What's Behind The Front - By Shari Sloane

Taken from Rip Magazine - June 1990

They came at you from out nowhere in late 1989 with debut single and video "Fire." A voice out of the past, yet a voice of the future. With sexy Michael Franano on vocals, brother Bobby on keys from hell, guitarist Mike Greene, Randy Jordan on bass and Shane Miller on drums, the Front was born two years ago in Kansas City, Missouri, and just a short time later commenced work on the process of recording their debut album. Released late in 1989 on CBS Records, the LP kept a relatively low profile until the early months of 1990 - the beginning of a decade in which the world would take notice of the Front as a force to be reckoned with. As a band, the Front has a very distinct groove --a vibe for the 90's, if you will-- which radiates from center stage, where a bit of the Doors, the Cult and INXS can be heard in Michael Franano's sometimes cooing, sometimes grinding vocals. Their live vibe is so thick, you could cut it with a knife. The crowd gets so caught up in the wave of their music, there is often a lengthy pause before any applause is heard after a number ends.

Michael believes the world and everyday life is a front (hence, the name), and that his music is about life. He sees the world through different eyes. As a manager or producer, you could tell some artist, "Give me an up-tempo dance track," and -bang - you'd have one. Say that to Mr. Franano, and you'd get a shuffle that talks about the reality of being a father or something. Michael says that people tell you what to think all the time, and it's more important just to think. It's your choice. There are so many ways to look at things and so many ways to live. He doesn't think his way is right or wrong. He says it doesn't matter what he thinks, because he only has an opinion, and his is just an opinion like anyone else's opinion. To put this complex person and the Front's complex personality into the right words is somewhat of a monumental task, so to coin a phrase, we'll let the music do the talking. Michael has something to say, or maybe he has nothing to say....There are infinite possibilities.

MICHAEL FRANANO: Basically this band's been together since January of 1988, about two years. Shane and Bobby and I had been in a band before called the Front, and the guitar player quit right as we got a deal with Sire Records. In late January I had some dates lined up and needed a band to play. We started holding auditions. That's when Mike came along. When he played with the band, it became permanent immediately. Then Randy came. Actually, Bobby and I had been trying to find Randy for about a month. When we finally hooked up with him, we knew right there it was going to be the band. Two weeks later we opened for Squeeze, and that was our first show.

RIP: Go back and talk about your deal with Sire records.

MF: Well, I guess it was October of 1987. Our old guitar player had just quit the band. At that point I decided we really didn't have a lot left to lose, so we went in the studio and made a four-song demo in Kansas city. I played guitar and bass on it cuz we didn't have anyone else in the band to do it. After that, Shane and I hopped in his mom's car and drove to New York, I had one name of somebody I knew at a record label - kind of a small person- and she turned me onto all these other people. Basically I begged my way into her office. One of those other people just happened to be Seymore Stein at Sire, and I took the demo to him. He pretty much liked what he heard, and he gave me more money to do a demo deal. We went back to Kansas City and recorded a few more songs. By January he offered me a deal. I sat on it for a little while, because I didn't have a lawyer yet or anything.

About the time I was getting ready to sign, I got a call from Scott McGhee, and he said that McGhee Entertainment was interested in us and for me to send a tape, which I never did. I didn't really know who Scott McGhee was, and I had never heard of Doc, either. Randy, our bass player was hysterical on the other end of the phone, mouthing, "He manages Bon Jovi!" And I'm thinkin', "Bon Jovi?" It didn't make much sense for them to wanna hook up with us.

Scott called me back about a week later - this was in March of '88 - and he told me he wanted to come check us out. He was there the next morning. He flew in from New York. He came to the loft - we had this burned-out old loft that we used to practice in that was real cool. He came and saw us play there because we really didn't play live too much. There's not a lot of places to play live in Kansas City. He dug it right away and took a tape back to Doc, who came to see us in the loft in May. We signed with him right there.

RIP: Did you have a lawyer by this time, so you knew what you were getting into?

MF: Well, Scott told us to wait on the Sire deal; so at that point Doc and Scott took the deal back to Seymore and said, "Well, if you want the band, they're yours." I guess they just couldn't come to terms on it. After that we started shopping the demos again to other labels, and obviously, ultimately ended up with CBS.

Rip: How did Scott hear about you in the first place?

MF: Well, he was in Italy for some kind of a music festival, and I had done a publishing deal with an Italian publishing company about the time I was doing the Sire deal.

RIP: How did that happen?

MF: I met the people through Seymore, and they wanted to do a publishing deal with a small percentage of the publishing. The advance was some money I could use at the time, so I did the deal with them. Scott overheard them talking about the group, and he liked the name. He got back to New York and couldn't find us anywhere. He really didn't know anything about the group. One day Scott was in our lawyer's office -- he works with some of the other McGhee Entertainment groups -- and he saw some paperwork on the group and said, "Oh, the Front. Do you know these guys?" etc., etc. Then he got my number.

RIP: Obviously you're happy.

MF: Very.

RIP: Who are some of your influences?

MF: When I was five, my first album was Cream, Disraeli Gears, so I was influenced by a lot of that music. I found a lot the stuff in the '70s pretty boring. I didn't get into Zeppelin till I was out of high school. It basically just a lot of '60s groups. I just felt that there was a certain mystique of bands in that era that seems to have gotten lost, you know. Music's become real diluted, homogenized, etc. The bands the '60s has a lot more of a "step back, I don't know how big this thing's gonna get" kind of thing. It was real cool. Music today doesn't do a lot for me.

RIP: Did you travel a lot before you signed?

