Perhaps one of the names missing in the who’s who of the guitar is Frank Marino. Frank trailblazed through the ’70s with his impeccable playing.

Frank’s guitar is the prominent instrument showcasing incredible fluidity and aggression as well as an obvious nod in the style of Jimmy Hendrix but as a power trio the dexterous support of bassist Paul Harwood and drummer Jimmy Ayoub. Born and raised in Canada, Frank commenced his musical career as a drummer before moving to guitar and forming Mahogany Rush.

Sadly for Frank, after seven albums recording for Columbia Records, at which he and the label reached a creative impasse, resulting in him leaving the company and vowing never to record for a major label again.

Frank was gracious enough to speak with me and give an update on his career.

What have you been up to?

FM: I have a big project that’s been going on now, for years, that I’ve finally got ready for distribution. It’s a live Concert DVD/BluRay that was originally 12 hours long, but I cut it down to six. It’s six hours of music and not very much talking in between the songs. It’s three two-hour shows. Everything’s done except for physically getting it out there for people to purchase it. Hopefully, that will be soon. And, even more hopefully, people will want to get it. I’ve had some offers from some well-known record companies, but I’m pretty much done with that way of doing things. I don’t want to go back through that machine. I’ll just put it out myself and see what happens.

You’ve been compared to Jimi Hendrix throughout your career, does it ever get tiring to hear that?

FM: Throughout my 50-year career, I’ve always been compared to him. Hendrix this and Hendrix that. I love Hendrix, don’t get me wrong. It’s just the way that I naturally play. That’s all I had to answer in the seventies, was about the comparisons to Hendrix. And it gets very tiring to hear that all the time.

Do you have a publicist or a record deal?

I don’t have a publicist and I don’t have a record company either. I walked away from Columbia Records in 1982 and didn’t look back. I owed them another record, too, but I chose not even to exercise my option. I’m just a very anti-industry, anti-corporate guy.

I’ve been offered a few times to play at NAMM, and I’m told that if I did that, I could get free gear. I’m like, why would I want free gear when I’m not going to use it? Don’t get me wrong; I love gear. I’m a gear nerd, but I build my own. Guys go to NAMM to talk to companies to try and get a guitar or pedal endorsement, in hopes of getting on a magazine cover, or something like that. I’ve never really been like that. I’m just a guy from 1969, and I was still in 1969.

Do you get any royalties from your back catalog from Columbia?

I know that some record labels have occasionally licensed some things of mine, from the past, and put them out telling people they’re remastered. If they did remaster them, they probably did them from the vinyl, because the few that I’ve heard sounded pretty bad to me. But I don’t have any ongoing relationship with my old record label. They don’t send me royalties or even really account to me, but I don’t care. So, consequently, they take whatever they can, and I’m not the only guy they’ve done that too.

Let me tell you something about a record contract. The only time you even look at a contract is when you sign it, and when you sue. So it doesn’t matter what’s in it because if they don’t honor what they wrote, that means you’re going to have to sue. But most people don’t because they don’t have the money or they don’t have the time. So, in the end, the record companies pretty much do whatever they want, unless you’re already some huge artist. And at the beginning of a career, you’re most likely not a very big famous artist yet, so you have to be careful about how you go about things at that time.

Let me give you an example. When I just finished this Concert DVD, I had to get permission to record my songs from previous record labels, because of deals I made when I was a teenager. Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing on the part of a company, because that’s the deal I signed. But one does have to live with the consequences of their early decisions, whether or not we think it’s fair now.

One of the things that artists do is that they tend to devalue their work when they are young; they figure that they can give up certain things in trade for some promises of tours or gigs, or even fame. And they tell themselves that they can just write more songs anyway, so they don’t realize what they’re doing by giving that away. They’re not thinking that in 20 or 30 years they’ll wish they hadn’t done that. But that’s exactly what happens in the end. And it’s a real drag, believe me.

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