Fastbacks were here before almost everybody. That’s the first thing people forget.
I didn’t know that when I first heard them.
I was still working at the record store back in Queens, sometime around ’90 or ’91, when a friend played me some Fastbacks stuff. I remember hearing “Wrong Wrong Wrong” and immediately wanting to hear it again. Fast, loud, ridiculously catchy. The voices were sweet, the guitars weren’t, and there was this guy playing lead like nobody had bothered to tell him punk rock wasn’t supposed to have guitar solos.
Then I started digging around and realized they’d been doing this since 1979.
That completely screwed up the neat little version of Seattle music I had in my head. Fastbacks weren’t a grunge band. Hell, they were already playing around Seattle when half the people who ended up in grunge bands were still in school.
Kurt Bloch, Kim Warnick and Lulu Gargiulo knew each other from Nathan Hale High School and started rehearsing in the fall of ’79. Even the lineup people think of as Fastbacks took a little while to happen. Shannon Wood was the original singer, Kurt was playing drums, Kim was on bass and Lulu was on guitar. Shannon left in 1980, Kim took over most of the lead vocals and Kurt moved out from behind the drums and onto guitar.
That turned out to be a pretty good idea.
Kurt wrote most of the songs, and his guitar playing is one of the things that makes Fastbacks impossible to mistake for anybody else. He had all the speed you’d want from somebody who’d listened to the Ramones and Buzzcocks, but he also clearly never received the memo saying you were supposed to throw away your Queen records when you became a punk. He could play his ass off. Proper lead guitar. Solos. All this stuff that should have made the songs heavier or slower, except somehow it didn’t. Kim and Lulu would sing over the top of it, sometimes together, and the whole band would tear through the song at about twice the speed anybody sensible would have chosen.
Somehow it worked.
And then there were the drummers.
Jesus Christ.
Fastbacks have gone through so many drummers that keeping track of them could qualify as a separate record-collecting hobby. It started with Kurt himself, and one of the earliest replacements was a kid from the neighborhood named Duff McKagan. He was about fifteen years old and played on their first 7", “It’s Your Birthday” backed with “You Can’t Be Happy,” which came out on No Threes in 1981.
Yes, that Duff McKagan.
But this was years before Guns N’ Roses, and reducing it to “hey, the Guns N’ Roses guy played with Fastbacks” gets the story backward. Duff was a Seattle punk kid and Fastbacks were one of the bands already there for him to play with.
That first single and the Fastbacks Play Five of Their Favorites and Every Day Is Saturday EPs came out through No Threes, the little label Kurt was running. Those early records aren’t exactly the easiest things in the world to find now. Their first actual LP didn’t show up until 1987, eight years after they started. …And His Orchestra came out on PopLlama, and “Wrong Wrong Wrong” was on there before it also turned up on a Subway Organization 7" in England a couple years later. So apparently the song that reached me in Queens had already traveled farther than I had.
They followed it with Very, Very Powerful Motor in 1990, but the thing that really helped me make sense of all those missing years was The Question Is No. Sub Pop put that out in June ’92, collecting singles, compilation tracks and other stuff going all the way back to 1980. Five different drummers on that one, including Duff.
I bought it before I moved out here that September, and in retrospect it was a pretty good introduction to something I was about to understand a lot better.
Seattle changed completely around Fastbacks.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to.
They had already been a band for more than a decade when Nevermind came out. They didn’t need to figure out what “the Seattle sound” was because whatever the hell Fastbacks sounded like had already been established years earlier. Punk, power pop, loud guitars, Kim and Lulu’s voices, melodies that stuck in your skull for days and Kurt playing leads all over the place. When every photographer and A&R guy in America suddenly wanted a piece of Seattle, Fastbacks didn’t suddenly discover drop-D tuning and start staring at their shoes.
They just kept making Fastbacks records.
Kim even worked over at Sub Pop for a while, which somehow makes the whole thing funnier. Here was somebody whose band predated the label by years, sitting in the office while Sub Pop was becoming synonymous with a musical movement Fastbacks didn’t really belong to.
