More People Really Should Know About: Marc Delgado

artwork for Marc Delgado feature

The X stands for the unknown.

Marc Delgado is a man of contradictions, a musician and a poet, a recovering addict, a family man, a loner. He is also one of the best singer/songwriters in the country that you may never have heard about. He is presently braving the winter months in his Glenford, New York home, just outside of Woodstock, at work on a new studio album and a book, “The Black Socks: A book of stories & poems & other stuff that may or may not have actually happened”. The book is due out this winter but may or may not be published.

He keeps Thursdays open for livestreams from his home that are about anything and everything, a mixture of spoken word, jazz, improv, art, rock, folk music, gorilla theater, harmonies. Expect the unexpected. They are hosted and performed by MxD, who will casually announce, “The “x” stands for the unknown”.

“I have a lot of things memorized”, he states, maybe not quite certain he could come up with something on the spot. “Bits of poems, stories that I tell. I have all these things floating around in my head, and they’re kind of like skeletons of things. I mix those in between songs. When I’m playing with my band, we get very improvisational. My favorite moments with them are typically when we go into a kind of vamp or extended jam, and I’ll start saying things that I don’t know where it’s coming from. Totally unexpected, whatever. I’ll start talking and then all of a sudden, we are playing off of each other”.

Some part of his inspiration for these MxD talks he attributes to seeing Tom Waits perform an Austin City Limits concert around the time of his “Blue Valentine” album.

“He’s got those gas pumps on stage”, he said, lighting up at the memory like something that gets under your skin and won’t ever crawl out. “He comes out and you can’t even see the band. They’re in darkness, but you can hear them. He’s smoking and just talks, man, he talks for 10 minutes. And I remember being floored by that. I just thought that was the coolest thing I’d ever seen in my life”.

Delgado’s recorded output is not exactly what you would call plentiful, in quantity that is. In quality, it contains more than enough to keep you listening for hours at a time. “Wildwood Road” is his singular studio album, released in 2021, a sincere, strange and wrenching middle-age record conjured out of the depths of loss and made into a marvel. It was followed by volumes 1 & 2 of “Live at Pete’s Candy Store” in Brooklyn from 2022 (released in 2023). Most if not all of what he writes is autobiographical and quite candid. “I don’t know what isn’t,” he admits. “Even stuff that doesn’t seem like it is on the surface, is anyway.” Elaborations on the material used in his songs can be read on his website blog.

You find out about songwriters in so many different ways, usually through reading a review or word of mouth. In Delgado’s case, it was in the course of researching a story on another singer/songwriter, Mickelson, who had made mention of him on his Bandcamp page. Taking a little detour that turned into an Interstate closure, I found Delgado’s website and became immersed in the music, then the pathos and humor of his blog entries.

“He’s a character”, Delgado remarked with a wry grin. “We bonded almost immediately, me and Scott. I met him in New York City, and we were playing at this kind of terrible venue, super noisy, and I can’t remember which one of us went first, but we certainly hit it off. I think we have a similar story in that the drugs almost killed us”.

Delgado was born in 1969 and raised in Fresno, California, which was a poor, segregated city in the 70s with a dark history of racism. In his expressive manner, he talked about being scared by the savagery of the school playground. He wasn’t a tough kid and had a flair for the arts, which got him regularly taking a beating. Even the girls scared him until he found out drinking and drugs made him feel unafraid, and that helped him to have a string of girlfriends.

Where was that fear coming from? Usually, it’s the parents and Delgado’s blog seconded that assumption. I wanted to skip over all the teenage angst to burrow a little deeper into his knotty relationship with his parents. Having my own parental version of opposites attract until they repel, it was irresistible.

“My dad was a sheriff”, he pronounced. “He was a really disciplined guy, strict. And my mom was the opposite. She had her own problems. She wasn’t a drug addict, but she was overweight. So, addiction is essentially in my brain along with low self-esteem”.

In a song from his unfinished new record, ‘Bring Me the Head of the Lapwing’, Delgado is trying to deal with the self-doubt that has been his dark passenger, gnawing at his psyche, a parting gift from a destructive childhood. “It’s hard to rest with a fire in the nest & the dark that grows darker inside your chest. So you breathe, breathe. “You’ll notice in the final verse of that song I say, Mother, when you said you can’t change, I turned my head and walked away”. So, I’m talking to her at the end of that song, and I feel like she keeps creeping into the narrative these days more than I’d like”.

He read about the mythology of the lapwing, a large oversized bird that was held sacred by this uncontacted primitive island tribe. In times of war, the way to bring peace to the village was to care for these birds and their eggs. “I remember that really struck me because I was ruminating on the nature of violence, the nature of evil. There had been a quick succession of school shootings, and I was just feeling overwhelmed and sad. Just thinking about that bird and how we can’t even protect our children. Where does that come from? That’s the voice of society saying, bring me the head of the lapwing. They don’t want to have anything to do with peace. You know what I mean? It’s like that’s off the table”.

