FM: Well, I hope it doesn't keep going in the direction of scantily-clad female singers, because this just seems to be a direction they're beating to death. I do have nephews that are 21-22 who are in rock bands...jam bands that play really heavy stuff. And I gotta tell ya, it's really refreshing to see a recurrence of this kind of music that I haven't seen in a long time.
BN: Lastly, I wanted to discuss a bit about the drug incident you had at an early age that is mentioned in your bio which resulted in this rumor that had plagued you for many years to come...a rumor that I actually remember hearing as a kid, something along the lines of you being the reincarnation of Jimi Hendrix.
FM: I went to the hospital in 1968, I was a thirteen year-old kid, it was the flower-power generation and I did too much LSD and became very screwed-up. While I was in the hospital I needed to do something to take my mind off what was happening. There was an acoustic guitar in the room that kind of became my lifeboat. I played with it 24 hours a day; I even slept with it. And when I came out of the hospital I was playing that Hendrix/Doors style of music, because that was the type of music that was around in those days. Now, Hendrix died two years after that, and that's when he really became noticed. I mean, he was famous in the '60s, but Eric Clapton was the guy everyone said was #1 and Hendrix was more of a cool underground guitarist. And that's about the time I began my recording career, it was 1971 and I was sixteen, and I was really into Hendrix because I was psychedelicized from my experience and I was playing guitar. So I wrote a song about Jimi Hendrix called 'Buddy' and I dedicated my first album [Maxoom] to him, who knew that would become some big problem. Some writer from a magazine saw the similarity and read the dedication and invented this story about me 'coming out of the hospital and being reincarnated with the spirit of Jimi Hendrix', or some kind of nonsense. We were just a bunch of kids from Canada, so who was going to call us to see if this was true? So this magazine gets the story on the wire and the next thing you know this story is making the rounds. It ended up getting worse and worse and it just drove me crazy.
BN: There were obviously other guitarists such as Robin Trower, Uli Roth, and years later, Randy Hansen, who were also criticized for capitalizing on the success of Jimi Hendrix shortly after he passed away. Nowadays, I can name a million guitar players that came around in the '80s who've practically cloned Eddie Van Halen and Yngwie Malmsteen, yet they hadn't got near the slack that you guys received in the'70s.
FM: I think I got most the flack because I was first guy in history doing that type of music after Jimi Hendrix died. Trower and the others didn't come along until a couple years later, and Stevie [Ray Vaughn] didn't come around for almost eight years after. So I became the whipping boy. I've got magazine articles with me on the covers saying, 'Mahogany Rush: The Band the Critics Love to Hate.' And if I would cover a Doors tune, they would write stuff like 'Frank Marino robs fresh graves.' So I had to grow up listening to this and these stories followed me on through the David Krebbs years, so naturally people were very suspicious of me.
A Conversation With FRANK MARINO Page 11