.....As rock and roll stumbles towards a new century, the once-vital idiom finds itself trapped between the contrivances of post-grunge pop and the wretched excess of electronica. All of which makes Fuel's 550 Music debut album, "Sunburn," such a wonderful curiosity. Muscular, melodic and surgically precise, Fuel come on like the mutant progeny of U2. Like Bono and company, Fuel shares a predilection for big statement, huge sounds and flawless performances. There is something unapologetically "rock" about Fuel, and their confident, grand-standing style is endearing.

.....Of course, music this manly couldn't have been forged in the fashion-conscious environs of L.A. or N.Y. Fuel hails from West Tennessee, where they gorged on a radio diet of arena-rock, supplemented by personal explorations into post-punk, new wave and hop-hop. Things really began to gel when the band relocated to Harrisburg, PA to take adbantage of the music scene that spawned such acts as Live, Deep Blue Something and Solution A.D.

.....Business savvy also factored into the band's success. Their independently produced 1996 EP "Porcelain" sold over 10,000 copies, while their 1997 EP "Hazleton" actually placed on indie and college charts. Now allied with 550 Music, vocalist Brett Scallions, guitarist Carl Bell, bassist Jeff Abercrombie and drummer Kevin Miller are on the verge of global conquest (their debut single, "Shimmer," made instant inroads at rock radio). HITS' house arsonist Bruce "Flame It On The Bossa Nova" Britt caught up with the marauding horde at Sony Music's west coast offices:

Brett Scallions: Because they're so many major markets surrounding it--Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh. It's a good 14-hour drive from where we are in Tennessee. Before we moved to Harrisburg, we had traveled around quite a bit, and we'd made some contact there. We had a pretty good following before we moved. We were looking for a place to settle down, where we could really gain a following and try to get a good buzz going. Plus you had bands like Live and Deep Blue Something there. So it's all history from there. It's not like we did a Mamas and Papas thing, where you throw a dart at the map or anything. It just hapened.

Carl Bell: I live in a town with a thousand people, so Harrisburg worked for me. Jeff [Abercrombie] and I grew up together. Our parents knew each other before we were born. It sounds cliched, but Jeff and I would ride up this gravel road with guitars strapped to our backs, and just play together. There was nothing really to do. It's pretty much soybeans and some great people. I mean, I had 27 people in my graduating class and everybody I graduated with I had started to kindergarten with. I'd never even seen a band play until I went to college.

Carl: You get Top 40 all the time. I remember the first time I heard the Beastie Boys on the radio, and I was like, "What in the world is that?" It was totally foreign, like music from another planet. Brett: I remember for while you'd turn on the radio and it was, "And here's the new one from Bad Company!" And this was in the 90s! It's like, if the music you listen to doesn't have rebel flags on it, then it ain't happening. It makes you realize that you missed a lot of stuff.

Carl: We felt like mutants. Everything I learned on guitar up until college was just pure discovery. I played basketball and my coach used to say, "If you spent as much time practicing ball as you do with that guitar, you'd be a great player." There's nobody thinking about bands there. It just seems like some distant thing that happens to other people. I had a next-door neighbor who was a little out there on the edge. My brother would go over and visit him and one day he had this new album called "Boy" by a band named U2. It seemed like weird stuff at the time. Listening to U2 at the time was like, "Whoa!"

Brett: I come from a town called Brownsville, and that's Haywood County. And Nutbush is in Haywood County, and that's what Tina Turner sings about, you know? Plus, I was 45 minutes outside of Memphis and Elvis, so you've got those two huge influences always in the back of my head.

Kevin Miller: Their experience is a complete 180 from mine. I'm from Allentown, PA which is right outside Philadelphia and New York. I can remember my parents taking me to the park to watch the big bands, ever since I could walk. Me and my friends would be poppin' in B-52s, Devo, the Dickies. If I was listening to Bad Company, I'd get my ass kicked.

Carl: When we put out our own record, our goal was to get to the level of a major. We wanted to get signed and get the help we needed to get our music out there. It's tough doing it yourself. It takes so much of your time that the music ends up getting compromised as a result.

Carl: Definitely. We had endcaps in some of the local stores, and we would tell the record company about it and they'd be like, "You guys know about endcaps?" You're always learning. But it definitely helped teach us what it's like on the street level, how it works in the stores.

Brett: It's a punk-reggae-polka kind of thing, with a little Puff Daddy comin' in the backside there.

Carl: I think it can appeal to alternative and rock formats. We just like to make rock music. We just like to make sounds that are touching and engaging. You don't want to be wallpaper, like muzak or something. The music I've always liked is stuff like U2--music that's engaging and musically moving.

Carl: For me, writing is like decoding events in your life. I've heard people say that writing songs is like therapy and maybe that's true. It helps to get things out in front where you can see them. It helps you understand things and get a grip. But it's funny, I heard our single on the radio in New York, and it was so weird to hear a song that's so personal and intimate being broadcast like public property. It makes you wonder whether you'd write the same songs knowing we were going to get signed and everybody was going to hear them. It's like exposing yourself.