Bring the Fuzz

Before I started living at the rehearsal space, I had stayed for a short time with D’arcy and her future husband Kerry (who is Catherine’s erstwhile drummer and my good friend) in their basement apartment on the north side…because Kerry used to date one of my old girlfriends, we share a sort of “hey, we went out with the same girl but it’s no big deal” bond…on top of that, the fact that he and D’arcy have fallen so completely in love brings us even closer together as he is often around bumming with her…I was homeless for a time, having recently broken up with my longtime girlfriend (whom I had lived with on and off and leaving behind my last apartment), and was so totally devastated that I couldn’t function for a time because of crying jags and panic attacks…taking pity on me, they graciously invited me to stay at their home so I wouldn’t have to be alone…I slept on their living room floor on a too small blow-up mattress, because they only had one bedroom in the place…crashing on the floor didn’t bother me much, because it was easier than being by myself…that is until they buy a ferret, which D’arcy promptly dyes pink for some reason known only to her…at first, the ferret is good fun…”look at the ferret! look at him eat that box! ha ha”…as his confidence grows, the ferret quickly becomes more like a terrorist than a furry little buddy…he destroys nearly everything in his path, chewing and shredding…he goes in their room, climbs under their covers and proceeds to bite Kerry on his penis while he is sleeping…paper money is hacked up, coins and shiny objects vaporize, nothing is sacred to this monster…plus he totally stinks like shit…the ferret and I develop a love/hate relationship (he loves me, I hate him)…adding to my psychic overload is the fact that Kerry and D’arcy’s romantic interludes (with not so gentle abandon) occur almost every night, with both of them doing very little to mask the fact that this is what they are up to in the next room (the walls were pretty thin)…I of course can’t, in good conscience complain, because it is not my place to…I really appreciated them letting me stay, but when you feel truly lonely and brokenhearted, and happen to be sleeping on a cold tile floor, anything that reminds you of the happiness that takes place between 2 people in love is painful and bitter…this is initially why I decided it would be better to live tucked away in the rehearsal space, because I figure it will be quiet and isolating and allow me the corner to grieve alone…not to mention, if I didn’t leave soon, I was going to strangle the stupid ferret…

Having received what was at that time the largest publishing deal of any of the early 90’s alternative bands (after our first record), I fell rapidly from pride at my early accomplishments to shame that I didn’t deserve them…so confident in my talent was my music publisher that he essentially gave me the equivalent of a gold record (which is 500,000 units) times 4 records, or to put it in plain English, S1,000,000.00 or $250,000 per record (money is credited to the songwriter per disc sold times a certain number of songs)…going from earning $12,000 dollars a year working at a used record store to having one million bucks in the bank freaked me out…it made me paranoid because now I had something to lose, where before I had had nothing…I had the pressure of earning it all back, and all the delusions of mounting expectations around me…the urgent sense, however unreal, that I would have to make the record of my life or that I was going to end up on the junk pile of humanity made me fearful to spend even one penny…I felt compelled that I would have to prove to myself that I had earned this money, as opposed to someone placing their faith in me…plus, getting this kind of money from an outside source created tension within the group towards me, which was fairly uncomfortable…in my logic, if the band blew up (which always seemed possible), I wouldn’t have to go back to working a normal job ever again…so I retreated into my safe world of work, work, work, where it wasn’t about meeting expectations but destroying them…

Nursing my wounds and losing my breath, I flip into overdrive, pushing myself and the band harder and harder to play at a higher level…I talk constantly about how we are going to make this insanely complicated record, one that is going to distinguish and separate us from all the (suddenly) heavy bands…we will top them with songwriting, arranging, heart and discipline…we are galvanized, transformed into something idealistic and unreal, and there is no one around to tell us, or more specifically me, that we couldn’t make it happen…tunes wind out into space, becoming longer and more obtuse…we are going farther and farther out, and there is no going back…

