Best known as the voice of Mr Big, ERIC MARTIN is returning to the UK in a way which may surprise many fans – in that he is picking up the guitar himself to play a brace of solo acoustic shows – in Belfast and Nottingham. Hang on, did we say Belfast? Well, that sounded like an excuse for Über Rock’s man in Norn Iron, Mark Ashby, to jump on the Skype connection to the vocalist’s home in San Francisco for a short (?) chat…

 

What resulted was not the quick chinwag we expected, but an in-depth 45-minute conversation covering Martin’s entire career – from his earliest days following in his father’s footsteps playing army bases in northern Italy to his biggest regret – producing album-loads of covers of horrible J-Pop trash! Along the way, the singer reveals the story behind his most iconic song, the multi-platinum smash hit single ‘To Be With You’… and how, in fact, it almost didn’t come to be recorded, never mind released!

Naturally, we’re curious to know why he has chosen to perform these, his first solo acoustic gigs in the UK, now?

 

“Following the Mr Big tours in 2009 and 2011, I did some solo touring in Europe in November/December 2012, and I thought that turned out great – it was painless, with no strings attached, just me on my lonesome playing an acoustic guitar… it was a little scary at the beginning but, hell, Mr Big wasn’t touring for a while and as long as I’m healthy and I’m having fun doing it, then it’s ‘go west young man’ – or east, as the case may be…  I didn’t want to sit at home and wait for the Mr Big ‘batphone’ to ring:  I gotta keep working and keep my chops up for when it does ring!  And, I wanted to play other places I haven’t played before…”

 

What can we expect from an Eric Martin ‘unplugged’ solo show?

 

“Anything and everything – request, shout outs… If I can’t play it, I’ll do it a cappella!  I did it in Italy:  somebody asked me to play ‘Just Take My Heart’, which is a song I wrote on piano and never learned on guitar – but, anyway, it caught me off guard and so I just sang it!  I’ve since learned it on guitar, by the way.  I’ll even get somebody in the crowd to jam with me!  But they always want to sing ‘To Be With You’ and then only the scatty part – and to try and sing it higher than me!”

 

For someone who is much better known for performing alongside guitarists, Martin is obviously not particularly known as a guitar player himself:  so, ÜR wonders, do these type of show present any special challenges for him, especially in relation to performing Mr Big’s material?

 

“I’m good for three or four chords… a chicken wing and a prayer…  I’m a singer, songwriter:  I write most of my songs on acoustic guitar – and then show it to the professionals!  No one’s really coming to see my fancy fretwork, trust me… no one’s expecting me to rip out a Paul Gilbert riff!”

 

Not least Martin himself?

 

“I learned the beginning to ‘Addicted To That Rush’ and when I played it the crowd went nuts – and then it was ‘oh shit, that’s all I’ve got!’  Mind you, people do shout out the craziest things:  obviously things like ‘Green Tinted Sixties Mind’ or ‘Colorado Bullfrog’ aren’t going to happen… well, maybe a cappella they might!”

 

Are these acoustic shows a natural follow-up from the Mr Big ‘Live From The Living Room’ Japanese sessions, which finally saw the light of day this time last year?

 

“Yeah, they’re sort of an extension of that!  I used to do something at home, here in the San Francisco Bay area, called ‘Wooden Music Night’:  it was like a Tuesday night music club, a  ‘round robin’, which I would host, and I’d sing a couple of my songs, and other people would come in and jam and play their songs – and that’s the sort of thing I’m trying to do… interact more with the audience, get them to do the backing vocals and harmonize with them… I’ll even have the opening act come up and play backing for me…”

 

At this point, your humble Über-interviewer decides to turn the clock right back to the beginning of Martin’s career…  His father was a musician, and a big influence on the singer getting into music himself.  But, when he first started out, his influences were more in the jazz and Motown veins – what first attracted him to rock music?

 

“The swagger, the attitude, the angst, the independence, the soul, the blues, the volume, the sexual tension in the room, the cockiness, the fact that you didn’t have to wear your best Sunday suit to play it… I loved the way people felt uneasy when they heard it!  I came from that sort of background of jazz and Motown and swing:  my parents listen to it all the time, and it drove me nuts!  I mean, I loved it, but that’s all we had!  My dad was a massive Frank Sinatra fan, and I’ve always loved him as well, but it always weirded me out because both my dad and Sinatra regarded rock ‘n’ roll as ‘the devil’s music’… so, being the troublemaker that I was, I jumped right into it!

