JM Quotes - JM's Music - Singing at Conventions - Buffy: The Musical - On the Show - JM Singing - Fan Clips on the WWW - Music For Elevators
JM Quotes

"It's just me and a guitar, so I'm not going to be doing a lot of Smashing Pumpkins. I do Tom Waits, Neil Young, Bob Dylan. That's all the good stuff, man. That's when they had good songs written for just voice and guitar. I wish I could do Johnny Lee Hooker, but I'm not that good." - on his acoustic performance at 14 Below, Santa Monica on 29th August 2000.

Question: Any chance we'll see Spike playing a guitar and singing? Maybe the blues?
JM: I don't know. I would love it, as I've been playing the guitar for about 15 years. If they could make it cool, then that would be great. I would love it. But I don't know if they have any plans for that right now. (Source)

"I like Belle and Sebastian, Beck, Catherine Wheel, the Charlatans, The Cure, Digable Planets, Miles Davis, Al Green, Benny Goodman, Arlo Guthrie...I'm rifling through my CD collection right now." - JM

"I'm really into my guitar", he says, his face lighting up. "It's going well. I'll write whatever I'm thinking. 'You screwed me, I know you're going to hurt me. Go to hell.' or 'You're beautiful, I'm thinking about you all the time'." He also finds that music is an outlet for any frustrations he is feeling."
James has also had the opportunity to jam onstage with Four Star Mary, the band who appear on Buffy as Oz's group Dingoes Ate My Baby.
"That was fun", he laughs. "They're very good. They just turn my guitar up and give me lots of distortion! They're good guys, and I'm learning from them. Playing with a band is an entirely different thing from playing by yourself. With a band, the whole point is to keep exact rhythm, so you come in and out. You have to hit everything cleanly, or else you muddy the whole thing up and it disappears. When you're playing by yourself, you can just go with your own flow, and switch it up as much as you like."JM (TEXT)

"Four Star were at the Garage in Brixton [actually The Garage is in Islington - MM], and they were having such a tight set that I really didn't want to go up. I really try not to screw up their sets. But everyone was expecting me. It worked out pretty good though, I have to say. We did especially well on The Cars 'You're Just What I Needed', the old cover. We were going to do Cheap Trick's 'Surrender', but Cheap Trick had played there the night before and had performed 'Surrender', so we thought we'd be tempting fate!" JM (TEXT)

"They advertise it and let Buffy fans know it's happening... otherwise no-one would show up! I play at the 14-Below club and the Opium Den about once a month. It's fun and I'm getting better at it. I'm writing more songs and getting introduced to more musicians. People from Four Star Mary want to record with me. It's taking off slowly which is good." JM (The Realm)

"All music. I like Miles Davis, Bush, Palace, sometimes known as The Palace Brothers, Al Green, Bob Dylan, Digable Planets, Benny Goodman, Billie Holliday, Johnny Lee Hooker, The Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello, Morcheeba, Roy Orbison, Nirvana, Charlie Parker, REM, Lou Reed and classical, Beethoven." JM

JM: "Roger Daltrey gave me this guitar, man!"
'It turns out that the Buffster and ageing rocker were chatting, and Daltrey gave him a new guitar because his one was rubbish'
'It's Only Rock & Roll but I Spike It!' by Tom Mayo from SFX, August 2001 found The Realm

Cult Times: We hear James Marsters plays too...
Steve Carter: "James Marsters also actually plays guitar and writes songs and has done some shows. We were playing a show for this fan party and James came up on stage with us. He learnt a couple of songs, and once we'd done them everyone's, like, screaming for another song. James says, 'OK, have fun' I went, 'No, you have to come with us. It's OK, the song's in C, just play C.' So he only knows one chord from the whole song. I turned around and looked at him in the middle of the song, and he looks like more of a rock star than anyone you've ever seen. It's the antithesis of Seth; James doesn't know what he's doing but he's just a rock god, whereas Seth can play guitar pretty good but he just looks so uncomfortable!
He's gonna be in England the same time as we are. He's gonna be playing in Glasgow which should be insane. The kids up in Glasgow are out of their tree."
Interview of Steve Carter, the guitarist for Star Mary which is the LA band behind Oz's band in Buffy
'James Marsters Ate My Baby' by Paul Spragg from Cult Times, June 2001 found The Realm

- A few of the musicians whose work James has covered in his 14 Below shows are Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Neil Young, and Nirvana. His own musical tastes are varied, but he's a big fan of Miles Davis.

