Breaking the Fourth Wall with Mark Webb Jr. (Feature Story)

There it was – that damned peach-shaped, pale orange painted water tower glaring at me from just above the tree line.  The fictional Francis Underwood, the eminent and devious politician from the Netflix Original House of Cards had most recently made it famous, or infamous perhaps. Driving through Gaffney, South Carolina on the hottest day, of the hottest week, of the hottest month of last summer, through what seemed like endless highway construction, it was, in fact, near impossible to miss.  It furiously seized my focus and at once conscripted me into the ranks of the other distracted drivers on the highway likely thinking the same thing. I resisted the urge to pay homage with a solo performance of my inner-thoughts about the grotesque monument-of-sorts, my own breaking-of-the-fourth wall as it’s called in theater and film.  But much like the South in recent years, I was confronted with reconsidering the types of people, real or fictional, that deserve such an honor. So, I just irritably drove on by without uttering another syllable, leaving it the distance, a menacing figure of fruit from the disillusioned past shrinking in my rear-view mirror.  

I was in pursuit of something much more elusive than a graphic water tower, anyway.  My journey south from Fredericksburg, Virginia, or that conglomerate of commuter cities some just call “NOVA,” was in anxious search for country music with a classic sound and an authentic message about the human experience.  Some might say I was asking for too much from today’s country music scene, but I found just what I was looking for on down the road in Greenville, South Carolina.  

A month or so before, Andrew Sergent, the owner-operator of Gold Ship Records, an independent record label in Bristol, Tennessee, introduced me to an Americana artist from his label named Mark Webb, Jr.  Mark had just released his new record, Smoke Wine Banter, in April of 2019 and Sergent invited me to come see Mark play live in Greenville.  Impressed with Mark’s work after a few spins of his latest album and a quick review of his older work, I hit the road south on a humid summer Sunday in July.  

We arrived in time to take a tourist’s glimpse of Downtown Greenville.  I had noticed earlier in my quick Google search to find the best taco joint in town the #yeahthatgreenville hashtag all over social media.  Mark later told me that while he was growing up in the area, people really didn’t visit downtown very often at all. “There was really nothing there – unless you needed to visit Sears,” he said.  “But in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the city decided to turn things around and make it the place to be.” He went on to say that when locals suggested that people needed to visit Greenville, the common response to their puzzled looks and the bad-mannered question that followed, “Greenville, South Carolina?” was simply “Yeah, that Greenville.” – thus the catchy hashtag.  Walking the downtown tourism track in the afternoon shade of the tree-lined sidewalks, amongst the crowds of the young and old alike cheerfully congregated at ice cream shops and wine bars, Greenville did, indeed, seem like the place to be.    

I’ll admit, when I heard that an up-and-coming country music artist was a Greenville native, Easley to be exact, my own response had been crudely, “Greenville? South Carolina?”  But Mark has been making a name for himself across music genres and across the country for a while now. His EP titled Home, released in 2016, made No Depression’s “Rookies on the Rise” list.  He co-wrote Ted Russell Kamp’s recently released song “Heart Under Pressure,” a song listed as one of the “10 Best Country and Americana Songs to Hear Now” by Rolling Stone in May 2019.  He’s even recently collaborated on the track “Open My Eyes” with Chris Carrabba of Dashboard Confessional. His latest album Smoke Wine Banter is also gaining momentum.  Although he’s a self-proclaimed recluse by nature, his songs certainly get around. 

The summer sun still beamed  vigorously through the tinted front windows of the Radio Room when I arrived a little too early for the show.  The venue is a hot spot for local and national talent and a leader in supporting the live music scene in the city.  The work of local artists and classic record covers adorn the walls. There’s a mural across from the restroom doors with likenesses of Dimebag Darrell, Rob Zombie, David Bowie, and Kiss.  They sell souvenir shirts that simply read, “I WENT TO THE RADIO ROOM BEFORE THEY HAD WINDOWS” for their loyal patrons. An old IBM PC monitor from the early 1980s with a neon smiley face painted on the screen and the phrase “Ok Computer” cleverly written in sharpie across the frame is the venue’s modern art masterpiece.  All and all, it’s exactly the kind of place I would want to spend my time.  

