Revved up like a finely tuned ’71 Dodge Charger, Fu Manchu continues to churn out dirty riffs and songs tailor-made for the road.

    Always teetering on the fence between mainstream and underground, Fu Manchu has managed to pull in a massive following over the past 15-plus years by providing consistency in an otherwise inconsistent business. Drummer Scott Reeder talked with TCS Wednesday, March 7, 2007.

Hello?

Yeah, this is Scott Reeder from the band Fu Manchu calling for Patrick Douglas.

What’s up Scott? How are you doing?

I’m doing ok. You were supposed to talk to Scott Hill, but he is indisposed, so you get Scott Number 2 instead.

Well, Scott number 2. That’s fine with me. That’s awesome.

Ok. Hope you like two instead of one (laughs).

I was just sitting here watching an old clip of Soilent Green that someone posted online.

Oh really?

Yeah with Glen Rambo on vocals from like ’89.

Really, what’s it on? Youtube?

Yeah. Youtube.

That’s cool.

You guys in Denver today?

We are in Denver today, yes.

My old stomping grounds. I’m in Montana right now, but I grew up in that area.

Oh, yes. I was wondering about Great Falls. I’m like ‘where the heck is that?’

I noticed that March 4 and 5 were days off from gigs for you guys between Washington and Colorado and right between those two areas, I’m sure you at least drove by Montana.

We did so much, I really don’t even know. Sometimes when I thought we were in Idaho, we were still in Oregon (laughs). It all kind of blended together. Big scrub brush.

You guys gotta swing by here.

We played there actually on the California Crossing tour in Billings, I wanna say. I think we did anyways. It was cool. I think I remember it was Super Bowl Sunday and there were lots of people in the bar or the club already. I don’t know if they were there for the game or if they were there for us.

Little bit of both.

I seem to remember a Fu Manchu cover band, actually, but I can’t remember the name. Somebody flipped us a CD I think and there was a bunch of Fu Manchu cover songs. It was pretty funny.

How’s this tour going thus far?

It’s good. We’ve been out for a week, I think. Is today Wednesday?

Yeah.

If today’s Wednesday then we’ve been out a week. We did our first show a week ago today. It’s been really good. All the crowds are really digging the new stuff and we’re really digging the new stuff. Playing some of the oldies. Sweatin’ to the oldies.

Describe for me a typical 24-hour stint with Fu Manchu on a road trip.

(laughs). Well, if I could describe it I would use Smellivision first. There’s a lot of that. There’s a few different smells roaming about. There’s some movie watching there’s a lot of reading, music listening. Not wanting to talk to everybody else in the band and then wanting to talk to them. It’s kind of like a family road trip, only it lasts like six weeks (laughs). There’s no women involved. Well, that’s not true, sometimes the wives come out. It’s always a little bit easier when they’re not around ‘cause you don’t have to worry about making anyone uncomfortable but yourself (laughs).

This band is kind of like a stoner rock equivalent of Mudhoney for me. The whole career of this band you’ve released outstanding albums while teetering on the fence of underground and mainstream. How satisfying is it for you to know that this band hasn’t had to sell out their ideals over all these years, but still maintain that growing fanbase?

For me, I’ve only been in the band for five years, so …

Right.

It was kind of funny, we were talking about this last night. It’s weird, you read reviews of the new album and go ‘comeback?’ Some people have said that. I guess a comeback would be if you weren’t doing anything and you just came back from being in the wilderness, but shit we’ve been touring and making records ever since I joined the band and they were doing it for ten years before that. To answer your question, it’s great (laughs). Satisfying. It’s cool too ‘cause we all thought that when this album was finished, I don’t know, it’s like you don’t really pay attention to the critics and all that kind of shit, but it’s very satisfying to read reviews of the stuff that you do and people are talking about it the same way you felt about it when you heard the masters versus the album. You were like ‘fuck yeah, this is great.’ Totally stoked on the way it sounds and all the songs and they way they came out and the packaging. Every element of it is good and everybody’s commenting the same way on it. That’s probably the most satisfying on that aspect of just being able to get out and tour and have people come to the show. Everything else is icing, or whipped cream, whatever you prefer.

Talk about this cover of ‘Moving in Stereo.’ It’s weird ‘cause when I first put the album in it was unexpected, but I immediately had these flashbacks of ‘Fast Times Of Ridgemont High’ …

As you should (laughs). Any man worth his salt. I’ve been searching for that ever since I saw that. If this gets me one step closer, let’s do the cover (laughs). No. I don’t know. We actually fooled around with that cover. We’re always messing around with different songs. We did another cover from this band called Void that’s really good actually. It’s probably one of the best things that came out, but continuity wise I don’t think it worked much for the album. I’m sure you’ll hear it. So we messed around with the Cars cover awhile ago and then I think we were searching … we also did a Van Halen cover too which ended up on the EP that came out before the record. I think we picked the one that would go best with the rest of the songs on the album and that was pretty much it. We figured out a way to make it more Fu Manchu and then we put it down.