 

“It’s the only argument I ever won with my dad, and when he came around he helped me to build my musical life… he was a jazz/swing drummer, but when I started playing drums, he got into rock, and he vicariously lived that life through my eyes, and my heart… he built my first website, printed T-shirts… he got really into it!  So, what started out as a family stand-off became a family business…”

 

As mentioned, Martin started his musical career following in his father’s footsteps as a drummer…

 

“I remember my first gig:  it was 1975, we were living in Italy at the time, and we played an army post theatre, opening for Sergio Mendes And The Brazil 66, who [as their name suggests] had a very Latin vibe… and we were playing rock!  I remember using the guy’s drum set:  mine was red sparkles and kinda funky – but his was leopard skin and disgusting… but that was my first time playing in front of people, and I loved it…

 

“Then I was in this band called The Buzz or something funky like that, and we had a singer who sounded like Otis Redding but had a real attitude problem;  so, the band decided to get rid of him and I took over – singing and playing drums at the same time,  which didn’t work out, so I just stopped playing drums and became a singer…”

 

And so Eric Martin the frontman was born… and the rest, as they say, is history.  Well, more or less.

 

Of course, we have to talk about Mr Big – and so the discussion turns to ‘To Be With You’, which was such a worldwide smash and is still very much a fan favourite:  does the song, given its age, ever feel like an albatross around Martin’s neck, or is he still proud of it and its success, even to this day?

 

“This is my honest answer:  to me, it is my finest hour!  I wear it like a medal!  I love that song:  it put me on the map, it stamped my passport.  It’s indicative of me:  it’s my voice, and I love the way I sound on that track – it’s got all the fat harmonies on it that I love, that sort of ‘Wall Of Sound’ soul!  Yeah, I love it…

 

“I don’t feel like it’s an albatross or a burden or anything like that:  I’m very proud of it!

 

“I knew it was special when I wrote it.  I was in my early teens and I could play a few chords that I had taught myself – the same chords that I only know now!  It had that hooky chorus, but it needed some kind of a twist.  The first version had a kind of folk-rock thing to it, in the verses, as I was a big Crosby, Stills and Nash fan at that time, but it had that sing-song chorus.  So, I had it for years and always played it to people, but never really did any more work on it, until 1988, when I got together with this session songwriter called David Graham for EMI Publishing, who I was signed to at the time, and he liked it but suggested doing a Beatles kind of thing, sort of like ‘Give Peace A Chance’, with a bass drum and a handclap – like ‘clap, boom, clap boom, I’m the one who wants to be with you’:  something real simple but with a bigger impact.  Then we threw in the big harmonies and some modulation… and it got that right leg, because it had been standing on one leg for so long!

 

“So, then I played it to Paul Gilbert when we first got together in 1989, and he loved it… but we had written the first album in the first week together as a band – I don’t think we even had the name Mr Big yet – and there was no room on it!  Plus, I didn’t have the balls to show it to him at first, because we were all four on the floor rock ‘n’ roll!  Then, when we were writing ‘Lean Into It’ I played it for our producer, Kevin Elson, and he seemed to take a real liking to it – and I think Billy (Sheehan) dug it as well… but, it was always on the back burner – until we were writing the last few songs for ‘Lean Into It’:  I remember Paul bringing in ‘Green Tinted…’ and that was my cue to ask if we could ‘To Be With You’ on the end of the record, like a small dessert…

 

“What happened next is funny – actually, no, it’s pathetic!  Atlantic had released a couple of singles off the album, which had hit the wall, and there was this programme director called John Perry at a radio station in Lincoln, Nebraska, who did a ‘Smash Or Trash’ kind of thing, and ‘To Be With You’ was a smash, after which it spread like wildfire all over the USA, Japan, Europe:  it was amazing…”

 

So, if Martin had not finally collected his balls and presented the song to Paul Gilbert as a ‘filler’, for want of a better expression, Mr Big’s biggest hit may never have seen the light of day?

 

“Maybe not.  Maybe it would have been on a solo album.  But, it was just perfect timing…  Paul and I shared an apartment when the band was first starting, and we jammed all the time, and I played him ‘To Be With You’.  I gave him the demo, which was very close to the version you hear on the record, except that I played piano on it as well… So, you never know: maybe he had been sitting on that solo for years before the ‘Lean Into It’ sessions…  I don’t know:  I never talked to him about it, but he definitely championed the song when it came time to fill that last slot on the record!”

 

While Martin may never tire of his signature song, it appears neither do the fans…

 

“I always think people would be sick of hearing it:  they’ve heard it like a million times!  And they may not shout for it at gigs, but they get so pissed off when you don’t play it!  They feel robbed of their ticket price if you don’t… I remember we played Hellfest – and I was afraid to play it:  I said to Billy, ‘you see these guys out here, they want blood…’ and he told me I would be surprised.  So, we didn’t play it, and everyone jumped on us… and Billy was like ‘I told you so’ – they want to hear it, no matter what…”

 

Over the years, Martin has also been involved, to some degree or another, in dozens of different projects – from songwriting for the likes of Laura Brannigan and Europe to collaborations with Todd Rundgren to the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers:  looking back, outside of his solo work and the Mr Big stuff, what were his favourite projects?

