Rock News

High Octane

by Paul Biel

When most bands think of packing up and relocating in search of fame, they move to a big city -- New York, say, or Los Angeles or Seattle. Not Fuel. They moved from Kenton, Tenn., to Harrisburg, Penn. "It's actually pretty cool because there are so many major cities surrounding it, with Philadelphia and Baltimore and New York," says singer Brett Scallions. "It was kind of like home base and then you had all these places within a two-hour driving distance to go play in."

The group put out a self-titled cassette and a CD called Porcelain before signing to 550 Music, which released Sunburn in March. The first single, "Shimmer" -- a remake of a song from Porcelain that sounds like a cross between the Dave Matthews Band and Soundgarden -- is burning up the modern-rock charts. Fuel also have a song on the Godzilla soundtrack. RockNews.com talked to Scallions, guitarist-songwriter Carl Bell, bassist Jeff Abercrombie and drummer Kevin Miller about small towns, a big lizard movie and the band's titanic tour bus. (Heather Muse)

Tennessee Homesick Blues

Jeff Abercrombie: Carl and I actually grew up together -- his mother used to babysit me when I was in diapers.

Carl Bell: Yeah, Jeff and I grew up in a farming community in Tennessee [with] not a whole lot to do. Basically we played guitars and we were in bands around the area -- what little bands there were. And then we saw Brett playing in like '93 and then he joined the band. He was the voice we'd been looking for -- the voice that we needed . . . Kevin [joined] after we recorded the record. We had a gentleman by the name of Jonathan Mover play on the record and then Kevin joined after that, around Thanksgiving of last year.

Kevin Miller: I've been in the music business all my life, from a young, young age, on the road traveling. I met these guys through the same agency; our band would play with their band and vice versa, like one night they'd support us and the next night we'd support them. We just developed a good friendship and I pretty much told Carl that if I didn't get the job I was going to kill him. It worked.

Indie Outing

CB: We really enjoyed [making the indie CD Porcelain]. I enjoyed making a record, putting it all together and mixing it down and doing all that. It was a labor of love in a way.

Brett Scallions: We were constantly playing. Then we'd go into the club and record a song. We'd get all these songs recorded, and then we'd take them back to my house and mix and everything.

CB: It's just all I ever wanted to do. I mean, I have nothing. I have no hobbies, this is what I love to do. So for me, I never thought about it as sitting down and going, 'Wow, I want to plan this all out.' It was just a natural evolution, just what I really enjoy.

Godzilla vs. Fuel

CB: They called me in the morning and they said, 'We want you to do a song for the Godzilla soundtrack.' I wrote it in like an hour and a half and it was done. It was just one of those songs that was like a bolt of lightning -- I just hit it, it just hit me. I was glad it happened that way because we had to record it like the next week.

BS: It's a song called 'Walk the Sky' . . . Brendan O'Brien produced it and it was a lot of fun working with Brendan.

KM: He's awesome.

CB: He was so much fun to work with because he totally gives you the vibe that you would expect. You go in as a band, and you record as a band. There's no, 'OK, lets lay down the drum track first, and then let's redo the bass from top to bottom.' We went in and we played.

JA: Just keepin' it real.

CB: Actually, [O'Brien] did a lot. He heard this song in a different way as far as tempo. So we slowed it down quite a bit, brought it way back, but it turned out cool. I think both versions are pretty cool but his version, the one that he envisioned, is the one that we recorded.

DIY and Die

CB: We're, like, these do-it-yourself kind of guys. So we thought we'd be smart and instead of renting a bus for 500 dollars a day, we'd just take that money and try to buy a bus. We bought this bus from this company, I think they're in Red Bay, Alabama . . . The bus is horrible. It's a 1998 bus and it's left us on the side of the road twice -- nothing more glamorous than crawling under your bus at 6:30 in the morning on Sunset Strip working on the transmission.

JA: The dashboard nearly caught on fire.

CB: We opened the luggage bays in the bottom and I thought we were living a scene from Titanic. All our luggage was just floating. It looked like wreckage in the water.

KM: You couldn't sabotage a bus and make it do this.


Fuel -- Articles