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The only question that remains is how come a guy this talented, entertaining and full of ideas isn’t as rich and famous as, say, Prince?

—Dale Anderson (Artvoice, 1996)

Mark Freeland, one of Buffalo’s most enduring personalities of the past four decades, passed away last week. For many Freeland was as integral to Buffalo as Jimmy Griffin, Rick James, Christine Baranski, Jim Kelly or Michael Bennett. His story is worth telling for the simple fact that it reflects a great deal about our city and our lives.

There is an old expression, “the child is father to the man,” and this recommendation letter written in 1969 by an elementary school teacher about a 12-year-old named Mark Freeland forecasts much:

Mark is the most impressive individual I have ever known. He is a gifted student who is intellectually superior, not only to his peers, but to those two and three years older than he. However, his intellect is not his greatest asset. Mark is, more importantly, an individual of keen sensibilities with a remarkable sense of aesthetics. He’s acted in plays, movies, written brilliant papers, makes posters, sculpts, and he makes various handcrafts—which he displayed at the Allentown Art Festival.

Mark has a voracious appetite for books and has read, for example, Sophocles, Tolkien, and Richard Brautigan. Mark’s reading has probably been the most important factor in liberating his sensibilities.

His taste in music is all embracing. He loves the Beatles and Stones, but his special interest is lies in progressive and underground rock and he can rattle off the genealogy more groups than I could ever list. He is, then, somewhat of an armchair rock historian.

I feel very strongly that Mark is his own person, a true individual. Group pressure from his peers has not moved him to cut his hair or to abandon his books for a baseball bat. Mark has his own mind and works very hard to attain his goals.

I recommend Mark Freeland as responsible person, an intelligent, mature individual and as a brother of kindred interests.

Sincerely,

E. Douglas Pratt

English Teacher

St. Paul’s School

Mr. Pratt was right to be impressed. Between 1968 and 1973, Freeland appeared in five educational films by Fred Keller, Jr., and one film, Iceman, was shown at Cannes Film Festival in 1972. A Courier-Express news-clip from 1969, featured a photo of “Folk singers playing at youth mass” in St. Paul’s church in Kenmore; a young Mark Freeland is playing guitar. And in that same year, Freeland, age 12, appeared in the play A Thousand Clowns at the Courtyard Theatre—an auspicious beginning, to be sure.

By the time Freeland attended Kenmore West High School, his creativity was on full throttle, and Kenmore West High was fertile ground. Soon the 14-year-old Freeland was forming the progressive/theatrical band Pegasus—progressive music was hot, Woodstock music was not. Freeland was already certain that he was destined for stardom. It helped that at Kenmore West they allowed bands to play in assembly.

Freeland described the 1970s Kenmore scene in a 1996 story in the Buffalo News:

“We competed against each other with amps, not footballs. The whole school was in a band. The only ones who weren’t in bands were the people carrying the amps, or driving the vans to go put up posters,” said Freeland. “At Kenmore, kids would gather for assembly, sit down in the auditorium and watch Pegasus cover ‘Thick As a Brick’ for 45 minutes. The whole album! Absolutely perfect. That was fourth period, to us.”

Guitarist Bob Mancuso said, “It was nothing at all to go into McVan’s and see Pegasus doing this note-perfect rendition of Genesis’ ‘The Lamb Lies Down.’ Freeland would have the Peter Gabriel daisy head on, the whole bit.

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Mark Freeland performs "Alien on my Jacket" on Off-Beat Cinema

“By the end [of the decade] you’d go into the cafeteria and it’d be…maybe Bill Manspeaker [Green Jelly] sitting there wearing a cowboy uniform or a cop suit with little cap guns, but it was all essentially one vibe…everyone was just very connected.”

Bassist Billy Sheehan remembers Kenmore as a hotbed of rock competition. “It was almost like the Jets and the Sharks. Only they weren’t gangs. They were rival bands.”

There were also plenty of places for bands to play in Kenmore—school dances, park concerts and public halls. And there were lots of bars, too.

