Martin Mull is easy to spot in the New York City rush hour crowd. He's the One waiting patiently outside of 57th street's English Pub, clad in slightly baggy white pants arid a faded, short sleeved, flowered shirt, the kind you see on the .Mike Douglas Show when Don Ho and his zany Hawaiians are cutting up. He looks a little like Viv Stanshall from the old Bonzo Dog Band.

I'm standing across the street, gawking at this bizarre figure and wondering what it's going to be like having dinner with Martin (never dull) Mull. Mull, of course, is famous for his rather irreverant approach to music, which usually involves him sitting on stage surrounded by old furniture and singing ditties like "Ventriloquist Love" (the classic tale of a love triangle wherein one third of the participants is made of balsa wood), "The Nothing" (a dance craze designed for the most lethargic of party goers) and "Margie the Midget" (the story of two young lovers which concludes with th£. 4uo walking hand-in-anlde into the s,unset). When he's not warbling in his slightly monotoned 'crooning voice, Martin arid a back-up band spend their time Concocting such instant classics as "DuelingTubas" and "2001 Polka." The main question in my mind at the moment is "will Martin Mull stick a carrot in his ear during the interview just to upset me?"

Tape recorder in hand, I am introduced to Mull by a publicist from his PR firm. There is music in the air, Johnny Mathis stuff piped into the muzak infested pub. This seems to please Mull, who uses the absurd backdrop fof an even more absurd tirade of puns and gags.

"I -know Ray Charles on sight, which is more than he can say about me."

"I understand your father was at Harvard — yes and he kept it looking beautiful."

"I'd like to see a really heavy metal group like Led Zeppelin come out on stage with sheet music and just play."

Sitting in our corner booth, Martin begins the evening's discussion by commenting on the beauty of the music circling our eardrums at the moment, which happens to be "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" by Dawn.

"This is my favorite song," beams Mull, tugging at his almost-walrus moustache for emphasis. "I want to do a Japanese version of this. "Tie a rerrow libbon round the dwarf bonzoi pine that you can grow in your own home, thirteen inches tall." That's it. There'd be a' really long chorus in Japanese. Something like "We lost the war/I'm coming home." "

At this point the waitress who" is taking our order for tequila sunrises is sure that she is serving two of the original cast of Marat/Sade. I tend to agree with her.

As the two of us proceed to work Our way into Ray Milland-inspired nirvana, I try to ascertain how Martin Mull and his fabulous furniture first came into being. All his biographies point to a band called Soup, which featured Martin on guitar (clad in a baseball uniform) singing songs about midgets and sandwiches while the rest of the band cavprted about dressed in pajamas and oversized cigarette cartons.

"Those were the days," sighs Mull wistfully. "We even played with Janis Jodhpurs and Big Brother. But my musical career," he says dramatically, "started at a very early age. When I was really little, my brother was the one who could sing and I was told by just about everyone "DON'T." I was thrown out of every choir I tried to get into. And then my parents, -to amuse themselves, went out and bought guitars. My father couldn't play at all. They junked them after a few months. They tried really hard for a while and finally came up with "Red River Valley." It was pathetic. The worst version I had ever heard. They decided, well we got the goddamn guitars, someone should have lessons. It was my brother. He took lessons for about two weeks and quit. The guitars went into the closet. At the age of sixteen, I took one of them out, sprayed it gold, bought a Duane Eddy album and learned how to go "Toowang dow dow dow dow." Then I put the guitar back into the closet where it died an embarrassing death. The neck fell off and everything.

"When I was in college I played in a country-western band, to work my way through school. I had one band that had a banjo, fiddle and guitar. I wanted to sing but 1 can't sing that well now and in those days I couldn't sing at all, I couldn't sing anything on pitch so I was forced into writing my own songs so I could sing them."

Playing with the swizzle stick half submerged in his murky drink, Martin recalls his budding songwriting career while, at the same time, worries about his diet. ("I'd rather drink a lot and not eat at all.") "My writing has always been less than dirge-y," he says in his slightly nasal twang. "I don't think I've ever written what other people refer to as "Gawd dontcha ever write anything SERIOUS?" But I'm very serious about the things 1 write. I consider them real stories, real life. Most of them are about my own life, so they have to be serious. The first tune I ever wrote was a thing called the "Chinese New Year's Waltz." The early stuff was influenced a lot by the North Carolina Ramblers. They used to have' red records which were really neat, the kind that you could see through. Later on, other influences came into play like Beckett and Joyce.

"I'm serious about Joyce," he assures me in earnest. "I like all her writing. Her last letter... no, I'm referring to James Joyce who wrote "Wake Me Up Finnigan," or was that "Finnigan's Wake-Up Call." Or on Broadway; "Does The Name Pavlov Ring A Bell?" "Lincoln: the Car, the Man, and the Tunnel. I believe the musical version was called "Nair." It was a take-off on "Hair," an instant take-off.

