MARCHELLO
DESTINY

Songwriter and vocalist Peppi Marchello was the founder of the legendary hard rock/AOR outfit The Good Rats from Long Island. The band was amassing an enormous regional following but never broke through on a nationwide scale. By 1984, The Good Rats were history and Peppi Marchello started working on a solo album.

Soon enough Marchello senior teamed up with his son Gene, who was an up an coming guitar player in his own right. The name of the project was supposed to be Popzarocca but CBS Records thought it wiser for Marchello senior to stay in the background and take on the role of songwriter and producer, with Gene being the focus of the band as guitarist and vocalist.

Marchello junior explains: “The company wasn’t really interested in my dad, he was an older guy and he was having fights with certain companies and managers and really after a while he thought that this could be the time to give me the chance.”

In March 1989, Marchello's debut album »Destiny« hit the shelves, combining high quality AOR/melodic heavy rock with Gene’s amazing fretboard skills. The song “First Love” was chosen as the first single and achieved heavy rotation on MTV.

Today, »Destiny« is hailed as a forgotten gem of the genre. The new edition of the album on High Roller Records will surely make the name Marchello known to a broader public.

Gene Marchello himself looks back philosophically: “I think the label did pretty good, it was my first deal, so I had nothing previous to compare it to, our manager used to work for CBS so he was in there all the time relaying our conversations to them and then stuff that they said back to us, telling us that they wanted me to sound more like Bruce Springsteen or Jon Bon Jovi, but I don’t sound like those guys, we use to have these silly arguments with our manager, he was kind of right in the middle of the whole thing.”