MF: I did for awhile. Probably six months before we signed with Doc, I was pretty busy just trying to get a deal, you know, and tryin' to meet people, because we didn't have a manager. We never had a manager -- I just never found anyone that I could trust. So I was trying to find a manager and do it all myself -- not an advisable thing to do, but when you're from Kansas City, it's tough, because nobody comes there to showcase groups. You kinda gotta get out there and do things yourself, and that's what I did for the longest time. There's just not a lot of places to play around there. Even for the bands who do travel, it's a real tight, little club circuit. Four sets a night, all cover tunes. There's only one concert promoter in the whole city. I'm not knocking the town -- it's a great town -- but the music there is pretty dead. The club scene you can compare to a brontosaurus -- anytime now it will be dying off, and a new breed will develop...hopefully. Kansas City has a strange kind of attitude. It has a lot of potential that's never gonna be developed. Whoever named Missouri "Show Me State" was right on the money. It take so long for things to develop there, and I don't know why that is. Fear of the unknown, maybe? I think that people tend to get real comfortable in the Midwest and don't take any chances.

RIP: What do you like to do?

MF: What does any guy my age like to do? I just do a little more of it, I guess. I love what I do for a living.

RIP: How do you usually write songs?

MF: I usually write from the melody standpoint. I don't usually write, like, a chord progression and put the lyrics on top of it. I like to write from a single point of view and then try to make the music sound like the words.

RIP: Lyrically, what do you sing about?

MF: It's kind of drive-in party music. I don't really like to say a lot about what everything's about. It's just what you get out of it. It's funny, but I'll play tapes for people, and it's amazing what the people will hear in a song. It's a lot like classical music, in the sense that you get a vision of what the music make you feel like -- you know, certain feelings -- so I don't like to go around saying, "Well, this song's about this," etc. A lot of it is pretty basic. Some are darker subjects, some aren't, and some are pretty innocent, in a sense. I don't like to tie myself into any explanations, though, because then I think you're cheating people.

RIP: So Scott McGhee put you into Le Studio in Montreal, Canada, to record the the album. How did that go?

MF: Scott choose the place. It's a real nice studio, and it's a residential-type studio -- kinda like a ski lodge. It kinda looks like Vail Village. You live there right on the grounds, and the studio is within walking distance. We spent seven weeks up there.

I almost didn't get into the country, which was kinda funny. I had some problems back here in the United States, and they didn't want to let me in. They take things real serious up there and, from what I understood, they can retry me up there for things I did in Kansas City. I had to go through the whole interrogation process just to get 30 days, then I had to drive to New York at the end of the time period, then drive back up and do it all over again.

RIP: You used Andy Wallace, who worked with Rick Rubin on the Cult's Electric album, to produce the record. Was there ever anyone else in the running?

MF: Yeah, there were a few other people, but when we met Andy, it just became real apparent that's who was doing the record. We found him by accident -- just kidding! Scott hooked us up with him. I'm one of those meandering people who likes to get his nose into everything, and I had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to sound like. Andy was one of those kind of people that are, like, very artist oriented -- he's not a product kind of producer. He likes to make an artist sound like an artist. It's real cool, and Scott knew that's what we were after. I actually did some of the mixing on the album too.

It's kind of a coproduction kind of thing, cuz it was Andy and I working along side by side. That's the thing about our music: It's real identifiable. We have our own sound, so to put a preset kind of production on it would really be a shame. It's so strange with this group; for example, on minute we sound completely innocent, and the next we sound dark. There are so many things happening in the music that if you were to try and put it into a certain kind of format, you would lose some of those emotions and oddball idiosyncrasies. It's better to just let a group like us go.

RIP: Did anything real crazy happen while you were up in the studio?

MF: A couple of things we did, I probably shouldn't say, because the mounties would probably get upset with us. I don't want to break up our relations with our friends in Canada! I think I got a story I could tell you without getting in a whole lot of trouble: There was this bar in Morin Heights, just down the street from the studio, and it's called The Commons. Every year they have this barbecue kind of thing, and they have bands come in to play all day long. Well, they invited us down to play, and we said, "Sure, we'll do a couple of songs." Anyway, we get down there about 8:00, and these bands have been goin' all day. We were thinkin' we could just go on right then and get back home, but we started drinkin' a little bit, and, before you know it, it was about midnight, and we're all out of it. That's when they tell us it's our turn to play! Well, about the time we start playin', here come all these bikers -- like a real Harley biker group -- a whole gang of 'em, and they speak French. It is the strangest thing in the world seein' these tough guys sayin' "Parlez vous?"

We started playin' and were blowin' one fuse after another. After the seventh fuse blew, I got all pissed off, and I took the microphone and just smashed it on the ground; then I started kicking in the monitors. The bikers thought this was the most wonderful thing they'd ever seen. They started throwin' bottles, chairs-- you name it. The manager was running around, screaming his head off. It was a lot of fun. We never did finish playing, and the crowd was just sitting there mesmerized.

RIP: How do you feel about your fast-approaching celebrity status?

MF: I don't know. I don't know to what extent I want everyone to know about me. I could sit here for hours and tell you all kinds of wild shit, but big deal --half the people would think I made it up anyway.

RIP: What would you be doing if you weren't doing this?

MF: I don't know. I've never really considered it. I would probably be very bored, and I'd probably be trying to find something exciting. That's the one good thing about being a Gemini: I like to do a lot of things and be proficient in a lot of areas. At least music gives me a home base. It gives you something you can talk about and say, "Hey, this is what I do." If I didn't have music, I'd probably be spinning my wheels, trying to be everything. Busy, busy, busy, and broke, broke, broke.