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.
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 wrote these songs with way more going on inside them than you noticed at first. He could play his ass off, too. Then you had Kim Warnick and Lulu Gargiulo singing over the top of everything, sometimes together, while the band tore through the song at about twice the speed anybody sensible would have chosen.
Somehow it worked.
The drummer situation was another story.
I’ve honestly lost track of how many people played drums for Fastbacks. Mike Musburger, Nate Johnson, Rusty Willoughby, Dan Peters, Jason Finn — even Duff McKagan played with them way back before Guns N’ Roses. At some point trying to keep track becomes its own hobby.
By the time I moved to Seattle in ’92, I was already a fan. The Question Is No came out that year and was a great way of catching up on some of the older singles and compilation stuff I’d missed. Then Zücker came out and I played the hell out of that one.
“Gone to the Moon” is still one of my favorite Fastbacks songs.
Answer the Phone, Dummy followed in ’94. Six different drummers on one record. Six. That probably tells you everything you need to know about Fastbacks.
And somehow it still sounds like one band.
That’s what I always loved about them. Seattle changed completely around Fastbacks and they never seemed particularly interested in changing with it. Suddenly everybody in town was getting photographed, signing major-label deals and being asked what “the Seattle sound” meant.
Meanwhile Fastbacks just kept making Fastbacks records.
They finally got dragged into some bigger rooms when Pearl Jam took them out for shows in ’95 and ’96. I remember being happy about that. Not because I thought Fastbacks were finally going to become huge — that never really seemed like the point — but because a whole bunch of people who probably had no idea who they were suddenly had to stand there and listen to them.
New Mansions in Sound came out in ’96 and might actually be my favorite record they made. Ask me tomorrow and I’ll probably say Zücker.
That’s how it goes.
The Day That Didn’t Exist came out in ’99 and proved they could still make a record that sounded completely like themselves twenty years after they started.
And now it sounds like Kim’s done.
She’s been playing with Visqueen, and from what I’ve heard she just doesn’t want to keep doing Fastbacks anymore. I can’t really blame somebody for deciding twenty-plus years is enough.
Still sucks, though.
If this really is the end, that means one of the longest-running bands in Seattle just quietly disappeared without anybody outside this town making much noise about it.
Which, come to think of it, is probably the most Fastbacks way possible for it to happen.
I’m putting on Zücker.
Loud.
