Fu Manchu to go commercial but refuses to compromise its art

For a musician, playing what's fashionable is a good thing for one's bank account but it isn't if you want to sustain a career. Southern California's Fu Manchu has never equaled in album sales what it's developed in cult status. Still, more than a decade since it came together, the quartet continues to build upon its fan base while finding everything from grunge rockers to new metal acts falling to the side in the public's favor.
"We just keep doing our thing. We don't do anything that's too hard to figure out. You put it on and it either moves you or it doesn't. Simplicity," explained drummer Scott Reader during a recent interview.
Using a cell phone, he answers questions while making stops to combat a cold. It's the day before he and his band mates -- vocalist/guitiarist Scott Hill, guitarist Bob Balch and bassist Bard Davis -- head out on the road for the next leg of its tour promoting the band's seventh full-length studio effort, "Start the Machine."
While the title makes a nice reference to the Discovery Channel's "Monster Garage" program, which uses Fu Manchu's music as the theme and has featured the band in performance, it also signifies that the band is ready to move forward with its most commercial-sounding effort that displays zero compromises.
"Get the ball rolling. Get out on the road. Play this music for people and fire people up. That's what we do. We're primarily a live band that makes records as an excuse to go on tour."
Sound derivations
Over a decade, Fu Manchu has developed a sound that owes as much to the heavy riffs of Black Sabbath as it does to the buzzed-out bliss of Blue Cheer and the energy of MC5 and Black Flag.
"We're all fans of those bands. So, I'm sure that stuff seeps in. There's a standard of music that we like, and we wouldn't make anything less than what we'd listen to."
On its latest release, the quartet's short sharp burst of hook-laden material seems far from removed its sludgier past, but, according to Reeder, it's just a reflection of a band evolving.
"The sound of the record has to do with being pent up and not having a record for two years," Reeder said. "We had a lot of material to draw from and it turned out to be aggressive. I liken it to if you trap somebody in a box for six months, they'd be banging on the walls eventually.
"We recorded the entire record as a performance, doing it live as much as possible. We did notice when we were listening to some older songs we hadn't heard in awhile we'd go, 'If we did that song today, that part would be shortened, we'd do this differently.' That's not to say we won't do longer songs in the future, it's just where we're at. We wanted to get in and out of the studio real quick."
Influenced by a potent SoCal combination of homegrown punk rock and surf culture, Fu Manchu made an impression across the nation by bringing up everyday touchstones such as skateboarding and cars in songs that related not only to the band members lives but its fans as well.
The slacker lifestyle became embodied in the music, which led it to be linked with other acts as part of the fuzz-toned stoner rock genre during the mid-'90s.
Reeder and his bandmates refuse to be pigeonholed. Instead, he sees the Big Picture of where the group's music relates to the past and the present. "It's rock 'n' roll is what it is. It's just a label that's easy to categorize something in, so you know what decade it's from."
XFu Manchu will be at Nyabinghi in Youngstown Tuesday and at House Of Blues Dec. 8.