Francesco Antonio Marino (born November 20, 1954) is a Canadian guitarist and singer, best known as the leader of Canadian hard rock band Mahogany Rush. Often compared to Jimi Hendrix, he is described as one of the most underrated[1] guitarists of the 1970s. In 2021, he announced his retirement from music.[2]
Biography and career
After playing drums since he was five,[3] Marino started playing guitar around age 13 or 14.[4] An often-repeated myth is that he was visited by an apparition of Jimi Hendrix after a bad LSD trip [5][6] - a myth Marino has always disavowed, and continues to do so on his personal website.[7] His playing, however, is inspired by Hendrix (on the Gibson website he is described as "carrying Jimi's psychedelic torch"[8]), and Marino is notable for often performing cover versions of Hendrix classics such as "Purple Haze" and "All Along The Watchtower".[9][8] He has been criticized by some as a Hendrix clone.[10][11] Marino himself claims that he did not consciously set out to imitate Hendrix: "The whole style just came naturally. I didn't choose it; it chose me."[12]
Mahogany Rush was moderately popular in the 1970s. Their records charted in Billboard, and they toured extensively, performing with well-known bands, including Aerosmith and Ted Nugent,[13] and played at California Jam II in 1978. Toward the end of the 1970s, the band began to be billed as "Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush."[14] Not much later, Mahogany Rush split up and in the early 1980s Marino released two solo albums on CBS. The band reformed and continued to perform throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In 1990, Marino opened his own audio recording studio, Starbase Studio, in the Notre-Dame-de-Grace district of Montreal, Quebec, Canada.[15]
Marino reformed a band in 2000, "I always knew we had fans, I just didn't know I'd find half a million of them on the Web," he said in an interview with Guitar Player in 2005.[3] He released Eye of the Storm, and went on tour again, playing more improvisational shows.[3] After having not played live for a decade, Frank scheduled a tour for 2020 that was postponed due to the pandemic. He rescheduled the tour for 2021, before announcing his retirement on June 30, 2021, due to an undisclosed medical condition. He was also involved in blues recordings with other artists, playing on tribute albums to Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Marino is a devoted Gibson SG player and uses them with the original PAF pickups, as well as two with DiMarziohumbuckers.[3] He also has an SG with single-coil DiMarzio pickups.[21] He is noted for complicated setups; according to Guitar Player, he has "an entire pedalboard ... assigned to hold the expression pedals that control the parameters of the effects on another pedalboard."[3] In the past, he has built his own amplifiers to achieve the right sound; he also uses Fender Twins.[3] He currently uses a preamp which he built himself, reminiscent of a Fender, and any available power amp, through a 2" x 15" Fane cabinet.[21]
