Drummer Gerhardt “Jerry” Fuchs, who played with Turing Machine, !!!, the Juan Maclean, and Maserati, among other bands, died on November 8, 2009, falling five stories after leaping from a stuck elevator car at a Williamsburg loft party. His feet landed on the floor, but the hood of his sweatshirt snagged on the elevator, pulling him back into the shaft.
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Guitarists Coley Dennis and Matt Cherry and bassist Chris McNeal have recruited their friend Tony Paterra, who drums for Zombi, to play with Maserati on their first tour since Fuchs’s death. That string of ten dates begins Thursday, November 11, in Arlington, Virginia, and brings them to the Empty Bottle on Wednesday, November 17. I interviewed Dennis by phone last week.
How do you feel Pyramid of the Sun differs from Inventions for the New Season? What progress did you make between the two?
Possibly. Once we figured out what we were going for in each song, I think it was pretty deliberate. We definitely got away from the long Inventions intros. That was something we were excited about at that time and took a lot of inspiration and grew from. Not to say we’re not still into that kind of thing. For the most part, the songs were in a way kind of writing themselves. We had tracked five songs with Jerry before the last tour we did with him, and a couple of those songs weren’t even really finished yet. We just went back in and finished the songs according to how he played them. We were adamant about keeping everything that he did the way he did it.
When I heard the news of Jerry’s passing, I didn’t know if you guys were going to disintegrate or what. I had no idea what to expect.
The first track [“Who Can Find the Beast?”] doesn’t have any drums, and we had an idea for that based off of “They’ll No More Suffer From Thirst” and “They’ll No More Suffer From Hunger,” which are two different sequenced songs. Jerry went in with me, and even though they weren’t completely written yet, he had those two songs kind of mapped out and played along to a click and sequencer and tracked them the way he envisioned. We went back in and wrote the songs basically to what he did, and the intro song was the third part to that trilogy because we wanted that sequenced theme to repeat throughout the record.
Has there been any discussion or attempt to audition different drummers?
Wed 11/17, 9:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, 773-276-3600 or 866-468-3401, $10, $8 in advance, 21+.