What did you think of that whole Van Halen thing that went down a couple of weeks ago? They’re back, they’re doing photo shoots for Rolling Stone and then they announce that they’re not back.

I don’t know. Does anybody really care at this point?

Right. Isn’t a little sad?

It’s extremely sad. They were the ones who were kind of the architects of their own coolness and they’re basically destroying it. Or if it has been still around. I don’t know. Unless they ask us to open for ‘em, why do I care? (laughs). I think probably a lot of people think that same thing. Is it really a full reunion if all the members of the band aren’t there? No.

A lot of bands these days are going with longer songs and you guys maintain music that’s quick and to the point. What do you attribute that to? Punk influences?

Short attention spans (laughs). I think we’re all pretty much of the same thought that, any album that is more than like forty minutes is pretty much like … whether you’re the Melvins and you do two songs in forty minutes or you do twelve or thirteen songs in forty minutes. Any longer than that and you really start to lose interest. I think a lot of bands probably look at it as ‘let’s get more material for the money,’ but it’s kind of like you end up selling yourself short because the law of diminishing return. How many really great songs can you have in a sixteen song album? I don’t think you can have probably five or six and then the rest of them are kind of like filler. Less songs, quicker songs and hopefully the songs are better and they stick in your head a little bit more and leave you wanting more instead of like ‘fuck, I can’t listen to this thing after the tenth song and I’ve got five songs left to go’ (laughs). I guess it’s kind of the punk influences as well. There are a lot of the albums that we like … like one of my favorite records is “Milo Goes To College,” the Descendents album and that’s not super long at all, you know, but they get the point across. Other stuff from like the late seventies, early eighties that are shorter. Some of the bands that I like put eight songs on an album and it was done in forty minutes and it leaves me going ‘fuck, I can’t wait for two years or a year until the next one comes out.’ Which to me is more satisfying than over-satisfying. One of my main problems with Soundgarden was … I love Soundgarden, but I could never listen to a whole album. There was too many songs.

Oh really?

Yeah. I like listening to all the songs, but I also like listening to an album that’s a continual piece form beginning to end. It has a flow to it. When you can’t listen to the whole thing, it kind of ruins it.

I was listening to that riff about three and a half minutes into “Shake It Loose” and it’s very tasty. To me it kind of sums up this kind of music. Everyone refers to it as stoner rock, occasionally doom rock. What is it about this music that gets you going and wanting to play it?

I don’t know. It’s kind of the energy of everything. From a drummers standpoint, it’s very fun to play. That’s the main thing. If you’re not having fun playing the stuff you’re playing, it’s gonna come across. I don’t think you can expect other people to be into what you’re doing if you’re not into it. If you’re just getting up there going through the motions. Really between the four of us, it really has to either move the hair on your arms or make you a little angry and go ‘yeah! Let’s do this (yells)’ you know. To be honest, I don’t know what in particular it is. It’s just you know it when you hear it.

Fu Manchu in general has been very popular with the skater crowd. Are you personally a skater?

Yeah. I like to get out and do that as much as possible. Of course, I don’t do it on tour because the danger element of breaking something is not good (laughs) so I tend to stay away from that. But, when I’m home, around Costa Mesa or whatever, I like to try and ride my board. I kind of wish I had a long board. I used to have a long board, but I gave it to my cousin, or my nephew ‘cause he seemed to have a little more time to skate. I love doing it. It’s great, even if it’s just tooling around town, getting someplace faster. It’s always something. We’ve always been into that sort of things. Obviously there are a lot of other people that are into it to.

Out here in Great Falls we have a newly built Grindline skatepark and it’s kind of funny seeing the dichotomy between the kids that are coming out to skate on it and the people that don’t understand that culture.

Yeah, without thinking about it too much, it’s like anything else. You kind of wanna belong a little bit. That’s initially the reason you do it. I don’t think kids pick up a skateboard because it’s like ‘hey, it’s a genre.’ They’re not thinking of that. They’re going, ‘hey, I wanna skate ‘cause my friends are skating.’ It’s only later when people tell ‘em ‘hey you can’t do that. You can’t do that here.’ It’s like, well what the hell am I harming? I guess it ties into the theme of this record if there is one, that people telling you ‘that’s not good. Do it this way,’ or ‘we know what’s best for you’ or whatever. It’s like ‘no, you don’t.’

That’s an interesting thing too about skating is, it can be this thing where tons of people are doing it, but it’s not flipped around and made to be uncool ‘cause everyone’s doing it. It always remains an underground activity that kids can relate to.

Yeah, they can do it anywhere, but it also becomes a thing too where when you get that element in there where people tell you ‘you can’t do that here.’ Once someone tells you you can’t do something a natural reaction is to go ‘oh, really?’ (laughs).

You get that here too. Almost immediately after it opened, the police came in and enforced a law that you have to wear a helmet in order to skate.