' "But I'm very serious about Beckett and Joyce being major influences, as well as Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Spike Jones, George Bums and George Gobel. You want to guess which one is the real influence? I'll give you a clue; it's one of the Georges."

Scanning the menu which our uneasy waitress has half-thrown on our table ("Now there's a good way to refer to wine," Mull comments. "A half-crock."), Martin traces his recording career with all the finesse and grace of a bulldozer in a geriatrics ward. "The first album sounded like it was recorded through a towel," he deadpans. "It was one of the best kept secrets of the industry. I believe it reached the position of number two hundred with an anvil on the charts."

"Actually," he reveals, starting on his second round of sunrises, "we got the recording deal verv strangely. I had a band called the Midget Band. Which wasn't. It was all a hoax. We were all actually full sized. But starting a new band is really impossible. You're about five minutes past the "Hey, let's start a band!" stage when you realize that you're going to have to buy equipment or borrow some until you can get enough money playing in cheap bars to buy your own. When you're at that point, it's very discouraging because you realize that there are about five billion bands in existence that have been out (of work for their whole lives. So I figured TURN TO PAGE 74.

Martin Mull

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 45. that a ruse of some sort wouldn't be a bad idea. I claimed that tfie whole band was made up of midgets, except for myself, of course. The club owners would say "Really? Dere little guys? oh boy! Yoor kiddin", right?" And I'd say that I wasn't, and they'd say "Wait a minute, yoor shoor dere little guys?

Like da miinchkins?" Of course we'd show up all full sized and play our gig. The people wouldn't mind too jnuch because we were pretty good. We auditioned for Capricorn Records at Gerde^s Folk City. We were playing four shows a night, five on weekends, seven days a week for one hundred dollars.. .for five of us. It was really good, just about covered our pizza bills. Capricorn came up to see us and the guys said to our manager that we were the worst thing that they had ever seen and if we ever got a contract tljey'd do something that Linda Lovelace is making a mint out of doing now.

"Two wfeeks later we sent them a denio of my stuff and they wanted to know why THESE guys had never auditioned tor them instead of those other clowns. We -signed a contract right then."

Since the Recording of his first album (Martin Mull) and the subsequent re-, lease of his second spellbinder {Martin Mutt and His Fabulous Furniture In YOUR Living Room!) Mull has become the darling of the off-the-wall set for his ethereal compositions about midgets, eggs, sandwiches and middle class white blues singers. Martin, of course, insists that there are legitimate artistic reasons why he chooses such varied topics. It is not merely a cheap ploy to garner laughs.

"Look," he says, taking his ice cubes from his half-finished drink and plunking them into his full glass of water. "Now it's ICE water!!

"Where was I? Oh, the songwriting, I write songs about situations. If you allow yourself to think and drift a bit you think of a lot of ramifications of the original situation. A story forms. The only-thing is, you come up with so many ramifications and permutations of the situation that it's impossible to write a song about it. It would have to be a trilogy. So then what happens is I get as drunk as I possibly can, so the ramifications aren't there at all. I can't think of anything. The only word that comes into my mind is fidget:" Out of that, you build.

"I'm very fond of midgets," says Mull while trying to toss a cigarette in his mouth and missing the first five times ("I can't understand this, I usually do this So~well."). "The midget thing first started not unlike the way Jonathan Livingston Seagull did. Instead of hearing the word "seagull" wafting through the air, I heard the word "midget." I just started saying "midget" every day until I realized what an important part they played in my life* I even look up to some of them."

As our waitress scurries for cover after taking our order for another round, Mull continues in his Rod Serling-ish version of" "This Is Your Life." "Some of my" tunes," he comments sagely, "are more deliberate. "Dueling Tubas" was a taste of my cynical outlook towards the music business as it stands today. Actually, saying that it stands is in itself a flattering remark. Kneels is more like it. Kneels. Like in Young and Diamond. Real young... in the desert. Now THEY were a good group, Young in the desert... America. What a band, America. They Anally put some literature in rock. "It was hot." I like that line. "Trees and things." Now there's a smartie, using the word "things" in a song. "Stuff is good too. What were we talking about?

" "Dueling Tubas?" Oh, well I listen to the radio in my Pinto a lot. Our reception is really punk. Our" antenna keeps on snapping off. A lot of times things will sound like something they're not. When Sammy Davis had that big hit "Candyman" last year, for the first three months I though he was singing "Handicapped." "Who can make a whiskbroom?" I really did. A lot 6f my parodies come from thftse misunderstandings. At one point it sounded like I was hearing tubas over the radio. I thought, "Well if I'm not, I should be." Now I am and I shouldn't be.

