Cover Story: The Marvelous 1

Click on his website, and a hyper-stylized cartoon image of Butch Walker brandishing a red, white and blue guitar seems to come bounding off the screen right toward you. But on a recent afternoon, the effusive rocker seems fairly ordinary as he makes his way down Moreland Avenue in Little Five Points. Moments earlier, as if to herald his arrival, a car passes by blasting Walker's current single, "My Way."

As the 32-year-old rocker greets approaching friends and fellow musicians, there's little evidence of his flash-animation likeness. His jet-black hair is cropped short and spiky with bleach-blond patches at the temples, his "Von Dutch Originals" T-shirt, faded blue jeans and Converse hightops a fairly unremarkable ensemble for this boho section of town. The only obvious hints of his trademark over-the-top onstage persona are the colorful tattoos on his arms.

After a waitress comments on his newest ink, a detailed star framing an image of a '70s Vegas-era Elvis, Walker orders a beer and leans back in his chair. It's a rare day off for the busy musician, at home in Atlanta between promotional stops to plug his new album, Left of Self-Centered, set for release Tuesday.

"I think it's cool that on every record I do, I try to make a point to have something on there that says, 'Be yourself; be your own individual and have your own identity,'" Walker says.

Which is ironic when you consider that Walker's previous band, the Marvelous 3, were often written off as hear-today-gone-tomorrow bandwagon-jumpers. Listen closely, though, and the group's radio hits, "Freak of the Week" and "Sugarbuzz," echo Walker's determination to go his own way — even if it may not be the most original route.

In fact, Walker always has been slightly askew of prevailing trends. He left his native North Georgia for Los Angeles with a hair band at the tail end of the pop-metal craze. When Hootie-lite crooning was all the rage, he toured the country with a metallic-funk-pop show band. He founded an '80s power-pop band when Nirvana, Pearl Jam and glacier-slow Sabbath grunge ruled the sales and radio charts.

Chalk it up to bad timing or a sheer obliviousness to trends. Or it may be that Walker doesn't give a shit about what others think. "There's a right way, and there's my way," he sings on his latest single. "There's a highway. If you don't like it, you can take it."

And yet Walker is not above caring about how he's perceived. "It's important for me to make that statement," Walker says. "Because that's how I'd rather be remembered. Especially when you get into the rest of the [new] record and realize that it holds true. It goes all over the place, instead of dumbing it down for the masses."

Of course, it can be argued that Walker's material has never been the most literate fare. Yet his sparse wordplay and simultaneous mockery and adulation of classic rock stand as faithful odes to the music that matters to him. Walker's music is frozen in a time when cigarette lighters were held aloft en masse and the act of showering an artist with empty water bottles was unheard of.

Self-Centered is, in many ways, Walker's statement of self. Almost single-handedly, he composed and performed every track on the disc. The music echoes the caffeinated pop of the Marvelous 3, but with the metallic touches of Southgang, his first major-label band.

"My songs are pretty simple. I'm not making a prog-rock record here," he says. "I'm trying to offer up hints of my influences in rock without people being closed-minded to it."

At Butch Walker's modest home near Little Five Points, you'll find no garish rock-star trappings, no bong on the coffee table — not even a giant-screen TV.

Settling on the couch with his hyperactive pug, Bill, curled up next to him and his trusty cell phone close by, Walker sips a beer and opines, "There's two kinds of music: good and bad."

In his hometown of Cartersville, Ga., Walker's radio beacon was Atlanta's 96 Rock. "In any small town, you're lucky to hear anything from the underground. You're a product of your listening environment of the radio," he says. "But, you know, if I didn't have Journey and REO and Survivor and KISS and Motley Crue and all that shit, I wouldn't be able to judge good and bad music now. A lot of that was bad; a lot of it was good. But it was all we were given. See, I had that — or Pong."

Later that night at The Earl in East Atlanta, Walker checks out a show featuring Dropsonic and The Tom Collins. Bands that, like Walker, wear their influences proudly and are often criticized for their devotion to the past.

"I know where Butch is coming from," says Dropsonic guitarist Dan Dixon. "He was into a lot of the stuff that I was growing up: Judas Priest, [Iron] Maiden. He does it with a smirk, and we do it with a scowl, I guess. But you can't deny your past. If you're 35 and only listen to indie bands now, you didn't grow up on that. You grew up listening to Styx and AM Gold stuff."

