The Songs - Reservation Girl

This is another entry in my ongoing “songs that visited me and decided they wanted to stay” series. I hope you like these enough to become a paid subscriber, because I really need you! I only ask for $5 a month, which is less than the last Guinness pint I bought.

Reservation Girl - Marah

I got myself a love
A love I didn’t need
A reservation girl
A girl I didn’t need

I’ve written about this band before. I’ve become friends with one of the band’s co-founders, Serge Bielanko, who also has a home here on Substack. He’s not in the band anymore. He stopped writing songs and focuses entirely on prose now. Which is fine by me. Honestly, any word the man puts down on paper is worth reading, but the first time I heard “Reservation Girl”, and that 4 chord groove kicked in with the drums, it sounded like one of my bookshelves collapsed. The rest of the song is belted out in 2 part harmony by Serge and his brother Dave, together sounding like a demented version of the Everly Brothers, and it became a frequent set closer and fan favorite (Also, possibly the last great song that includes the word “jive” in it). One of their fans was a Jersey punk named Bruce, who jammed on the song with the band in Asbury Park, and suggested they might have been the loudest band he’d ever heard.

That’s serious business, Cuz.

The lyrics are about as unintelligible as the first few R.E.M. records, but little bits jump out at you….”got myself a girl”…..”what’s a man to do? what’s a man to say?”. There’s no bridge. There’s no chorus. Capo 4 and you’re off. It ends by driving itself into a brick wall. It’s a song built for the bars the band haunted for years….and the dueling guitars of the brothers sound like a dog not wanting to let go of the bone in his mouth. It’s hard to call what is happening a guitar “solo”. It’s more like a guitar strangulation.

Serge told me he wrote the song on the back of a math worksheet while he was in high school (“I was almost certainly stoned”), and that the band could never quite get it right in the studio, which is why the only official release on the streaming services is a live version from Spain in the year 2000. You can hear the sweat. You can smell the beer. The band is worked into a complete lather, and you can understand how trying to reach the same place in a recording studio would be hard as fuck. You can’t just walk into a room and play “Reservation Girl”. You gotta be hours and miles (and maybe garage-band-years) into things. Last call has to be close. When it’s over you wring yourself out like a wet towel. Anything after it is gonna sound like muzak in an elevator.

Marah as a band never broke out of the slogging-around-the-country-in-a-van phase, despite great records, incendiary live shows, and famous fans. They ain’t alone in this. Luck plays a huge part in finding a record company willing to pay for blow and a tour bus, and the band never had any of that. Bands stay together when they can afford to stay apart.

And all of this non-fame is selfishly fine for me. Marah remains a band I want to keep to myself……a pack of fucked up kids from the Philly suburbs who could find the rock and roll the way the rest of us found fireflies. It could be just about anywhere…..on the banks of the Schuylkill River, or even in a drunken Mummers parade. Nobody knew what to do with them. Nobody knew what hole to shove them in. They didn’t listen to anybody anyway. Trying to imagine Serge and Dave Bielanko being asked to play (and to turn the volume down on) their latest #1 on Dick Clark’s Rockin’ Eve sounds like the plot for a movie that I might come up with after hitting on the same bowl that inspired “Reservation Girl”. The band left behind a few great records (may I suggest “Kids in Philly”), scattered like clues in CD bins and streaming services, and that’ll do me just fine.

Theirs is the kind of rock and roll I fell in love with. It starts in the gutter and reaches for the stars. Serge Bielanko surely had a rock and roll movie playing in his head as he scribbled all over that worksheet, and a few years later he was able to star in it. None of us dreamed of groupies and money and gold records. We dreamed of being on that stage and laying it the fuck down to a group of happily pissed punters. Those 4 chords might start a revolution. Or they might just simply send the folks home with a great buzz. Either is pretty cool.

Times are hard. Everybody is suffering from something. We get so used to dealing with our own physical and psychological aches and pains that we forget that others feel them too. I look for the fire-breaks wherever I can find them. A soft chair in front of a fireplace. A good Netflix binge. A Roddy Doyle novel. The laughter of my kids. Or rock and roll from a band that proved it all night, even when almost nobody was listening.

In a bit….

—tf

Songs That Visited Me and Decided They Wanted to Stay

Intro
In a Big Country
Found Out About You
Tutti Fruitti
Surrender
Who Knows Where the Time Goes?
Nightswimming
Fast Car
Take Five
Romeo and Juliet
Wichita Lineman
Waterfall
There She Goes
A Sort of Homecoming
Purple Rain
Nights On Broadway
Tough All Over
What Am I Doing Hangin’ ‘Round
Inside Out
Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More
America
Thirteen
I Wish
Love is Alive
Back in the High Life Again
Volunteers
The Show Goes On
Mike Collins
Fall Down
Green Grass & High Tides
Tom Sawyer
Mainstreet
Volunteers
Northern Sky