Why Do I Love Fu Manchu?

The gloriously dumb California rockers return

Fu Manchu (L-R: Scott Reeder, Bob Balch, Scott Hill, Brad Davis)

Book news! The Wire has published the first excerpt from In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor. It covers the recording of the 1999/2000 Dewey Redman/Cecil Taylor/Elvin Jones album Momentum Space, and includes stories of Taylor being a manic cokehead and a catty bitch. Here’s the link. Enjoy!

Former Wire editor Derek Walmsley has written a long and thoughtful review of the book on his blog. Read that, too. Had he not assigned me to interview Taylor in February 2016, In the Brewing Luminous would not exist.

If you’re a journalist who’d like to review it somewhere, or interview me about it, get in touch and I’ll send you a PDF.

You can pre-order the book from Wolke Verlag now. I recommend doing so, but then, I would.

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For decades, dumbness has provided some of rock ’n’ roll’s purest pleasures. The Kingsmen (the “Louie Louie” guys), the Ramones, the Stooges (did you know Kingsmen keyboardist Don Gallucci produced the Stooges’ masterpiece, Fun House? Now that you do, doesn’t it make perfect sense?), the Dictators, Grand Funk Railroad, Rare Earth…these are bands whose dumbness, whether feigned or real, is key to their art. Latter-day retro acts like Mudhoney, the A-Bones, the Mummies, and others embraced rock ’n’ roll dumbness, too, achieving their own kind of glory in the process.

(Yes, all of these are white acts. Rock ’n’ roll’s Black pioneers — Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, even Ike Turner — were not dumb. Nor were next-generation artists like Sly Stone and George Clinton. They were hip. They were wise. They were sharp. They observed American life keenly, spotting cracks they could slide through. White rockers didn’t need to sneak around; they could blast through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man. Of course, some of them — notably the Ramones and the Dictators — snuck a certain wiseguy-ism into their dumbness, at least while Dee Dee was writing the Ramones’ songs, anyway.)

Stoner rock is, unsurprisingly, a playground for dumbness. We’ve previously discussed the dumbness of High On Fire in this newsletter. Some people think Dave Wyndorf and his band Monster Magnet are dumb, but Wyndorf is actually a genius who wraps genuine profundity in lyrical conceits culled from old Jack Kirby comics. Fu Manchu, though… they really seem to be one of the dumbest bands in rock history. And that’s exactly what makes them great.

Fu Manchu kinda-sorta grew out of a noisy, plodding hardcore band called Virulence; their sole album, If This Isn’t a Dream…, was heavily and obviously influenced by Side Two of Black Flag’s My War and early work by the Melvins. When they changed their name in 1990, Virulence’s guitarist, Scott Hill, took over as vocalist and creative mastermind. They abandoned hardcore and started releasing singles with titles like “Senioritis” and “Don’t Bother Knockin’ (If This Van’s Rockin’)”. Their debut album, No One Rides For Free, was released in 1994.

Fu Manchu’s sound is deceptively simple. (This 2014 interview features a detailed rundown of their gear and approach.) Their songs are built on crude but catchy riffs and a strong backbeat, with choruses that typically amount to one line shouted two or maybe four times. Hill’s vocals have the half-asleep feel of a sun-baked surfer dude telling you about something he’s stoked about in the parking lot adjacent to a California beach. Sometimes they’ll take lengthy guitar solos, or embark on slightly psychedelic jams, but for the most part they keep those impulses under control — the goal is just to rock, for three or four minutes at a time. The cumulative result, across a dozen albums and a fistful of singles and EPs, is an astonishingly cohesive catalog. There are no radical sonic departures in the Fu Manchu discography; if you’re on board with their sound, you’ll probably like any and every one of their releases.

Still, it’s been a journey. Their third album, 1996’s In Search Of…, was both a breakthrough and a transitional release. It was their first album on the Mammoth label, but their last with guitarist Eddie Glass and drummer Ruben Romano, who would go on to form another long-lasting stoner band, Nebula. The cover art featured two Seventies muscle cars preparing to drag race, with an interstellar sky in the background, and the track titles were a mix of car culture and science fiction (“Asphalt Risin’”, “Neptune’s Convoy”, “Redline”, “Cyclone Launch”, “Strato-Streak”).