That steadfast refusal to deny some of the more bloated, cheesy and embarrassing elements of rock's past can make Walker's musical approach a "love it or hate it" proposition.

"A lot of naysayers go, 'I don't get you,'" says Walker. "But if they had gotten me, they'd be have gotten all they could stand of me in two years, and I'd be gone. I'm motivated by people's disbelief."

It's a strategy that's worked well for him thus far.

"I think Butch gets the last laugh," says independent concert promoter and club booker Walt Whelchel. "He makes music for the majority of the listening public. The fist in the air, Camaro-driving kids who love rock and roll. And there's nothing wrong with that."

For his part, Walker thinks he's got his critics pretty much figured out.

"All the people who criticize me grew up on the same records I had," he says. "It's OK to not like something or it not be your cup of tea, but I think we should always be supportive of what feeds us — and that's the music scene."

And Walker, a networker extraordinaire who can schmooze with the best of 'em, has been nothing if not supportive of the Atlanta scene. Local radio personality Steve Craig — the 99X jock who first brought Walker's music to the attention of the station's program director, Leslie Fram — cites Walker's willingness to offer "pro guidance" to upstarts in the scene. He's certainly qualified — especially when it comes to playing the system: Walker's on his third major label.

"You can treat [your career] like 'white trash wins the lottery,' and take the deal, take the money and then flop," he says. "You might walk away with a little advance money that might last you a while — unless you have a big cocaine problem. Or you can use it as a stepping stone and a plateau for when they quit believing in you.

"I use the record companies just like they use me."

Simply put, says Walker, "I'm a stubborn son-of-a-bitch. I won't give up. I've been workin' my butt off for this new record. And if it doesn't do anything, it won't be [new label] Arista's fault."

But while the company is planning a big publicity and marketing push for Left of Self-Centered, chances are it'll be an acquired taste for most listeners. The album seesaws on a decidedly '80s-informed platform of breezy pop hooks and Springsteen-via-Bon-Jovi blue-collar emoting.

"A lot of people can't get the humor," says Walker — not because it's highbrow or exclusive, he adds, but because so many programmers are locked into what he refers to as the "safety net of post-grunge."

The album's first single, the gleefully defiant "My Way," comes just after the album's opening track, "Rock Vocal Power," a comedy bit skewering the overwrought singing style now inherent on the same highly formatted radio stations that have, in the past, taken to Walker's music.

"When he played that for me, he said, 'We're gonna make some people mad with this,'" laughs Jayce Fincher, Walker's bandmate in Southgang, Floyd's Funk Revival and the Marvelous 3. "But it's all in fun. His stuff has always been to entertain. And he's always balanced that with being a great businessman."

If Left of Self-Centered doesn't sell strongly, it's bound to irk the businessman in Walker — even the artist in Walker doesn't seem care.

"I've already done more than most people can say they've ever done, musically, in 10 years. I have nothing to prove anymore," he asserts. "I'm comfortable, I'm happy, and I get to make music, produce records and tour when I want now. I don't have to worry if it sells a million copies. I would like it to — and anybody who tells you any different is full of shit."

As a kid growing up in Cartersville, Walker relied on his sisters' tastes in music for inspiration.

"I absorbed their collection. I grew up on everything — rock, punk, country, new wave, even disco," he recalls. "Disco was cool to me in a way because it was like Britney Spears meets KISS. I was too young to know that disco wasn't credible. Like today, a lot of kids don't know that Limp Bizkit isn't cool."

Walker's parents encouraged their son's interest in music. "He got his musical talent from his mother," says his dad, "Big Butch" Walker, 62. "She can play piano, and I can't even play dead, or tune in an FM radio. But, man, I love Aerosmith, Willie Nelson and Grand Funk Railroad — even some of Kid Rock's stuff. We listen to 99X. A lot of it sucks. Right now, it's the same song, different verse. Everybody's just alike."

"My dad was a beer-drinkin', hell-raisin' dude who looked after his kids," says Walker. "He listened to all this '60s and '70s country. I realized that he was just rebelling against commercial music, and he thought that was punk — and that shit was punk. Those guys, like Buck Owens and George Jones, they were the original bad boys. Crazy dudes."

Walker pauses and sips his beer.

"And then there was KISS."

An 8-year-old Butch begged his parents to take him to a KISS concert at the Omni. "And for some reason," he laughs. "They took me."

