Local rapper commits to vinyl, live shows

By JIM TRAGESER - Staff Writer | Wednesday, September 3, 2008 12:16 PM PDT ∞

Not that he recommends it as a career move appropriate for everyone, but for Vista rapper Mark My Words, working overnight at a gas station led to his burgeoning success in music.

The rapper, whose given name is Mark Simmers, said he'd been freestyling with his friends for a while in his late teens before he began taking it seriously.

"I started writing it down out of boredom working the graveyard shifts at gas stations," he remembered, laughing.

Simmers grew up in Oceanside, attending El Camino and Carlsbad high schools before getting his GED and enrolling at MiraCosta College. It was at MiraCosta that the performance bug first bit.

"I started working with my buddy Chris, who goes by Y-TEST, and I still work with him today. We did kind of a lunchtime show in the cafeteria at MiraCosta. That was kind of weird ---- it wasn't a show environment. It was people eating lunch, and they had a big sound system.

"That one went really well. We got good feedback from the audience and met some people at that show that we still work with today."

But Simmers said he thought of the music as more of a lark then.

"I was very inexperienced and didn't take it seriously."

For the last four years, he's been working with DJ Sinn (Jacob Dutaut). And Thursday night at the Jumping Turtle in San Marcos, the two men ---- performing as Nature of the Beast ---- will be issuing their first full-fledged CD.

"The is the first one I've actually bar-coded and shrink-wrapped at this scale," he said of "Homeland Security."

"I've done maybe 10 others that were just a CD-R (home-made CD) that we kind of cut, or we've done the slim cases before and I've put them in Lou's Records.

"This would be the one you would look back and see as our first album. This is all us. We had to eat Top Ramen and scrape through sometimes. We're doing this whole show by ourselves."

In addition to the CD, Simmers and Dutaut also released the album on vinyl.

"There's not a lot of people who do it, so it opened a lot of doors. To put a piece of vinyl in someone's hands shows them how serious we are."

Interestingly, this will be the first show that Mark My Words and DJ Sinn (Simmers and Dutaut) have done in a while. Simmers said they'd been in a previous project, but grew tired of only playing live and never recording.

"We came together and made some songs, and we decided the best way was to get out there and do some shows. We were always busy doing shows, so we never put the time in the studio. We got burned out, and nothing to show for it.

"DJ Sinn and I decided to take a step back and get a product in hand, then do it 100 percent in the public."

With the CD (and LP) done, Mark My Words and DJ Sinn are looking to play out more.

But echoing the statements made by other local hip-hop acts, Simmers said it can be a tough sell getting local clubs to book such acts.

"It's hard to find venues that want to book hip-hop. The people who know hip-hop around here, it's a strong community within, it's just that some of the people outside the community don't want to help as much as we'd like."

Fear of gang involvement scares many club owners away, Simmers said.

"If you're doing gangsta rap, then your target audience is going to be gang members. But in underground hip-hop, there's so many different types. For the most part, everybody comes for the music, and is pretty respectful of the art form."

Nature of the Beast (Mark My Words and DJ Sinn), with Qwel, Y-TEST, DJ Arkane and more

When: 8 p.m. Thursday

Where: The Jumping Turtle, 1660 Capalina Road, San Marcos

Tickets: $10

Info: (760) 471-7778 or thejumpingturtle.com

Web: notbmusic.com

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