When Mark finished high school around 1975, he formed a close bond with a quixotic young man from New York City who appeared briefly in Buffalo and became the singer for a short-lived Kenmore band named Astro Boy. The two spent several months going to concerts together, always finding their way into the dressing rooms or hotel rooms of acts like the New York Dolls, Mott the Hoople, Alice Cooper, Humble Pie, Genesis with Peter Gabriel, Aerosmith, etc. During these close encounters, Freeland hungrily sucked in the creative energy of these artists and always walked away with a thousand new ideas and thousand new reasons to believe that he was just like them, just as creative and just as destined to be a world star. It was nothing less than intoxicating to be around such sublime artistic confidence. One night at McVan’s his friend did a show that involved a custom-made, four-foot, blue neon dildo, and after the show one of the Kenmore bandmates secretly smashed the neon light because, as he later admitted, the singer was getting too much attention. The next day Freeland’s friend—that was me—was kicked out of the band and left town.

Freeland was stunned at the provincialism of the Astro Boy musicians, and he dug in with even greater determination alongside the more adventurous and sophisticated members of his own band, Pegasus, writing rock operas, creating wild costumes and screen projections, and delivering elaborate performances, mostly at McVan’s on Niagara Street.

The very elaborateness and depth of Pegasus’ creativity probably doomed the band. If you’ve ever been in a band, you know what an incredible chore it is once you begin adding lights, projections, sculpted art pieces, costumes, etc. I suppose it’s quite manageable if you’ve got the time, the budget, and the large stage given to someone like Alice Cooper or Genesis or the Rolling Stones, but when you’re a destitute band playing in a little bar and trying to put on a full-tilt rock performance…well, it’s enough to drive one to drink. A lot.

By 1980 Pegasus was long gone, but an unusual thing followed. A new band, a trio called Pegasonics, made of former Pegasus players Freeland, Chuck Cavanaugh and Steve Trecasse, signed themselves to their own record label, Trelaine Records.

As Freeland told the late Tim Switala, “Chuck [Cavanaugh] made a calendar that had marked on it what you had to do, every day and every night. Chuck didn’t sleep or eat; Trelaine didn’t either. Cavanaugh told me, ‘If you do everything on this calendar, I’ll get you famous. But if you screw me up, then its your fault.’”

Switala observed that Freeland’s use of the word “famous” was decidedly confident, a confidence born from the past nine years of performing. “Those years,” wrote Switala, “not only represented a period for working towards an uncompromising degree of fame, but delivered numerous original compositions at a time when the cover song syndrome in Buffalo was reaching an apex of musical self-destruction.”

The Pegasonics’ first record release on the Trelaine label was New New York, and rock critic Kevin Hosey declared it “the best album recorded yet by any local group, and yes, that includes Talas.”

That band eventually folded as well, and the coming years saw the creation of Electroman and of Freeland’s long and relentless career with the Fems. Both of those bands are of such well known stature and local fame that I’m not going to go into detail about them, other than to point out that the Fems were as good as any punk band ever (with the exception of punk’s poet laureate Patti Smith and godfathers the New York Dolls), and I was there to watch all the originators in the 1970s in New York City. Electroman, quite simply, should have been world famous. As Billy Sheehan once told Freeland, “You might be the only musician I know that might be cooler than me…and you’re totally undiscovered.”

Over the years, Freeland created and played in so many bands and with so many musicians that it would be too challenging to adequately discuss them all: Pegasus, Pegasonics, Electroman, Erectronics, Killik, Brian One, Dolly Dew and the Weiner, Pageantry of Weens, the Fems, the Jamie Moses Band, Industry of Life Divine, Our Daughter’s Wedding and probably a lot more. He was tireless in his pursuit of music.

In a 1987 Buffalo News interview with former music critic Dale Anderson, Mark asked, “When they’re testing kids in school, which one do you think is going to score higher––the kid who spends hours working on one painting or the kid who turns out a hundred things in ten minutes?”

Anderson, observing Mark’s creative prodigiousness, concluded that there was no question in Freeland’s mind as to which is the mark of a genius.

His music transected every approach imaginable, from synthesizer-induced prog to minimalism, punk, rap, hip-hop, third world beats, blues, jazz and rock-a-billy. Mark simply loved music, all music. He loved to hear it; he loved to play it. The list of musicians he played with is also far too extensive to include here, and I hope none are offended because they’re not mentioned. I know he loved you all.

