Mark Huzar has got his Tore Down House band humming like an eight cylinder engine. TDH is booked solidly through September. Working with the Not So Costley booking agency, the guitarist-singer-songwriter picked up a lot of rooms to showcase his band’s skillful handling of music by Gov’t Mule, The Allman Brothers, and The Grateful Dead. As his TDH trio became more well known throughout southern New Hampshire, Huzar worked video footage and social networking into his marketing plan.
“I try to record videos at every gig, just a snippet, and I put them on Facebook and send them out and hopefully people like it and watch it,” he said.
Tore Down House plays a lot of music that is not only hard driving but also challenging. Bar patrons might not hear a lot of three chords over a 4/4 beat. Huzar grew up listening to the Charlie Daniels Band, The Allman Brothers, and a lot of material that had jazz influences.
“It really caught my ear,” Huzar said. “When I got into jazz, I became a bit of a jazz snob and went into the fusion stuff. It came full circle to the roots-rock and roll-jazz influence that I grew up with. I wanted to emulate that with a trio sense like Gov’t Mule and Cream and the power trios. You can make a lot of noise with three guys if you really put your mind and heart into it.”
Huzar is informed by everything from Hank Williams to Lynyrd Skynyrd to Steely Dan to Miles Davis. Needless to say, Huzar and his Tore Down House trio will not be playing usual bar band clichés like “Mustang Sally” and “Brown Eyed Girl.” His eclectic set list doesn’t always go over well.
“Sometimes it doesn’t work,” Huzar conceded. “Usually, we won’t book that room again if it doesn’t work. Mostly, when we go into a place, what we hear most is ‘Oh, you guys play stuff I haven’t heard in years. This is great stuff. You play stuff no one else plays.’ And that was my whole point of this band was to go out there and play the deeper tracks and the B-sides of some of the songs that were such great songs. They might not have been number one hits, but everyone kind of knew them, and they were kind of forgotten in the bar scene.”
Huzar came to form Tore Down House after working with his original drummer John Michaud in jazz and funk bands. Huzar just said to himself that he wanted to form a trio in the mold of “Gov’t Mule and see if we could come up with some songs.” TDH just took off from there. Michaud retired a year ago and was replaced by Ryan Barrett. Bass player Dave Guilmette came on board in 2009, and has been a show piece talent of the trio ever since.
“Ryan Barrett’s a natural drummer. He played with Josh Logan for years,” Huzar said. “He’s got really great ears. He picks up things right away. The dynamics are there, and it’s a lot of fun. Guilmette “has huge ears too. He’s just right on it.”
The trio is challenged by the material they choose and that transfers to something their audiences can enjoy. “I love a great three chord song too. As long as the song’s good, I like it,” Huzar said. “But the more technical stuff just kind of catches my ear and it just interests me how someone could come up with a certain riff or a certain passing phrase through a song and chord change. It just gets to me. It invokes a feel that just kind of energizes me. I don’t know if I can put it into words. But the challenging stuff just really interests me a lot.”
Tore Down House, because of their excursions into lengthy material, can also be compared to a jam band. Playing, on one occasion, a gig at Woodstock Station in northern New Hampshire, TDH answered a Deadhead demand for some Grateful Dead songs. “We played a 20 minute version of ‘Scarlet Begonias’ and ‘Fire On The Mountain’ and the place went crazy. There’s tons of people out there who are jam band lovers and they go on the circuit to go see all these jam bands, even the Dave Matthews people. I don’t know if they go out to bars, because when they do come to see us, they’re like ‘Oh my God. I can’t believe you guys play this stuff.’ For the most part, they must just go to festivals or whatnot. So, maybe we should be doing the festival circuit.”
Huzar is also a songwriter with plenty of original material to offer. In fact, Tore Down House often get the most applause for their original songs. Huzar has CDs with his original songs included that he makes available at his shows. “People go home and they come back and they’ll request a song,” he said. “It’s just the greatest feeling to hear somebody wanting to hear something I wrote.”
