Best Man Back!
Third Eye Blind Guitarist Felt like Famous Ousted Beatle Drummer

Mike Ross
Edmonton Sun

Philosophers have pondered this question for years: What if the Beatles had fired Ringo Starr and invited Pete Best back?

To a lesser extent - in an event that wouldn't actually put the entire universe out of alignment (not to mention depriving the world of Octopus's Garden) - this same situation has occurred in Third Eye Blind. Playing tomorrow night at the Joint, the band recently replaced its guitarist with its old guitarist, Tony Fredianelli. A terse statement released in January wished departing member Kevin Cadogan "every success" - just so long as it wasn't with Third Eye Blind. Tony was there at the very beginning, when the "visionary" singer-songwriter Stephan Jenkins came up with the happy, poppy smash hit Semi-Charmed Life - a song about speed freaks and oral sex, as it turns out - but money ran thin, Tony met a girl in Vegas and didn't come along on Third Eye Blind's rocket ride to superstardom. As the great philosopher Homer once said, "Do'h!" Says Fredianelli, "It was like, you were happy for your friends, but at the same time, you're thinking, (heck), not Pete Best! Come on, man. Noooooo ..." Meanwhile, Fredianelli was working on a band of his own, called Magic Alex. Things were looking good, he recalls, as they enjoyed a carnival of free flights, limos and record label suits falling all over themselves in a rush to profess their undying love for the next big thing in rock 'n' roll. It all came to nothing, as these things often do. "I was being stroked pretty hard by a lot of different labels," Fredianelli recalls. "And I actually let myself become suckered into the belief of hype. You're spinning a hype ball, basically, hype, hype, hype. At some point it's going to connect or it's just going to go kerflooey. I guess it wasn't meant to be for us at that time, and I was meant, obviously, to make it back over here." He elaborates, "I believe in fate in the hands of destiny and free will. I think they work simultaneously. You can kind of create your reality, but at the same time, it's all fate. You know what I mean?" Not really, but maybe that's why they call this 30-year-old guitarist "the Monk." Besides, he's from San Francisco. Anyway, Magic Alex is toast. Third Eye Blind, on its way to selling four million records, is opening for the Rolling Stones. And Fredianelli is left to wonder if maybe he'd made the wrong call. Things looked up when the band hired him as a sideman to play keyboards, working on the same stage as the aforementioned, doomed-to-be-fired guitarist. The whole thing happened in a flash. "They decided it was time to give (Cadogan) the termination slip and that was that. It was an amazing thing to see somebody actually get fired, especially when they're like a songwriter in the band, a player, not just a sideman. It happened really fast. The next thing I knew we were on a private jet flying to do the Jay Leno show and I had to learn the song on guitar in a few hours. We just kept moving at a high pace since then." Although Fredianelli sometimes slips and says "they" instead of "we," he says he feels as much a part of Third Eye Blind as anyone else in the band, that he's actually managed to "breathe some new life into this." He's most pleased with the public's acceptance of this new, albeit old, face in the band - not that many fans would've known or cared who Kevin Cadogan was in any case. Still, he says, "I'm amazed. I'm amazed by the fact that fans have been so accepting. It's almost bizarre to me that there hasn't been anything negative."