Marc Moreland

Marc Moreland (January 8, 1958 – March 13, 2002) was an American rock musician. He was the former guitarist for new wave band Wall of Voodoo, punk band The Skulls, and rock bands Pretty and Twisted and Department of Crooks. He also released a solo album under the name Marc Moreland Mess.

Moreland grew up in West Covina, California, and was a student of West Covina High School and Coronado High School.

In the late 1970s and early '80s, Moreland played guitar for one of the earliest American punk bands, The Skulls. He wrote some of the band's earliest songs, including "Victims" and "Babies".

Moreland was a founding member of Wall of Voodoo, which had its roots in Acme Soundtracks, an unsuccessful film score business started by vocalist-keyboardist-harmonica player Stan Ridgway. Acme Soundtracks' office was across the street from the Hollywood punk club The Masque, and Ridgway was soon drawn into the emerging punk-new wave scene.

Moreland, guitarist for punk band The Skulls, began jamming with Ridgway at the Acme Soundtracks office and the soundtrack company morphed into a New Wave band. In 1977, with the addition of Skulls members Bruce Moreland (Marc Moreland's brother) as bassist-keyboardist and Chas T. Gray as keyboardist, along with Joe Nanini, who had been the drummer for Black Randy and the Metrosquad, the first lineup of Wall of Voodoo was born.

The Wall of Voodoo sound was noted for Moreland's unique guitar style – a mixture of twangy spaghetti western-style melodies, angular post-punk riffs and well-placed guitar feedback.

The band had a sizable hit in 1982 with the song "Mexican Radio", which received considerable play on the newly aired MTV. Ridgway recalled, "Marc and I used to go to rehearsal in my '67 Mustang and we were really fed up with Los Angeles radio. We were very cynical and we thought it was much better to tune into these Mexican radio stations that would waft in across the border — of course, now the stations are all over Los Angeles. Anyway, when we'd come across one of these stations playing mariachi music, we'd get all excited — 'Great, man, I'm on a Mexican radio!' I didn't think a thing about it until one day, Marc came in with this little one-minute (demo tape) sketch of that great guitar lick and him singing, 'I'm on a Mexican radio,' kind of mumbling it. I thought, 'Wow, that is just inspired and twisted,' and immediately some of the other lyrics came to mind and where to take it, although it was still a puzzle."

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