This is no short article, but it's worth every minute it will take to read.
What is going on in the life of Frank Marino?
Frank – I guess I could say that I’m kind of back in the music business. I was out for a while and doing very little in a professional manner. From '93 to about '98 I just kind of walked away. Then around '98 I started doing a few gigs and a few records and it started to be a little more every year. Now I guess we have this “Real Live” record and we’re back out there doing our thing.
I didn’t grow up listening to rock, so I wasn’t familiar with your music “back in the day”, but I heard the “Real Live” album and it rocks!
Frank – Thank you for that and I thank God for that.
Many of your fans know the story behind how you got into music while being treated for an LSD addiction at the age of 13. However, I've only read one piece that talked about how deeply spiritual you became at that time too.
Frank – Well, there were actually a lot of pieces about it, but as you well know, this type of subject usually gets a very short attention span in the mainstream press. Consequently, that’s why you have Christian labels and Christian publications now. You’re too young to imagine, but I can’t imagine that in the 70’s there would have been Christian labels and publications. Even the word “Christian” was considered something uncool. At the time I took quite a bit of flack for that, especially in the early to mid 70’s. Music was just coming out of the 60’s and historically, during that time, the big trip was to become a Buddhist or something, to follow Indian culture. The Beatles went to see the Mah Haraja and all of a sudden everybody became a Hindu. So to be a rock and roll musician playing psychedelic music, which was basically 60’s style music, talking about Christian stuff left me pretty alone back then. Even though I did talk about it quite a bit, and always alluded to it through album covers and lyrics, it was played down quite a bit in the mainstream press. That’s probably why you never heard of it.
For many people, I suppose, the whole "70's rocker who also follows God" is a contradiction of terms.
Frank – In some ways, some of them are a contradiction in terms. I’m what you call an Orthodox Christian. I was raised as a Roman Catholic until grade 5. But being raised that way just meant that was what people said you were. It wasn’t like you felt it or you thought about it at all. It was almost like you were forced to do it. My mother was Eastern Orthodox and even though we were raised Roman Catholic, we were always going to her church, because of my grandmother. So we had the influence of the Antiochian Orthodox Church in our life. Around grade 5 we just decided that we might as well be Orthodox since our mother was. Of course, at that point, religion isn’t a big part of your life. As a young kid you’re thinking about it like “Oh here we go again. It’s Sunday and we got to go to church.” That type of thing. For the first couple of years after I got sick at 13 I tried all of the different remedies of the late 60’s and early 70’s, which were follow after this religion and that religion and reading this guys book or that guys book. It was really quite a mess. But once I finally started to receive grace I really went back to my Orthodox roots to study it. The Orthodox doctrine is based on the fact that it doesn’t change and what better place to start to study than in something that doesn’t change? My point about the rock and roll musicians is when you look at finding God or God finding you, in an orthodox sense, I can also see that it is true that some people who espouse Christianity, yet do things that maybe aren’t so Christian, maybe in a sense they’re not really Christian. Of course, not all of them. Certainly, it does apply, because when it became fashionable to talk about Jesus, there were those who would speak about it, but their daily lives, outside of their group, didn’t usually encompass being Christian or acting Christian. So it’s one thing to say that a guy wrote a poem with a really cool message from the Bible, but it’s another thing to say how did the man actually live. So I can see why there would be a thinking that there’s a contradiction there, but for the most part, I think that most people who actually do decide that they’re going to follow Jesus pretty much sooner or later actually begin to follow them. They may start the wrong way, but they eventually find out that it’s really good medicine.
