Michael Roach & Johnny Mars 'about johnny'

Songwriter, harmonica player and singer Johnny Mars was raised in a sharecropping
family. He was given his first harmonica at age nine. His family lived in various
places around the South, including North Carolina, Georgia and Florida. When
Mars' mother died in 1958, the older family members settled in Florida, while Johnny
and hisyounger brother went to live in New Paltz, N.Y. After he graduated from
high school, he played club shows around New York and recorded with his band
‘Burning Bush’ for Mercury Records.

In the mid-1960s, Mars moved to San Francisco, where he met Dan Kennedy and
formed the ‘Johnny Mars Band’, playing clubs and festivals in northern California, as
well as shows for rock promoter/impresario/producer Bill Graham. After hearing about
the greener pastures in the United Kingdom from his friend Rick Estrin of ‘Little Charlie
and the Nightcats’, he toured England in 1972. There,he recorded a couple of albums,
eventually moving to West London in 1978. Working with producer Ray Fenwick,
who also worked with Spencer Davis and Ian Gillan, Mars had success with the much
praised album, ‘Life On Mars’.

In 1991, Mars became a featured soloist with the British New Wave pop group
‘Bananarama’. The group used him on their singles ‘Preacher Man’, ‘Megalomaniac’ and
'Long Train Running'. He also appeared in the music video production of 'Preacher Man'.
Through the 1990s, Mars retained his strong European fan base, and he enjoys a particularly strong following in Ireland and Scandinavia. Critics there have called him
"the Jimi Hendrix of the harmonica”. After all, Mars did share bills with Hendrix.

In 1992, after a long absence from the Bay Area blues scene, owing to his new
foothold in the UK and the rest of Europe, Mars was invited to play at the San
Francisco Blues Festival. In 1994, Mars had an American release ‘Stateside with
Johnny Mars’ on MM&K records. Richard Skelly of the ‘All Music Guide’ wrote,
“Stateside with Johnny Mars features brilliant, original, topical compositions and
superb, unique harmonica playing, unfettered by the standard Chicago blues conventions”.