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From Area 51 to Pretty Girls Make Graves to Murder City Devils: The Evolution of Derek Fudesco

The Murder City Devils founding member recounts his old bands and memories up until now.

At the end of the last century, Murder City Devils were inarguably the most important punk band operating out of Seattle. This isn't meant to discount other crucial acts operating out of the Emerald City—other bands were pushing for greater levels of chaos, or exhuming the edgier dance grooves of post-punk and no-wave, or exploring more sophisticated melodic territories. But Murder City Devils reminded everyone of how to revel in the glory of down-and-out rock n' roll. They were so good at what they did that it was a bit of a surprise when they announced their breakup in 2001. Here was a band at the peak of their game, and they were pulling the plug. Granted, they were one of the hardest working and hardest living bands on the circuit—a hiatus may have been necessary simply to recuperate and recalibrate. But as someone that was in tow for the final tour, it was bizarre to see a band that still seemed to enjoy their craft and enjoy each other's company call it quits.

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Consequently, when Murder City Devils announced a reunion back in 2006, it didn't carry the connotations of a cash-in like so many of the resurrected acts of recent years. And any naysayers who view the band as little more than a greatest-hits act would be well served to check out their new album, The White Ghost Has Blood On Its Hands Again. The band chose to forego the safe route of churning out more of their fire-and-brimstone proto-punk in favor of whipping out clamorous, howling grudge-rock. Think less MC5/New York Dolls/Dead Boys and more of the cacophonous death blues of The Birthday Party's Junkyard. Any punk band that opts to get even uglier, dirtier, and meaner as they age is worthy of greater inspection. But what led to this sonic evolution? And why did it take eight years for the reunited band to make a new record? The answer to both questions can be found in the individual Murder City Devils members' inexhaustible output. Drummer Coady Willis has been performing with Melvins and Big Business. Guitarist Dann Gallucci has done time with Modest Mouse and Cold War Kids. Singer Spencer Moody fronted the avant garde act Triumph of Lethargy Skinned Alive To Death and a host of equally confrontational short-lived projects like Smoke & Smoke and Dead Low Tide. But the most prolific of all the members is also the most media shy. Bassist Derek Fudesco rarely talks with the press about his music, but his catalog best demonstrates the piss-and-vinegar that generated the original Murder City Devils albums and the musical fecundity that germinates in The White Ghost Has Blood On Its Hands Again. We cornered Fudesco and asked him to talk about a few of the milestone songs in his extensive discography.

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Area 51 - "Over The Edge"

Noisey: I remember reading a review of the Area 51 7" in Maximum Rock N Roll and the reviewer said it was the best record they'd ever heard while working for the zine. That was a serious accolade for a punk band at the time. You also had Dann, Spencer, and Andrea in the band, all of who wound up being co-conspirators in projects down the line. Do you think you just lucked out and found the right batch of people from the get-go? Or do you think "luck" is one of those bullshit words people throw around to dismiss hard work and dedication?

Fudesco:

Damn, that's pretty good. I must have read that when it came out, but I don't remember it. When Area 51 started, we just wanted to write a song as good as Filth's "The List". As for luck, yeah, I think I totally lucked out. I met Spencer and Dann the night after I moved to Seattle, Andrea about a week later at our first band practice. That was 20 years ago and I still make music with all of them.

Death Wish Kids - "Lucky"

Speaking of luck. Death Wish Kids will always be a sacred band to me. Your live shows averaged about, what, ten minutes? It was a hard thing to capture on record, but I think "Lucky" comes closest to harnessing the chaos and destruction of those shows. The thing is, whenever I think about which concerts and shows had the biggest impact on me, I generally think back to Death Wish Kids, Behead The Prophet, and a bunch of other DIY hardcore bands from the time. I don't consider myself a hardcore kid anymore, but I think those experiences were so pivotal to me that they've branded a certain part of my psyche into forever associating whatever I do creatively with punk. I was curious how it feels to be on the other side of that equation—do you still feel a connection with that whole scene? Do you ever think about the lineage of punk and where your projects fit into it?

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Wow, that's a big compliment. Thank you. This was a great time in Seattle, so much energy. Death Wish Kids started after Spencer quit Area 51 but we all still wanted to play music together. Our sets were so short cause almost all of our songs were about a minute long. I moved into the Goat House (a punk house in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood that hosted shows in the mid-90s—ed.) after being in Seattle a little while and got to see some amazing shows. The Goat House always felt like it's own little island to me. Growing up in this environment left a strong impression for sure, but having a connection to any scene isn't something I think about.

The Hookers - "What You Need"

It's funny listening back to these records now because I felt like The Hookers were such a left-turn from Death Wish Kids. Death Wish Kids were fast, noisy, unhinged. At the time, I felt like The Hookers were more about tension—the tempos were slower, the musicianship felt a lot more deliberate. Listening to it now, it makes total sense in the chronology of your projects and was a big indicator of what you were about to do with Murder City Devils. Do you remember what instigated the change? Was there a big shift in the kind of music you were listening to at the time? Or were you just aware that maintaining something as rabid and reckless as Death Wish Kids wasn't really possible?

Yeah, there was a big musical shift. For me, I think that The Hookers exist because of Death Wish Kid's drummer, Sterling. The music he'd play in the van when we toured was so different than what I was listening to at the time. The Mummies and Teengenerate were two bands I specifically remember getting super psyched on. Up until this point I was heavy into groups like Born Against and Los Crudos and all of these records he was playing sounded so fresh. They were raw and catchy, and all of a sudden there was this seemingly bottomless well of music to discover. I remember hearing The Gories for the 1st time and thinking that was the kind of music I wanted to make. Dann, Spencer and I had been talking about starting something new. We got Andrea on the drums. Unfortunately the band wasn't around long, we only played a handful of shows, but we recorded all the songs we had. Most of the Hookers songs ended up as Murder City Devils songs, but for whatever reason this one didn't.