Another song that will be on the record references an old frenemy. Taking drugs has been a recurring theme in Delgado’s music, and this time it’s the innocent sounding ‘Angel Dust’. Peter Pan famously said, “All it takes is faith, trust, and a little bit of angel dust”. Well, maybe it was pixie dust. Same difference. “That’s such a versatile phrase”, Delgado intimated. “Angel dust could mean all these different things, but I love that it’s first and foremost about a drug (PCP) that was the only one I took that I immediately regretted. It was the most awful experience I’ve ever had”.

His daughter, Mary, is woven into the narrative, which at first glance seems troubling. “I have a kid who is eight, and I’m old (55). It’s wild that you get to relive your childhood through them, and you try to patch up all the trauma, all the wounds you felt”.

Delgado sung about dust first on “Wildwood”, although a different kind on a beautifully fingerpicked song, ‘We Drove Out Through The Dust’.  “From dust we came, to dust we shall return”, is a line often quoted at funerals. He is driving out to Fowler, California where his mother is buried. Many of the tracks on the album have their setting in the Golden State. He has written many extra verses to the song and plays them in live shows, joking that it’s about all the places in California where he was arrested. But it’s really a rebuke of Horace Greeley’s remark about American expansion, “Go West, young man”.

“The West is supposed to be the answer, right?” he asked rhetorically. “That’s where you’re going to find gold. You’re going to get some sun and live among the movie stars. The Land of Promise. For me, California has a dark undercurrent, and I’ve fully experienced it. It’s a false promise. I mean, I guess those things are there, but more than anything there’s a lot of trickery. There’s a darkness I’ve felt that is very hard to get away from. I had to get out of Fresno, out of California, so I headed East, kind of the opposite of Scott (Mickelson)”.

It was like the old high school math problem about the two trains, rewritten as: If one drug addict left California on a train going 65 miles an hour, and another addict left New York going the same speed, maybe slightly less crazy, who overdoses first? “Yeah, except in our case it was like one train was on uppers and the other one on downers”.

Liz Phair also sang about leaving California by using the old saw about a guy walking into a bar. “Okay, this guy walks into a bar, No, I’m just, I’m just fuckin’ with you. I’m kiddin’. Na, there’s this, this young bull and this old bull, And they’re standin’ on top of a hill”. It’s about all the politicians and celebrities who are fake and will fuck you over as soon as look at you. After moving all over the state, Delgado wound up in San Diego where he remained for 10 years until the drugs snapped his sanity like a breadstick and he got sober. “That’s where I met the woman who would become my wife three or four years later. She hated California, so we left it behind and headed East. Wound up living in this tiny one room cabin in the woods near Woodstock”.

Sometimes Delgado plays shows at this little bookshop in the town he calls home now. He likes to recite poems off the cuff during performances. One of them the shop owner thought was a little strong on the dark side. It was to introduce his song, ‘The Wild Dogs of the Central Valley’.

“I was living in Fresno. My mother had just died, and I had a monster drug habit, just killing myself. And I was in a bad place, one of the worst times of my life. I remember there was a lot of death and violence in Fresno. At the end of the song, I have that whole narrative where I talk about Earl the Pearl (not the seventies NY Knicks basketball star), who was a street guy we knew. I don’t know if he was actually ever murdered or anything. No one knew what happened to him, so I kind of made that part up. But the woman I mentioned, Kimber Reynolds, she was murdered at the Tower Theater in the Tower District where we hung out. She was shot in the head by this biker who was out on parole. He hadn’t been out of prison but a few days, and he killed her while she struggled to hold on to her purse”.

It was one of the shootings that led to the “Three Strikes and You’re Out” law. Proposition 66 in the end failed to pass. Instead, California shop owners got saddled with Proposition 47, which basically allowed criminals to steal up to $950 before they could be arrested and charged. Delgado sung about another murder in the song. It had to do with a woman who had a bookstore in her house. Again, attempted robbery became fatal.

“Kimber’s father, Mike Reynolds, went totally insane”, Delgado said, remembering the man’s volcanic reaction. “I went to school with her brothers. To me, it’s symbol of the corruption in Fresno, the drugs and the violence. There’s a darkness there that is pervasive. When I go back to visit, it’s like that darkness is alive. I can feel it like it knows I’m coming. It’s living, breathing evil, and it had a hold on me. That’s what the tune is all about”.

artwork for Marc Delgado featureDelgado has this thing for song titles, as in he likes to write them down as they come into his head. The actual songs may or may not come later. ‘The Ballad of Dope and Coke’ is one example. First, he wrote a poem based on the title and then developed this elaborate fingerpicking instrumental that was basically too difficult to play. But his drummer, Justin Tracy, loved it and convinced him it was worth toughing it out. “We came up with this crazy strumming pattern, something like Guided by Voices, then put some of the lines from the poem over it. Part 2 is the instrumental that still has never been recorded”.

