Eat My Dust!
The Making of Fu Manchu’s The Action Is Go
Go ahead and judge this book by its cover. That’s legendary skater Tony Alva demonstrating a “frontside air” at the Dogbowl in Santa Monica in ’77. After 12 years, professional skateboarding was finally finding its rhythm, but Alva and the Z-Boys bucked convention with a more audacious and aggro style based on surfing. By 1997, Fu Manchu had been kicking up dust for 12 years (dating back to its origins as the hardcore punk act Virulence) and had already recorded several fuzzed-out full-lengths. But Fu Manchu vocalist/guitarist Scott Hill was already growing restless with that sound, so for The Action Is Go, he approached it like his childhood hero Alva would’ve: When you’re feeling pent-in, go vertical.
The dominant storyline of The Action Is Go is one of reinvention, but Hill and bassist Brad Davis also had no choice, since half of the lineup from Fu Manchu’s first three albums left after the recording of 1996’s In Search of… to form Nebula. This opened the door for guitarist Bob Balch and drummer Brant Bjork, representing the era of Fu Manchu that birthed three of the band’s most fully realized and beloved albums, and ultimately led to the band’s current lineup (replacing Bjork with drummer Scott Reeder) that has been a constant since 2001. As a member of Kyuss, Bjork had already witnessed Fu Manchu through multiple incarnations: “Fu Manchu was like a chopper or custom car. Sometimes they had to take it apart and rebuild the motor, but the underlying spirit was there throughout.”
Lyrically, The Action Is Go represents Hill’s endless fascination with things that affected cultural shifts in the mid-to-late 1970s: muscle cars, lowriders, action sports, things that go vroom, big skies and endless blacktops. That’s pretty much every song on The Action Is Go until you get to “Laserbl’ast!,” a last-minute addition to the album written in the studio, where Hill contemplates the apocalypse. It’s also worth highlighting that the penultimate track, “Saturn III,” arguably the band’s magnum opus, is about outer space. Except that, in typical Fu Manchu fashion, the biggest concern is whether the spaceship’s engine has enough horsepower to carry its passengers across the universe.
The best way to describe this album is that it sounds like the second half of My War, but if Black Flag had discovered Foghat and Blue Öyster Cult instead of Black Sabbath. Lots of time spent in pre-production and in studios with wonderful ambiance, plus the encouragement of producer Jay Yuenger and veteran engineers Joe Barresi and Brad Cook, helped to coax the very best out of Fu Manchu on The Action Is Go. And led to some pretty out-there stuff, too, like the sound of an electrified Slinky moving down the hall on “Burning Road.” But the band supplied the blueprint with stone-cold classics like “Evil Eye” and “Saturn III,” the reason that material from The Action Is Go remains at the top of the band’s set lists. Congrats to Fu Manchu for entering into the Decibel Hall of Fame. Keep on truckin’ and have a nice day.
Need more classic Fu Manchu? To read the entire seven-page story, featuring interviews with the members who performed on The Action Is Go, purchase the print issue from our store, or digitally via our app for iPhone/iPad or Android.
The post Fu Manchu – The Action Is Go appeared first on Decibel Magazine.