A Silver Tray Q/A with Frankie Muriel
A Belated Conversation with the Frontman of Kingofthehill.
So, here’s a true story. I interviewed Frankie Muriel in early 2023, not long after Kingofthehill saw two releases come to life in January of that year. They include the 12-song album that was slated to be their second, major label release, dubbed II, and produced by the late Keith Olsen. Along with it came Sessions, a compilation of 16 tracks that comprised a variety pack of live, acoustic and outtake cuts, a neat complement. To celebrate, the band had played to a full house at Diamond Music Hall in February of ‘23.
The other part of this true story is that it’s now late into 2024 and this interview, which has occupied a small, nagging portion of my brain for well over a year has to come to life, or I’ll simply combust. What’s especially annoying is that Frankie was such a decent guy on the phone, talking about the band that he, guitarist Jimmy Griffin, drummer Vito Bono and bassist George Potsos shared in the early ‘90s, after a popular run in local clubs as Broken Toyz, which dated back to 1987.
We chatted about the two albums with FnA, the possibility of further reunion shows, (which they’d undertaken from time-to-time over the years) and the possibility of some future recording work. And at the end of the interview, I promised to post it in “a couple of weeks.” Better late than never?
For those needing a primer on the band,
wrote a great piece in early 2023 about the band for The Riverfront Times. You know, around the time I originally planned to publish this. Thankfully, it’s still on the RFT site here.Enough of the self-mockery, let’s rock!
Hey, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.
No problem, man.
I’ve been wanting to do a website about projects that’ve sorta disappeared or resurfaced on Bandcamp or the like and I thought this album would make sense for the project. So if you could tell me that 101 version of how the second record came to be…?
Gosh, we recorded that in like 1992 and we recorded it with Keith Olsen, the famous producer. He’s the guy who introduced Mick Fleetwood to Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. He had stories! A platinum, platinum, platinum selling producer. We recorded that at the Sound City Studios complex. That was our second record for the label. They approved it. I was actually working on the liner notes for it. And our guy gets fired, a new guy comes in and cleans out his desk. And we’re back in St. Louis at this point.
So it sat for quite some time. For decades. We did a release for parts of it, most of it, in early- to mid-2000s, at one of our first reunions. And that’s how it lived out there. The mastering was weird. There were mistakes in the order, mislabeled tracks. So it was kind of a strange thing. And then I’ve had this label approach me over the last five years and it was like, “yeah, why not?”
Did you always have a sense that your fans always knew about this and wanted to hear it? Or was it kind of a band and inner circle knowledge?
The fans really wanted it. They were asking about it, trading bootlegs on eBay, especially the fans from Europe. So why not give a proper release? All these years later, you look at it differently, you’re not so in the middle-of-it-all. You have a little more perspective. It brings back a lot of good memories and gives fans a bit of a treat with the artwork. We actually wound up doing two releases with this label, since I had a lot of b-sides. Going through the vaults, I found a bunch of live tracks. So we put the original sequencing on II, as the second record was supposed to be, with the songs that hadn’t been circulating.
To your ears, how did the second record sound in comparison to the first? Whether at that time, or with years on now?
We were a part of that whole glam rock thing and in the middle of that, but we had a little different thing with the funk and soul influences, so we tried to add that. I think the songwriting is much more evolved on the second album. On the first, we were just kids. We were a bar band that made it, really. We talked about the things that bar bands did then, you know? This record had something more to say on some of the songs.
Looking back all these years later, it has the dated sound, of course. I think some of the songs hold up. And it’s a cool marker. It’s a history of where we’ve all been.
I’m kind of interested in your take of having things like journals around the house. I’ll be honest, I wound up burning some things I found last year. I was like, “no, no, no. It’s time to let this stuff go,” right? It’s not something I would ever release to people. That was just my comfort level with these writings. Tell me about offering something like this up to the public. Is there some self-consciousness, maybe a little bit? But also being proud of what you were doing…?
