THE FRONT

From BLAST! Magazine June 1990

After spending six months in a loft, hammering out a set that wouldn't embarrass them, the Front put themselves in front of a club audience night after night. The effort paid off when they brought the best of these songs to their first recording sessions, and the creative burst led to The Front. Now the album is stirring up the kind of buzz most new bands dream of. But there's one part of the buzz that irks lead singer Michael Franano.
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"We Don't Sound Like The Doors!"

BLAST!: What influenced your music, if as you say, there wasn't that much going on in your hometown of Kansas City?
MICHAEL: I have such a genuine respect for music that I wanted to know everything I could know about if from every angle. I just feel like if I was going to do it, I wanted to do it right. So, we just went out with the attitude of trying to discover new things. I'd order records form Europe from a record store we had in town, just so that I could kinda keep up with what was going on. There's a lot of good music out there that doesn't make it to the Top 10 radio, unfortunately.

BLAST!: I read somewhere you were participating in that jazz and blues club circuit.
MICHAEL: Yes, because that was the real, true music from here, in my opinion. You know what I mean? It was the jazz and blues that came out of Kansas City. Really, I draw on it for inspiration. Jazz, I'm not a real big fan of. I like blues much more than jazz. It was the performers, themselves -- being quite a bit older than myself -- who got to me. I don't know. It was the simplicity of what they did. They did it so right. It just really excited me so much more than hanging out in rock clubs. In those clubs, there was a lot of the same homogenized sound. There were different bands, but it all came off pretty much the same. I went there because these people tended to be much more realistic, much more personal with their music.

BLAST!: Now, Michael, you were in a band called Fallen Angel. Did that band have records out?
MICHAEL: No, we put out a little tape we sold around Kansas City. I think we sold, maybe, a thousand copies of it -- something like that. It was more towards the end of my adolescence period -- if it's really ended! I was like every boy who gets into metal music. The first thing you do is make as much noise and play as fast as you possibly can. We did 23 AC/DC songs and seven originals. It was our repertoire.

BLAST!: You, of course have heard that you look and sound like Jim Morrison of The Doors. Is it just annoying to you, at this point?
MICHAEL: Well, it's getting that way. The thing is, any time somebody new comes out, they're going to compare you to someone. And we pretty much knew this going into it. We knew who we were going to be tagged with. If people want sit there and say: "At times, you resemble Jim Morrison, and at times, you sound like him," that's fine. But when people come up to us and say:     "Hey, you guys sound like The Doors," that pisses me off. That's bullshit. This band doesn't sound a thing like the Doors.