Q: Of writing, acting or singing, which gives you the most satisfaction?
JM: I can’t split it up. The singing thing is much more vulnerable and scary to me both because it is live and somehow for me, sustaining a note and producing that sound makes you dig into an emotional realm or at least makes you connected to it. Also, the fact that I am singing my own material or material that I was on hand for when it was being made and I really know what it is about. So there is a real terror of ‘God, I’m going to be too honest today’ and then the joy of ‘Hey, they love it!’ I can’t tell this to my own brother, you know. I can’t tell most of this stuff to anybody but I’m just singing it out and they like it.
Acting for film is a little frustrating. I like to say on stage, the actor is like a chef at Benihana. He gets all the ingredients and he has to create the product at the point of sale, so to speak. So it all goes through him and everybody else is simply giving him ingredients to use to create the art at that time. But in film, you are just one of the ingredients and the chef is the editor who creates the art later. It’s freeing to only be concentrating on the minutiae but it’s also a bit of a smaller job so you end up having to do less of a job but you make it look much better and that is really cool. It’s all different. I don’t know if I have a real preference. I have to say being in front of an audience is something that is probably my favorite thing.
As for writing, I’ve kind of written all my life. I had theater companies in Chicago and Seattle and a lot of our plays were taken from other source material and put into a play or original material. At one point, we translated “La Vida es Sueno” which is “Life is a Dream” which is known as the Latin “Hamlet” written by Pedro Calderon De LA Barca. I was so proud of us because we read all the translations and they all sucked. So we went back and retranslated it and discovered that a lot of liberties had been taken with that play and that maybe a lot of people didn’t know a lot about that play. We did a really successful production of it and I’m really proud of that. Writing music forces you to really get down to the core of what you want to talk about because you can’t use that many words. I call it whining, you know, because a lot of my songs are dark, about love not gotten and all of this stuff but if you can take your pain and make it beautiful, I think that is the best thing. At least that is what I tell myself when I think that I am just whining. (Text)
Singing on the Show

"Oh man, yeah. To sing Sid Vicious, man. That's the best. David Semel who directed it, he's one of the producers over on Dawson's Creek, and who is absolutely wonderful by the way. He took it in one take. When I read the script, that was my favorite part because I love Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols. And they're going to let me sing My Way. I used to sing it on the set all the time. I don't know if they heard me. The whole Sid thing was a bit of a touchstone that the character started with. Joss wanted the Sid and Nancy of the vampire set. I'm not sure if he got that [laughter]. People keep saying that he got Billy Idol, but you do your best. But I'd often be hanging around the sound stage singing My Way, so when I got that in the script, I was really happy. Then we got to film it. It was like "Take one. Ok, let's move on." I'm like, "Nooo! I want to sing this all day." JM (TEXT) 

Q: You mention on the FX Network “Buffy Bites” segments that you and some of the cast would do Shakespeare readings on Sundays at Joss’ house. Did that really happen?
JM: Yeah. They didn’t happen so much this year because Joss was over on Angel but it is something everyone is clamoring for now that we have a little more time.
It all started when we were doing [Season 5 episode] “Fool for Love.” On a Wednesday, I was on the Paramount lot doing total kick ass fight stuff in the New York Subway. [Crowd hollers in appreciation] That was one of the best days of my life! Seventeen hours, Steve [his stunt double] almost never got in –I was fighting the whole time and I loved it. The very next day, I was playing William with the wig and the squinting. There was twelve hours difference between the two and I said to Joss ‘Dude, this is just like Repertory Theater. This is what I dreamt of when I was in high school but when I got out of college all the Rep companies had gone bankrupt and there really isn’t that experience of actors much anymore.’ He got this little look in his eye and said, “Maybe we should continue that philosophy.” And then he started having Shakespeare readings and then at the end of reading the plays, they would start drinking and I would watch them get drunk which is always fun, and we’d start singing. First we started singing old standards and then people started bring out their own material. I started bringing out my own material and finally Joss was like “Well, this sucks but I’ll play it for you” and it would be amazing! Week after week, he would keep coming up with songs and we kept giving him reinforcement saying ‘Joss, you are really good at this.’ Then he decided to go ahead and write the musical. [Audience applauds] It’s one of the wonderful things when artists are put in close proximity and they are allowed to really talk to each other and not kiss ass and really cross-pollinate. (Text)
JM's Music

Ghost of the Robot - The band that JM is a member of and they have finally announced that they are working on their first album, mad brilliant.

