Audio By Carbonatix
Two years ago, Del Fuegos front man Dan Zanes stood in the place where he was and watched his world spring a major leak. “My band was falling apart, the record company situation was falling apart, and my songwriting was falling apart,” Zanes says. The band that had once thrilled critics and fans with raging bar-pop and then pissed them off by flacking for Miller Beer had “bottomed out,” Zanes says. “It was time to turn around and work back up again.”
Two years later, that job is basically done. The Del Fuegos are the authors of one of the quickest, but not necessarily the most spectacular, comeback stories ever in rock ‘n’ roll. They’ve returned in 1989 with a hopeful new album (Smoking in the Fields), a new label (RCA Records) and two new band members (guitarist Adam Roth and drummer Joe Donnelly).
It turns out that all Dan Zanes had to do was look over his shoulder at a hazy period called post-adolescence, when his band was on the verge of Miller Time.
It was then that the Del Fuegos would get off work, head over to a dingy old rehearsal space, write songs by and for themselves, and perform what they’d written before recording it. The problem was that the group began to get away from its roots. In fact, by the time of 1987’s Stand Up, the band’s last album for Slash Records, the group was cranking out music in the studio under the heavy hands of producer Mitchell Froom.
After Slash and the Del Fuegos parted (Zanes has said the label turned up its nose at the band’s latest material), the group was under no pressure to record, so it returned to its glory days of raunchy writing and arranging. Zanes and original bassist Tom Lloyd hired on Roth and Donnelly to replace the departed members–Dan’s brother Warren and Woody Giessman–and tested out new material by playing live dates in the Northeast. “This album comes from two years of playing shows, trying new tunes, and listening to tapes of shows,” Zanes says. “By the time the album was made, all the songs had been played live. We knew they were something we could go out and play live every night.”
Zanes also had to rediscover his baser musical instincts, which is to say that the Fuego head started tuning into his inner muse and stopped paying so much attention to the way he thought he should write songs.
“This time around, I started realizing that the songs that were working were kind of personal, ones I might not have even intended to play for the band. They were the ones more about real things. And the ones that were clever and funny weren’t really connecting.”
Zanes’ songwriting philosophy packs Smoking in the Fields with a nervous energy that sometimes pushes all the right bar-band buttons and at other times deteriorates into the most rote of Bruce Cougar Segerisms.
“Move With Me Sister,” the opening track, sets the tone for the album as a pulsing rocker that re-creates the Miller-era Del Fuegos. And the band is capable of turning it up even hotter, as on “Headlights”: Zanes’ voice, sounding like Bob Dylan gargling with ground glass, tangos with guest harpist Magic Dick of J. Geils fame on a car song that’s rawer than any of Springsteen’s automobile ditties.
It’s when the Del Fuegos forget they sound too much like Springsteen for their own good that they get in trouble. “Down in Allen’s Mills” and “Breakaway,” for instance, probably would’ve eventually been written by B.S. if Zanes hadn’t gotten to them first.
In this atmosphere of Bossiness, though, a slow number like “I’m Inside You” comes off as one of the best tear-jerker/romance numbers you’ll never hear on the radio this year. Seemingly designed as a throwback to a not-necessarily-innocent, but definitely bygone era, the song is custom-built for heavy petting in the back of Dad’s DeSoto. And it comes complete with appropriately sappy string parts. “We just thought it was such a raunchy song by nature, singing about what we’re singing about, we wanted it to be like a soul ballad,” Zanes says. “The song asked us to put strings on it.”
The way Zanes tells it, he seems to have been at the mercy of the music on more than one tune. Several parts on the album come off as near-samples of AOR radio staples. “Down in Allen’s Mills” cops a riff from Bob Seger’s “Rock and Roll Never Forgets”; the intro to “I’m Inside You” recalls a section of Big Brother and the Holding Company’s “Piece of My Heart”; and “Dreams of You” emerges as “Sweet Home Alabama”‘s long-lost twin.
“We knew it when we were doing it,” Zanes admits. “You can’t fight it. I used to try and fight it. Every time I was writing, I would think if this would sound like something, and I just wouldn’t write anything.
“I don’t see any problem with that. Look at the blues. The blues is basically a particular chord progression, and how many times has it been used? But nobody’s saying, `Hey, you took my one-four-five, man.’ That’s not to say I’m content to rehash things, but you can’t help here and there when things sound like other things. I really do want to be thought of as a band for the Nineties, and not be thought of as a roots-rock band.”
For now, the Del Fuegos have progressed by steering the way-back machine to the time of their first album. But Zanes is already focusing on steering the band into the future. “We’re not gonna make another Smoking in the Fields. All the guys in the band are good singers. We’re trying to think of ways to use all our voices. And there’s so many grooves we haven’t attacked yet and so many bands that’ll turn us on over the years that we’ll want to try new things. We’ve made mistakes we’ve learned from, and I’m sure we’ll keep making mistakes. That’s the history of the band–a long string of successes and failures.”
Zanes isn’t even worried about entering the next decade with a band that’s died and lived with the most basic of rock ‘n’ roll formats. “It’s fit in for the last three decades,” Zanes reasons. “It’s always worked. It’s just a matter of playing it in a fresh way.
