I read today that Alberto Fujimori, former President of Peru, was just convicted of abuse of power, the first in what should be a string of convictions. But that just reminded me of my dear friend Mark Harp, who in his final years was the self-styled King of Peru. In fact, nearly every day something reminds me of Mark; just a few days ago he figured in my post on Vigil. I met Mark when I was 17, a freshman in college. The campus radio station, WJHU, had a marvelously liberal policy regarding on-air staff: you didn't have to be a student, or even affiliated with the university at all! Mark was a so-called "community member" of the radio station. I got to know him when I graduated from the 3-6 AM timeslot into 1-3 AM; he came on after me. He scared me a bit at first, because he was a big, ugly guy. But he was incredibly friendly and his enthusiasm for music was unbounded. Every week he brought a mind-blowing case of records into the studio with him, and I would often stick around for an hour or two just to hear them, and what he did with them. Mark's ecumenical taste in music opened my eyes to so much that I had ignored until then, so he is probably more responsible than anyone else for broadening my own musical world. Mark was also a musician, and was the driving force behind Baltimore's first (?) post-punk band, Null Set. That was slightly before my time, but for a first-hand account of the Null Set years, see Pam Purdy's remembrance in the Baltimore City Paper. For this post I'm going to skip ahead to 1988, when Mark and his musical partner Mike DeJong wrote a song about a guy they met in Frederick, Maryland. They took a trip from Baltimore to the central Maryland town one day and were surprised to find "weird" records in the record store (Mother's) at the Francis Scott Key Mall (a.k.a. The New Mall). They met the guy responsible for stocking the weird records, Jason, and they became friends instantly. Mark and Mike wrote a song about Jason in classic call-and-response format: Mike makes statements about Jason, and then Mark qualifies them (and for you linguists and cultural anthropologists, Mark has the finest Baltimore accent ever recorded):
What makes this song significant to me is that, coincidentally, I already knew Jason through a completely different route: he was the housemate of my girlfriend's brother (yet another record-selling dude). In 1991 there was a big multi-band show at the Lithuanian Hall, featuring several of Mark's bands and his friends' bands, a remarkable gathering of Weird Baltimorea. Jason was there as a member of Mark's "Timmy" project, and it was there that I met Jason's wife for the first time. A little over eleven years later, she became my wife! (And with no hard feelings.) Mark died in December 2004; Jason still sells records as a co-owner of The True Vine; GF's brother still sells records and now blogs here on Vox as Platters That Matter Records; I no longer sell records and am thankful for that every day; and Mrs. Veneer takes wonderful care of me and our assortment of children, for which I am also thankful every day, and which in some sense I owe to Mark, whom I will never forget.
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