I do think there are one or two intersections worth mentioning.

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From the archives: Mark Freeland's Electroman performs "Potatoes and Corn"

In the 1980s Freeland went to New York City to play with Our Daughter’s Wedding. Joining Our Daughter’s Wedding, in my opinion, was a big mistake. They may have been living in New York City, and they may have been signed to EMI records, but it was a band of losers going nowhere who didn’t deserve to have Mark Freeland in their lineup. Instead of arriving in New York powered by a musical wave of his own creation, Mark got swallowed up by these sodpots. And while there were occasional bright spots, like meeting Psychedelic Furs saxophonist Mars Williams and recording with Japanese rock star Motoharu Sano, rather than being celebrated in New York’s trendy clubs, Freeland and ODW were more likely to be tossed out. He drank heavily and was so broke he had to collect empty bottles to buy beer. Finally, I think, his brother came and rescued him. I tell you this knowing that Freeland, more than anyone, never hesitated to speak about his vulnerabilities or even his moments of humiliation.

Freeland, who stopped drinking in 1995, said afterwards, “I apologize to people for having to see me drunk. Now when people meet me, they meet the real me. I’m not saying that every time I was drunk I got into trouble, but every time I got into trouble I was drunk.”

As Mark entered the late 1980s and 1990s, he had some remarkable successes with his music, most notably Electroman’s Adventures in the Solar System, which was produced with the help of his friend Dave Elder. It was the Buffalo News pick for Best Album of the Year, beating out Ani DiFranco’s disc Puddle Dive. Mark also had gave some stellar performances in both the Fems and Electroman, but it seemed like each show was taking more and more out of him. Although his stage shows were fun, he no longer was sending signals that he expected to be the next David Bowie. In fact, he spent a number of years playing a weekly gig on Elmwood Avenue where he quietly sat to the side and tapped percussion, usually with his eyes closed—happy just to be with some friends and making stress-fress music.

But there was a new star burning inside him. He realized that he would be able to paint until he was an old, old man, and he loved painting as much as he loved playing music. The late 1980s saw him create almost a dozen wall murals all over town, some as large at 100 feet long. He traveled to California briefly to pursue an art career, but quickly found out there is no art in California other than what God and Hollywood make. But his art was good, it was great; it was so Freeland, so original.

Mark lived by one straightforward code his entire life: If you want to do something significant, do something original, something different. Anyone he respected lived by that code, whether they were musicians like Elvis, Bowie, Hendrix, the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, the Velvet Underground, John Coltrane, the Sex Pistols, Peter Gabriel, Miles Davis or Bob Dylan, or visual artists like Dali, Van Gogh, Pollock, Seurat, Duchamp, Basquiat or Picasso. He could appreciate James Joyce and Keith Haring, as long as they confirmed his belief that to be an artist you must be original, and be original again, and then continue to be original.

Buffalo has nurtured many talented musicians who achieved fame, from Harold Arlen to Rick James, Spyro Gyra to Grover Washington, 10,000 Maniacs to Ani DiFranco, the Goo Goo Dolls to Tommy Tedesco, Billy Sheehan and many others. Were they more talented than Freeland? Not really, not if creativity is the measure. Was he more talented? It would be in poor taste to say that, and in fact Freeland was a fervent fan of many of those artists.

But the difference between them is not that difficult to understand. With the exception of Rick James, all those listed above played it safe. Yes, they worked hard, struggled and persevered, but they steadfastly remained safely within the bounds of the music industry they studied so tirelessly until they finally cracked the combination that unlocked the door to success. One might do a little tattoo here or a piercing there, a streak of color or a dye job of their perfectly calculated hairdo, but nothing too radical, nothing that might not “sell.” Freeland was incapable of behaving that way. For him it was necessary always to reach farther, to be more outrageous, to dream up the unthinkable, to surprise, to shock and to affirm relentlessly his own sense of genius. It was always about the art, the performance, the immediate fans, and never about the business. Freeland believed that someday someone would recognize his gift and take care of all the business tasks needed to propel him to stardom. “The guy who finally gets to market my brain is going to be a millionaire,” he once said.

