The Fuzz RIP

Dan Jones is my friend. We met in the mid-90s - 1995? - at Oasis fine foods in Eugene. I was a delivery driver, bringing the vegetables in my Carhart shorts and Doc Martin boots. He was working in the kitchen at Oasis deli under the brutal chef Andrew. One day I noticed a goofy guy with a faded Husker Du shirt - is this my kind of person? He gave me some guac and chips and thus began our acquaintance.
A year later he was working alongside me at OGC, receiving trucks in the warehouse, stacking broccoli and apples in the coolers and then training behind the wheel with me as we rode around town in the 1996 International delivery truck. I knew he was writing songs. Daftly, I turned down the opportunity to contribute to his demo he was making at a local studio - it became For Your Radio, a classic blast of literate folk-punk and his calling card into the local songwriter scene. FYR was first a cassette and then re-released as a proper CD. He invited me to play electric guitar with him and Derek Trost on snare and brushes at a gig at Sam Bonds, so I woodshedded on his tunes from the tape and joined his duo without much rehearsal. I went direct into the PA with my trusty Sans Amp while Dan and Derek strummed and brushed away.

"Turn it up in the monitor - I want to hear what Ed's playing!" I remember Derek saying to the sound-person. Of course Dan slipped in some unexpected yet pretty easy cover tunes on the fly - maybe 'Love's gonna live here,' by Buck Owens or a Roger Miller tune or Meat Puppets' Lost on the Freeway, I don 't really recall, but I know it was a bucketful of fun.
Fast forward to the early 2000s -  Dan and I would jam a lot in my garage, collaborating on goofy 4 track songs and trading off on instruments. I remember embryonic versions of his songs Cucumber Gods and Walkin' Blue and many others. I had the riff for The Fuzz but no title. We were already recording and Dan joined in with some cool guitar counterpoint while I stuck to the main, simple arrangement and mid section. It was a steady enough track that I was able to add drums and bass and a vocal after Dan left - voila! A song was born.  No one really asks me what it's about, but 'the Fuzz' is my memory of the sound of Bob Mould's fuzzed out guitar from Husker Du's worst lp, Warehouse: Songs and Stories. It's the most rigid, solid state guitar sound of all time and yet totally unique - it didn't sound like stupid Whitesnake or Motley Crue. It was THE FUZZ and it drilled into my teenage mind like a mosquito buzz that I could never forget.
We had a band called Activator a few years later, with John Laney on bass and Eric Jensen on drums. In 2003 we recorded 10 songs at Jackpot studio in Portland, including the Fuzz, my song Vice Squad and a bunch of Dan songs that he later re-did for some of his own CDs - Hot Pink UFO and Airport City Taxi Limousine among them. I've always loved Dan's wash of sonic guitar on The Fuzz. It sounds like a slow-motion Jackson Pollock painting, globs of sonic paint flying all over he place. Hope you can dig; hope you can Remember the Fuzz.