A & E

These guitarists, who will perform this weekend at the Pittsburgh Blues Festival benefiting the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank along with other national and regional performers, each lack a certain amount of respect.

Marino was once skewered in a Wayne's World skit on "Saturday Night Live," Mike Myers' character saying "I feel like I'm in the delete bin of life, next to Mahogany Rush."

Trout is often denounced by blues purists, so much that he's printed T-shirts with a put-down he received.

Both, it seems, are decent guys who deserve a little of the respect that Dangerfield craved.

Walter Trout

The T-shirts are one of Walter Trout's best merchandise items, even though they bear no elaborate logos or art. Simply, they read "Too Many Notes Too Loud," something Trout has been accused of doing.

"In music, you either listen and you like it, or you don't," says Trout, who performs Friday at the Pittsburgh Blues Festival. "I'm just a really nice guy who is trying to play guitar for people. All the venom that I get, it just blows my mind. It's not like I'm trying to hurt people."

Trout is resented, in part, because he has the nerve to step outside the realm of traditional blues. His latest studio album, "Full Circle," features contributions from bluesmen John Mayall, James Harman, Coco Montoya, Bernard Allison and Jeff Healey.

But, there are also elements of gospel, soul, rock, bluegrass and rockabilly.

"I like to dabble," Trout admits.

Trout's love of music dates back to his childhood. Born in 1951 in Ocean City, N.J., he would often frequent the vacation destination's beaches and boardwalk, soaking in the sounds.

"I still remember sneaking down to the beach at night as a little kid with other little kids," Trout says. "There were high school and college kids with their transistor radios, and I'd hear Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. Music went along with the whole scene, it was really an integral part of it. All the rides and the hot dog and cotton candy stands were playing the popular music of the day.

Trout left New Jersey in the late 1960s for Los Angeles to look for work as a sideman. It didn't take long for him to find gainful employment. His resume includes a stint in Canned Heat, and as a backup musician for Percy Mayfield, Pee Wee Crayton, John Lee Hooker, Big Mama Thornton and Joe Tex.

"I got something out of all of those gigs," Trout says, adding that a lot of what he learned concerned life more than it did music.

Most of the time he tried to immerse himself in the style of the artist. But when he joined John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and tried to mimic the style of Peter Green, Mick Taylor or Eric Clapton, it didn't last long. Mayall quickly told him he was not hired to approximate other guitarists.

"He gave me the freedom to explore a little bit, to experiment," Trout says. "With all those other guys I concentrated on being to true to what their style was."

Trout embarked on a solo career in 1989. Since then, he's met mostly with success, one of the highlights being cited as the sixth most popular guitarist in a 1993 BBC Radio 1 poll.

But every so often, one of those pesky blues purists will write something that irritates Trout. Just because his guitar playing is often more aggressive and fiery, it's not the blues?

"I find them to be so ridiculous, saying I can't play something," he says of his detractors. "They can't play; they're intellectualizing this instead of trying to feel it. ... I'll get one review saying that this is the greatest record I've ever heard in my life, and the other guy will go, 'This is not the blues.' I need you to tell me what the blues is? John Lee Hooker hired me to play lead guitar. I guess you know more than he does."

Frank Marino

By 1993, Frank Marino had decided he'd had enough of touring, and effectively retired from live performance.

Five years later, he was researching his family ancestry via the Internet when he saw some Web sites devoted to him.

"I couldn't believe there such an interest in me," says Marino, who performs Saturday at the Pittsburgh Blues Festival. "So I started participating online, getting to know everybody."

Gradually, he started performing again, at first just one or two dates per year. While Marino still only plays a handful of dates per year -- he'll never reprise the 200 dates per year of his heyday -- he has other things that take up his time.

Specifically, Marino spends most of his time raising three daughters and practicing his faith as an Orthodox Christian. While many are surprised this is the route he's taken, it's nothing new. Marino's earliest records gave an indication of his inclinations.

"My very first album cover -- I was 16 years old -- has a picture of the Last Judgment on it," he says of reproduction of a painting by Flemish artist Hans Memling. "I was making a statement as early as that, that I was a person who was at least delving into this subject. Although I didn't know as much as I do now, I was making the commitment at that time to go into that direction."

Marino says he never shied away from talking about his faith, but instead journalists focused on his relationship with Jimi Hendrix. When Marino was 13 he suffered a bad acid trip and went into a coma. When he awoke, supposedly the spirit of Hendrix had entered his body. The urban legend would live on, never mind that Hendrix was still alive in 1967 when he was taking possession of Marino's body. No matter what Marino did to correct this misperception -- the truth was that he learned to play guitar after coming out the coma and Hendrix was an influence -- the story became an "albatross around my neck," Marino admits. "Here we go again."

Marino laughs about it all now. His life revolves around his family and especially his Orthodox Christian faith.

"It's the prime motivator in everything that I do," Marino says. "If I'm doing anything, at least one time every half hour in the day, I'm thinking about that."

Marino describes his existence as "monkish," noting that he spends a lot of time in this basement writing theology. When he emerges to play music, it's a joyous experience in which he can indulge in a number of styles.

"I spent a lot of time over the decades learning about a lot of different kinds of styles, stuff I never did when I was younger," Marino says. "Now that I have such a deeper appreciation of music in general it creates a type of maturity. For me to go back and play poppy or bluesy, I approach it with a different attitude, almost like a jazz guy's attitude. Our fans find that interesting because a great deal of the core group are rockers, not jazz heads. But when they listen to us they are sort of being given a jazz-fusion, blues-fusion, rock psychedelic mix. And they love it. I've never gotten a letter telling me to stop, so we're pretty happy with where it is."

While searching out his family history, he came across another nugget that will be of interest to Pittsburghers; he believes he may be distantly related to Dan Marino, the Hall of Fame quarterback who grew up in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh. When told it's hard to go wrong with the Marino last name in Western Pennsylvania, he replies, "Well, I'm a huge Pittsburgh Steelers fan. They've always been my team."

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