By 1999’s King of the Road, their new lineup — guitarist Bob Balch, bassist Brad Davis, and drummer Brant Bjork — had solidified…or so it seemed. The album cover featured a vintage photo of a parade of custom vans, a theme that continued throughout the art and extended to the lyrics; track titles included “Hell On Wheels”, “King of the Road”, “Boogie Van”, and the one-word command “Drive”.

Their next release, 2001’s California Crossing, was their last with Brant Bjork on drums. After its release, he was replaced by Scott Reeder (not the same Scott Reeder who played bass for the Obsessed and Kyuss). There have been no lineup changes since. The songs — including “Thinkin’ Out Loud”, seen above — were shorter and a little catchier, the vocals more prominent; “Bultaco” featured a guest appearance from Keith Morris of the Circle Jerks.

At the beginning of the Neil Young & Crazy Horse live album Year of the Horse, someone in the crowd shouts, “They all sound the same!” to which Young responds, “It’s all one song”. Although their original songs are in that same spirit, Hill and Fu Manchu occasionally explore different sonic possibilities through unexpected and weirdly pleasing covers. They’ve tackled Blue Öyster Cult’s “Godzilla”, the Cars’ “Moving in Stereo”, Devo’s “Freedom of Choice”, Rush’s “Working Man”, Foghat’s “Slow Ride”, and Thin Lizzy’s “Jailbreak”, and while they make them their own, it at least shows that they listen to music other than Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and the James Gang. Maybe the biggest surprise in their discography, though, came on 2018’s Clone of the Universe; while that album kicked off with six standard Fu Manchu tunes, the entire second half consisted of an 18-minute instrumental, “Il Mostro Atomico”, with a guest appearance from Rush’s Alex Lifeson.

Between 2020 and 2023, they released a series of three EPs, Fu30, each of which consisted of two original songs and one cover: the Doobie Brothers’ “Takin’ It to the Streets”, the Surf Punks’ “My Wave”, and the Plimsouls’ “A Million Miles Away”. While their core sound remained unchanged, the performances showed that the band, whose lineup hadn’t changed since 2001, were as locked-in as ever. And now they’re back with their first new album since 2018, The Return of Tomorrow.

The new record is a mature artistic statement by a band whose whole thing is immaturity — not in the “willful-childishness” sense as much as the “refusing-to-acknowledge-the-passage-of-time” sense. But while there are plenty of meaty, fist-pumping stoner anthems in its first half (“Loch Ness Wrecking Machine”, “Haze the Hides”, “Hands of the Zodiac”), the second half gets significantly more psychedelic and meditative. The back-to-back “Solar Baptized” and “What I Need”, each song nearly six minutes long, create a mellow, even melancholy interlude. The latter track in particular, with its gentle, shimmering guitars and background synth drones, sounds more like Baroness than the Fu Manchu of old. And the album ends with “High Tide”, a drifting instrumental that’s like Black Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan” crossed with ZZ Top’s “Asleep in the Desert”. But the title track kicks things back into gear with a massive fuzz riff and some truly nasty guitar soloing that also recalls ZZ Top; in this case, Degüello.

The lyrics on The Return of Tomorrow are so meaningless they might as well be placeholders (“Liquify/On your side/Goin’ low/Goin’ high”), but Hill delivers them with intentionality, as the riffs roll endlessly forward. The rest of the band — Balch, Davis, and Reeder — are almost telepathically bonded at this point; they all move as one. I love late-period albums by groups that have been together with no membership changes for a decade or more. They have a feel that can’t be achieved without musicians spending endless hours in each other’s company — the heights they scale can be great, but the stakes are lower somehow, which gives the whole thing a degree of deceptive ease, like watching a veteran craftsman build furniture with smooth, unhurried precision. And a band like Fu Manchu, whose entire ethos is built around an almost Zenlike dumbness, are more equipped than anyone else to slip into the kind of been-at-this-forever “no-mind” that reveals the path to transcendence.

That’s it for now. See you next week!