The once and future Fuller
Twenty years ago, my band made a record. Today it's finally available for you to hear.
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In 2004, I was playing music regularly around New York City and environs with three bands. (This may sound like a lot and it is, though for a brief period slightly earlier in the aughts I was in four … but that’s a tale for another day.) The three bands couldn’t have been much more different. There was the tuneful folk-pop of Bedsit Poets. There was the raucous but well-dressed garage rock of the Grand Old Party—of whom I’ll be writing more soon. And then there was Fuller.
Subscribers to The Countoff know that I’ve written about Fuller before, so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much here. Besides me on guitar, the band consisted of Michael Gelfand on bass and Peter Catapano on drums. We used to describe ourselves as “cinematic instrumental rock.” Our first gigs, as a quartet with vocals, were in the summer of 1998 at the Charleston on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—one of the few venues we played that still exists—where patrons were entertained not only by our music but also by the “light show” that consisted mostly of the bar’s proprietor, clad in an apron smeared with tomato sauce, flicking the house lights on and off and pointing at us semi-artistically with a laser pen. From there, we moved on to a somewhat higher level of booking. We also did a bunch of recording in various studios, lost our fourth member, gave up singing in response, acquired a manager and attorney, and tried with only minimal success to get our music placed in films and TV shows.
One could argue (and I will) that Fuller reached its high point, at least career-wise, in March 2003 with a performance at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas that I recall, perhaps with a dose of nostalgia, as particularly superb. Nothing much resulted from that trip, however, and by 2004 the question of what to do next was looming larger. The answer, at least in the short term, was to see whether we could turn the new material we’d been developing in rehearsal into a full-fledged album, and whether we could record that album decently in the familiar comfort of our practice space rather than a studio.
Pretty much anyone who’s been a part of the NYC music scene over the past 45 years will have some awareness of where Fuller practiced: in one of the 69 rehearsal rooms that fill all 12 floors of the Music Building, located on a grungy stretch of Eighth Avenue near the Port Authority bus terminal. The room we shared (as was, and is, customary) with several other bands was on the eighth floor, a large high-ceilinged room with tall windows facing the street. We generally rehearsed on weekday afternoons, fueled by piles of barbecued pork, bok choy and white rice in massive white styrofoam containers from the Chinese restaurant around the corner.
It just so happened that Matt Charles and John Hurley, the guys who ran our space, also had a lease on the room next door and occasionally would use them both for recording projects, with one studio as the control room and the other as the live room. Michael, Peter and I decided we wanted to get in on that action, so we pooled our funds and invested in what was then state-of-the-art technology: a Mac PowerBook G4 loaded with Pro Tools 6.1 and an accompanying Digi 002 rack interface. These were the principal implements with which we created Fuller’s second album.
At some point in 2004, with Matt in the engineer’s chair, we cut basic tracks for 12 songs over multiple sessions. I forget just how many, but I know we had to start early in the morning because the practice rooms in the Music Building were open 24/7 and our walls weren’t soundproofed; by early afternoon, the environment could get quite loud and tracking was no longer possible. Months of overdubs followed, some in the practice space and others in my apartment. I added two tracks of sitar to “Lepidoptery” and, for the first time in four years on a Fuller recording, vocals—admittedly wordless—to “Water of Leith.” For the first time ever, we drew on the talents of musicians outside the band. Peter Primamore played piano and organ on four songs, including the prettiest of the bunch, “Naomi Sleeping,” while Jay Rodriguez layered multiple flutes, tenor saxophone and bass clarinet on “Element of Tang,” adding to its eeriness. (Both Peter and Jay cut their parts remotely.) The new album had become our most ambitious project by far.
With recording complete, the mixing began. This also went on for months and was almost entirely handled by yours truly. In session after session, I labored over mutes and fades and pans and other automation moves. Finally, in early 2005, I reached the conclusion that I’d gotten as close to done as I was going to get and handed the mixes off to our friend, indie rock legend Wharton Tiers, whose production and engineering credits include groups like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., and Helmet, for mastering. We’d worked with Wharton before and the results had always been excellent, so I was shocked by what I got back this time: The album sounded muddy and distorted. I asked him to do a second pass, and it was better, but only slightly. What was going on?
Then I realized the problem wasn’t Wharton’s mastering, it was my mixing. From the start I’d felt that Michael’s bass parts were the essential core of the music, so I wanted to make sure they were emphasized. But I didn’t just emphasize them, I overemphasized them, giving them so much room in the mix and making them so boomy that they sucked the life out of everything else. The bass clearly needed to be tamed before a proper master could be made. But taming the bass would, without a doubt, necessitate lots of other changes too. Basically, it was back to the drawing board. And after almost a year of working on the album, I couldn’t stand the thought of that.
By this point, it must be noted, the band was barely a going concern. There were new priorities. Michael was preparing to become the father of twin boys, and Peter had a young daughter. We played a grand total of one show in 2004 (at Arlene’s Grocery on the Lower East Side) and none in 2005. The other two bands I was in had gotten much busier, especially Bedsit Poets, which in 2005 released its debut album, The Summer that Changed, on an actual label—a small Canadian indie label, to be sure, but still a label—and played gigs in Toronto and L.A., among other locales. Nobody was clamoring for a new Fuller album, not even the members of Fuller. So I shelved the recordings, and they stayed on the shelf for almost 20 years.
During that long, long time, I developed an inner narrative about the tracks we cut in rooms 801 and 802. They weren’t really that good. The music was over-complex, too convoluted. We’d gone way up our own backsides, so it was just as well that nobody ever heard the results.
But over the last few months, I’ve come to understand that this narrative was mostly false. Is the music complex? Yes. Could you argue that it’s convoluted? Sure, but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad. And the only person who went up his own backside was me, obsessively working on mixes for months while losing all sense of the big picture. The quality of the compositions, the performances and the recordings wasn’t the issue. They just needed new ears.
Which, very belatedly, is what they got. My pal Tom Beaujour remixed all 12 tracks earlier this year, and another pal, Geoff Chase, remastered them. For the first time in decades, I could listen to this music without cringing a little inside. I even enjoyed it.
And now you too have the opportunity to enjoy it. As of today, that Fuller album we slaved over 20 years ago is available at last for listening and purchase (!) on Bandcamp. It’s titled 584 in honor of the Music Building’s Eighth Avenue address, and although it’s never been released before, we decided we may as well call it the “20th Anniversary Edition.” Peter, Michael and I have discussed the possibility of playing a concert somewhere in NYC celebrating this music later in 2024, so stay tuned. In the meantime, we thank you for your patience.