Crawdaddy! The Magazine of Rock

What happens when life doesn’t turn out quite the way you’d planned? Do you give up and go home? If you’re Serge and Dave Bielanko of Marah, you do what you have to do to keep your dream alive, and sometimes it’s not pretty. Like most touring bands, they’ve seen their share of struggle and hardship, broken down vans and run-ins with the law. But unlike a lot of their contemporaries, they’re in it for the long haul. For the Bielankos, quitting isn’t an option.

The brothers hail from Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, an old mill town nestled in the suburbs of Philadelphia on the banks of the Schuylkill River. It’s a hardscrabble community, not the sort of place you stick around for very long if you’re an ambitious kid with talent and determination. And so, not long after finishing high school, they moved to Philly and started Marah. Twelve years, several lineup changes, and five albums later they’re still out there plugging away, achieving minimal airplay or record sales but garnering the staunch support of critics and a small but intensely loyal fan base that treat each show as if it were a family reunion.

Indeed, going to your first Marah show is strangely akin to meeting your fiancé’s family for the first time—you’re not quite sure if this tight-knit bunch will like you no matter how much you may love the band. But Marah fans, like the band itself, are an unpretentious sort, and they accept you as one of their own whether you’ve seen the band once or 50 times, whether you are a longtime fan or neophyte. These people don’t care if you know this obscure b-side or that unreleased studio outtake. They love this music and these musicians so much that they are thrilled to find someone who cares about them as much as they do. And in times like these, when live music competes with video games and iPhones for our attention, that’s no small thing.

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