‘January’ is another new track that Delgado cut with his friend Todd Nelson’s Century Band and a jazz pianist he met one night while playing the basement of a club in NYC. Don Klug was playing upstairs and heard Delgado during a break, so he went downstairs to listen and the men became friends. Having recently lost their fathers was something they had in common. Klug sent Delgado a demo of a tune he had written.  “I took the demo to my guys in the band”, he recalled, “and told them this guy wants to collaborate. They were okay with that, so we ended up rewriting the lyrics and shining it up a bit musically. Then he came up here and we recorded it in a day. I mean, the song was about winter and missing someone, and I certainly could relate”.

His pitch-black humor can be so engaging, and there’s a striking sense of urgent intimacy scattered across songs like ‘Joanie, the Queen of Coming and Going.’ It turns out she’s many women, but let him tell the story.

“She’s basically a composite; I think is the right word. When I lived in Fresno and Sacramento, and even in San Diego, I spent a lot of time with prostitutes and Joanie is based on one in particular, mostly. But she’s kind of a blend of a bunch of ’em, because I ended up living with several. I’d kind of go from here to there, living in and out of motel rooms with them for a few weeks, and then I’d move on. But she represents all of them to me. I always thought, how in the world am I ever going to be able to talk about this kind of stuff? I thought it was an unapproachable subject, but the truth of it is that I really loved them and they loved me. In retrospect, I feel like these women were certainly more dignified and more human than I was at the time. Really. I feel like if it wasn’t for them, I might’ve been killed. They showed me some decency, and they showed me love. So, Joanie is a character I continue to write about, and I just find it endlessly fascinating”.

Kate was one of the women he met in Sacramento while trying to get clean. “We were engaged until I let the demon out of the box”. She makes an appearance in the medley, ‘Dear Kate/Ashes to Ashes’. He started using again two weeks before the wedding, and she called it off. “That’s when things really spiraled out of control. Major Tom was wrong It’s not lonely out in space When your friends are gone. You’re in a better place. “I had a lot of companions, all these street people. My house became this kind of carnival tent. with strange people coming and going, and I got really heavy into meth back then. I’d be up for days and days. I always said Major Tom was this great fictional junkie”.

There’s a new song about death, which Delgado admits to being unable to stop thinking about lately. It’s called, to the point, ‘You Can’t Stop Thinking About Your Own Death’, and it captures your attention like a car crash that’s impossible to look away from. ‘The Secret Underground Railroad to Freedom’ is another destined for the new album, and here Delgado grumbles that I’m hearing all the new stuff before it’s out. Of course, he sent me the demos and knows it. Just being a wise guy.

Anyway, Delgado read Colson Whitehead’s book – “The Underground Railroad” – and thought the fantastical nature of the railroad was fabulous. Instead of an underground network of people called a railroad, in the book there is an actual railroad underground.

“The protagonist in the book is a woman,” he said, while it felt as he was drifting back into the novel. “The first time she gets free, she’s walking around this city, noticing everything, but she is seeing it all with fresh eyes. I mean, I’ve certainly never been oppressed in that way, but it occurred to me that we’re all just trying to get free. In wrestling with this problem of death and thinking about it all the time, I’m trying to come to terms with it. I don’t want to be afraid of it. I’m sick of being in fear of something that’s going to happen. There’s nothing I can do about it. Then, it occurred to me that maybe it’s a great thing, maybe death is the best part of life, maybe that’s when we’re truly free. We’re free of this body, of all this bullshit, and maybe it’ll be this wonderful experience. And so, I took the metaphor a little bit further by saying the secret underground railroad to freedom is death. And if I think about it that way, then I don’t have to feel so scared”.

It’s no grand revelation that Delgado has an obsession with death, and that if only one could be sure there is an afterlife, well, it wouldn’t be so frightening. That puts him in lockstep with at least 90 percent of the population, although there are degrees. His paternal grandfather came over from Spain and had a farm in Fresno. He shot himself one day. His dad worked on the farm picking grapes, and he used to threaten to kill himself. He also threatened to kill his son once by putting a gun to his head. He didn’t blame his father, said he deserved it.

“Being a cop, my dad always carried a gun, and that day he pointed it at me and said‘, ‘I should shoot you and then fucking shoot myself because I can’t do this anymore’. There has been a lot of pain with our male lineage. No one knows why my grandfather killed himself. No note was left. Never said a word to anyone”.

