Frank Marino

After playing drums since he was five, around age 13–14 Marino started playing guitar. An often-repeated myth is he was visited by an apparition of Jimi Hendrix after a bad LSD trip, a myth Marino has always disavowed, and still does so now on his personal website. His playing, however, is inspired by Hendrix (on the Gibson website he is described as "carrying Jimi's psychedelic torch"), and Marino is notable for often performing cover versions of Hendrix classics such as "Purple Haze" and "All Along The Watchtower". He has been criticized by some as a Hendrix clone. Marino himself claims that he didn't consciously set out to imitate Hendrix's style at all: "The whole style just came naturally. I didn't choose it; it chose me."

Marino returned in 2000, "I always knew we had fans, I just didn't know I'd find half a million of them on the Web," he said in an interview with Guitar Player in 2005. He released Eye of the Storm, and went on tour again, playing more improvisational shows. Frank is still active, recording and touring under his own name. He has also been involved in blues recordings with other artists as well, playing on tribute albums to Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Mahogany Rush was moderately popular in the 1970s. Their records charted in Billboard, and they toured extensively, performing with well-known bands, including Aerosmith and Ted Nugent, and played at California Jam II in 1978. Toward the end of the 1970s, the band began to be billed as "Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush." Not much later, Mahogany Rush split up and in the early 1980s Marino released two solo albums on CBS. The band reformed and continued to perform throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In 1990, Marino opened his own audio recording studio, Starbase Studio, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. In 1993, Marino retired from the music industry.

Francesco Antonio Marino (born November 20, 1954) is an Italian Canadian guitarist, leader of Canadian hard rock band Mahogany Rush. Often compared to Jimi Hendrix, he is acknowledged as one of the best and most underrated guitarists of the 1970s.