For Danny Martin, the workplace attire for his day job as an engineer is just a little bit different than what he wears on stage as bassist for the high-energy band Wicked.
“Sometimes I’ll do interviews, and I’ll close my office door and I’ll have to throw on the rock ‘n’ roll regalia in the middle of the day,” Martin said. “It’s pretty funny.”
As for his coworkers’ reaction if he were to walk out into the office that way?
“Oh, they always know. They’re like, all right, we see you got some bracelets or something on. You must have just done an interview,” he added with a laugh.
Wicked — made up of Martin, his brother Chad Michael on vocals/guitars, with Scotty V on lead guitar and Gunnar Coston on drums — prides itself on classic rock with a modern twist. That will be on display May 18 when they open for Buckcherry at Jergel’s Rhythm Grille in Warrendale.
“The biggest thing with Wicked is we want people to come and feel that escape when they come to the show,” Martin said. “So a show that is visual and sonic and full of energy. We always use the tagline, ‘high energy rock ‘n’ roll,’ because it’s somewhere between if you saw a punk band at CBGB just absolutely raw power energy, tearing it up on stage, to a theatrical Alice Cooper.
“And somewhere in the middle is what you could expect from Wicked. It’s based around having a fun time, escaping your day-to-day for a few hours, and just having that brevity of energy and showmanship that we felt we were lacking when we were growing up in the music scene that we were exposed to. We were always like, how do we bring this high energy rock ‘n’ roll to life? And we’re doing it.”
The band is due to release a new album, “Go Rebel,” later this year, with “Obsession” and “Go Rebel” the latest singles.
In a phone call last week from New York, Martin spoke with TribLive about the new album, Wicked’s live show, their stage wardrobe and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.
You guys have a new single called “Go Rebel.” So what should people know about that song?
“Go Rebel” is a cool one, self-titled off of the album title, and it really speaks to the project as a whole. We wanted this project to be less about just us and remove somewhat of that cliche rock ‘n’ roll narcissistic ego, right? And again, be more about the community. So “Go Rebel” is like a verb to us. The song is this upbeat song where you could see people in the crowd with their fists in the air, very light and fun vibe, but with that hard rock ‘n’ roll edge, maybe something like Slade would have played back in the day if you strapped a couple of rocket boosters on the side of that band, you know what I mean? It’s really cool right off the back of our first single that we released, “Obsession,” which was much more melodic and heavy. This gives that good dichotomy of what the album is about. It’s this mix of influences, everything from heavier melodic songs to your good old having fun, party, rock ‘n’ roll vibe, like if the 1970s re-blossomed with this modern edge.
The new album is coming out this summer, so what’s your favorite song off the new album?
My favorite tune is, I’ll tell you what, I think it’s probably got to be this one song called “Cool Bars.” It reminds me of a very Cheap Trick vibe, and it always goes over so cool in the crowd at shows. It’s a lot of fun. But we’ve been playing a couple of these singles live, and it’s great to see the response, and I’m excited to see what the fans think as more of these tracks come out.
Do you have a release date in mind or is that still in the works?
I’m thinking it’s going to be September, to be honest, because we’re going to come back out with a bunch of tour dates, and we’re working on U.S. dates, and in Europe actually for this year. So we haven’t announced them yet, but we’re putting those together to go lockstep with the album release. It’s a bit of a moving target. But right around that September timeframe, and we’re stoked, man. I think this has been one of those albums where we’re really putting all we got into it, and we’ve got a great team, and we’re excited to see what we could do with it.
Have you guys toured internationally before?
Canada and Mexico, so we’re looking forward to getting over the pond and getting over to Europe. We know right now we’ve got June next year, we’ll be in Japan for a couple of weeks. It’s super exciting. Since you grow up as a kid and you start a project like this, a band, myself and my brother, and having all those dreams of grandeur of what you could be. For us, it’s like all that hard work over the years is really coming together now and seeing that synchronicity and things are starting to pay off. We’re excited to see the fans that we only see through social media or Spotify in person overseas.
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Do you feel that fun might be missing a little bit from the hard rock scene right now?
Yeah, exactly. And kudos to other types of rock ‘n’ roll that do stuff and pull on those emotional strings and different things like that. But we miss the days of the ‘70s where it was all about guitar rock, big solos and the drums just being this focal point and that quintessential lead singer. So you can hold all the pyro and all that, you could do this stuff just with personality, emotion and characters on the stage, first and foremost. That’s what we’ve based our project around is bringing that kind of showmanship.
If you had access to a time machine, what bands would you have wanted to see back in their heyday?
It’s no doubt bands like UFO and Thin Lizzy, as well as some of the greats, like I’ve mentioned, Cheap Trick, Alice Cooper, those bands, even Slade and stuff like that. Those bands in the ‘70s were just everything to us when we were becoming exposed to rock ‘n’ roll. We were blown away to see this – the outfits, the songs, the showmanship. Nowadays, things have changed and it’s a little different, but it’s funny because you see even in clothing and different things like that, some of the cyclical styles and things coming back around. I think at the end of the day, people love to just go and enjoy themselves and be entertained. If you could pull it off and you have the guts to do it, more power to you.
Speaking of those outfits, where do you source that kind of stuff? It’s not like you can just get that off the rack.
No, that was always the thing that we were like, yeah, how do we work toward that? When we started our career, we just said, screw it, let’s just start making our own outfits. My brother really championed that and he learned how to sew leather. We got this sewing machine that would crank in through thick cowhide and we put together over the years, so many different kinds of outfits from when we started, with some white cowhide leather and platform boots to some of our transitions into dark clothing with leather vests and studs all over them. We’re always iterating, because for us, we’re music fans as well. We don’t wanna get stale. We’re always trying to evolve and challenge ourselves, whether it be with the clothing or even with the musical writing and the influences. We’ve set this precedent where we’re like, let’s just let anything that’s appropriate come into the blender. Then, at the end of the day, we know how to put it through that formula to make it Wicked. But it keeps us interested and it keeps our fans excited.
It’s just all part of the whole experience.
I think David Bowie did it best. He constantly reinvented himself and did it at an A-plus level and people like that are folks that we look up to in that regard.
Last year, Wicked got the chance to open for Ace Frehley at Jergel’s, so what do you remember about that show?
Man, what an amazing experience, being with a legend and one of our favorites. It was surreal, and everybody in Ace’s band was so cool. It’s awesome to see the support and the feedback, getting the accolades of hey, we’re really doing it up there on stage and they enjoyed it. But to see Ace come out, I remember two black SUVs came down the side of Jergel’s and here they pull out Ace and they walk him in. It’s like this presidential motorcade is what it looked like (laughs) and they basically just propped him up on stage, and he just started going with that freakin’ guitar, that rock ‘n’ roll that Ace was so known for, and here he is at his age still doing this. It was this surreal moment to be able to be a part of that, share that moment with Ace’s fans and our fans coming together. It really was a bucket list thing for us.
If you go
Who: Buckcherry, Brkn Love, Wicked, Turbo Lovers
When: 7 p.m. May 18
Where: Jergel’s Rhythm Grille, Warrendale
Tickets: Starting at $37.65, etix.com