re working in spacesuits that smell like week-old socks, and living in tin cans, but secretly you come to love Mars. I’ve been back for several years now, and there isn’t a day when I don’t think about the planet and wish I was back there.
I think Tiny especially realized that he was leaving something special behind. But no one gave them a choice. Skycorp, which had taken a beating from the press because of cost overruns and fatalities incurred by the powersat project, had seen a chance at good publicity in the Mars Hotel. There’s a clause in the fine print of everyone’s contract that says the company reserved the right to terminate an employee’s duty whenever it pleases, and Skycorp called in that clause when it made the deal with the record company. Joe, Tiny, and Gary weren’t fired so much as they were, to use the old Army phrase, honorably discharged, but the deal stank anyway.
The night before they left on Shinseiki they played one last gig in the Mars Hotel. Everyone showed up, and everyone tried to put a good face on it, but it was different than before. It was definitely a goodbye show, and no one wanted to see them go. But more than that, there was this sense that the Mars Hotel, the band, didn’t belong to Mars anymore. It was another resource which had been dug out of the rocky red soil and flung out into space for someone else to use.
The band was also very somber. They played as well as they always did, but they didn’t seem to have their hearts in it and they didn’t play for very long. After they did “Sea Cruise” they just put down their instruments and smiled uncomfortably at everyone—the place was very quiet then—and mumbled something about needing some sleep before the launch next morning, and then they sorta shuffled out of the wardroom. Just like that, it was over.
Saundra Lewis; producer, Red Planet Days and Kings of the High Frontier:
I don’t know why it didn’t work out…
(Long pause.) No, no. Scratch that. I know, or at least I think I know, why the Mars Hotel bombed after we got them back here. It’s just hard for me to admit it, since I was part of it.
In the music business we tend to put talents into convenient little niches, thinking that if we can put a label on that which we can barely comprehend, we somehow control the magic. So the little niche that was carved for the Mars Hotel was “Oldies Band from Mars.” Once we had made that label, we went about forcing them into the niche.
Once we got them back to Earth and into a studio in LA, we got carried away with the realization that, unlike with Red Planet Days, there was a chance to tinker with the band’s style. The euphemism is “fine tuning,” but in this case it was meddling. The unexpected success of the first album had made us overconfident; I, at least, as the producer, should have reined myself in.
But we hired backup singers and session musicians by the bus load, and added strings and horns and electric guitars and drums and choruses, thinking that we were improving the quality while, in fact, we were getting far away from that elegant, stripped-down sound that was on Red Planet Days. Joe’s mini-synth was replaced by a monstrous, wrap-around console he could barely operate, for example. Nor did we listen to their ideas. Tiny wanted to do “John Wesley Harding,” for instance, but we decided that we wanted to have a more country-oriented approach, so we forced them into doing Willie Nelson’s “Whisky River” instead, saying that it was bad luck to do two Dylan songs in a row. (Laughs.)
The only bad luck was that there were too many cooks in the kitchen. Kings of the High Frontier was an overproduced catastrophe. In hindsight, I can see where the errors of judgement were made, where we had diluted the very qualities that made the band strong. But worse than that, we failed to recognize a major reason why people like the Mars Hotel. But we were too busy fooling with the magic, and it wasn’t until they went out on the road that the lesson was learned.
Gary Smith:
The promoter had booked us into medium-sized concert halls all over the country. The tour started in California and worked west through the Southwest into the South and up the east coast. It should have been just the three of us, and maybe doing small clubs instead, but the record company and the promoter, who were pulling all the strings, decided to send along the whole mob that had been in the studio doing the album.
We had no creative control. There was virtually nothing that we could veto. Each night, we were trying to do soulful, sincere versions of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” on these huge amphitheater stages with three backup singers, a couple of guitarists, a drummer, two horn players, and a piano, so there was this wall of sound that just hammered people back in their seats. And in the middle of this orchestra there were me and Tiny and Joe, wearing these silk silver jumpsuits that were some costume designer’s idea of what we wore on Mars, while overhead spun a giant holographic image of Mars.