Sure, it’s both of those things. We’re proud of what we accomplished. And we’re proud that it touched so many people around the world. But when you look at some stuff you wrote at 20, even at 19, you look away. Then you just realize that you put it in the perspective of the time and that it was what it was. Songs, some of them stand the test of time, like with writing. Some do not. Either you’ve moved on, or you think differently, or you’ve developed your skill set. So it’s a combination of all those. There’re some cringe moments and some stuff that makes you think we were a pretty good band, man, we threw down.
You spoke about people around the world contacting you. Obviously, growing up in St. Louis, I knew about the two names that you played under. But how did that national and international fanbase find you? And how do they still communicate with you?
Well, it’s all social media. There are groups for the hair metal days. I’ve found that we’ve got a fan base in Germany. Over the past few years, I’ve been doing vocals for a glam rock project out of Germany, Shameless. They get a lot of guests of artists from back in the day. Members of LA Guns, Stryper, Warrant. A lot of guys do tracks with this guy. Working with them, I’m realizing how many fans we have. We’ve been asked to go out and tour, gosh, every year for the past 30 years. When we were over there, we made a lot of noise and had a very successful tour with Extreme right when they were having their #1s. You do a tour, a tour at a popular time like that, and it’s a time stamp for people. They remember us, which is pretty cool. We’ve toured with pretty much every major band of that era across the States and did a lot of Europe and Eastern Europe, especially.
It’s funny, we did a reunion about 10 years ago outside of Chicago and there was a line around the building, people wanting to meet us and take pictures. “I saw you in Dallas in ‘92.” “I saw you in Maryland.” These people drove to this show. It was bands like us and Ratt and some others from back in the day, a weekend-type thing. It’s a good fanbase. They’re still into it, in a cool way. They’re not obsessed, just are into the music of their youth, like everybody.
At this point, are there any reunion shows planned?
Gosh, we just came off of one in February. We’re getting along great. We’re sounding as great as ever. Everybody’s still active musically. It’s been fun. We’ve got a different perspective now. We’re doing it for the fans, for the fun of it instead of being so uptight about it all the time. It’s definitely more fun. We’re not worried about things. Dust it off and have good times.
A couple of last things. A light philosophical question. Did releasing these cap anything for you? Did it put a different spin on all this?
Definitely. It came full circle. It (II) never got a proper release. We were waiting to go back out on tour and all of a sudden life changed for us. And the whole business did, quite honestly. So it was nice to give it a nice, proper, respectful release for what we did back then. It’s a nice bookend. People were asking for it. We did a nice, sold-out show around here. We’re getting calls from promoters about jumping onto tours, packages of bands from back in the day. It’s been fun. There’s been a resurgence of that feel-good type of music which is fun.
I’m sure everyone asks this question, but is there any material that’s not been released or has been, for lack of another term, “a new era” batch of songs that could be released?
You know, that’s something we have been discussing. Jimmy and I, the last time we got together, talked about swapping some riffs. We’ve talked about maybe, maaaaybe having something for the next show. So the door’s open. I’ve got a vault full of stuff: demos, live shows, some unfinished things that we could go in and finish. Lots of things I’m sitting on. We’ve got a lot of contacts, so there could be the release of some vault-type stuff.
One last thing. It sound like the whole project is a fun thing for you, but was there ever a point at which you didn’t want to talk about Kingofthehill any more? That it was part of your past? Did you ever get to that point?
I never really did. But I know it got to that point for a couple of the guys. By the time I was in Dr. Zhivegas (and for any of our bands) the reason that they became known so quickly is because everybody knew Kingothehill and Broken Toyz, right? If Jimmy was in something or if George was in something, it immediately came with people who’d at least check us out. Our fanbase came to other projects, and they grew pretty quickly because of that.
It just kinda filtered out. There was never any big breakup. It just dwindled when we couldn’t get any traction. Not a bad blowup or anything. Things just wound down, man. I’ve always felt pretty good about it, about what we accomplished together. Really, it’s about the fans. Those original fans jump-started my whole life. To this day, I play music for a living and it’s all because of that time.
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Thanks for the shoutout, Thomas. Great interview.