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Murder City Devils - "Broken Glass"

I feel like I'm really incriminating myself here, but I remember catching a couple of the really early Murder City Devils shows and not knowing what to make of it. It just seemed so rock n' roll, which was a really bold move to make as a punk in that era of the '90s. It was probably the third or fourth time I saw you guys play, but I remember hearing "Broken Glass" for the first time and that's when it all clicked. It was like the Rosetta Stone for showing the connection between all the gnarly proto-punk stuff of the '70s and the current hardcore/punk scene. The band's best songwriting was still down the line, but I still think "Broken Glass" is easily one of the top 3 MCD songs. Do you remember anything about crafting that song? Did it feel like a tipping point in the band's history? Or am I projecting too much onto one song?

Ha! I think most people around here felt that way. The Hookers were around at the same time as DWK so it seemed more like a side project but when Murder City Devils started none of us were in other bands anymore.

I think it's rad "Broken Glass" was the song that clicked for you, I really like that one. It started out as a Hookers song. I remember I found a red Farfisa Compact at the Value Village in Lake City, It was around $80 and sounded amazing. Real haunted vibes. This was towards the end of The Hookers, and we got our friend Brandon in the band and he was working it into songs that were already written. Actually, the recorded version of "Broken Glass" on the Hookers LP doesn't have the organ yet.

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Pretty Girls Make Graves - "This Is Our Emergency"

It's kinda crazy revisiting this stuff now because Pretty Girls Make Graves seemed like such a logical extension out of Murder City Devils, and each Pretty Girls album seemed like a logical evolution in the band's sound. But placed within this context, it's by far the biggest stylistic shift thus far in your career. And even revisiting the Pretty Girls albums, it's pretty remarkable how each record is so different. I think that at the time, music in both Seattle and the nation as a whole was evolving at such a dramatically greater pace than it had been in the '90s. And that was apparent in Pretty Girls Make Graves' dramatic shift from the early Dischord/Gravity cerebral post-hardcore sound of Good Health through to the deconstructed reductionist indie pop of Elan Vital. Back in the midst of that era, I think I would've picked a different song by the band to encapsulate what PGMG were all about, but in hindsight I think "This Is Our Emergency" really captures the whole breadth of the band's output. What do you remember from this era? Do you look at it as a mini-indie Renaissance of sorts? Was it an inevitable result of the wider exposure of underground music courtesy of the internet? Or were we all just punk kids growing up and branching out?

Andrea and I had been trying to start a new project for around 4 years. Whenever Murder City wasn't on tour, we played with different groups of people but nothing clicked. I met Nick and we jammed a little and started something up. He had been playing with Nathan, and Andrea was gonna sing. After a few practices Nathan brought in Jay to play 2nd guitar. Nick, Jay and Nathan are such incredible musicians and their songwriting style was so different than anything I had done before. Tons of parts, odd time signatures, all of us breaking down every part in every song. At first it totally worked, but then became more and more difficult to make anything everyone was happy with. From what I remember "This Is Our Emergency" was just Nathan and Nick jamming in the studio and Phil hit record. Andrea wrote lyrics to it pretty fast and Jay and I worked out our parts. I think we wrote and recorded that one in the same day.

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The Cave Singers - "Seeds of Night"

Speaking of big shifts, you came out of Pretty Girls Make Graves and switched to acoustic guitar for The Cave Singers. The first time I heard "Seeds of Night" I thought, "holy shit, it's like a rough-hewn version of Fleetwood Mac's 'Never Going Back Again'." At the time, I assumed The Cave Singers were a reaction against your past projects—a counterpoint to all the noise and volume. After all, you guys always staunchly rejected having any sort of interest in folk music, even from the get-go. Here you are seven years and four albums later with what's become your longest, consistently operating band. Did you finally find your true calling with Cave Singers?

"Never Going Back Again", what a perfect song. He did a weird slow/breathy version of it last time Fleetwood Mac played Seattle, it wasn't great, but man, just hearing that opening riff gives you the chills. So the Cave Singers were a recording project. Pete and I were living together and he was doing four-track stuff and had this parlor guitar that I wrote a thing on. He recorded and sang on it while PGMG was on tour. The song came out great, it was so simple and sounded perfect that way. We started writing a record—no real direction, we just knew we wanted it to be bare bones. The idea was to try writing songs in a way that was different than what the both of us were used to at the time. Up until this point we both had been in very collaborative bands so it was exciting to write with just one person. I started writing the music on guitar instead of bass but ended up just writing bass lines on acoustic guitar, I wasn't very good at playing chords so that made the most sense. "Seeds of Night" is a good example of that.

Murder City Devils "Pale Disguise"

So here we have the lead single off The White Ghost Has Blood On Its Hands Again. In some ways I feel like it's the most characteristically "Murder City" song off the album, but at the same time I still think it's a departure for the band and evidence that you guys have all expanded your musical horizons in the last 13 years. It has that almost harpsichord-like keyboard line; the guitars fill out more space; Spencer's lyrics seem more in line with Triumph Of Lethargy's "Hey Asshole" than, say, "Johnny Thunders". I love that it doesn't feel like the song was dug up from a time capsule buried back in 2000. Was there any deliberation between the Devils about what the new material was going to sound like? Any discussion about how the band was going to evolve? Or was everything just a natural, unspoken progression?

I'm really proud of this album. We never talked about what we wanted it to sound like or not sound like, we just got in a room and played. Spencer has some of my favorite lyrics on this record. Everyone in this band is so passionate about music and has made some amazing records since the last time we wrote songs together. It felt effortless, just good buds jamming