" "2001 Polka" was in response to the fact that Deodato had done such an EXCEPTIONALLY fine job on "Zarathustra," turning it into rock and roll. It seemed to me that it took care of most of the population who was interested in that type of rock. The only people Who were left out of it were Polish people. I was trying to give them a little something because Polish people are often overlooked in rock. Polack rock has just never come out of the closet in this country,"

For a moment, his attention is drawn to a match-book cover advertising learning hoW'to do whatever and earning big bucks. "I can see Jimi Hendrix on one of these," he says impishly, "with a guitar saying "LEARN HOW TO OPERATE BIG EQUIPMENT... BIG PAY!! Boy, he sure cuts a lot of sides for a dead guv. Same with Janis. Wouldn't it be swell to release a new Big Brother and the Holding Company album with just the instrumental tracks? That would be interesting. BIG BROTHER AND THE HOLDING COMPANY WITH JANIS JOPLIN and have big X's through Janis" name and have no vocals on the record. THEIR LATEST HITS!"

With the annotated history of Martin Mull out of the conversation, the blonde-haired master of the pop insanity market turns to more serious things, like his current status in rockdom. "I've played for a lot of strange people," he grimaces. "I've opened to Sonny Terry, Liza Minelli, Melissa Maneater, or Chesty, er Chester, Mahavishnu, John Hammond;A lot of people don't know what to do when I walk out on stage. I mean, my stage act is just like Jagger's, only funnier. I'm using slides now to illustrate my songs if the people think they're too dull, which is usually the case. I try to think of what I'm doing as being multi-dimensional. I may be doing some shaft radio skits for the Lampoon people soon. Things like "Waiting for Godot" where Godot shows up right away. A lot of people don't understand what I do.

"People walk into a club and there's this'guy with furniture... there are a lot of raised eyebrows. I started the furniture thing because I felt lonely up on stage by myself. It was sort of a crutch. The record company didn't want me to have a back-up band because they figured I'd get lost and no one in the audience would know what the fat guy up in front was up to, the fat guy being me. It's also a kind of "welcome to my living room" homey motif"

Mull talks briefly about the biggest drawback of his newfound fame, being separated from his wife Kristin for months on end. In Kris, Mull finds not only a spouse, but a partner in his devilish escapades. "We like to go to these restaurants where you make reservations and the guy announces "THE SMITH PARTY." We've been registering under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Fred Birthday, Guilty^ Bon Voyage, Going Away, New Year's Eve... we have a lot of fun.

"I like drinking a tot," hebeams good-naturedly. "It allows you to focus as a pedestrian. Blissful state. You know, reading everything on the men's xoom wall and trying to come up with something yourself but not being able to outdo anything that's there; The thing about being an alcoholic is that if you're NOT an alcoholic, you wake up in the

morning and think "This is the best I'm going to feel all day." An alcoholic doesn't have to say that, he KNOWS he's going to feel better later on. Especially after the way you usually wake up, feeling like you could mow your mouth.

"I really don't feel that I owe anything to ONE individual either. I mean, my albums aren't like WELL YOU LOVED HIM IN SLADE, HERE HE IS WITH THOSE SAME HOT LICKS! ! I've been sent up Randy Newman's flagpole a few times, but I don't care for, that. •I'd rather have people review me as an individual. The songs are more important than the opinions people have about the'Songwriter. If you do a review of a restaurant you talk about the food, not the manager. ;

"The Newman thing is funny though. I've always had this naive notion that doing something out of the ordinary is much more desirable and artistic than doing something ordinary. This is the •exception rather than the rule in the music industry, an industry. that uses the word "new" more than any other and is least sensitive to the concept of "newness."

"The inside of my new album cover is an out-take from an old Randy Newman album. My wife designed a center spread that popped furniture off the surface when you opened it up. The record company said it would cost too much and found that picture instead. So we airbrushed my props in and released it. Newman didn't want it. The reason we added my cartoon stuff in the right hand corner is that, in the original, Newman was sitting behind the piano. I wanted to leave him in for poetic justice's sake, but nobody else thought that was clever."

With our dinner coming to a close, Mull begins to conjure up new horizons in weirdness for his show biz career. "I'd like to.be the warm-up act for the Watergate show," he says at one point.. "It would be so great. SAM EHRLICHMAN WILL BE WITH US IN A MOMENT LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BUT FIRST, HERE'S A TALENT WE HAVE IN THE WASHINGTON AREA FOR ONLY A SHORT TIME. And I'd get up there and say things like "N6w take the watercloset affair, please." I wduld be great."

As our waitress warily clears our table and we lurch out the front door, I ask Martin if there's anything that he'd like to see in print about himself that he's never seen before.

"You could always say that I'm a showoff," he smiles angelically.

And then he is gone, around the corner and into the tacky New York night.

... and not once did he stick a single carrot anywhere NEAR his ear. Showoff.