Freaks of the Month

 by Sean McDevitt, Guitatmag.com

Marvelous 3 frontman Butch Walker is tired of Taco Bell, stinky hotel rooms, and traveling in a van to and from 250 gigs a year. But now that the band's infectious single "Freak of the Week" is in active rotation at stations across the country, and the group's debut Hey! Album ... (Elektra) has finally arrived, it seems safe to say that power-pop trio will soon find less malodorous places to sleep.

"I guess this is the reward for paying your dues," says Walker, the band's guitarist, songwriter, lead singer, and guiding light. "I'm knocking on wood and keeping an open mind about it, because I've been set up for a fall so many times. I'll finally believe it if everybody buys this record!"

Hey! Album ... is a fresh spin on Cheap Trick and Queen, marrying catchy, smart lyrics with pulsating rhythms. "My whole life centers around guitar," says Walker, who was first inspired at age eight after seeing Ace Frehley's axe implode during a Kiss gig at the Omni in Atlanta. "I consider myself a songwriter first and foremost now. But when I was growing up, I was definitely all about the guitar and nothing else, because I never could write songs then. When you're 15 years old, you're not gonna be the best songwriter in the world. It comes with age."

The members of M3--Walker, bassist Jayce Fincher, and drummer Slug--have known each other since they were kids growing up in surburban Atlanta. They jammed as high school students, moved to Los Angeles together around 1990, and today share a collective bond that's as personal as it is musical. "When you're in school and you're young, you sort of flock to your kind," says the affable Walker. "There was nobody in our schools who was our kind. I had multi-colored hair, nine holes in each ear, and a different color shoe on each foot. We weren't really freaks or outcasts, but we were definitely visual spectacles."

Walker isn't embarrassed to admit that he knows the entire Survivor, Styx, and Foreigner catalogs, having played those tunes time and again in cover bands while growing up. Call it the price of being a mid-to-late-'80s high school grad: You enter school while Journey is the rage, and by the time you're finished, the big hair bands rule. The ever-changing musical landscape during M3's formative years, if nothing else, gave Walker direction about the kind of guitarist he wanted to become and the kind of music he wanted to perform.

"I was the only guy who could listen to Ratt and play every guitar solo by Warren DeMartini, but then I could also turn around and play R.E.M. and Duran Duran, who I was a huge fan of," he says. "It kicked my ass to hear a good pop song. Even Rick Springfield, as cheesy as that is, had some great fucking songs. I think when all of those blow-their-wad guitar players came out in the late '80s, I just decided, 'There's no way I can compete with this. These guys can play with their dicks better than I can with my hands, so I might as well not even compete.'"

As good as they are on disc, Marvelous 3's bread-and-butter is the stage. Walker says the group's relentless touring schedule has enabled it to find just the right mix of soul and aggression--all of which is decorated with a don't-take-me-too-seriously motif. More than 50,000 people saw them play at Atlanta's 1998 Big Day Out when M3 shared the bill with bands like the Goo Goo Dolls, Semisonic, and Fastball.

"That was amazing," Walker says of the gig. "But I think I get the same rush playing before 200 people in a cramped club. For some reason, the closer you are to them, the more connected you are. There's nothing like hearing people singing back the chorus to your song. It's the biggest compliment you could ever have."