Legendary Canadian guitarist and Mahogany Rush leader, Frank Marino, has announced his retirement from touring due to health reasons. A message from Marino follows:

"With sorrow I am forced to announce my immediate retirement from touring, and possibly all things related to continuing my career, due to an unexpected and debilitating medical condition which makes it impossible for me to tour.

"I want to thank all the people who supported me all of the last half-century. I know that many were looking forward to seeing us play this fall and I was looking forward to getting out again and doing more shows, but it now appears that in the absence of a miraculous recovery, my Concert DVD (Live At The Agora) will constitute the last show I will ever have played. I ask any that are believers to include me in their prayers."

According to his bio, Frank was born Francesco Antonio Marino on November 20, 1954 in Montreal, Canada. Half Italian and half Arabic, Frank is one of five children and only has a 7th grade education that even included a short stint in military school. "Those years were the late sixties and everyone was into the hippie peace movement and we were so busy getting stoned that we certainly didn't want to attend school. All we did besides getting stoned was listen to Hendrix, The Doors, The Beatles and a few others as well as getting involved in movements such as peace, love, anti-war etc. Those were definitely the days, not like now where many young people seem to be into negativism and hate."

It was during those days that his experimentation with LSD would lead him to what was later to become the definition of his life. As a young person doing far too much acid, he couldn't really understand when it finally caught up with him and gave him such an incredibly vivid experience that was so overwhelming, that it landed him in the hospital. "This experience became the basis of everything that I was to do in music, including the name Mahogany Rush, which was a description I would use to describe a certain sensation that I was having on the trip. The artwork on the albums, Child Of The Novelty and Strange Universe are an artist's rendition of my trip as told by me to the artist, Ivan Schwartz, who has since passed away."

Since this early drug experience later became known to the press that covered his career, and since he played much in the style of Jimi Hendrix who had recently died, these sensationalists created stories that to this very day Frank has tried immensely and unsuccessfully to dismiss. "The most often heard story is that I took an overdose and woke up from a coma in the hospital and somehow became the spirit of Hendrix, or that I met this spirit and it entered me, endowing me with this amazing ability to play a guitar and magically know everything about it. Later on the story changed into a version that said I was in a car accident, died and came back as Jimi Hendrix in my body. They never ask me the truth and when I told them, they wouldn't listen. The short truth about it is that I learned how to play guitar while recuperating from my trip. The guitar became a soothing help for me because of my great fear of letting my mind wander back into the trip if I wasn't occupied and besides it was the only thing in the hospital relaxation room. I never even thought about the guitar before since I played the drums quite well anyway. I had this trip while Hendrix was still alive and began to play his music because it matched perfectly to what I was going through at the time."

It was only a few short years later after many different band members, that Frank Marino recorded his first album. "In the early years I played in a church and even on a float in a parade. I did mostly cover songs by The Doors, Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Cream, Johnny Winter, The Beatles and even The Grateful Dead as well as a few originals that I had written."