As I am good friends with our space mates (the local band) Catherine, I often stick around for their rehearsals to check out what they are working on and offer unsolicited advice…I notice that in this tight room, they sound very like some kind of jet taking off when they play…the feeling is very exciting, and being the sound whore that I am, I not so slyly interrogate them about how they create this dizzying effect…they all point sheepishly to these little silver boxes on the ground, and tell me that’s about it…their vintage pedal, invented by The Electro Harmonix Company, is a simple old school distortion/fuzz device called ‘The Big Muff Pi’…manufactured back in the 60’s and 70’s, it comes in a brushed metal frame, with cheap black knobs (the later models are more easily recognized by the big red Pi symbol stamped on the faceplate)…they sell used for about $75-100, and there are only three critical settings: volume, tone, and sustain (the volume sends the amount of signal to the amp, the tone the amount of bass vs. treble, and the sustain basically means how much fuzz overload you are going to get)…I notice that when the boys play the space hums with an electrical energy that shoots thru my bones and rattles my teeth…it’s as if this room is made for this sound…they tell me that the reason they like using the pedal is the deep booming sludge it makes, as the sound within collapses from the intensified pressure, creating a bigger presence when they rock hard (and also managing to hide a few inconsistencies in their playing)…the affect is immediate, as they suddenly appear to me to be a much more dangerous combo than I last remember…somehow the alchemy of the concrete walls, the cool air, and this dumb little pedal make the band sound like God himself is coming down from the heavens…which of course means I have to go get one for myself…

It is almost impossible to describe the intensity of the practice space when the Pumpkins are playing at full tilt with The Big Muffs cranked…the basic dimensions of the room are around 25ft x 15ft, with the basic band circle smack in the middle of the shoebox…when you have possibly the loudest drummer in the world playing with passion and power (not to mention about 10 crash cymbals slicing the air) vs. 2 100watt Marshall half-stacks and one 400watt SVT bass amp, you’ve got your basic dull roar fully in hand…add this to that the fact that we are playing in a stone bunker with little or no soundproofing and you’ve got yourself a decent headache blast…but what really puts these tunes over the top, what makes the whole thing ring, and what discreetly pours our liquid brew from sonic anecdote into our own rock and roll riot, is switching to this almost forgotten device…

Occasionally, we take (in various combos, sometimes 2, sometimes all 4 of us) LSD and try to practice…this seems like a good idea for about the first hour, until either the strychnine or the acid itself creep into your brain and melt all your senses and prog-metal suddenly seems way too hard…this drugging loosens the uptight barriers between us, and seem to clear the air without anyone saying anything…somebody starts laughing, and we are kids again, forgetting all this nonsense about topping the charts and changing the world…

We are obsessed with technical precision, for it is obvious to us that the tighter we play the heavier we sound…adding the Big Muff pedal into our charge makes us appear wider and meaner than we truly are, but all this beefed up bludgeoning comes at a hidden cost…because the sound is so grossly overblown (the amps sound like they are going to explode at any second), the band sadly doesn’t sound tight at all…at first, we figure the sound of the fuzz is going to take some time for us to get used to, and because we are having so much fun playing along with them anyway that it doesn’t seem like a big deal…but after only a few days, it becomes obvious that certain aspects of what we do, little things that we take for granted (namely our focused attack), disappear in a haze once we light ‘em up…we discuss ditching the pedals for good, naively talking ourselves into thinking that we can just go back to our normal sound and compensate in some other way...we only last a couple of minutes using our old equipment before we fall to a halt, puzzled because we now sound to our confused ears boring!…we are at a crossroads, as we have made a deal with the devil (of demon fuzz) and can’t seem to go back…it is a Faustian deal for this most exciting sound that makes us deliver invincibility, but by taking away our detailed intensity, also degenerates us to a common pub band…after some discussion, we unanimously decide the fuzz pedals will have stay, and we will just discover a way, as yet unseen, to make them work…we will just have to practice all the harder…