The Glamour of Marvelous 3

October 19, 2000
Shannon McCarthy
Real Detroit

There aren’t too many bands these days that have the charisma, the decadence and the flash of Marvelous 3. When last year’s Hey! Album came out those of us who noticed it or caught the buzz video “Freak of the Week” on MTV got stars in our eyes. Could rock and roll be coming back? Could this band really be sugary sweet and bad ass at the same time? A big hell yes! The high-powered energy that Butch Walker, Jayce Fincher and Slug bestow on their fans is one hell of an over-the-top, straight-up, no-compromise rock and roll show. With the recent release of the sexed-up and glammed-out ReadySexGo, I could not be happier to have these guys out on the road again. Butch and I had the chance to talk about the important things in life: sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. But mostly about rock. Go figure.

ALL THE YOUNG DUDES

My first concert was Kiss in 1977. That’s what changed my life forever. If that wasn’t enough sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll right there at the tender age of 8, I don’t know what is. Sitting there with people dressed up in Kiss makeup, long-haired and 18-year-old guys smoking pot and passing it over my head and I’m seeing 20,000 stoners going nuts when Ace Frehley blows his guitar on stage. And I was like, “OK, I know what I’m doing.” I had two older sisters and I got exposed to their Camaro-driving, bootleg, corduroy-wearing, Foghat-listening, pot-smoking boyfriends, really early on. It was a magical time that doesn’t exist anymore. Everything that I grew up on in the ‘70s and ‘80s definitely epitomizes it. It seems like it all went away in the ‘90s but it wasn’t a bad thing. I think we needed a break and we all got exhausted from trying to scream about saving the whales and that’s what everybody started doing in the ‘90s. We lost a lot of our decadence and recreational aspects of the music business.

Let me go rock ‘n’ roll

I don’t think it’s ever died. People aren’t interested in having an attention span. Playing a riff and grunting “Shut the f**k up” is where our attention span is these days. As listeners we’re not challenged. We play with flash, we dress with flash and we talk and walk with it and there’s nothing wrong with that. I have no desire to get up there and regurgitate the same old stupid old-school rock banter of show me your tits, or is everybody high? That’s all been said and done before. Two years ago this shit didn’t exist. We just go up there and unleash our teenage adolescence. You’ll see moving lights and fog and full backdrop. I think a lot of that (decadence) needs to come back for the sake of getting rid of boring rock and roll.

THE ROCK SHOW

Sometimes the stage is about a facade — it’s about being someone you’re not. I get up there and get to unleash the person I can’t be when I go walking through the aisles of the grocery store or through the park. I’m not the same person, but it’s always what I wanted to be when I go on stage. I’m living vicariously through my idols. One thing we can always pride ourselves on is that we don’t sound like one particular style of band and we love that. We like the fact that we can play with Disturbed one night and Wheatus the next night. But at the same time you want to go out there and be competitive and school everybody.

Rock is my life and this is my song

Everybody that knows us knows that we’re a bunch of beer-drinking, hell-raising punks that grew up in a small suburban town with the Dazed and Confused soundtrack as the soundtrack of our lives. It’s just too much work to come off stage and be an asshole. It takes too much effort to say, “OK, what am I going to do today that’s going to make the press? Who am I going to fight? What hotel am I going to trash? How can I overdose today so I can sell more records ‘cuz my music sucks?” The lifestyle, I could care less. I’m 30 years old now; I’m a lot more grown up in my ways. Right now, taking it to the stage is the only place I care about really showing my rock and roll decadence and all that. That’s the only place anybody knows me from anyway — no one knows me off stage. I don’t want them to. We play like six shows a week and it’s not like every night we can keep up. People say, “Come party afterward,” and I’m like, “Dude, we just partied the last five nights in a row.”

PLASTER CASTER

We tend to have a problem with a couple of our guys in our camp liking to use cordless razors. The one thing I can suggest is that you want to be careful, if anybody gets on our bus and ends up leaving with no hair. A couple of guys get a little crazy about daring people to let them strip them of all their body hair.

READY, SEX, GO

The Hey! Album was very reflective of where I was that year — when I was on the road and playing for $100 a night and barely getting by, and dealing with being lonely to the point of insanity and relationship turmoil, that’s what kind of album you get out of it. But last year, we had this big f**king celebration and it was a lot of fun. We didn’t have to worry about whether or not we were going to be able to come off the road in two weeks because it was going to make us starve. We had a very celebratory year last year. We got to go out and play all over the world and be on all the late-night shows and it was a blast. So on this new record, I was in a different headspace and I’m very happy about that because I was able to come home and express myself in a different way on tape and not be so miserable. And also live, I’ve been known for being a physical performer whether it was sexually dynamic or a strong personality, and I wanted to get more of that on tape instead of making a regular safe rock record. It was coming to terms with picking up a guitar and translating that same energy that I get when I’m feeding off the audience.