So it was all slick Hollywood-Nashville bullshit, the exact opposite of everything we wanted our music to be, manufactured by twits and nerds with a cynical outlook on what people wanted. (Shakes his head.) Well, you can’t sell people what they don’t want. Even though the concerts were almost all sell-outs, from up on the stage we could see people wincing, frowning, leaving their seats and not coming back. I stopped reading the reviews after awhile, they were so grim. And Kings of the High Frontier was DOA in the record stores, of course.
It ended in Baton Rouge at the tail-end of the tour. It had been another hideous show, and afterwards, while all the session players were drinking and screwing around in the hotel, the three of us slipped out and caught a cab to an all-night diner somewhere on the edge of town. At first all we wanted was to get an early morning breakfast and to escape from the Nashville bozos for a little while, but we ended up staying there until dawn, talking about everything that had happened over the past few months, talking about what had happened to us.
We knew that we were sick of it all—the stardom, making crap records, touring—so there was practically no argument over whether we should break up the band. We didn’t even try to think of ways to salvage something from the wreckage. All we wanted to do was to give the Mars Hotel a mercy killing before it became more embarrassing.
No, what we discussed was why things had turned so sour so quickly, and somehow in the wee hours of the morning, drinking coffee in the Louisiana countryside near the interstate, we came to the conclusion that we had been doomed from the moment we had left Mars.
It wasn’t just the way Kings of the High Frontier had been made, or that we were doing George Jones instead of David Bromberg or Willie Nelson instead of Bob Dylan because someone decided that we should have the Nashville sound, whatever that is. No, it was the fact that we had been playing music that had been born on Earth, but we were doing it on Earth. What had made the Mars Hotel different many months before had been the fact that we were playing Earth music…on Mars.
It was a strange notion, but it made more sense the longer we considered it. We had taken a bit of human culture to Mars, and then exported it back. It was the same culture, we hadn’t changed the songs, but what was different was that it had been performed by people living on another world. Back here, we were just another band doing a cover of “Sea Cruise”. People take culture with them wherever they go, but what makes a frontier a home is when they start generating a culture of their own. We had been proving, without realizing what we were doing, that it was possible to do something else on Mars than make rocket fuel and take pictures of dead volcanos.
It was then that Tiny surprised Joe and me. He pulled out of his jacket pocket a small notebook and opened it. I had seen him, now and then during the tour, sitting by himself and writing in it, but I
had never really paid attention. Now he showed us what he had been doing—writing songs.
They weren’t bad. In fact, they were pretty good. There was one called “Olympus Mons Blues,” and another piece that hadn’t yet been titled, about running from a sandstorm. Not sappy or stilted, but gritty, raw stuff. Great Mars Hotel material.
“But this isn’t for us,” he said when I commented that we should try playing them before we ended the tour. “At least this isn’t anything that can be played here. I’ve got to go back there for this stuff to make sense, or if I’m going to write anything else about it.”
It was ironic. While we had been on Mars, Tiny hadn’t been able to write a thing about the place. It took coming to Earth for the words to finally come out. But his memories were beginning to dry up, the images were beginning to fade. Tiny knew that he had to go back if he was going to produce any more. Mars songs. Nor would anyone appreciate them if they were sung from any place else but Mars.
He had the notion to apply for another duty-tour with Uchu-Hiko since Skycorp obviously would be displeased if he tried to get his old job back from them. Joe was also up for it, but I wasn’t. I liked breathing fresh air again, seeing plants that weren’t growing out of a hydroponics tank. They didn’t hold that against me, so we decided that, once we had fulfilled our contract obligations by finishing this tour, we would formally dissolve the band.
Afterwards, I moved back up to New Hampshire and started a small restaurant in North Conway with the money I had made. On weekends I play bass with a small bluegrass jug-band, but otherwise I lay low. I got postcards for a while from Tiny and Joe, telling me that they were now working for the Japanese and were being trained at the Cape for another job at Arsia Station.