Fats Comets

Along with the Art of Noise and Yello, Fats Comet was one of the “big three” while I was at college. They were all marvelously inventive, brilliantly produced, largely instrumental groups that worked loosely in the dance genre and were obscure enough to get my collector’s juices flowing. And of the three, Fats Comet was by far the most obscure.

Loosely formed in the late '80s as the house band at Sugarhill Records (home of Grandmaster Flash and many early groundbreaking rap groups), Fats Comet hooked up with British producer extraordinaire Adrian Sherwood to release a string of amazing (and amazingly hard to find) 12” singles.

I was first turned onto them by my insane friend Ben (whom we called Bent because of his proclivity for gobbling prodigious amounts of drugs and hatching bizarre plans – the last I heard about him was that he was smoking crack and shooting heroin, but, as he put it, “it’s all under control”). Somehow, he had stumbled across drummer Keith LeBlanc’s remarkable Major Malfunction album and had stolen a press kit about him and the other musicians that made up Fats Comet. For the record, Major Malfunction is really a Fats Comet album, but it was released under Keith’s name because he had had a minor hit with Malcolm X, in which he spliced a bunch of Malcolm X’s speeches over his inimitably funky drumming. Part of the appeal (and frustration) of following Fats Comet is that they released records under a wide variety of names. The two most common monikers were Fats Comet and Tackhead, the latter which tended to be a little darker and more political than the bubblier party incarnation of the former, but they also released material as Che, Maffia, and Mark Stewart, and later the same group of musicians also became Strange Parcels, Spike, Got to Move, and Little Axe. You can see the problem.

One of the things I liked most about this group was the production. With the possible exception of early Art of Noise producer Trevor Horn, nobody else was able (or willing) to get such a big, thick sound – especially out of the drums, where each snare hit feels like you’re being thrown through a brick wall. Part of the problem at the time was based solely on technology. That was the early days of what came to be known as techno music, and a lot of early practitioners were poor and could only afford cheap drum machines and sequencers (most notably, the Roland 808 and 909). Consequently, that tinny sound became associated with the dance scene and that’s the sound people expected to hear so that’s the sound that producers used. Adrian Sherwood, however, went the other direction, throwing as much meat into his beat as he possibly could, largely because of his interest and involvement in dub music, the far out son of reggae in which the drums and bass were king and everything else was frosting.

Fats Comet quickly became a favorite of my friend Geoff as well, and we would breathlessly share each new discovery with each other. He found Bop Bop and he sent it to me on a tape (a terrible tape, as it turned out, as he made it with a high fever) while I was in Interlochen filming my documentary. It was one of the most amazing tracks I had heard, and I loved playing it while looking out the window at the beautiful snow-covered landscape of rural Michigan, like a little edgy piece or urbanity I could keep in my pocket to remind myself of where I had gone since leaving the frozen woods. I found Eat to the Beat in a second hand record store in Greenwich Village and we’d skank around the apartment, chewing on those thunderous drums. He was the first to unearth Is There a Way Out? (more commonly known as King of the Beat) and I reveled in its bare-bones funkiness. And I discovered Rockchester at my favorite used record store at the time, St. Marks Sounds in the East Village, where I’d go once a week or so to crawl through their racks. St. Marks was a great place to go because everybody was making the transition to CDs and lots of people came to dump their vinyl there and, since there wasn’t much of a market for used vinyl (I was holding out against the digital age as long as I possibly could), I could pick up an armful of albums for $20. I bought a lot of crap there (interesting looking records priced at $.99 are hard to pass by – although I eventually learned how), but I also had some major scores, like the entire Severed Heads catalog for $10 and this glorious bit of shattered industrial funk for $1.99.

Many people that I’ve played Fats Comet (et al) for assume that the drums are programmed – after all, most dance music drums are. But these are most decidedly played live, and played live by a little skinny white guy. I know because I had the pleasure of seeing a Tackhead show. Keith LeBlanc reportedly saw the threat coming from drum machines and worked hard to make a distinctive style that would be difficult to program (I know, I’ve tried – there’s just enough syncopation and hesitation to make it virtually impossible to recreate on a machine). And, until he made his peace with drum machines (they show up frequently on his hyper-rare solo releases), he reportedly used to pour his can of Coke into them whenever he found one in a recording studio. He forms half of the best rhythm section I know of, along with “bass in yo face” player Doug Wimbish. The other steady member of the group is guitarist Skip McDonald, who lays pretty low and lets the bottom have all the fun while he shimmers and shines over the top. All three (and, of course, producer Sherwood) are featured in top form on Rockchester, an extended funk fest that blows through the party like a freight train. I especially love the cut-up beginning with its unpredictable drums and little vocal shards. Most of the vocals on this track were taken from answering machine messages recorded during a cold weekend in NYC in which the Fat Comets let a buddy borrow their apartment. Once ensconced, the buddy apparently never left nor answered the phones. Which is why you hear a progression of irritated and frustrated exhortations to “pick up the phone”. Geoff and I also used to amuse ourselves trying to figure out just what is being said in what I guess would be considered the chorus. Tiny Tuesdays? Tired of tube steaks? And are they asking somebody if he wants to be a big porn star? The faithful could pore over these enigmas long into the night.

Much to my dismay, most of the obscure catalog of these fantastic musicians, which I spent years tracking down, was recently released on CD (albeit with different versions and without the B-sides), allowing any rainy day fan to pick up a butt load of killer funk in one fell swoop (well, three fell swoops, actually – two volumes of studio cuts and one live disc). Fortunately, however, those discs quickly disappeared into obscurity as well and are now nearly as hard to find as the original vinyl singles.