14 Below - The L.A. night club where Ghost of the Robot plays from time to time.

JM & GotR Info page at BuffyCollector.Com News items

mary_101020820 misc11 jmwguitar

Q: Is that how Ghost of the Robot started because of these musical interludes?
JM: Actually, No. I’ve been performing by myself with a guitar in bars for a long time. I met this guy, Charlie DeMars, who had just moved into town and he is an amazing songwriter and musician. And we just started talking about life and about the songs we try to write about and what we try to talk about and we found a lot of common ground. He had some guys he had worked with before and we formed the band pretty quickly. That really just grew organically out of him moving into town and being my neighbor. (Text)

JM Quotes - JM's Music - Singing at Conventions - Buffy: The Musical - On the Show - JM Singing - Fan Clips on the WWW - Music For Elevators - Top
Singing at Conventions

From what I've found online, JM does sing at many of the conventions that he attends as a guest. There are sound clips of those performances online.
Buffy: The Musical - Season 6 Episode 7

SpikeSearch.Com has a section on JM's music as well as for the Musical episode.

Studiesinwords.de

The best source for show transcripts and sounds files, including music from the musical episode in season 6 (Buffy The Musical).

Q: What was your favorite episode of Buffy?
JM: The Musical [“Once More with Feeling”] by a wide, wide margin. It was one of the great pleasures that every single episode pleased me. I found myself cursing the commercial breaks even though I had read the script and filmed the damn thing but I was like ‘Oh, what’s up?!’ I’m a fan of the show. I would be a fan if I weren’t on it. But the Musical was one of those things where we were absolutely terrified as a company. I mean abject terror because not only the actors but the designers, the lighting department, everybody was asked to do things they never thought they would be asked to do and kind of like “Do it now.” Sarah didn’t know if she could be a lead singer and carry the lead. How many songs did she sing? Six songs? I mean she was apoplectic. To her credit, she boned down and got voice lessons and really got it down. Tony [Head “Giles”] and I were already singing publicly so we were a little more comfortable with it. Nick was being asked to dance which try doing that in front of six million people when you’re not trained to dance. We didn’t know if our boss could write a musical. We were like ‘Ok, Joss. Flush the whole thing down the toilet.’ [Laughs]
We filmed for like two days and he did a rough cut of the Anya/Nicholas dance sequence which was the first thing that we filmed, and showed it to us just because he realized we needed a little encouragement. It was brilliant. It was absolutely wonderful. At that moment, we just took off. Everybody was just flying and smiles all over. There is something about music that just taps into emotions more directly than words. I often feel like words have to be processed by the intellect and then accepted or not accepted by the heart. But music bypasses the intellect completely and goes right into the heart. So, we’d be acting the scene and the time would come for the song. Joss would hit playback and the big speakers would roar up and this beautiful music would come out and you’d lip-synch (but you’d feel like you were singing) and we were able to go to emotional places that you couldn’t just doing dialogue. When a musical is designed, there is a point where the characters can’t talk about it anymore. In order to express what they really want to express, they have to sing about it so it jumps up a level. Then Joss, of course, puts that on its head and he had people singing things they really should shut up about. By the time we got to “Tabula Rasa” which was the one after the musical, we were like ‘Oh, this sucks. There’s no music! It’s boring.’ And in fact, “Tabula Rasa” was one of the most delightful, where we all lost our identities and it was complete farce. (Text)
You can hear JM singing in the following songs from "Buffy: The Musical" Season 6 Ep.7

Rest In Peace
Walk through the Fire
Life's A Show
Where Do We Go From Here
JM Singing

All Things Spike-y has some JM music (a Neil Diamond song at 14 Below), Spike Sound Bites and two Angel singing clips.

::L.o.s.t.s.o.u.l:: is a great site and they have some great audio and video files of JM singing and talking.

JMarsters.com Sound clip's from 14 Below shows

JMarsters.com Video Clip's from 14 Below shows

JM Quotes - JM's Music - Singing at Conventions - Buffy: The Musical - On the Show - JM Singing - Fan Clips on the WWW - Music For Elevators - Top
Other clips created by fans on the WWW

3 Dance Sound Mixes can be found at Tangled Synthesis

::L.o.s.t.s.o.u.l:: has several video clips of scenes set to one song.

HeadTilt.Com has lots of music videos and a Spike Head Tilt compulation video ( must see)
Music For Elevators - CD Information and sound clips

This is a great CD by Anthony Stewart Head (Giles from Buffy) and George Sarah.

JM does b. vox (I think that means back vocal) for the third track on the CD, Owning My Mistakes. The official CD website has 4 music clips, but unfortunately not the song that JM sings in. His part is small since it's a back vocal, but you can clearly tell it's him.
The CD info and packaged case only list 14 tracks, infact there are 2 great bonus tracks!

::L.o.s.t.s.o.u.l::

JM Quotes - JM's Music - Singing at Conventions - Buffy: The Musical - On the Show - JM Singing - Fan Clips on the WWW - Music For Elevators - Top
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