Frank Marino & Mahogany Rush - Blowing Away Crowds With Eye Of The Storm
By Martin Popoff

Canada's greatest axe legend Frank Marino has returned with a rippling, rocking new Mahogany Rush album called Eye Of The Storm, which at press time, is only available over the internet (www.mahoganyrush.com) and at shows.

Shows? Yes, indeed, Mahogany Rush is flying high again, Frank playing sporadically since re-starting his career in '98, picking up the pace in late '00 with incredible jaw-dropping stops in Buffalo, Toronto, Ottawa and hometown Montreal.

Returning full circle (sorry for the pun: that was the name of one of Frank's solo albums), Eye Of The Storm fits squarely within the willowy Hendrix-inspired psychedelic hard rock of Mahogany Rush's eight albums spanning 1973 to 1980 (dd man out: Double Live from '86).

"We started to become a little bit too rock 'n' roll," explains Marino, looking back at the heady daze of the '70s which found the band touring incessantly with Leber Krebs management mates Aerosmith and Ted Nugent. "And this wasn't anything I ever did when I was starting. But I do happen to like that live album. But there was this time when I was really giving up a lot of the psychedelia. And rock guitar psychedelia is really what I'm all about. I know I play blues, and I love blues and stuff, but I'm not really a blues player. And I'm certainly not a purist. I don't like pure blues. So I'm getting back to those of roots, and this record Eye Of The Storm is really an exercise in that. Probably every song on the record, with the exception of one that's a little more hard rock, every song is a kind of hypnotic, psychedelic '60s guitar song. But it's not a guitar record in the sense of the performance of it. It's not a flash record, and it's not a shredder record, not a lot of speed playing on it. It's more melodic, backward guitars, droning two chord patterns against these jam sessions that more designed to hypnotize you."

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