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Frankie Machine
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There is a decidedly visual quality about L.A. Power Pop quartet Frankie Machine. Start with the band's cinematic moniker, lifted from the name of Frank Sinatra's heroin-addicted drummer in the film noir classic The Man with the Golden Arm. Then there's guitarist Creston Funk, a respected and acclaimed photographer with a number of magazine and album cover assignments on his resume. And let's not forget Riley Baxter, bassist extraordinaire and tattoo artist of the highest caliber. This is a group that is definitely in tune with disparate imagery.
That odd diversity of experience is borne out in the Frankie Machine sound as well. There is an exuberant contemporary energy that is perfectly balanced against a penchant for hook-drenched '70s Rock. Guitarist and vocalist Ryan Martin concurs on the assessment.
"The best one was last week, when this guy said, 'You guys sound like a pissed off Cheap Trick,' " Martin says via cell phone between dates on the band's current Hard Rock Cafe tour. "We loved that one. But nobody ever told us that before. It's so weird, but it's cool. I love Cheap Trick. Growing up in Chicago, I was definitely influenced by them."
Martin came to the guitar as a pre-teen only because his mother dissuaded him from his first choice for an instrument -- the saxophone.
"She refused to let me play the saxophone," he says. "She said, 'It's too loud, and you don't like that anyway. My friend teaches guitar, I'll let you take guitar lessons.' So I started taking guitar lessons from this sort of Country Western guy for about a year when I was 10 or 11. Then I quit, you know, I said, 'Screw that. I don't want to do it.' Then when I was 13, a buddy of mine started taking lessons from this guy who was like this 21-year-old guitar guy, long hair and all. I went with my friend to meet him, and I ended up taking lessons again. He actually ended up being our bass player when we moved out to L.A. He was like my mentor."
Martin and his merry band of Chicagoans broke up almost immediately upon landing in L.A., and the irony didn't stop there. "I left Chicago right before it became cool, and just as L.A. became lame," says Martin with a laugh. "I did it all backwards."
With Martin's Chicago band in disarray, he began to look around to resurrect some semblance of a group. Almost immediately, the tone of the band began to change as the new unit began to gel.
"I was looking to form a band after the band I moved out to L.A. with fell apart," Martin remembers. "We got that big dose of reality. I was basically just the guitar player, and my singer left, so I was looking for a whole band. That's when I found Gary (Benson on drums) and I had the bass player from my previous band. We started messing around, and we were going to look for a singer. I was singing everything at the time, because I was writing the songs, but Gary said, 'If you get a singer, I'm quitting. You're going to sing.' At the time, I wasn't really in singer mode. But it worked out."
One of the biggest alterations of the Frankie Machine formula came two years ago when Martin decided to expand the band from a trio to a quartet with the addition of the second guitarist, Funk.
"We were a three piece for most of the time, with a couple of different bass players. Then we added Creston, and he gave it a whole different dimension."
The band's appellation was the result of one of those stress points when decisions have to be made at crucial junctures in a band's life.
"We needed a band name, and we went through a million of them," Martin says of the christening. "Creston brought it in one day, he had just seen a Frank Sinatra VH-1 special the day that he died. We thought, 'You can't really go wrong with Frank in your name.' I don't know, it just seemed that way for some reason. We actually used it for awhile, and we changed it again, because we weren't sure it was the one we wanted. When we got signed, the record label really liked it."
Like most signings, Frankie Machine took the long road to inking a deal for its debut album.
"We actually did a demo for Hollywood Records, and the guy who produced it, Marshall Altman, was also an A&R guy for Hollywood," Martin says. "Hollywood passed on the demo, and Marshall sort of inadvertently got it to Jay Ferris at Mammoth -- their managers are mutual managers or something -- and I guess Jay really loved it. He sent some of his guys out to see us. They liked us and signed us. It was pretty easy considering all the other crap we've gone through over the years playing for labels. They always want to hear more, they're just not sold on you. So it was really nice to have a guy just say yes or no."
When Frankie Machine finally hit the studio to record One, its debut with Mammoth, they went in with Altman staying on as producer, and with a wealth of material backlogged from a fairly long and prolific writing period.
"I probably have 35 or 40 songs on tape, and we whittled it down to 16 that we recorded, and 11 made the record," Martin explains. "So there's a lot out there."
Also included in the mix was one ringer, a propulsive cover of the 1981 Split Enz hit "I Got You," which Martin proposed to the rest of the band as they prepared to lay down their own songs.
"I always wanted to do a cover song, and I thought that would be a great song to do," Martin says. "It kind of felt like a song that we could have written. It was written on guitar, it felt right, and it just works. I like the simplicity of it. It's a simple Pop song, and you can just crank it out on guitars. Plus it's one of those songs that everybody's heard, but they haven't heard it for awhile. It turned out really good, so we put it on."
The most recent change in the Machine isn't reflected on One, as the band's last bass player was jettisoned after the recording of the album in favor of tattooed four-stringer Baxter. The respected skin artist knew the members of Frankie Machine in a roundabout way, and when Benson was getting a tattoo from Baxter, he lamented the band's bass woes.
"We've always kind of known Riley through friends," Martin says. "Gary was getting some work done, and we all really hit it off. Riley was like, 'You should have me in your band.' And Gary was half kidding, 'Yeah, that'd be great.' We just never thought it was serious. And then finally we said, 'Screw it, we're not happy with our bass player, let's play with him and see what happens.' That was it: We played with him and it was great. He was like the missing piece of the puzzle."
As good as the album is, Martin is ecstatic over the current line-up and the sound that Frankie Machine is delivering now. With all of the different permutations of the band, Martin was a little like a chemist, trying a bit of this and a pinch of that, and working it out on the blackboard until the formula was a success.
"Everything just seemed to work finally," Martin concludes. "Everybody knew what their job was, and they did it. There wasn't any conflict or somebody not doing their part."
Although Frankie Machine will be playing at Bogart's in Cincinnati, the bulk of the band's current tour is an all-ages free admission circuit of the country's Hard Rock Cafes, sponsored by Jolly Ranchers. For a band that's touring weeks ahead of its album release date (One is released on March 28), the Hard Rock shows are a great way to get people into the clubs to see a fairly unknown musical entity.
"There's all these kids in (the Hard Rocks) that we would never normally be playing to in a bar," Martin says. "They're all out to have a good time, and it's just working out really good. It's harder when you go to the bars to play. We played a (show in a) bar last night that was a radio show in Springfield, Missouri. It was great, but nobody really knows the material. They responded good, but it's a chance, and you've just got to do it and hope that they like you and the next time have the CD or have heard some more songs, and they can get into it."
With a dearth of faceless, first-album-toting, guitar bands making the rounds, Ryan Martin and his compatriots in Frankie Machine know they have their work cut out for them. They're doing their level best to make a lasting impression on everyone who takes a chance on going out to see them live, which further reinforces the visual theme established earlier.
"These guys are a bunch of characters," Martin says. "You definitely don't forget Gary. He gives you the visual. He's got so many faces when he plays that I have to move to the side so that people can see him. Everybody's always screaming his name after shows. He wins them over pretty quick."
FRANKIE MACHINE joins Neve and Peter Searcy for a free show at Bogart's on Thursday.