But Freeland’s “guy” never showed up. And sadly, some of those whose success he inspired left him behind as well. For example, a 1994 interview in Xtreme Magazine asked Johnny Rzeznick of the Goo Goo Dolls about the music scene between 1979 and 1984. “Those guys,” said Johnny, “especially Mark Freeland, Kent Weber and Dave Kane. They’ve all been working so hard. Freeland kills me. He is a bigger rock star than I will ever be. I love that guy because he’s everything a rock star is supposed to be. Everything is complete excess. Those were the guys who really taught me a lot of what I know.”

But once Johnny was comfortably ensconced in Los Angeles he seemed to forget. After Johnny said publicly many times that he “really should” purchase some Freeland artwork, a message was sent to him in LA through a mutual friend that some artwork could simply be chosen and sent to him. The return message was “Okay, send it to the House of Blues” because the Goo Goo Dolls were doing a show there.

So the Albright-Knox Art Gallery packaged an enormous crate with four wonderful paintings, including a portrait of Vincent Gallo that had been an Artvoice cover, and sent them to the House of Blues in LA. Mark included a humble letter in the package thanking Johnny and laying out his strategy to get his art into the hands of some celebrities as a way of increasing interest in his work, and hopefully increasing their value. A member of R.E.M. had just recently purchased a piece. It’s a known fact that collectors attract other collectors.

Also included in the shipment was an invoice. It was never paid. At first Johnny said he never received the paintings, then it was reported he’d said he had received them but that his manager would have to take care of paying for them. Who knows what’s true? Maybe he has them, maybe he doesn’t. But even if he didn’t ever get the paintings, would it have been too much for Buffalo’s mult-platinum recording artist to say, “You know what, Mark, I never got the paintings, but why don’t you send me some others and I’ll gladly buy those.”

Even when Mark’s close friend Jon Simon helped him to get an entire room in an exhibition at the Albright-Knox’s “Rockin’ at the Knox 2005,” Mark’s brilliant show was being completely marginalized in the press, who seemed only interested in Robby Takac’s involvement in the concert/exhibition. It’s not Robby’s fault how the press behaves—in fact, Robby (and also Billy Sheehan) contributed to Freeland’s recording efforts over the years.

To his credit, Freeland never let these slights bother him as much as they bothered those who cared about him. He just moved on to the next painting. His sentiments were perhaps best expressed in a conversation with former Artvoice arts editor Elizabeth Licata. He told Licata that on Happy Days, Fonzie can be found each morning fixing the Cunningham’s family car for free. That was Fonzie’s art, according to Freeland. And “real artists,” said Freeland, “never do it for anything but an inexplicable drive to do it.”

On his 50th birthday Mark gathered a few close friends at his house. With his life drawing to a close, he decided finally to reveal to those he loved what he’d been enduring privately for so long: months of surgeries, chemotherapy and other struggles associated with cancer. It was a shock to see him, thinned to the bones, clinging to the arms of an easy chair and able to speak only in a low whisper. Friends leaned in close to hear him whisper in their ears. His eyes were remarkably bright as he surveyed the room, drinking in the emotions of the friends that surrounded him. He looked quite at peace with himself, and perhaps for the first time in his life, at peace with the fact he was not going to be a world star; for better or worse, he was going to pass away quietly in Buffalo, New York, and all that he’d done over so many years, he had done for Buffalo. And that was all right.

A few days afterward, he was able to shuffle a bit around the kitchen whispering to Carla, and he told her he realized that everything in life came down to one word: love.

Love was not something Mark Freeland ever lacked; he gave it freely and he received it from all who knew him. After he passed away in his sleep on June 14, 2007, hundreds came over the next few days to give homage to the champion for whom they had rooted for so long. Musicians, photographers, music writers, painters, fans and friends came from as far away as California and from as far in the past as Mark’s childhood years.

Yesterday I went to see Carla and picked up a small blue canvas suitcase from her—a suitcase that held the photos, news clippings, poems, music and the dreams of Mark Freeland. It was all that was left, tucked gently under my arm. Mark Freeland has gone from us forever, his fragile bones and blue eyes sunk now into the moist soil of mother earth. There will be no new Freeland songs, or performances, or paintings. We have lost someone very precious. So bury your face deep in your hands, for now is the time for tears.