Recap Mark Mallman’s Marathon 3 at the Turf Club

This is not a recap of the entire marathon. When a man vows to play a 78-hour show, the part everyone is most interested in is the gruesome end, when he’s most likely to keel over from this insane act of sleep deprivation. (Not that the rest of Mark Mallman’s show, which ran Thursday through Sunday at the Turf Club, wasn’t worth seeing. In fact, watching the live webcast at all hours of the day was surprisingly addictive.) In the hours leading up to the 10 p.m. finish line last night, the piano man looked rough, but he was surviving. Aside from a slightly crazed Jack Torrance look on his face, a hoarse voice, and a sprained foot, he was doing pretty well.

Shortly before 5 p.m., he took a break (while his band continued playing, of course) to consult with a doctor about the foot, which he injured onstage on Saturday. He came back reporting that he’d need an x-ray after the show: “I have low blood pressure as well. ... But [the doctor] said I’m fine. And I shouldn’t be doing this.”

Should or shouldn’t was kind of a moot point: Mallman’s reason for doing it was, “Because.” He had a lot of support for his decision, surrounding himself with dozens of talented friends—including locals like Terry Eason and Jacques Wait, as well out-of-towners like Sean Tillmann and Chuck Prophet—who shared the stage with him in one-hour shifts. The music depended largely on who was in the band. Sometimes Mallman called out key changes, but he usually just let the non-stop music mutate naturally while singing lyrics about darkness, danger, and death from a thick three-ring binder. (When he reached the end, page 574, around 9:30, he showed the audience what it said: “Instrument solo.”)

Prophet seemed the most integral to Mallman’s sanity over the final few hours, playing the straight man as Mallman forwarded his clock to 10 o’clock, claimed repeatedly that he was going to give up, and carried out various other schemes to get out of finishing the show. (A favorite: Mallman looked at his phone and said, “I just got a text from my friend Tony. He’s got tickets to see Scream 4 at 9:30. I can’t finish Marathon 3. He’s deployed tomorrow, so we have to go at 9:30.”) Each time, Prophet would shake his head gravely and the show would go on.

If the entire marathon seemed like occasional fragments of melody connected by long interludes of vamping, the last hour was pure razzle-dazzle finale. Mallman changed out of his denim jacket—with his nickname, Mr. Serious, airbrushed on the back—and slipped on his “fancy” white suit coat, which also had “Mr. Serious” airbrushed across the back. The band switched over to a disco jam that seemed like one of the few planned bits of the entire four days. Mallman laid across his keyboard on his back, screaming, “I see Nana,” and relaying a conversation he was having with his late grandmother, during which she couldn’t understand why he’d do something so stupid. He chanted a new mantra: “I’m a newspaper man / I get paid to deliver.” And then it ended.

Unlike Marathon 2 (his 52-hour show in 2004), this one didn’t come with an encore. Instead, Mallman’s dad, a marathon runner, came onstage to present his son with a medal (or rather, three medals fused together and hung on a red, white, and blue ribbon). On the verge of collapse, Mallman looked out over the cheering crowd and said, “I’m not gonna give a speech because this was just for fun. And anyone can do shit for fun.”