Huzar’s own songs are often inspired by current events. His song “American Farmer” is about the American farming industry in which family’s are losing their century old property. Love, life, and loss are also equal motivators for his material. A man with plenty of life experience, Huzar moved out to southern New Hampshire when he was only 17.
“I came out with my friend from high school,” he said. “I was 17. I saw Hampton Beach. I said ‘That’s it. I’m moving here.’” Huzar soon changed his mind as he found Hampton Beach is a wasteland during New Hampshire’s long winters.
At an earlier point in his career, Huzar, out of necessity, had to put away his gear and start playing bass. He realized that a lot of bands had a hard time finding a bass player because most people think it’s cooler to play guitar or drums. So, during a period of bingeing on Jeff Beck’s Blow By Blow and Wired, he became a bassist.
When he’s not gigging with his Tore Down House unit, Huzar is the bass player for the Manchester-based Jeff Mrozek And The Yeah Guys, and he plays some duo gigs with Mrozek. A repairman for The Music Techs in Manchester, Huzar met Mrozek when Mrozek came in for an upgrade on his gear. “Jeff Mrozek is a great singer with a huge range,” Huzar said. “We started talking about music and he just came over, and we just hit it off. It’s a lot of fun. I get to play all my bass playing idols like John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin.”
Having been a bass player and having a slight background in drums, Huzar can play off his rhythm section with bigger ears and better feel. He can hear what goes best with what, making it easier to find his place in the sound. When he puts his musical skills and songwriting ambitions together, Huzar comes up with clever material. His most popular title is “Weatherman.” When asked what the song is about:
“The weatherman getting it wrong,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many times my plans have been ruined by me listening to the weather man. It’s my own fault for listening to the weatherman. When he says it’s gonna rain, I cancel my plans, and it doesn’t rain. If he says it’s not gonna rain, I go some place and it rains. On my motorcycle I’ve been soaked so many times, and all I’m doing is cursing the weatherman. So, I say, ‘I’m gonna go home and write a blues song about these guys.;”
Huzar believes his song became popular with local bar patrons because everybody relates to it. “It’s a humorous song, and I think it’s happened to everybody. It’s not supposed to snow today, but there’s three feet out there. The stores sell out of everything.. It’s crazy. Naming the snow storms now, it’s ridiculous.”
A couple of Huzar’s songs, “All There Is” and “Blameless,” are acoustic roots songs. He put the music to those songs after his friend and collaborator, Manchester lyricist Ann Barden, wrote the lyrics for them. “Those are songs that she wrote lyrics to, and I just put it to music and recorded it with all the instruments.”
Huzar wrote about his New Orleans experiences in his song “Crescent City.” He was conned by a street person who scammed with a trick question. “It’s a lot of fun,” he said. Huzar put music to a Barden song about a girl named “Emily” who went off on her way and got into trouble. Huzar composed his tune “For Whom The Bell Doesn’t Toll” with an Outlaws vibe in its southern rock influenced.
Huzar would like to eventually record these songs in a recording studio. Yet, there’s not a lot of money in original music, after paying the band, and he doesn’t have the capital at this point. “I would have to come up with capital to pay whoever was playing if we went out and played because most places don’t pay to hear original music, especially in New Hampshire. It’s a tough racket.”
Huzar has tried shopping his songs to other artists and once entered one in a contest, but he hasn’t heard anything back yet. “A lot of this stuff would be great, the stuff that Ann and I wrote together, to a national artist, a nice ballad. I’ve been trying to do that, but that costs money too.”
Huzar’s next step for Tore Down House doesn’t include an end game. “It’s basically a bar band that likes to rock out and play some tunes and hopefully people like it,” he said. “I shove in my originals when I can, and people seem to like those. Ultimately, I would love it if there was an original band that played all my original tunes before covers instead. I don’t know if that’s a possibility.”
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