Mark McGrath
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| Mark McGrath | |
 Sugar Ray group photo (crop). |
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| Birth name | Mark Sayers McGrath |
| Born | March 15, 1968 (age 39) Hartford, Connecticut, USA |
Mark Sayers McGrath (born March 15, 1968) is the lead singer of rock band Sugar Ray. He currently hosts the television tabloid Extra.
He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, but grew up in California. He graduated from Corona del Mar High School and then majored in Business Communication at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business in Los Angeles. He worked as a truck driver before making his success in music.
McGrath moved through a few different bands before he went into Shrinky Dinx, one of them being Newport Beach's Electric Kool Aid (an early band with Anton Newcombe and Matt Hollywood of The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Hollywood now being a member of The Out Crowd). McGrath was in this band for merely one day.
McGrath met and began singing with a band called Shrinky Dinx in 1992. By 1994, the band had changed its name to Sugar Ray (after a threatened lawsuit by Shrinky Dinks manufacturer Milton Bradley), and landed a record contract with Atlantic Records. Their initial record was not successful, but the band achieved a number one hit with "Fly" in 1997, and the band went on to even greater success (see Sugar Ray for details).
Charismatic and personable, McGrath's personal popularity soared as he appeared on national magazine covers (Rolling Stone and Spin, for example) and made numerous appearances on MTV, VH1, and various talk and awards shows. People magazine named him the "Sexiest Rocker" of 1998.
He contributed the track "Reaching Out" on Strait Up, a tribute album to late vocalist Lynn Strait. He appeared in the video of "Angel's Son," another song written for the album (by Sevendust) and performed with the band during their appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
In the 2000s, he began making guest appearances on television shows like Las Vegas and North Shore, and he made a guest appearance with the rest of Sugar Ray in the 2002 movie Scooby-Doo (he had a previous cameo appearance in the 1997 movie Father's Day).
He began his stint as co-host of the Extra television show on September 13, 2004.
During 2004 he worked as a guest judge for American Idol auditions; these were aired in early 2005. Also that year he recorded a duet with Shania Twain entitled "Party for Two".
With Jaime Pressley, Mark McGrath co-hosted the 2005 Radio Music Awards on NBC. In addition, he performed a cover version of the Beach Boys' Getcha Back for the soundtrack of Herbie: Fully Loaded, a Walt Disney Pictures movie of the same year.
He is also the current host of "Pussy Cat Dolls:The Search for the Next Doll" (Premiered in March 2007).