The title of Delgado’s book refers to the black socks in the drawer where his grandfather kept the gun. He loves the imagery. From having his dad point a pistol between his eyes to being afraid when his mother smiled, that qualifies as an atypical upbringing. It’s no wonder Delgado wrote a song about being “Asleep in a Cave.’ Now I know it’s time, it’s time, it’s time …. To quit this ruined verse we rehearsed …. We never made it rhyme”. It’s really a lack of protection, about finding the balance between emotional breakdown and the primal need for deep connection.

“Well, I think I’m probably hard to reach”, said Delgado, mumbling through the self-referential conclusion. “I can be a very cold or distant person. I live inside of my head, and I don’t mean to be like that but I think I am. I’m a difficult person to live with”.

With love and relationship being such a high-risk, high-reward venture, it poses taxing moral dilemmas, and Delgado finds himself finally committing, yet still looking back. He finishes the “The Live at Pete’s Candy Store” album with a cover of Daniel Johnston’s True Love Will Find You in the End.’

“The first time I ever performed that song”, he recalled, “was at a show here in Woodstock with my band. At the end, I said I want you guys to leave the stage, I’m going to play one more. The audacity, right? But I did and it was great. Then the next week he (Johnston) died. Like, thanks for ruining my song, dude. I’m checking out. I still play it a lot, especially after hearing a bunch of my songs in a row, which starts to get a little hopeless, I want to play something promising”.

Delgado wrote ‘The Cautionary Tale of Richard Manuel’ possibly as a reminder, like a string knotted around your index finger, after the Canadian songwriter died, sadly committing suicide after years of struggling with addiction. You have the impression that the lyrics are the result of a stark, vulnerable conversation between two songwriters with similar issues.

“He was such a beautiful musician. I loved his voice, the music he wrote, the way he sang”, Delgado remarked without hesitation. “He had this kind of otherworldly talent and, by all accounts, squandered it. You hear he wasn’t that great a guy to be around, and I get that. I know what drugs and alcohol can do to a person. I mean, he was with this amazing group of musicians making music as good as you’d hear anywhere, and he couldn’t keep his shit together”.

But Manuel wasn’t the only member of the Band whose act was far from together. Danko and Helm were such junkies that from what you can read, Robbie Robertson just couldn’t handle the unpredictable behavior any longer. Of course, Delgado finds the parallels to his own life experiences. He admits that he’s still learning to be clean, yet the patterns are always repeating, a phrase heard in the song by the band Runner, ‘Ur Name on a Grain of Rice’, suggesting that, even in small doses, resolve weighs a ton.

“I’m not even in the same town as Richard Manuel”, Delgado declares (although actually he’s pretty close to West Saugerties). ‘Time and again, I’d relapse, and again, and again. People would ask, why do you keep doing that? And I would say, I don’t know. It was such a lame answer, but the truth is, I couldn’t figure it out. It must have been something else. Because I was depressed, or I was afraid or on and on. But it was simply because I was a drug addict, and that’s why I would just fucking blow my life up over and over again. And with Richard, it was the same thing. It doesn’t matter what you got going on, man. It’ll take everything from you. In the song, the refrain is, I can’t explain what comes over me‘.

But it gets worse, or actually better in the sense that one of Delgado’s best songs is ‘Mr. Sorrow Strikes Again’.  This is what could be playing in the waiting room of purgatory, a swarming, tranquil ambience with an encroaching divinity that never fully arrives, but you never stop sensing its closeness. I ask if Mr. Sorrow is him, and the answer comes that he’s him and he’s not him. ‘I know that it’s you behind the pyre. Yes, you… & the things that you sell’.

“Well, I mean, he’s a demon. He’s been my constant companion for years”, Delgado asserted as factually as one would say Jesus Christ is my Lord and savior. “I would dream about him and sometimes he appeared as a man in a striped suit with the head of a ram. He would come in different forms but always in stripes. And he would never leave, especially when I lived in Sacramento after Kate left me and I went to the dark side. He would tell me how things were going to go from now on and what to do”.

The only question left to ask: Is he gone now? “He has been gone for a while”, Delgado replies, though you sense that it may be temporary. “There are other ones around, though, maybe his minions. But they don’t have the sway that he did”.

Addiction is hard to fight. You can get sober, stay clean for decades, but there is no cure. Mr. Sorrow may go away, but he leaves his calling card in case you get lonely. But you can learn to keep him at bay by writing, playing music, spending quality time with your family. The ways I’ve changed and all the ways I’ve stayed the same. But fear, it lingers. “I’ll be alright again, Once you’re by my side”.

But that’s a lie and Delgado knows it. And as long as he continues to know that, he’ll be able to finish a marvelous new record. If you’ve heard his previous recorded output, slim though it may be, you would have no doubts that this is absolutely one songwriter more people really should know about.

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JS DeGaetano

Marc is an unsung genius. It truly is a crime that he is not a household name. But in my household he is revered.