Then Zücker came out in ’93.
I played the hell out of that one.
“Gone to the Moon” is still one of my favorite Fastbacks songs. That record gets the balance exactly right for me — ridiculously melodic without sanding down the guitars, fast without turning everything into a blur. Ask me what my favorite Fastbacks record is and I’ll probably say Zücker. Ask me tomorrow and I might give you a different answer.
Answer the Phone, Dummy followed in ’94, and if you want one statistic that explains the Fastbacks drummer situation better than I ever could, here it is:
Six different drummers.
On one record.
Six.
Rusty Willoughby. Jason Finn. Dan Peters. Mike Musburger. John Moen. Nate Johnson. Different songs, different sessions, six guys behind the kit, and somehow when you put the record on it still sounds like one band.
That’s because the center never moved very much. Kurt’s songs and guitar, Kim’s bass and voice, Lulu’s guitar and harmonies. Drummers could come through the revolving door — and Mike Musburger stuck around more than most during the ’90s — but that front line was unmistakable.
By then Kurt was also one of those guys whose name you started noticing elsewhere if you spent enough time looking at Seattle records. He’d been playing with the Young Fresh Fellows since the end of the ’80s, and he did recording and production work around town too. It makes sense. Fastbacks records always sound like they were made by somebody who actually likes records, not somebody who thinks recording is the boring part you do between writing songs and getting your picture taken.
The really strange part came when Fastbacks finally started getting shoved in front of audiences vastly bigger than the ones they’d spent most of their lives playing for.
Pearl Jam were fans.
They had Fastbacks open a few enormous shows in November ’95 — including those ridiculous Salt Lake City and San Jose crowds — and then took them out properly in ’96, through dates in the States and Europe.
Think about that for a second.
Fastbacks start rehearsing in 1979. They spend the ’80s putting out little records, changing drummers and playing this music that barely fits whatever Seattle is supposed to mean at any given moment. The whole city explodes around them. They keep going. Then, sixteen or seventeen years after they started, Eddie Vedder and company put them in front of arena-sized crowds on another continent.
I remember being happy about that.
Not because I thought Fastbacks were finally going to become huge. That never really seemed like the point. I just liked the idea of thousands of Pearl Jam fans walking into a building and suddenly having Kurt, Kim and Lulu coming at them whether they knew who the hell they were or not.
New Mansions in Sound came out in ’96 and might actually be my favorite record they made.
See?
Already changed my answer.
There’s also a live record from the Crocodile from around that period, Here They Are: Fastbacks Live at the Crocodile Cafe. If you want to know why people around here loved them, a live Fastbacks record makes more sense than another paragraph from me. Speed, hooks, guitar, voices, jokes, everything threatening to fly apart without actually doing it.
Then The Day That Didn’t Exist came out on spinART in ’99, twenty years after those first rehearsals.
Twenty years.
And it still sounded like Fastbacks.
That might be the thing I admire most about them. They never needed to pretend they were the same people they had been in 1980, but they also never seemed embarrassed by what they were good at. Seattle went from punk town to nowhere town to center-of-the-universe town to the place everybody in the music business had already moved on from, and Fastbacks just kept writing these short, loud, ridiculously catchy songs.
Now I’m not sure what’s happening.
Kim has been playing bass with Visqueen this year, and Fastbacks have been awfully quiet. Maybe that means nothing. People in Seattle play in more than one band all the time. Hell, if having another band automatically meant Fastbacks were finished, Kurt would have killed them years ago.
But this feels different.
Maybe I’m wrong.
I hope I’m wrong.
Because if this really is winding down, one of the longest-running bands in Seattle might disappear the same way they spent most of their career existing — without the rest of the country paying nearly enough attention.
Which, come to think of it, would be a pretty Fastbacks way for it to happen.
Anyway.
I’m putting on Zücker.
Loud.
