Should Have Been a Rock Star Channeling Jimi

Channeling Jimi Hendrix


I believe that it was the summer of 1976 when my brother Tim and I went to an all-day outdoor concert in Tulsa to see Bob Segar and the Silver Bullet Band. The weather turned nasty, rain and mud, so the promoters moved the show from the fairgrounds to the huge fairgrounds exposition building.
The stage was located at the end of a huge concreted floor area. Fans who had expected an outdoor show in open summer sunshine instead were greeted with an enclosed, stuffy building, filled with the echo of bustling long-haired guys and girls in an array of bell bottoms and halter tops. Lawn chairs and ice chests, intended for the outside, littered the expanse of the room as pre-concert tunes vibrated through the concrete floors. I could feel the thump of bass speakers in my chest.
The show was scheduled to open with a new band called Ruby Star, and followed by Mahogany Rush and Black Oak Arkansas before the day’s headline act of Segar and mates took the stage. Ruby Star was a “find” of Black Oak and Mahogany Rush was the new heavy metal band with a twist of Medieval and fantasy, as were most of the metal bands of that period. Uriah Heep, Rainbow, and dozens of other progressive Rock bands played in pseudo-medieval wear and sang about magic, dragons and the power of Rock.
The sweet smell of hundreds of joints wafted across the arena mixed with cigarettes and beer. At this point in my life, just after my sophomore year in college, I still had not tried either pot or beer. I had been around it plenty, but seemed to always be the driver for those who were in pursuit of an altered state of consciousness.
Ruby Star took the stage and played a hectic rock and blues 45 minute set. The curly haired female lead singer, wailed and stomped the stage, and despite the fact I thought she was sexy, we had drifted to the back of the concert crowd with an apathetic eye on the stage. The Girls drifting around the crowd were more interesting than the Ruby Star stage show. They ended up releasing one album with little fanfare before disappearing.
The stage cleared and the second band began set up. I had one of Mahogany Rush’s albums and had read somewhere about their fabled beginnings. The story went that Frank Marino, their lead guitarist and songwriter had at one time been hospitalized with a drug overdose. Before going into the hospital, he had never played a musical instrument. There, he lapsed into a coma and experienced something that changed his life.
While drifting in the fog of his drug induced coma, Marino supposedly said that he had a vision of Jimi Hendrix. Now, Jimi had died just five years before the concert that I was attending, and only two years before their first LP release. According to these rumors, when Frank awoke form his coma, he was able to play guitar just like Hendrix.
When they took the stage, Marino never said a word, just went straight into his set of pounding drum and wailing guitar. The first song was one of his own, which he immediately followed by the old Tornados instrumental classic “Telstar.” Frank was playing some screaming guitar!
Without a break, he launched into Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” The song was perfect. I couldn’t imagine Jimi doing it any better. The set followed with Hendrix song after Hendrix song, until by the end of the set, I found myself and my brother standing in front of the stage, having been drawn form the back of the crowd. I stood; wide mouthed as, I swear, I saw Jimi Hendrix channeled that day through Frank Marino. The set left me exhausted and wanting more, but after using his warm-up band allotted time, Marino and Mahogany Rush disappeared.
The rest of the show, despite a great performance by Segar, was simply postscript for me. If anyone had asked me that day, I would swear that the ghost of Jimi Hendrix possessed Marino. It was a near divine experience.
Now, Marino’s web suite discusses the rumor of the LSD overdose and Hendrix visitation, and denies that Marino ever told anyone that story. It even goes into the growth of the tale and its mutations. But, if you had asked a19 year old Charlie on that day in a hot, stuffy building in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he was a believer