Frankie
and His Fingers
By Peter Aaron
It’s
been 53 years since Elvis Presley first walked into Sam Phillips’s
Memphis Recording Service; 30 years since The King “left the
building” for good. So why would a pair of 21-year-olds think
rock ’n’ roll is still relevant enough to play now—and
do it like they really mean it, no less?
“God,
why wouldn’t we want to play it?” counters Sammi Niss,
the petite but potent drummer who powers Woodstock-based garagepop
duo Frankie and His Fingers. “This music is in our blood.
My dad played me rock ’n’ roll when I was still in the
womb.”
“Yeah,
music, especially rock, is like a religion in my family,”
says Frank “Frankie” McGinnis, the band’s eager,
side burned singer-guitarist. “We were raised on the hits,
pop stuff from the mid Fifties to the Nineties, a lot of Top 40.
I have a brother and five sisters, and everyone had different tastes.
And we were never shy about our feelings, which makes you very sensitive.
I guess that’s why I go in for a lot of that heart-on-the-sleeve
stuff with my songs.”
Frankie
and His Fingers got together in the fall of 2004, when the Roxbury-raised
McGinnis and Westchester native Niss met as students at Vermont’s
Bennington College. At first, the pair hooked up regularly just
so McGinnis could hear a beat behind the confessional anthems he
was cooking up in his dorm room. But after it became apparent there
was something special going on, they decided not to waste time auditioning
other members and started playing out. Soon, the pair was tearing
up stages across the Northeast, and even found their way onto the
bill of a festival in Missouri. “We’d always planned
to add a bass player or get some other people in the band,”
says McGinnis. “But we just kept forgetting about to do it
[sic],” adds Niss.
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