Del Fuegos Beaned In Boston

Del Fuegos Beaned In Boston

FEATURES

Richard Riegel

So how young are the Del Fuegos? Well, if I�d been impressionable enough to have knocked up a Il�l high school gal the first time I heard the Beatles� siren song, I coulda fathered the Del Fuegos� Warren Zanes, as he didn�t come onto the scene until 1965! Fortunately for my �future earning potential� (ha!), I kept my seed in close quarters in those days. But not every healthy young guy did so, with the just-as-fortunate consequence that we got fine youthful rock�n�rollers like Warren Zanes and his elder (vintage 1961) brother, Dan, amongst us now.

I�m sitting in the dressing room of Cincinnati�s Bogart�s with the black-leatherjacketed Zanes brothers, who are noiselessly strumming their guitars to tune up, as they fill me in on their communal sibling recall. Dan Zanes has his trademark Dylan-cum-busdriver cap jammed down over his dark curls, and is a shy (he�s left compulsive eye contact back in the decadent 1970s where it oughta stay) but very talkative spokesman for the Del Fuegos. Warren Zanes has light blond hair, and a big, wide toothy grin that makes him look just like somebody customized George Thorogood�s face by installing Tom Petty�s platinum locks and triple-chromed choppers.

Not a bad dental radiator grille if you can get it, as it just happens that Tom Petty is the Zanes brothers� chief r�n�r idol. Yep, they�re still damp enough behind the appendages to regard Petty as an old soldier of the music wars, but they were even younger than that when their parents split up and they stayed with their mother. Next act was the greening of Mom Zanes, whose �new boyfriend turned her on to weed,� says Dan, savoring the primal turning (-on) point of his own r�n�r career.

Along with the controlled substance came hippie-household album staples like the Beatles, Stones, Dylan, and the Band, plus Mom�s own more idiosyncratic fave, the one & only Jonathan Richman, all available on the turntable for the younger Zanes�s ears at any hour of the day. This was taking place in remotest New Hampshire (�Live free or die!� snarl their cocky license plates), mind you, and highlight of the Zanes boys� pre-Del Fuegos career was when the whole family motored down to Boston to catch the irrepressible Mr. Richman live. Dan and Warren were technically underage to be on the same premises as the Paradise Club�s alcohol, but the club bowed to public pressure—�Let them in; they�re from New Hampshire!� chanted the crowd—and admitted the lads. They finished off a fine evening by not only scoring Jonathan Richman�s autograph, but also by obtaining firsthand proof of the theory of relativity when they met his parents!

How do you follow up an act like that? Well, by the time Dan and Warren Zanes were picking up their own guitars in the late �70s, their broken-home r�n�r influences were such a dualistic mix of mainstream and oddball that they couldn�t even relate to the �punk� rebellion wowing much of their generation. They hadda go (and go crazy they did) for Tom Petty instead. �We were on another boat in the �70s,� says Dan. �A David Bowie album never came near our house. When the �80s began, our type of music—X and the Blasters—started happening again.�

The Del Fuegos started happening at the turn of the decade, too. Dan Zanes kissed Mom and her Jonathan Richman LPs good-bye, moved down to Boston, connected with bassist Tom Lloyd, and after a couple changes of drummers, began conquering the coldwater-fjat Beantown rock scene. One-nighters wherever they could get them eventually made the Del Fuegos headliners at the Paradise Club, guaranteeing Dan Zanes�s first legit entry therein.

As an experiment in sibling servitude, Dan Zanes drafted his little brother Warren to be the Del Fuegos� second guitarist, on the very day in June �83 that Warren graduated from high school. The local success of the Del Fuegos� independent single, �I Can�t Sleep,� got them a shot opening for the Blasters� Boston show, which led in turn to Blaster Dave Alvin taking a Del Fuegos tape back to Slash Records, who gladly signed on the energetic New Englanders.

The Del Fuegos packed their final drummer, Brent �Woody� Giessman, aboard their new van, and headed for L.A. to cut their first album. The van, a fellow N.H. live-free-or-die fanatic, got skittish when it crossed the border of the Midwest, skidded on a patch of ice in Ravenna, Ohio, and crashed in the very shadow of the Human Switchboard�s world-famous refrigerator door. Realityphilled, but not'frozen out; the Del Fuegos dusted themselves off and headed out to California a second time.

Safely arrived in L.A., the Del Fuegos ran head on into the same theory of relativity they had encountered in their meeting with Jonathan Richman years before. Even though they had disdained the trappings of the punk scene, the Del Fuegos were firmly committed to its DoIt-Yourself principles. They had assumed that rock�n�roll consisted of getting up onstag'e and bashing away at their instruments, and that philosophy had worked real well in Boston.

So well, in fact, that some of the Del Fuegos� old Boston fans turned on therTi and called them �slick� the moment they signed with Slash. Baffled by these situational semantics, the Del Fuegos took their slick new show down to N.Y.C., and heard it called �raw� in Gotham�s more jaded context. In L.A., in turn, they found themselves too raw at studio technique to successfully transfer their essential rawness to vinyl, but were still taken aback when Slash assigned Mitchell Froom to oversee their album. �At first we didn�t understand why we needed a producer,� says Dan Zanes. �But Mitchell Froom really got us serious about our music. He really got us to think about our music on a national level.�

The Del Fuegos� debut album, the Mitchell Froom-guided The Longest Day, shows off a young, talented band gritty & eager for rock�n�roll and more rock�n�roll, their own variety pretty solidly �punkabilly� in sound, even if they�d never let that term near their house. And their new album, Boston, Mass., is even better, because the songwriting�s getting stronger.

�We�re unbelievably happy with this record,� says Dan of Boston, Mass. �Mitchell said that the guitar would have to be �awesome,� and brought in Jim Ralston to get that out of us.� Warren Zanes lights up his grin at the sound of �awesome,� and echoes Dan�s opinion of the growth Mitchell Froom has drawn out of the band. The Zanes brothers seem so unanimous in response to all aspects of the band�s experiences, that if there were just one more Zanes aboard, they could pass for my fave literary siblings, Huey, Louie, and Dewey.

But Mitchell Froom�s no blithering Unca Donald to these clever nephews. �Something we�ve noticed is that he�s always right,� says Dan. �But things have always gone well for this band—we�ve always been surrounded by good people.� The Del Fuegos are just young and exuberant enough to believe that they can keep the good people around them all the way to the top of the charts. Hey, their guy Tom Petty did it that way, didn�t he?

Onstage at Bogart�s, the Del Fuegos are as jumping and visual as anybody could want. Blond boppers Warren Zanes and Tom Lloyd, regular Larry Cranes of the future, hop up all of a sudden and crash down again in the real-life drama of chord changes. Drummer Woody Giessmann and tour keyboardist Cleave Davis ladle on the five-way chili of the Del Fuegos� hot sound. Dan Zanes is wearing a bandana and vest along with his everpresent cap now, and looks like a Roosian worker/theorist of the 1905 Revolution, but sings with an r�n�r essence as all-American essential as, say, the late Brownsville Station.

The Del Fuegos are frantic, loose, and golden with their own youth. But then America itself can look that way from the window of a speedy R.V. Let Huey and Louie tell it:

Interviewer: �What were your impressions of Ohio, riding down from Cleveland today?�

Dan Zanes: �We heard �Muskrat Ramble� and �Convoy� on a local radio station.�

Warren Zanes: �We ate at a truckstop where the home fries were extremely HARD.