"It was a family outing," says Big Butch. "We all went. Some people go to the park; we went to see KISS."

To this day, it's still the best concert Little Butch has ever seen. "I saw Ace Frehley blow up his guitar, and 20,000 stoners went nuts," he says. "I was frightened, but at the same time, delightfully and blissfully knocked out. I said, 'Oh my God, I've got to do this.' And from that day forward, I knew music was gonna be all I was gonna do."

Big Butch adds his own color: "I took him in the bathroom where they were puking from overdoses and over-drinking. I said, 'This all goes with it, but I hope you don't learn this too.'"

Big Butch says his son has always been a show-off: "He did a few table dances in a tutu when he was little. His sister dressed him up in a tutu, and that's when he did his first performance. He's always been a clown and into music." (Walker's sister Dana still does her brother's hair and styling.)

When Walker was 15, he asked Big Butch to take him to the local music store to apply for a job teaching guitar. "I said, 'OK, but don't be disappointed if you don't get it because you're young.' But he said, 'I know I can.' He played for the guy, and ran up and down the neck of that guitar — just burnt it up," Big Butch recalls. "The guy said, 'You're hired.'"

Soon enough, Walker was announcing to anyone who'd listen that he was headed to Los Angeles.

"We were scared to damn death," says Big Butch. "But it was what he wanted to do, so we didn't discourage him."

With plans on attending guitar school in L.A., Walker funded the move with earnings from guitar classes and paying gigs with metal bands. "I'd come in from being out all night in bars and go straight to school," says Walker. "I'd have mascara running down my face, and black and orange hair to my ass, and still I did my work."

Through it all, Walker stayed focused. "I'd think, 'Man, go ahead and look at me, because I know you have no idea what I was doing last night.' I knew what I wanted to do. I moved to L.A., and 10 months later, I was on a major label."

The early-'90s vehicle for Walker's entree into the music industry, Southgang recorded two albums for the Virgin label that, according to Walker, "didn't do shit. [Virgin] wanted me to do a third album, but I said, 'No, I'm breaking up the band and I'm gonna reinvent myself.'"

And if anyone was capable of reinvention, it was Walker. "When I think of Butch Walker, I think 'pure rock star,'" says Michele Rhea Caplinger, executive director of Atlanta's chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and former member of Marching Two Step, a band that featured Ed Roland, later of Collective Soul.

Caplinger was around to witness Walker's next invention, the funk-soul-metal outfit Floyd's Funk Revival. "Even on small stages, Butch was larger than life," she says. "He radiated a sort of importance onstage and he was — and still is — the nicest, most genuine person offstage. He knows the business and how to survive."

The Marvelous 3 dissolved following a massive farewell show last year at On The Bricks in Centennial Park. Frequently dismissed as a derivative one-hit wonder, the band had a brief but successful run as a radio favorite in 1998 and '99. They played on all the major talk shows, guest-starred on the TV series "Charmed" (as themselves) and even appeared in a few magazine fashion layouts.

"We are friends, first and foremost," says Walker's Marvelous 3 bandmate Jayce Fincher.

Not surprisingly, Walker refuses to discuss any details of the band's demise. But it was "for the best," he says. "Like a divorce."

He dealt with the breakup by keeping busy, channeling his energy into songwriting, and producing major-label debuts for Injected and Bowling For Soup.

"I was scared to death of starting over one more time," Walker admits. "I didn't think I had it in me to do it over again. There was some really traumatic shit that we had to go through [to break up]."

In a way, Left of Self-Centered was Walker's grief therapist.

"When I finished this record, I remember I just fuckin' bawled," Walker says. "It's silly, because it's not like a Jeff Buckley record. It's not a melancholy vibe, but it took a lot to write it all."

To this day, Walker still gets the most satisfaction out of playing live. "It's the only time I get during the day — when I'm being all serious and a business guy — to let it all hang out," he says. "I realize I'm being an idiot sometimes."

Walker made his rather inauspicious live debut as a solo artist at Music Midtown in May, in a set plagued by sound problems and inclement weather. Still, Walker and his new crew soldiered on — and the crowd was attentive.

"I've regretted stopping shows for problems, because I didn't get to come back on," Walker says. "A year later, when no one cares what I ate for breakfast, I would've wished I had played that show, because people were listening. And that's all we ever really want: to be heard, in one way or another."??