Marvelous 3 Ready For Rock Stardom

January 19, 1999
Larry Flick
Billboard Online

NEW YORK -- As the Jan. 26 release of Marvelous 3's Hi-Fi/Elektra debut, "Hey! Album," draws near, it's business as usual for the tireless Atlanta trio -- which logged a whopping 250 club gigs last year.

Apparently, trekking around the country in a van since forming in 1997 is paying off. Besides landing a major-label deal, the act is winning the support of modern rock radio station -- 59 of which started spinning the set's first single, "Freak Of The Week," approximately a month before its Jan. 11 release.

One of them, WNNX (99X) Atlanta started playing "Freak Of The Week" when it was first issued on the homemade version of "Hey! Album," which was released on the band's own Marvelous Records in October 1998. It was the station's support, coupled with the intensity of Marvelous 3's live show, that grabbed the attention of John Hecker, president of the Elektra-distributed Hi-Fi Records.

"I was sold within a minute and a half of seeing them onstage," he says. "They are absolutely fearless when they play. They're like the rock stars I went to see when I was growing up. They flail around, have a great time, and completely interact with the crowd."

Hecker says he was so taken with the band's performance that he ran to the bar and wrote out a contract on a napkin. "It said, 'You can have anything you want as long as you record for me.' My lawyer wanted to kill me."

Hecker's not alone in believing that Marvelous 3 is at its best onstage.

Diana Donde, manager of Miracle Music, an indie retail outlet in Atlanta, has been carrying the band's homemade discs for a little more than a year, and she says the "morning-after action" after a gig is always impressive.

"If you see them once, you're hooked," she says. "On the day after a gig, we'll sell as many Marvelous 3 discs as we will almost any album on a major label. It'll be interesting to watch what happens now that they've hit the big time."

From the perspective of Butch Walker, the band's front man and primary songwriter, nothing will change, "except maybe we'll happily hand over some of the work on the business end of things."

"But in the end, we're a pretty self-contained machine," he says. "We'll power on through regardless. As long as we can play, we'll survive and thrive."

Elektra is banking on that energy and philosophy to be the primary fuel of "Hey! Album," which was produced by Walker with Jim Ebert, who has helmed discs for Meredith Brooks and Jason Falkner.

In February, the band will open for the monthlong East Coast leg of Eve 6's tour. Along the way, the group will also hit the press and TV circuit. They're booked to appear on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" Feb. 2, with spots on other high-profile late-night shows pending. Also, consumer publications, including Rolling Stone, Spin, USA Today, and Teen People, have committed to either profiles or reviews.

According to the band's manager, Nancy Camp of Atlanta's Drastic Measures, the group "want this more than anything," she says. "But they don't do it from the sense of entitlement. They want to earn it -- but they want to have fun along the way."

Given the carefree tone of Marvelous 3's music, that's no surprise. "Hey! Album" aims to be more than merely another collection of guitar-laden rave-ups. Walker infuses tunes like "You're So Yesterday" and "Lemonade" with an appealing blend of simple, pure-pop melodies and lyrics that are etched with biting humor. He says he's "endlessly complimented" by the frequent comparisons his songs enjoy to the early output of Joe Jackson, the Cars, and Cheap Trick.

"They're from a time when music was larger than life and not nearly so categorized," Walker says. "One of the reasons we do the kind of music we do is because we're tired of shoe-gazing, apathetic bands. We grew up loving top 40 rock. We want our music to touch a chord in a lot of people -- not just a small segment of the world."

Still, he admits to a twinge of apprehension about being dubbed a sellout by the group's comrades on the do-it-yourself circuit -- thus the track "Freak Of The Week," which he says is about "people who worry about how they're perceived . . . and worry if they're going to be seen as selling out. At the end of the day, though, that fear disappears when we realize that we're relentlessly true to our music. And we've always been honest about wanting to be massive."

Walker, along with bandmates Jayce Fincher and Slug, is off to a respectable start in achieving that goal. The group's 1997 indie release, "Math & Other Problems," garnered it four Atlanta Local Music Award that year, including a nod for Atlanta's best rock'n'roll band.

"This is no Cinderella story," Walker says. "We've known each other since we were kids growing up in a suburb of Atlanta. We've passed through a lot of bands together. It's funny, but the one common thread through all of our experiences was that all three of us were the youngest in our family. And all three of us grew up with two sisters and no brothers. You might say listening to our sisters' records was the real bond -- pretty interesting, eh?"