Live at the Belly Up: B-Side Players, Maren Parusel (Belly Up Productions, Peaks and Valleys Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS-TV, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, April 28) my husband Charles and I watched a KPBS Live at the Belly Up rerun from ten years ago (2013) featuring the B-Side Players and Maren Parusel. The B-Side Players were founded in 1994 and are still together after nearly 30 years – their Web site says they’ve been making “Music for the People Since 1994” – and the description of their music on the site (https://thebsideplayers.com/about/) says it’s a fusion of many different rhythms, mostly Latin American. I have a personal connection to the B-Side Players – or at least the edition seen and heard here – because the keyboard player was Fabio A. Rojas, whom I featured as a cover boy on one of the last issues of Zenger’s Newsmagazine (https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2012/01/fabio-rojas.html) mainly because I’d run into him as a volunteer for Activist San Diego and he was exactly what I was always looking for in a cover story: a quite attractive young person who was also intellectually interesting enough to supply material for a compelling interview.

On this Live at the Belly Up appearance from 2013, the B-Side Players performed five songs in the first half-hour of the show, two in English and three in Spanish. The English ones were “Rocksteady Boogaloo” (which seemed to draw largely on Jamaican music, particularly the intermediate style, actually called “rock steady,” which came between ska and reggae) and “Sweet Good Miss ‘U Lovin’,” which featured a particularly nice tenor sax solo by Regan Branch, which sounded like what John Coltrane would have if he’d remained a rhythm-and-blues musician instead of going after a career in jazz. Frontman Karlos Paez (who did all the lead vocals and also occasionally doubled on trumpet) introduced “Sweet Good Miss ‘U Lovin’” as the group’s country song, and while it doesn’t sound much like country music it does indicate that the B-Side Players can do slow romantic ballads as well as hard-driving danceable rhythm songs. The three songs in Spanish were “El Mar y la Esperanza” (the KPBS chyron got the last word wrong as “Esteranza,” but Paez was clearly singing “Esperanza” – “hope”), “Calavera Negra” (which Charles, who knows conversational Spanish which I don’t, told me means “Black Skull,” Paez’s way of saying that so many different people of color have been part of his ancestry that his skull is basically black) and “Todo Tiene Su Final.”

Maren Parusel was actually more fascinating, at least to me: she was born in Tübingen, Germany and came to the U.S. in the late 2000’s, pursuing a career in indie rock. Alas, I can’t find a Google search entry on her later than November 2015 so it’s a bit of a mystery exactly what she’s doing now, but I’d like to find out because her music is quite good and a convincing evocation of 1980’s pop-rock. Basically Parusel struck me as Siouxsie meets Nena (the fellow German who had an international hit in 1983 with the great anti-nuclear war song “99 Red Balloons”), and she’s also a multi-instrumentalist. For her opening song, “Ordinary Day,” she played a red electronic keyboard instrument that sounded like an electric organ, though she carried her white electric guitar and wore it behind her back. For her second song, “Castle in the Sky,” she began on a Korg synthesizer but then set it to repeat her part on an endless loop while she got out her guitar and played that. For the rest of the evening she mostly played guitar on “You Better Run,” “Kiss You,” “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Me Now,” and “Artificial,” though she reverted to the synthesizer on “Tight Rope Walker,” the title song of her second full-length album. Just before she recorded Tight Rope Walker Parusel lost all her equipment to thieves, and she used the crisis to revamp her sound and make it more synth-driven. Alas, she doesn’t seem to have recorded anything since 2012 and, as I noted above, there are no Google search entries for her since 2015 (when she put up a tweet that she was recording in the home studio of former Door Robbie Krieger – not the first member of rock royalty who’d helped her; her debut EP was inspired by a summer she spent at the home of T. Rex founder Marc Bolan’s son Rolan), so I have no idea what she’s doing now, but if talent will out (and if she’s still alive) she’ll undoubtedly be heard from some more.