The heat and light blaring through the front windows caused me and the other early birds to writhe restlessly in our chairs, but the local tapped craft beers helped to calm us all down as the sun sank across the street.  In the last remnants of evening sun, the man I was looking for walked in the bar-side and released a calming sigh indicating some relief from the exasperating heat outside. He had the hint of an emerging mustache just noticeably thicker than his five o’clock shadow.  He sported a baseball cap, sneakers, and a brilliant red Hawaiian print button-up shirt for now. The tattoos on his forearms led down to his wedding band. He had renounced the stereotypical country-classic Cadillacs or lifted pick-up trucks of the current country-radio scene for the Honda Fit nicknamed “Fitty Cent” he pulled up in.  When he took the stage later, he’d changed into Texas-style cowboy hat, light-washed Levi’s, and snake print cowboy boots that would make even Little Jimmy Dickens blush. But the Hawaiian print shirt stayed on. He’s a modern cowboy for the modern age and he’s exactly what the world needs. “You gotta have something to catch people’s attention in a live setting, to be funny, to draw them in,” Mark later told me.  With his contagious personality and superb songwriting, he certainly has not trouble with that intention.  

In live music performance, the difference between a good show and a great show is the storytelling, both in the songs and between the songs, and storytelling is Mark’s business.  People dawdle in dive bars on a Sunday evening for a number of different reasons and one of those reasons is not always to listen to live music.  The crowd was small that night in Greenville, maybe forty people and Mark opened for another up-and-coming country act, Porter Union, a duo out of Springfield, Missouri.  As Mark took the stage, a few eager fans had already filled the first couple of rows while others began to twist to attention from their bar seats and from the corner couches hidden in the dim venue lights.  I lingered in the back, partly to gauge the sound and partly to gauge the crowd. Before the song “Hangin’ On,” he announced the crowd with a sly grin, “This song is about the first time I met my wife…and none of it’s true!”  And just like that, he’s had them. By the time he was midway through the chorus of “Then You Find Love,” the bar-side has nearly emptied, the last of the quiet chatter has been muted, the glow from the last few lit phone screens has disappeared, and the audience belonged to him now.  If the tell of a true artist is in whether or not they can inspire attention, then Mark is truly a master of his craft.

But even artists need inspiration and Mark finds his in his everyday life, perhaps one of the reasons his songs resonate so well with people.  He later told me in a late-night chat after the show that the idea for the song he co-wrote with Kamp came from a roadside billboard for a heart clinic he saw while sitting in traffic.  The song “Lucy” was inspired by a down-on-her-luck local woman he remembered from his childhood that often visited his parents’ store in Easley. She had suffered from drug addiction and was murdered as was the main persona in Mark’s song.  But “Lucy” is much more dynamic than just a simple retelling. “So, part of being a writer is being able to take something maybe you heard somewhere, an overheard conversation or an idea, and create a story just because you want to write,” Mark said.  “I just imagined – I don’t know what it’s like to grow up during the Vietnam Era like her, but I know what it was like to grow up in the aftermath of 9/11 – what if I knew her from school and I saw this happen to her?  And so, I wrote a song.”    

Mark is as humble as he is genuine.  “My favorite thing about music is writing songs.  I started playing guitar when I was in high school, and the only reason I started playing guitar was to write songs…not to be a shredding guitar player.”   He wants to hear a good story as much as he wants to write one in a song. “It gives me a unique perspective on songs because my focus is not the music at first.  So, I like all kinds of music because a good song is a good song,” he said. He likes all kinds of good stories, too. Andrew and I told old “war stories” from a past life over a few beers while Mark listened after the interview, his attentive mind weeding out the interesting from the routine.  He was at once in leisure and at work. He got some laughs out of two loosened-up dear friends but no good song ideas that night.

The bar neared closing time.  The overhead lights came on, but we were still too deep in conversation to notice.  I told him how eerily relatable I think the song is to our generation, that I can remember parents of friends, and then friends, suddenly going off to war after 9/11 and the impact that had on them and the rest of their lives.  We talked about how fewer and fewer of us can say we don’t know someone who has fallen victim to the opioid crisis down here in the South or up in NOVA or along the Appalachian Mountains that had connected us that night. We had a bit of a bonding moment when we realize we were both in tenth grade English class when the planes slammed into the Twin Towers.  We watched the second plane crash into the second tower on television from the same grade-school style desks. Even though we were a couple hundred miles and two states apart, we had a shared experience, one that he has brought to life for both of us in “Lucy.” The song has a calming rhythm, but the lyrics are somber. The emotional consequences of catastrophic loss are on full display when Mark sings: “Then her daddy got called away and died at war.  Lucy spent the rest of her life not knowing what to fight for.” But his delivery gives the listener a sense of sanctuary, like listening to a wise elder speak cautionary tales from his front porch to anyone who will listen and with a lifetime of lessons learned to back him up. 

And that’s what Mark’s live performances really are, a closeness, a moment in time when the rest of the audience disappears and the storyteller on stage is suddenly speaking directly to you.  In a song, a chorus, a verse, or even just a line, he breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the heart and mind of each audience member. I saw it happen in real-time from the back of the Radio Room.  Some in the audience may not have been expecting it, but the odds are they’ll never forget it.