Mr. Big’s Eric Martin Hints at Future Recordings: ‘I Always Wanted to Keep the Door Open’
Mr. Big said farewell with its The Big Finish tour, which wrapped up Aug. 23 at Romania’s Way Too Far Rock festival and is documented on The Big Finish Live album and DVD coming out Friday, Sept. 6.
The group plans to make an actual finish next February, with a couple of shows in Japan.
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But if frontman Eric Martin has his way, the “To Be With You” quartet may well be with us again in the future.
Talking to Billboard via Zoom from his home in San Rafael, CA, Martin admits to having second thoughts about packing the band in 35 years after its debut album. “I was right there in the beginning when we were sitting at the online table making the decision — ‘This is it! The big finish!’ I even thought of the name. I was right there with everybody else — ‘It is time. Let’s be done with this!'” Guitarist Paul Gilbert, he adds, had even broached the idea five years prior.
“But now,” Martin says, “after playing on the road with these guys, I felt that we were so tight. We were getting along great. Why are we breaking up? Why is this over? And it’s like, ‘Well, we can’t go back now. All those other bands like M?tley Crüe, Kiss, we laugh at them. We don’t want to be those guys!’ And I’m thinking, ‘Who cares! We made a mistake! Let’s come back!’ You’re supposed to go out with a bang, right, and at the top of your game? We were at the top of our game, tighter than we were back in the ’90s. Let’s not stop!”
That’s the plan, however, after what are being billed as the final two shows – Feb. 22 in Osaka and Feb. 25 at the Budokan in Tokyo, where The Big Finish Live was recorded last July 26. But Martin says that if Mr. Big’s days as a touring or even a live act are indeed over, he doesn’t think the band has to stop completely.
“I always wanted to keep the door open to making records,” he says, adding that he hopes Ten, which the band released in July, “isn’t the final thing we do. We’re not touring anymore; everyone agreed on that. If nobody wants to tour anymore, that’s cool, but can’t we throw ideas around the table? Have Zoom calls to write some songs? I sure think we can still do that — and I’d love to.”
Martin formed Mr. Big in Los Angeles during 1988 with bassist Billy Sheehan, adding guitarist Paul Gilbert, his chief songwriting partner, and drummer Pat Torpey. The group broke big with its second album, 1991’s platinum Lean Into it — which Mr. Big performed in its entirety throughout the farewell tour; it contained Mr. Big’s biggest single, the chart topping ballad “To Be With You.” The band went through some lineup changes before breaking up in 2002, resuming seven years later and working sporadically since.
Torpey, who Martin calls “the band’s referee,” passed away in 2018 of complications from Parkinson’s disease; Nick D’Virgilio from Spock’s Beard, and other bands was Mr. Big’s final drummer.
“There were some great times and some super bad times, too — it’s a rock band, y’know?” Martin says. “It consumed my life for 30-plus years. I’ve written my best songs with Mr. Big. I cherish that writing relationship I had with Paul Gilbert; him and I just clicked — and Andre Pessis, who wrote a lot of those songs with us.
“Off stage, some of us got along and some of us didn’t get along; I’m like the clown prince of rock ‘n’ roll sometimes, and maybe nobody liked that side of me. That’s just my personality. In our band we’d give it all on stage but we’d come off and we weren’t like other bands, partying it up and, ‘Yo, bro, we just kicked ass at a rock concert!’ It was more like the Christian Science Monitor Reading Room; you could hear the sweat hitting the floor. We just gave it everything on the stage.”
Martin says he was gratified that Mr. Big recorded the Ten album — which was also a contractual obligation — even if it doesn’t rock quite as hard as he or Sheehan might have preferred. “I do love the Ten record,” Martin contends. “I liked the process; me and Paul Gilbert wrote together for the first time in so many years. I flew to Portland and basically lived with him and his family, and we wrote from scratch. I did keep saying to him, ‘There’s no ‘Daddy, Brother…’ on here. There’s no ‘Addicted to That Rush.’ But he didn’t want a copycat of the other records; I don’t know if he said that, but I felt that from the vibe and the mojo that was happening in the room. It is totally different from any of our other records, and the fact that we wrote it from scratch, just him and I, I really enjoyed that.”
The Big Finish Live album and film, meanwhile, was decided upon not too long before last summer’s Budokan shows — just six days after the 13-month tour began. The 26 songs include the entirety of the Lean Into It album, as well as covers of Humble Pie’s “30 Days in the Hole,” the Olympics’ “Good Lovin'” with the band members on different instruments and the Who’s “Baba O’Riley.” It also features a five-song acoustic section capped by Cat Stevens’ “Wild World.”
“That was my favorite part, the acoustic portion,” Martin recalls. “I just love the intimacy, the camaraderie of the band. We were so close together, closer than we are on a tour bus. You could see in our faces there’s no acting there. It’s really genuine.” Most of the group members’ families, including Torpey’s widow and children, also came out to the show, which Martin says made the experience “really special.”
Martin acknowledges some vocal problems during the tour, though only one date had to be postponed; Michele Luppi, an Italian singer and keyboardist, was also brought in to “shadow” Martin during a few shows on the European leg. The frontman was left with a warm memory, too, after the very last show.
“We climbed on the tour bus, and each of us had different flights and different days,” Martin remembers. “That night Paul and Nick and all the crew split to the airport, and me and Billy Sheehan were left — just like it was at the beginning, when he called me in 1988 and said, ‘Hey, you want to start a band? ‘Who do you have?’ ‘Just us.’ So it ended up the same way it began.”
Martin doesn’t have too much time to spend mourning Mr. Big’s conclusion, however. He, along with Night Ranger’s Jack Blades, is about to head back to Japan to tour with the Tak Matsumoto Group, which he started with 20 years ago and which reformed and released a new album earlier this year. He’s anticipating some solo shows after that, on his own acoustically and possibly with a backing band. And then…
“I don’t have a wife anymore, my kids are almost 20 years old and I sit in the dark and go, ‘Oh, God, man, I wish I had Mr. Big to turn to right now,'” Martin says. “I may go, ‘Hey you guys, what do you think?’ Somebody might hang up on me, or they might say, ‘Hey, let’s do it.’ I don’t want to do the full-scale tour anymore, but maybe five or six shows here or there. Nick said, ‘Why don’t we do a residency somewhere — Indonesia, Vegas, the Philippines, I don’t know. I would like to open that door, but I don’t have the strength to open it by myself. I’m gonna need someone else to help me. So we’ll see.”
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