Which, I don’t think is a bad thing. All the old guys didn’t have helmets and shit like that ‘til they started competing. Then you get people that file law suits and all of that stuff, so that makes it fun.

Yeah but once you get people out there turning it into something where they’re telling you what to do, then it becomes a different matter.

Yeah. Then you get the little subversive element in there, which is always fun.

Today I was speaking with Wino from Hidden Hand and we were talking about how the Internet hasn’t killed the record industry as people were predicting years earlier but has really leveled out the playing field by giving everybody easy access to so much music. How do you think the Internet has helped Fu Manchu out in recent years?

I think that it’s one of those things where, say like the last label that we were on didn’t do that great of a job of getting our album out there, especially in Europe and stuff. In those cases it’s great ‘cause it allows people to actually get the album and what they wouldn’t have heard before. Or some of the older stuff that’s now cropping up on iTunes, like our seven-inches and the live album and all that stuff. I think it’s great that way. The people that complain about it are the people that are too much well overfed as it is. What’s the point? It’s gonna change. It’s happening. You better roll with it or not, you know. For us, we still sell the most records when we tour, so we don’t look at it as, it’s all this or nothing. We know we have to tour. We do it ‘cause we like to. Again, the byproduct is, we sell more records, which again, I think is always gonna be the thing. If you’re a good live band, people are gonna come and see you and if you’re not, they’re not gonna come back. That’s pretty much what we focus on. The good thing about the Internet is, again, it creates a community of people that are all into the same thing. If some guy in frickin’ Estonia can get our record that wouldn’t come out normally, but he can get it ‘cause of the Internet, fine. I’m all for it.

It gives you guys a chance to have some freedom to showcase your stuff and take control of your music. On MySpace you can post four or five songs and tell people who you are and things like that whereas in the past it was kind of up to the label to decide.

Yeah, as far as that thing, they got involved this album with putting stuff up on our MySpace page, which is great ‘cause I’m not gonna sit there and do it (laughs).

There’s a cross pollinations going on between all of these bands like Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age, Mondo Generator, Masters of Reality, Fu Manchu, you see guys pop up all over the place. It’s almost like a professional sports league of music in general. I haven’t really seen it anywhere else in music as detailed as it is with this group of bands. How do you look at it?

I’ve only been in this one so I can’t really say. Again, it’s a community. We don’t all hang out and get buddy, buddy with each other, but when we see each other we’re like ‘hey, yeah, what’s going on?’ ‘You’re touring now? We’re doing this. We’re doing that.’ I don’t know. It’s great. People sometimes bug out about ‘stoner rock, what do you think about it?’ and all that stuff. I don’t. People can call it whatever they want. If they wanna come to the shows and support our bands ‘cause they like the music, if they wanna put a label on it, that’s fine. We never have. That doesn’t bother me. I think the community of people that play this kind of music … if you really, really listen, all of the bands are really different.

Right.

The one thing they all share in common is, they have a bunch of fans that like the same stuff. The bands themselves don’t really do it, it’s the people that like the music that do. They’re actually the ones you’d wanna ask that question to (laughs).

You’ve been a part of it and it’s interesting to see your perspective of the whole thing.

I was a fan of the band before I even joined. Knowing Brad and playing in other bands that didn’t necessarily have that type of sound and were different styles or whatever it’s cool to come into a thriving thing where the audience is still hungry for it and still waiting. I don’t know, we’ve been really lucky to have a fan base which, shit, most bands don’t. We’re extremely lucky to be able to do what we do and most bands would kill to have half the following. We’d obviously like to have more, to reach more people, but it’s great.

If you could share the stage with any bands, past or present, which ones would you choose?

There’s so many. There’s a lot of bands that I like that I wouldn’t want to share the stage with ‘cause (laughs) they’d fuckin’ blow us off the stage. I think it’d be cool to geez, I don’t know, probably the original Bad Brains would be pretty good. Probably of the more current, I don’t know, we’ve played with some pretty good bands. We’ve played with the guys in High On Fire, we’ve done some tours with them, stuff with Clutch. We’ve been pretty lucky in that aspect because we respect those guys as musicians and the stuff they put out, we like that kind of stuff anyway. There’s always the bands that are the pipedreams, and we were lucky enough to do a little bit of both Black Flag reunions so that was pretty cool. Although it was kind of intimidating to play and have Robo standing right behind you, leering at you and you’re going ‘fuck.’ (laughs). We’ve been pretty lucky. There’s definitely people out there we’d like to see. I’d like to go see shows by bands that don’t exist anymore that you’ve always heard about. Maybe that’s why they’re so good because they’re mythological and if you actually saw them you’d be disappointed. (laughs). Better to leave it that way.

Scott, I appreciate you chatting with me.

Sure.

It’s always a pleasure to talk to Scott Number 2.

Cool. Thank you (laughs). Take care up there in Montana.

Maybe see you guys up here again.

Yeah, you never know.

Have a good one.

Alright, bye.