Butch Walker is glad to be on the bus again.

Having just finished an in-store performance in Thunder Bay, Canada, the singer/guitarist of the new rock group, The Marvelous 3, breathes a sigh of relief and apologizes for his late phone call.

The performance has thrown off his entire day’s schedule.

Life has been like that a long time now for Walker. Along with bassist Jayce Fincher and drummer Slug, he has been playing what he calls a “metaphorical rock recipe” for almost 12 years.

“We’re one part punk rock and new wave, aggression and image, and the second part songwriting,” Walker said. “We’re trying to fuse that together because it seems like a missing link in rock ‘n’ roll these days.”

Drawing influences from both Elvis’s, Cheap Trick and Kiss, the Marvelous 3 puts out a rare combination of knee-buckling power pop and pulverizing slabs of guitar, with Walker’s poison pen providing the flavor.

As the only three guys in an Atlanta suburb who played instruments and cared to, it was only natural for the musicians to form a band as a means of escape from the doldrums of the small town.

“We didn’t want to shoot deer and play football and have a gun rack and a 4 x 4 truck,” Walker said.

The hardest thing for The Marvelous 3 when it was starting out was getting gigs, finding the right shows to play and drawing crowds.

“The only way to do that is to put on a rock show,” Walker explained. “A lot of bands are lacking in the connection with the audience and we kind of honed in on that. We didn’t have air play or a record company behind us to promote a single that would draw tons of people to the shows.”

The Marvelous 3 broke into the business the old-fashioned way — by going back to the basics and putting on good-hearted solid rock shows.

Walker said the band’s approach seems like a new concept, but it is actually an old concept taken from the beginnings of rock.

“It was something to give them a visual spectacle so that when they were watching you they weren’t looking at their watches waiting to hear the hit single so they could take a pee break or go home and play Playstation,” he said.

After the 1997 indie release “Math And Other Problems,” which garnered the band four Atlanta Local Music Awards, The Marvelous 3 followed it up with the self-made “Hey! Album” in October of ’98.

It created such a buzz with both critics and radio, the threesome ended up signing with HiFi/Elektra and hit the studio to re-record the album under the direction of Jim Ebert.

“Jim is definitely one of the producers to look for coming up. He’s excellent,” Walker said. “The one thing that he contributed in the best way possible was to be able to have somebody come in and say, ‘Why don’t you just go concentrate on playing guitar and singing.'”

The album’s first single, “Freak Of The Week,” has gotten friendly approval by many but has also caused a stir among some critics.

“It’s a direct rip-off of ‘So You Wanna Be A Rock Star’ by The Byrds — at least that’s what some people say,” Walker said. “I’m just saying that to be cheeky. It’s a subconscious thing how everything sounds like something else — like how every Oasis song sounds like the Beatles.”

Walker doesn’t mind the criticism because he knows the song is reaching a lot of young people and giving them a voice.

“It’s a non-conformist’s anthem. It’s about selling out for the sake of your integrity or security of not being able to be yourself.”

Walker said everyday people, including people he knows or wishes to know, inspire his songwriting. He feels his songs aren’t an outlet for a disastrous childhood or growing up under harsh conditions because he never had any of that.

“There can’t be a whole lot of self-indulgent, auto-biographical songs because I personally, from a songwriting standpoint, didn’t come from that kind of an interesting background,” he said. “If I were Eddie Vedder and grew up so troubled, then there’d be a lot to complain about and write about.”

If Walker were to complain about anything, it would be the music industry. He thinks it has caused music to become a disposable commodity instead of something to build a career upon.

“They have no passion for an artist that puts out five or six albums in a row and becomes the next U2,” he said. “Now it’s all about one hit, one shot, one album, one video — you’re gone.

“Look at this whole merger with the record companies soaking up all the cool smaller more artist-friendly, integrity-laden labels,” he continued. “Gone because some guy with a lot of money wanted to buy them all up just to say he owned them. He probably doesn’t even listen to music anymore.”

It’s these problems with the music industry that prompted Walker to tell SPIN magazine, “I’ve got to figure out how to save rock ‘n’ roll.”

“I can sum it up just by me walking into a music store this morning to do an in-store. We looked in the poster rack. There aren’t any rock posters anymore,” he said. “All there are are Backstreet Boys and N’Sync posters. On the other end of the spectrum you have Marilyn Manson and Korn.”

Walker believes the problem is that if you don’t choose to wear a rubber mask when you’re playing, figuratively speaking, you don’t stand a chance.

“We don’t get up there with demon masks or syncopated dance moves unless we’re making fun of them,” Walker joked.

He described a Marvelous 3 show as a variety show with lots of fun, sweat and energy.

It is this formula that Walker believes is the key to saving rock ‘n’ roll.

The Marvelous 3 play tonight at Supertoad in Des Moines. The all-ages show will kick off with Dovetail Joint at 8 p.m.