Making music
The former QE2 building will focus on counterculture crowd, underground music
Entrepreneur William “Tragedy” Yager new owner of Fuze Box building.
Tragedy now owns the Fuze Box. In certain circles within the city, those six words need no further explanation. Of course he does. It makes perfect sense.
For the uninitiated, William S. Yager III, known almost universally by the nickname “Tragedy,” for reasons that won’t be satisfactorily explained later, is the serial entrepreneur behind holdings that have grown into what he calls the Tragic Empire: Patsy’s Barber Shop, Modern Body Art, Shocker Tattoo Co., Lucky Cat Laundromat and Bull and Bee Meadery & Tasting Room, all in Albany. He also fought in an amateur mixed-martial-arts bout at the Washington Avenue Armory and owns a pink hearse that he parks various places around the city.
If you haven’t seen it, you may have seen him. At 52 years old, 6-foot-2 and 245 pounds, with a long braided beard and tattoos from a dragon on his scalp to a portrait of his wife on his ankle, Yager cuts an imposing figure. His seems an unlikely success story, having started as a train-hopping teen runaway from the rural Greene County home of his youth who came of age in Lark
Street’s glory years of the 1980s. As with many people in the city’s creative scene, like Yager now middle-aged or older, he hung out with the punk crowd at the hallowed music venue 288 Lark and, later, QE2, the legendary club that was open for 13 years at 13 Central Ave.
“Those two places helped make me the man I am today,” Yager said.
Decades ago, Yager was banned from 13 Central Ave., when QE2 owner Charlene Shortsleeve found out he’d been underage for most of the years he’d been going there, and fired from the Fuze Box, the club that succeeded QE2 in a distinctive, former White Tower hamburger chain building.
The firing seems odd, given that Ya
ger founded the Fuze Box.
It began life in late 1997 as a swanky cocktail bar in a back room of the Power Company, a since-closed dance club catering to the LGBT crowd. Power Company was owned by the business partners Alfred J. Famiano Jr. and Jimmie O’Toole, who also own the popular Oh Bar on Lark Street.
“They essentially gave me carte blanche for the Fuze Box,” Yager said.
With its own rear entrance, stylish atmosphere and staff dressed to reflect the resurgent interest in swing music at the time, the Fuze Box was a hit. After QE2 closed, in 1999, the Fuze Box owners the following year moved it there, essentially across the street, into its own space, a decision Yager thought was ill conceived. Because that block of lower Central does not have odd and even addresses on opposite sides of the street, the Fuze Box became 12 Central Ave., to differentiate it from QE2’s address.
“They were trying to make that building something it wasn’t,” Yager said. “The spirit of that place was a punk club, and it always kept creeping back, no matter how much they tried to make it a swing bar. That was a passing fad. Punk rock is forever.”
Famiano and O’Toole fired him, but not merely because of differing business philosophies.
“I was on another path,” Yager said. “It was a fast, crazy path.” His nickname predates that period. When asked about the origin of “Tragedy,” he promises to tell people, but only once they’re too drunk to remember the story. More than a few have found out that he genuinely means this.
After a few years away from Albany in the beginning of this century, followed by what he describes as “living in the woods for a year or two” locally, lessons absorbed from business and
motivational books including “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” began to take hold. He apprenticed at, then in 2006 bought, Patsy’s, a longtime downtown barbershop. Multiple other businesses followed, including Lucky Cat, the first laundromat in the city to allow customers to pay via an app.
“I never really thought about buying (Fuze Box) until I heard about them wanting to sell in 2019,” Yager said.
“We have been extremely successful for the last 20 years,” Famiano said via email, “starting as a martini lounge and evolving from poetry reading to hard core bands to goth and everything in between.”
Over the past two years, the parties and their lawyers circled one another, with deals falling through, until the Fuze Box, which had been open less and less regularly in recent years, became a victim of the pandemic.
“It’s bittersweet when you sell a successful business,” Famiano said. “But I also think fresh ideas and good energy are also important. After a fantastic run, it was time.”
“They came to me and said, ‘This is our final offer. Take it or leave it,’” Yager said. “I leveraged pretty much everything I had to make sure we could keep this for the community.”
His sentiment echoes that of Leena Monette, a Guilderland resident, Fuze Box patron and owner of an online fashion boutique. In June, as word was going around about the potential sale
of 12 Central, she wrote on the club’s Facebook page, “Whoever ends up buying the Fuze Box in downtown Albany better have a clear understanding of how important and what a musical safe haven that place was to so many people in the community.”
Monette continued, “It would be a rough week and we would go there to mingle, dance, and smile away our problems with some of the most unique, kind, and special people in the area. Just saying. I will be so heartbroken to see that place be bought and turned into some restaurant or some basic (crap) no cares about. Maybe someone can help?”
Yager said the deal for his purchase of 12 Central closed on Wednesday. While declining to specify the sale price, he indicated that it was less than the $250,000 originally being asked.
A grand opening on Halloween is planned, though the Fuze Box may host private events and have a soft-opening period sooner, Yager said.
Although he described the interior as being in rough shape, Yager said, “It’s a punk-rock bar. This thing is going to take 20 minutes to clean and get open again.” It will feature minimal food, likely in the form of packaged snacks, and New York stateproduced beer, wine, spirits, cider and mead.
“We’re not going to have a million things to drink,” he said. “It’ll be like one gin, one vodka, one whiskey, one pilsner, one IPA, one lager. Trust us to make the choice for you. If we’re selling it, we’re saying, ‘This is worth trying.’”
Although the Fuze Box will be opening within six months of Yager’s launch of Bull and Bee, he believed he shouldn’t miss an important opportunity.
“I felt like I had to buy it, to make it work,” he said. “I want to bring it back, make it a music venue and counterculture community center for the punks and the hippies and the music kids and the gay and trans people — a place like I had coming up as a young man.”
“They were trying to make that building something it wasn’t. The spirit of that place was a punk club, and it always kept creeping back, no matter how much they tried to make it a swing bar.”
— William S. “Tragedy” Yager III