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By Doug Van Pelt

FRANK MARINO ON LESTER BANGS + MORE...

High school Memory #78:
Crowd cheering madly for encore.
Frontman steps up to mic:
"For those of you who dug this before
a long time ago,
and for those of you who wanna dig it now,
Jimi Hendrix..."

Frank Marino & Mahogany Rush was simultaneously one of the best kept secrets of 70s hard rock, and also one of its larger cult heroes. By 1979, he had hit his stride. He was asked to close the show at the world's biggest festivals –– California Jam 2 (300,000) and Texas Jam –– where he always brought the house down, and his studio albums were starting to sell. What more could a budding guitar hero want?

"I liked doing (those) shows," admits the thoughtful but still hungry musician, "because when I'm playing I'm in a different zone, but I hated doing those shows from a standpoint of my psyche. I come from a time when it was not uncommon to watch a band of some stature play a concert in an outdoor park and, after they finish, sit on the grass with all the people and watch the other concerts. No one ran around, saying, 'Oh look! There's so and so sitting on the grass!' It was the most normal thing in the world. It was like having a bunch of friends, of whom some of them happened to play, and so somebody needed to be up there using the equipment, so they'd get up and play. It's a very Grateful Dead type of thing where I come from. Certainly, the business by the late 70s –– Cal Jam most of all –– was kind of a symbol of the monster that we created in rock and roll. The money train. The excesses. A lot of the artists started to believe that stuff –– that there was a big difference between ourselves and the audiences that buy our records. And there's really no difference."

"I found that those shows sort of represented all that was starting to become wrong with rock and roll, from a musician's perspective. Certainly, it was great for fans to be part of stuff like that, but I think when you're backstage and you're coming from the type of mentality I came from in the 60s, which is kind of an 'everybody's your friend' kind of comradery, and everyone's out to make music and you end up at these shows, which are basically giant productions of Entertainment Tonight, it sort of brings home to you that rock and roll has changed. It no longer was sort of the definitive moment, where you could try to make music that was in sync with the listener. It became more of, 'Hey, look what we can do! Look how big we are! Look how exciting this is!' It became demonstrative, competitive music. And when you're backstage with a lot of those groups, that's the attitude that they all have. 'Who's going to blow who off the stage? Who's going to be better? Who's going to be remembered more? Who's going to get more encores? Who's going to have more lighting? Who's going to sell more records?' That's not what it was ever about for me. When I found myself doing those kind of shows with those kind of acts, with that kind of attitude and those kind of conditions. I was happy to be able to expose the music to a lot of people, but I was also being sucked in. When I was going on stage a lot of the time and not totally being myself in regards to talking to the crowd and acting personally. Thank God that we actually had the songs to do, because during the songs I could be myself. But the whole, how would you call it, the dress-up, it seems to be very phoney. The personas that the musicians put on and the audience allowed them to put on, it becomes kind of an unspoken 'we are the audience and you are our heroes' -- a total separation.

"We lost our humanity in it (music performance). That's something that I took a lot of years to try to get back to -- just being a human who happens to make music."

The mistakes of the 70s "rock and roll counterculture" were many. Marino describes three of the worst: "The mistakes of excess; the mistakes of believing one's own press; and the mistake of believing that they were a counterculture in the first place, because they weren't any longer. The last counterculture was in the 60s. What they did was they took counterculture-ism, of which I grew up with, and they turned it into a production. They turned it into commercialism. They called it counterculture and they dressed it up and sold it as counterculture, but when the culture and politics of a society is towards established commercialism and you're against that in the 60s and then, in the 70s, you find a way to dress that up and sell it to people. That's like saying, 'Buy your hippie wig! And be a hippie now!' That's like saying, 'Wear flowers on your shirt! Buy these peace signs.' The counterculture-ists of the 70s were not counterculture-ists. They were imposters. They were selling it to people as a commercial thing. That was a huge mistake. In trying so hard to band together to up the establishment, we became an establishment of the highest order, and then there was nothing left to rebel against! Because we would've had to rebel against ourselves. They went to great excess in a nutshell and lost the artistic creativity that made it special in the first place, when it really was a counterculture.

"I never refer to myself as a guitarist, because that implies some kind of wizard or something that plays an instrument. I'd rather be making music than playing guitar. I'd rather be part of a band than the focus of it. I'd rather be listening to the group as they make music together than planning my next solo.

"I quit the business in '93. I said to myself, 'I'm just going to do the music -- without worrying about anything. I don't care how long the songs are! As long as I like it.' When they got me to go back out on tour, I said, 'Yeah, I'd love to go out on tour . . . as long as I like it! As long as it's fun.'"

What is your opinion on Lester Bangs and Rock Journalists of 70s?

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