Mardo dishes the dope on Fresno, rock íní roll, gigs at high schools and Huey Lewis By CHRIS HANSEN ORF
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Ask a rock band about their influences and you'll typically get the standard “Uh . . . Pink Floyd . . . maybe The Stones”-type answers. Ask Mardo, and the flood gates open.
“Our influences come from so many different places, from spiritual advisers, occultists, athletes like (former tennis player) Bobby Riggs, famous lawyers — Charles Geary — Seagram's, Bob Seger and ancient Chinese wisdom like the ‘I Ching,’ ” says drummer Robbie Mardo, who along with his brother, bassist Aron Mardo, and guitarist Rob Small, make up the riff-rocking trio Mardo. “If you just name your influences as rock bands, you're gonna be a copy of the band you like,” Robbie continues. “If you are influenced by all facets of life, then you have true life experiences to write about.
“Plus,” he adds with a laugh, “drunk blondes help as well.”
The band, whose self-titled debut album features a bevy of classic sounding rock ’n’ roll in the Led Zeppelin/early Aerosmith mode, is in town Wednesday to play The Edge (103.9 FM) Independent Exposure 3 show at Martini Ranch. If the band's live reputation of blowing the headliners off the stage is any indication, the Kings of Leon, who will be in town for the Edge show and will open the two U2 shows at Glendale Arena next week, had better be at their best.
“We're friends with a lot of bands we're on the bill with before the show,” Aron says. “Then after we play, we're not friends with them anymore.”
Mardo's humble beginnings date to a farm in Fresno. The dusty central California town is not known as a birthing place for rock stardom, but the Mardo brothers’ upbringing north of the neon rock ’n’ roll capital of Los Angeles prepared them for the big city.
“I was literally a farmer — I wrote a lot of songs on a tractor,” Aron says. “We did the whole farmer thing, but we did get pluses out of it — we weren't jaded when we got into the game, we knew what we wanted to do and we knew the sound we wanted to create. We didn't have anyone standing in our way telling us we had to look a certain way.”
“That's what's nice about a place like Fresno — Pearl Jam is a new artist,” Robbie laughs. “They're just coming out there. You don't get influenced by the flavor of the month.” One artist the band did get inadvertently influenced by was ’80s rocker Huey Lewis. Mardo even recorded a version of “I Want a New Drug” for the debut album.
“When we were younger our parents took us to a concert in Fresno,” Aron says. “There's two uncool things you can do as a kid: Go to a concert with your parents, and if it's a Huey Lewis concert you've struck out. We were late, and as we're walking to the arena Huey gets off his bus, and he shook hands, met us, and he was a really nice guy. “So when were doing the record we decided to put ‘New Drug’ on there — it fit what we were doing, and we also heard he has one of the largest units in rock ’n’ roll. Whenever we see someone now we say ‘Hey, did you see the Huey Lewis on that guy?’ ”
In addition to Lewis the brothers’ parents also had a huge record collection that helped shape the Mardos' musical direction.
“We just ducked through their collection, and their records were great rock records, but they had everything from jazz to pop to classical to show tunes,” Aron says. “You put in the influence of Motown that came with that later on — we just kind of took all the elements that we liked out of that and a lot of those that we really liked, like Zeppelin, a lot of the Beatles records that are melody-oriented.”
“Our parents raised us that the song is the most important thing — you can't fabricate that or put a gloss on it,” Robbie adds. “Then you sprinkle sex and drugs on top of it and you get rock and riffs.”
The Mardo brothers recorded their debut album themselves, playing all of the instruments and even tracking the drums in their parents’ bedroom, before adding guitarist Rob Small. Aron even painted the band's psychedelic cover art for the disc.
“We decided that if we were going to call the band Mardo it better be completely Mardo,” Aron explains. “It's not a job to us — we live it. If you're going to be bold enough to call the band your last name you better do everything involved. We truly are an indie band — we have full musical control, full artistic control and business control as well.”
The band's unconventional approach to business has led them to play on high school campuses, including Mesquite High School in Gilbert a couple of weeks ago. Playing for high schoolers is a tactic the band says pays off in spades.
“It's pretty cool because at first you think, ‘high school?’, but we sell more CDs and merchandise in one day than we do in six months in a club,” Aron says. “We've been getting 3,000 hits a month on our Web site.”
“And what's awesome is, some of these schools are all-girls schools — those are the dream gigs,” Robbie laughs.
The band is already in rehearsal for their next album and has high-profile shows booked in the U.S. and Germany, where they will be on MTV's Rock-am-Ring bill with Marilyn Manson, Green Day, The Prodigy, Slipknot and R.E.M. With their star on the rise, Mardo will keep flying the rock-’n’-roll-forever flag they've been waving since their days on a tractor in Fresno.
“The bottom line is we write to please ourselves, and if others like it, great,” Robbie says. “Rock ’n’ roll has no age — you're either young or you're dead.”
The Edge (103.9 FM) Independent Exposure 3
With: Mardo, Kings of Leon
When: 8 p.m. Wednesday
Where: Martini Ranch, 7295 E. Stetson Drive, Scottsdale How much: Free; open only to Edge Insiders Info:
