Hey! We're Marvelous!

Music Monitor April 1999

By- Rick Cornell

Older sisters. The absolute scourge of their younger brothers, right? Hell-bred demons in make-up and braces. Actually, no, not if you ask any of the members of crunch-pop band Marvelous 3: Butch Walker, Jayce Fincher, or, no kidding, Slug. All three grew up with no brothers and two older sisters, and they'll swear to you that they were blessed. "It was all about hanging out with your sisters and their boyfriends because their boyfriends were cool and into ROCK," says guitarist/lead vocalist/songwriter Walker. "They'd take our sisters to rock concerts, and you felt cool to be hanging out with the older crowd, little brother tagging along. For better or for worse--worse for them--I'm glad they did it. It helped."

This sibling situation was only one bond the guys shared growing up in the same Southern suburb, their teen years coinciding with the '80s. Walker describes the trio as "three guys who were the only guys on their block in Atlanta who looked the way we did and played music, and wanted to rock and have three-different-color hair and crazy clothes, and not drive pick-up trucks with gun racks. We pretty much had our own agenda, and I think that's how we bonded and have stayed together over the years.... I tell you, we have outlasted any relationship any of us has ever had."

The musical part of the trio's relationship has been going strong for ten years now. After many van miles and more than their share of nights where the number of people on stage was greater than the number of folks in the crowd (a really bad thing for a trio), the Marvelous 3 made their first good-sized splash with the release of their album Math And Other Problems. It earned them the Best Atlanta Rock 'n' Roll Band award for that year and convinced them to get right back in the studio. The result, HEY! Album, was another collection of loud and energetic guitar-pop tunes--nothing fancy and certainly not an attempt to redefine the boundaries of power-pop or hard-rock. "I think it's really good to blatantly come out and stab people in the eye [editor's note: ouch] with something that's so catchy and hooky and fun to listen to," offers Walker. "This was not going to be one more album about being pissed off and crawling into a corner and lashing out."

HEY! Album's catchy and hooky fun was undeniable, and a minor frenzy developed as major labels began the wooing process. Walker and crew tried to keep things in perspective and hold on to a little healthy skepticism: "It always seems like such a jinx to see these bands get into these big bidding wars and then all of a sudden their records come out and they stiff, and you never hear from them again. That overhype thing is just so plastic.. I like to give ourselves a little more credit than that and think that we're actually a little bit more than just a novelty."

In the winter of '98, the band signed with HiFi/Elektra, and it was back to the studio--this time to "rerecord" HEY! Album. Walker admits it was a bit of what he calls "an artistic science project." "All kinds of tracks from the original version of the record were lifted and put in with new tracks. So there are a lot of different elements, but there are also a lot of things that are exactly the same because we just took them right off the record. I didn't want to lose any of that magic spontaneity. There's always been something endearing about the records we've done because they were made on such a shoestring budget and a nervous time frame. And I like that. I like that energy." Now, I'm as sick of the phrase "win-win" as anybody else, but that annoying buzz term pops into my head when Walker discusses the end result: "The beauty of putting half and half together, and compromising just a little bit was we gave the label a chance to have something a little more sonically present, while at the same time keeping the rawness and the energy that existed on the first demo record."

"The record goes down avenues of time," Walker continues. "The first half of the record, I tend to think of as going down the '90s avenue. Then it turns down the more serious side. And then it turns down the cheeky, kind of more campy '70s/'80s side." It is a pretty wild ride. HEY! Album blasts out of the gate--take that exclamation mark in the title seriously--with the cheeky "You're So Yesterday," an onslaught of "do-do-do-do's and ten-story-high hooks. "Freak of the Week," an ode to that dreaded disease, self-consciousness, is the first single, and it has Scurry Up the Modern Rock Charts written all over it.

My favorite three-song stretch starts at the end of the album's "serious" portion, kicked off by the Cheap Trick-ish "#27." This leads into what Walker identifies as the "old-school portion of the record." "That's supposed to be taking you down Memory Lane as far as the late '70s/early '80s--that vibe, that's what that's all about. That part of the record is the influence of Joe Jackson, Elvis Costello, the Kinks, and stuff like that pouring out."

"It's a song record," is Walker's final and succinct summation of HEY! Album. "It's deep. I think it's got a lot of substance to it, although I'll be the first to admit I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel. And I'm definitely not trying to be Mr. Indie Cred, either. I want this to sell a million records or more. I want people to have it and love it and come to the concert and freak out to it." You get the feeling though that even if Walker is the only one freaking out to it, he and the other guys would still be doing this--for beer money, for gas money, whatever. And he confirms this suspicion, saying that if Elektra were to all of a sudden stop footing the bill (note to Elektra: Butch would obviously prefer that you didn't stop footing the bill), they'd go right back to the way it was in the old days, way back in 1997. "[We'd] come home from the road and be exhausted, with only about 100 dollars in our pocket to show for it. But we'd be like, well, we gained some fans, we sold some records, and we made people happy. And you know what? I didn't have to make the donuts."