Marvelous 3 go it alone on debut release

February 18, 1999
Karen Bliss
JAM! Showbiz

After most American A&R reps blew smoke up Marvelous 3's behinds for months, the Atlanta-based power pop trio went ahead and put together its second independent release, Hey Album, in a week.

Immediately, influential Atlanta radio station 99X started spinning the pop song, "Freak Of The Week", and M3 signed a deal with Elektra within a month and a half, tweaking the indie album and re-releasing it.

"We were always fans of the band," says Leslie Fram, program director at 99X and "Goddess Of The Airwaves", according to the thank you credits in M3s CD liner notes.

"I thought they were the best live band in Atlanta. Anywhere they played people go crazy. It's mesmerizing watching (frontman) Butch Walker perform. He's just a great talent. But when I heard the album, my radio ears flared up, there were about four or five songs that were hits."

Fram, who is credited with giving the same break to Shawn Mullins with his current smash "Lullaby", says the phone response to "Freak Of The Week" was top 5 the first week and M3's EP, the original Hey Album, sold 1500 copies in 10 days.

Record companies had been aware of the band for months. At Austin's music festival SXSW, in March '98, the club was jammed packed with over 20 attentive but stiff A&R reps careful not to reveal to their rivals whether they were interested in the energetic guitar band onstage with the expressive-faced, enigmatic singer/guitarist, and his bandmates bassist Jayce Fincher and drummer Slug.

"It took about six months of people shamelessly going, 'We're gonna see what the other labels are gonna do,' or 'It's not good enough,' or 'We don't hear a single,' or all the stupid cliches that come with an insecure business with people scared to take chances on something new, before all of a sudden a lot of those same people, who had passed, were telling you everything you wanted to hear," recalls Walker.

Fed up with waiting for a firm offer, the band, whose self-financed and produced 1997 debut, Math And Other Problems, on indie label Deep South, had run its course, wanted a follow-up to sell at shows. They had been recording at home over a period of a year and decided to throw Hey Album together.

"After I met with Elektra, and that became the decision, things moved ahead very fast," says Walker. "They were like, 'Okay, get an album out very quickly because the song, 'Freak Of The Week, is being played on the radio everywhere and it's in high demand, so we need to get an album out very fast."

M3 rerecorded the majority of Hey Album with producer Jim Ebert (Meredith Brooks) and rereleased it. Now, Walker is pleased to have a genuine shot at making his lifelong passion a quote-unquote success.

"No matter what you do in this business - and if anybody tells you any different then they're full of shit -- but you want to succeed, especially if you've been doing it for 10 or 12 years. It goes beyond being a hobby. It becomes your life and your full-on destiny.

"I know that sounds corny," he admits, "but there's really no other way to put it. With all the elements throughout the years (toiling in other bands), nothing had quite lined up the way it finally has. It just took up until recently, the last six months, for the pieces of the puzzle to finally be put together correctly."