 

“I did a Rush tribute album, and I sung ‘The Mission’.  Mr Big had toured with Rush on both the ‘Presto!’ and ‘Roll The Bones’ tours, which was awesome, and both Paul and I were huge Rush fans;  in fact, Paul was constantly pestering them to sign albums for him!  Anyway, every night they did ‘The Mission’ and it was very touching, moving – it’s such an amazing song.  I’d always wanted to do, so when the tribute album came along…

 

“The I have this other project that I did a couple of tours with – we’ve never recorded anything – called Scrap Metal… it’s the Nelson brothers, Marc Slaughter, Kelly Keagy from Night ranger on drums, sometimes Kip Winger, sometimes Jeff Scott Soto, sometimes Joe Lynn Turner, and yours truly – and that was fun!

 

“And, to be honest with you, I loved doing that Power Rangers movie soundtrack!  I really did.  There was Ron Nevison, Matt Sorum from Guns N’ Roses, John Pierce from Huey Lewis And The News and Tim Pierce, no relation, on guitar, and it was fun!  I mean, when am I ever going to get to sing the likes of ‘the ability to morph and even the score’ again?  And, then, a couple of years later, I had kids and they love that song and then to have them realize it’s their father singing it… that’s cool!”

 

Are there any he looks back on now and asks himself ‘why did on earth did I agree to do THAT?’

 

“Oh yeah… have you got a couple more hours?  I did this project in Japan called ‘Mr Vocalist’…  Long story short:  Sony Records Japan asked me if I would sing on these albums of really famous Japanese pop songs, that all the Japanese kids grew up on, but translating all the lyrics, which were done like haikus, into English, while keeping the melodies:  they thought my voice would give them a new edge…  I wasn’t familiar with the original songs and although I think I can sing just about anything some of that JPop material confused the hell out of me!  I didn’t have a lot of creative control and my songwriting partner Andre Passis and I didn’t like the way the Japanese writers were changing the lyrics:  I couldn’t sing those songs; I didn’t like the way they were coming off, so Andre and I took over this huge project – and it was really hard!  A lot of those J-Pop songs are about heartbreak, which I don’t have a problem with, but there’s a lot of redundancy:  they have like seven different choruses – five was the norm but sometimes there were seven, and they were all different… they said the same thing but in a different way.

 

The last one was called – wait for this – ‘Mr Rock Vocalist’!  I would have cut my leg off to get out of that one!  Marty Friedman, Richie Kotzen, John 5 all played on it and my old friend Marty Fredrikson produced some of the tracks… I liked some of that J-Pop stuff: I did some English songs:  I did ‘White Christmas’, and I loved it.  But, most of it was bleugh… I look back and ask myself why I did it, but I did it and I did 100 per cent!

 

“To be honest, I’ve gone past the point of caring about people thinking I’ve sold out:  it’s work!  If it’s fun and a challenge, I’ll do it!

 

So, looking beyond the forthcoming solo jaunt, and the tentative touring plans with Avantasia, what else is in the pipeline for Eric Martin? Are there any plans for a new Mr Big album in the near future?

 

“Like I said earlier, I’m waiting for the Batphone to ring!  I’ve got my feelers out there:  I throw the management an email every few weeks, because I want to do it.  But I also want to be prepared for it, unlike the last couple of times… even with the last album, ‘What If?’, there were no plans: nobody sat down and said ‘we’re gonna record an album and do a tour’, then, all of a sudden it was ‘yeah, let’s do an album next month, so get prepared…’  But, I guess I do a lot of my best stuff with my back against the wall and under pressure, and I felt that we put out a great record.  And the touring was awesome!

 

“Look, after ten or 15 years, you lose the taste to hate, and the whole reunion thing with Mr Big has been a pleasure… I love it… I love being on the road and making the records.  But, when it’s not fun… I think that’s the reason we didn’t tour in 2012:  everyone wanted to concentrate on family and their own gigs that they’ve been doing for years, and we didn’t want the whole Mr Big train to run into the ground!

 

“In the meantime, I’m going to keep as busy as possible.  I’m going to do as many acoustic shows as I can, and this Avantasia thing, but apart from those I don’t really have anything else going… I am supposed to being some shows with this ‘Legends Of Rock’ thing, with Bobby Kimball from Toto, Joe Lynn Turner, Ben Chaplin and maybe John Waite, in the middle of the year – just to keep busy and keep my chops up so that I’m ready, strong and healthy for when that ‘phone rings… and I’m willing it to ring!”

 

Eric Martin plays Auntie Annie’s, Belfast, on Sunday March 3rd (supported by Pat McManus) and Rock City, Nottingham, on Tuesday March 5th.

 

Eric Martin’s official website is http://www.ericmartin.com

 

Visit Amazon’s Eric Martin store by clicking right HERE!

 

[Photo kudos to Katrin Bretscher and Michael Gardenia]