Marvelous 3, the freak of the week in Lawrence

By Cynthia Price, The Bulletin

"Freaks of the Week" Marvelous 3 has been a work in progress for years and that work is starting to pay off.

The group released its second independent album, "Hey! Album," in October and was picked up by HiFi/Elektra records shortly after.

"I was thinking we needed to get a new record out, ... something for our fans because we were playing all this new stuff live that wasn't on the [first] album ("Math and Other Problems")," said lead singer/song writer Butch Walker.

"A lot of it we felt was just too damn good to not have on a recording," he said. "At that same time we were recording it as demos to shop for a deal. We just put the record out real quick and all of a sudden things heated up."

The album was recorded at Walker's house in less than two weeks. Elektra wanted to reissue "Hey!" but "I wasn't unhappy about doing that from a production stand point," Walker said.

The group asked for a few extra weeks in a studio to revamp the album and used about half of the original tracks from the first release to create "a brand new sonicly face-lifted version of ŒHey! Album.'"

M3 is currently playing theater and arena shows on tour with Collective Soul. Collective Soul is "a band that's serious about their songs and their song craft, and that's very respectable," Walker said.

M3's April 21 performance in Lawrence, Kan., with Stir was the band's only headlining show for this tour.

Walker said he would like to see his group tour with other "bands that have some sort of persona to them," like Hole or Lenny Kravitz.

The group played at Big Day Out in Atlanta, Ga., a music festival that featured Goo Goo Dolls, Semisonic and Fastball. The event drew in about 50,000 people.

Walker said M3 enjoyed having that opportunity to play for their underage fans.

"They're more serious, devoted and dedicated to music and becoming fans than the people over 21 are."

Several years of extensive touring has eased any nervous butterflies these guys may have before a performance.

"Our show is a big rock show so we get more psyched," Walker said. "We're more like a football team that's going out to go on stage than an opera or a high school play.

"Our show is physical. It's all about connecting with each other first and then connecting with the audience."

But the direction of M3 was not always so clean cut.

"We've had several incarnations of the band," Walker said. "It goes so far back it's almost hard to name them all. I'd say there's been at least half a dozen or so bands since we started to play together when we were 15 years old."

Countless shows and about 10 years later Walker, bassist Jayce Fincher and drummer Slug have settled into a band together, at least for now.

M3 members were involved in Southgang and The Floyds, a band which they put "on an indefinite leave" to work on the project which became the Marvelous 3.

"It was pretty much just a bunch of good old-fashioned hard rock pop songs that had been brewing for a long time in my brain and didn't really seem to fit what we'd been doing at the time in the previous group," Walker said. "We ended up recording it and Slug played drums on it and Jayce came and played bass on it.

"It was like ŒWell, here we are again,'" he said. "It's pretty much the band. We might as well keep running with it' because it sounded so good that we just couldn't not pursue it.

"We just felt good about it, and the public felt good about it. We played it for a lot of our friends and a lot of fans. They took to it very well. At that point we knew we were on to something because it didn't sound like anything else at the time.

"We shed our indie-cred roots I guess and went straight for the sell-out. We're really happy about it actually. We've been playing together for so long that we just got to the point where we were like Œyou know, there's nothing we could do that could hurt us right now, nothing. If it hurts, it won't do any damage.'"

Walker said there was never any debate about the name of the band.

"I wanted to come up with something so cocky and so different, just tongue in cheek, because we never took this too seriously from the stage or that point of view."

Walker said he and a friend were at a bar listening to the music.

"[I was] drinking and groveling over not having a band name," he said. "He was talking about how marvelous it sounded [and] said why don't you call it The Marvelous 3?'

"It was just a big epiphany at that moment. It felt right even though I was drunk as a skunk."

Walker said he wrote the name on a napkin, went home and passed out in his clothes. The napkin was there beside him in the morning as a reminder of the name this now signed band would take.

Members credit Queen, Cheap Trick and The Cars as influences. That era of rock music "is so good, it's not datable. It has a quintessential sound of the early Œ80s, but so does our stuff," Walker said.

"The songs [on "Hey!"] didn't start off sounding that way," he said. "When you get into the studio and start producing, you realize what your vibe it about."

He said the songs are a form of "living vicariously through our influences.

"If you play these songs on an acoustic guitar they don't really sound like an early Œ80s, late '70s song. Lyrically, [the goal] was to write something that's timeless and musically to have something that's got a kind of vibe to it so it just doesn't sound like another grunge or another 90s alt-rock thing."