Are Seattle’s premier post-punkers really aliens in disguise?
by Dave Thompson - From Alternative Press.
I can’t remember if it was Dr. Who or what, but I once saw this sci-fi show in which the earth had been invaded by a race of super-intelligent beings with the ability to transform themselves into anything they wanted. They took on the appearance of regular people, and before long, nine-tenths of the human race had been subjugated.
Ah, but as the show’s hero said, the aliens made one fatal mistake. “They overlooked the one thing that raises humankind above all other species of life- individuality.” In other words, the alien men all had little waxy moustaches, and the alien women all resembled Mary Tyler Moore.
Far-fetched twaddle? That’s what I thought. Now I’m not so sure. Look around you. Ever noticed how many female bass players these days are named Kim? Kim Gordan, Kim Deal, ex-Pandora Kim Shaddick (sic) - and just to prove they’re aliens who aren’t quite sure what they’re doing, ask yourself who that woman was in the Batman movies. Kim Bassinger. Q.E.D., my dear Watson.
Bass-playing Kim Warnick squirms uncomfortably. She thought we were going to talk about the Fastbacks, the band she has co-fronted ever since she beamed down from Planet X47G6 in the vanguard of the invasion, a decade and a half ago. So, in fact, did I. Zucher is the band’s newly released third album (discounting live and compilations), and I would have liked nothing more than to sit and discuss the life and times of Seattle’s (or anywhere else’s) premier post-punkers.
But maybe I’ve read too much She Hulk just lately, and with Superman gone, someone has to save the world. And rather me than Bill “Did I really promise that?” Clinton. Explain yourself, alien.
She looks at me like I’m crazy. “I actually started out playing guitar, but the first band I played in said, “Well, we already have a guitar player, why don’t you play bass?” So I said, “Okay, I can do that,” and it just sort of stuck. When I started playing with the Fastbacks, Lulu [Gargiulo] already played guitar, Kurt [Bloch] wanted to play drums, so okay, the bass. It really was by default.”
You don’t deny, however, that you and all these other so-called Kim bass players, are bent on conquering the world? After all, show me a musician who doesn’t want a number-one single, and I’ll show you a snake that can skateboard.
Warnick’s eyes light up. “Really? I’ve never seen one of those before.”
And she fires back with a paradox. See, the Fastbacks have been around for 13 years, but you could count on one ante-diluvian hoof the number of people who’ve heard of them. They’ve not made the cover of Rolling Stone, and most of their records are scarcer than hen’s teeth. “If I really wanted to conquer the world,” she assures me, “I’d have found a more effective way of doing it than this.”
The Fastbacks’ story is simplicity itself. Kurt Bloch, Kim Warnick and Gargiulo came together 13 years ago after Kurt and Lulu met in a high school photography class. “It’s amazing,” Lulu was saying, “I took this picture of my friend Kim, but all that came out was this 40-foot space monster with...” Actually, they met when Kurt spotted Lulu’s newly developed pix of Iggy and Bowie, snapped on the Popmeister’s Idiot tour.
Friendship followed, and with their musical tastes dovetailing around punk, in 1980, a band. Prior to that, Bloch admits to a fascination with early 70’s progressive rock- and suggests that at least two of Zucher’s 14 songs were originally (if not consciously) conceived as meandering multi-minute monsters, full of recurring motifs and up-yer-ass guitar solos. It was only when the band came to record them that they changed. “Kim and Lulu hate that kind of thing,” he says. “If it gets too long, they start yelling at me.”
Warnick, meanwhile, grew up on AM radio and “everything from the Partridge Family to “Whole Lotta Love,” those presumably being the only things able to penetrate the deepest recesses of outer space. “I didn’t have an older brother or sister, so I didn’t get to know that much about the Rolling Stones or The Beatles,” she confesses. “They were kinda scary to me, actually.” Why? Don’t they have long hair on Alpha Centauri?
The early Fastbacks, Warnick and Bloch earnestly insist, “were really horrible for a long time.” But they take a strange kind of satisfaction from my observation that the band’s sound has scarcely changed since then. “Don’t Eat That, It’s Poison,” from the band’s retro-remix from last year The Question Is No, dates from this earliest period, and it’s hard to differentiate between it and much more recent material.
“The only major difference is that we learned to play better,” Kim says, “although not that much better. Now we can play guitar standing up.”
A bunch of singles, EP’s and compilation cuts followed, but the Fastbacks have left more than a truckload of killer vinyl behind them. They have also gone through an inordinate number of drummers.
Since Bloch relinquished the drum seat to Duff McKagan- he of future Guns N’ Dosies flatulence- in 1981, no less than 273 drummers have passed through the Fastbacks’ ranks, and most of them- I wickedly allege- are now dead. If Spinal Tap hadn’t made such a humorous virtue out of such wastage, the FBI would have swooped in years ago.
“Actually, they just leave. We don’t even get the chance to sack them,” Warnick pleads. Right now, one of the Posies is keeping the sticks warm, but by the time you read this, who know?
“I can’t figure it out,” Warnick and Bloch both seem genuinely puzzled. “I guess they [drummers] just get tired of it. We don’t do very much, we play Seattle a lot... I guess they just get bored. It might be different if we were a real band who went on tour and things like that...”
Instead, you’re a front for ingenuous space invaders, but that in itself is part of the Fastbacks’ magic.
“We’re not what you’d call a full-time band,” Warnick explains. “We all have different stuff going, and that’s the reason we’re able to put out an album 13 years later. Low expectations, and just having fun doing it.”
And instead of touring extensively, the Fastbacks kill time doing other things. Anyone picking up 1990’s Another Damned Seattle Compilation would have caught Warnick, as part of Motorhoney, yammering through a superb “Psychomania,” even as Bloch- with the Young Fresh Fellows- perfected “Fan Club,” and the Fastbacks themselves whacked “Hit or Miss.”
Bloch, meanwhile, is increasingly in demand as a producer, twiddling knows for Tad, Bum and jap-punx Supsersnazz: the Young Fresh Fellows themselves remain a slab of pure exuberant vitality; and if all this activity detracts from the Fastbacks, quite honestly I’m glad. I’d rather have three Fastbacks albums a decade and know they’ve done their best, than see them working at the canning factory, stuffing each album with filler and relying on the brand name to sell it to the suckers.
And as for all that crap about aliens, yeah, I still believe it. But to be absolutely truthful, I don’t even care any more. Mankind has made a big enough hash of rock n’ roll as it is. Maybe we should let another life form have a go.
