Alt-rockers of Fuel talk about ‘roller coaster’ struggles and reuniting the band
Last year, Carl Bell, founder and guitarist of early 2000s alternative rock band Fuel, decided to re-form the band after having been away from it for more than a decade. But he found it harder than he expected.
Fuel drummer Kevin Miller tells the story of how the band assembled for what was “not even a rehearsal, it was just a vibe thing, seeing how Carl was going to feel playing with the new lineup and all that stuff.
“We were probably 25 minutes into it, and Carl was, like, ‘Dude, I’ve got to sit down. I haven’t played a guitar standing up in 15 years. My shoulders are killing me,’ “Miller says with a hardy laugh.
Fuel on Oct. 22 released its first album in seven years — and its first with Bell in 15 years. The disc, “Anomaly,” both captures the classic Fuel sound on new singles “Hard” and “Don’t Say I,” as well as updates and moves the band’s sound forward behind Bell’s new compositions and new singer John Corsale.
Bell also has gotten his stage legs back. The band is doing shows again, and Friday plays at ArtsQuest’s Musikfest Cafe in Bethlehem.
Bell, in a recent conference call with Miller while both were driving — in separate cars — from the New York area to play a show at the Parris Island Marine base in North Carolina, says Miller’s tale is true.
“Another thing these guys were laughing at was I had to kind of relearn a lot of material, and the songs,” Bell says. “They looked at me like, ‘Seriously, how do you not know your own stuff?’ And I’m, like, ‘Dude, what kind of jackass sits around in his own house playing his own music all day long?’
“Are you supposed to sit in your house going, ‘Gosh, I love me,’ “Bell says, laughing. “So I didn’t know. I had to literally, from scratch, relearn. I mean, obviously you know [the songs] ‘Shimmer,’ you know ‘Hemorrhage.’ But some of the other stuff was like, ‘What was I doing there?’
“So this has been, for Kevin and I, a bit of a discovery. … So that’s been kind of fun, too.”
Convoluted past
The story of how Bell and Miller revived Fuel is as convoluted as the history of the band, which is best known for those songs — “Shimmer” hit No. 2 on the Alternative chart in 1998 and “Hemorrhage (In My Hands)” hit No. 1 in 2000. The band’s 2001 album “Something Like Human” went double-platinum with additional Top 15 Alternative hits “Innocent” and “Bad Day.”
The band was then based in Harrisburg, and was especially
a Pennsylvania favorite. In 2001, when singer Sheryl Crow canceled a show at Bethlehem’s Musikfest at the last minute, Fuel — already headlining one sold-out night, was tapped to replace Crow and nearly sold out a second night. Twenty years later, the band still holds the record for selling the most tickets in one year as a Musikfest headliner.
But after just one more album, the Grammy-nominated “Natural Selection” in 2003, with its hit “Falls on Me,” Miller was dismissed from the band. And in 2006, singer Brett Scallions quit.
Bell soldiered on with Fuel, releasing one more disc, 2007’s “Angels & Devils,” with new singer Toryn Green, but the band eventually went on hiatus.
“I was burned out,” Bell says. “I was really kind of over bands in general, to tell you the truth. It just was not an environment that I was enjoying. And I was just kind of done with it all.”
But in 2010, Scallions decided to revive Fuel with an all-new lineup, and in 2014 released the band’s last album, “Puppet
Strings,” which peaked at No. 77. Scallions toured with Fuel for the next decade.
Bell says he licensed the band’s name to Scallions for 10 years.
“He said, ‘Oops, I want to do Fuel again.’ So I let him have the band for 10 years,” Bell says. “And he didn’t want me in it — he didn’t want me involved. And I bowed out and I backed out of it and I said, ‘Take the band and you can do carte blanche. You can have it to do whatever.’
But a year ago, when the 10 years was up, it again “just became hostile,” Bell says. “And I said, ‘I don’t know. After 10 years I’m still the enemy?’ I didn’t know what to do. And so, basically, we just terminated the license agreement. And that means it’s back in my world. It just fell out again. And there’s obviously a lot more details than that, but that’s the Reader’s Digest version.
“I think anybody there in Pennsylvania is kind of familiar that it hasn’t always been perfect,” with Fuel, Bell says. “And no bands are. Bands are difficult, bands are just difficult. Ask Aerosmith. Ask Led Zeppelin. Ask The Beatles.
“And so the Fuel thing has been quite the roller coaster and we apologize to the fans. And I’ve always thought sometimes it might be a strain to be a fan of the band because of the changes.
But if you think it’s a strain to be a fan, you ought to try to be in the band,” he says, laughing.
‘I have the band’
In the meantime, Bell and Miller had reconnected.
“Probably eight or nine years ago, I guess it was, Kevin calls me up out of the blue. It was an unlisted call, and for some reason I took the call. And he’s, like, ‘Um, hey dude, it’s Miller.’ And I’m, like, ‘Dang, why’d I take this call?’ ” he says with a laugh.
“And then Kevin says, like, ‘Whoa, whoa, before you hang up, I just want to say I’m sorry.’ ”
Miller also called when Bell’s father died, and “that meant a lot to me, Kevin,” Bell tells Miller in the call. They later met for lunch in Las Vegas, where Miller was working construction, and “reconnected and we talked about how important
Fuel was to us,” Bell says. “Fuel changed our lives and we know this. And we have a deep respect for what it was able to do for us. And I think Kevin and I kind of bonded on that.”
So when Fuel came back to Bell last year, he says he called Miller to tell him, and Miller said, “Well, let’s go!’ And I said, ‘No. Are you crazy? I’m not going to do this again.
“But Kevin has a way of wearing you down,” Bell says, laughing.
Bell says Miller told him, “I’m going to make it really easy. And I have the band.”
It was Miller’s cover band, Kevin Miller’s Smashed, which frequently played at Wind Creek Casino in Bethlehem and elsewhere in the Lehigh Valley. That band already played Fuel songs.
Bell says he met the members of Smashed — singer John Corsale, guitarist Mark Klotz and bassist Thomas Natalone, who had been in Smashed just two months.
Bell says, “And I went, ‘You know what?’ And they’re just a bunch of nice guys.’ It just felt really cool, and I said, ‘This is really interesting.’ ”
A new album
Bell says the plan was that the new Fuel was “just gonna play shows. We weren’t even gonna do a record. And then my crazy brain goes, ‘Hey, you’re back in Fuel. You better start writing.’ And it was just kind of automatic — started writing an album and next thing you know I had the full album.”
The only music Bell had done since originally folding up Fuel was a 2017 country album, “Tennessee Fuel,” a 10-song disc that was a tribute to his father and included a country version of Fuel’s “Bad Day.”
For the new Fuel disc, “I basically started completely from scratch,” Bell says. “I hadn’t written a rock song in 10 years, probably. And then when Fuel came back like it did … I’d just trained my brain so long to just write music, I just started writing songs in my sleep like I do. Like anything — you’ve done something, you’ve hard-wired your brain. They say your brain kind of rewires itself to write — well, I’ve been doing it all my life. And so then when Fuel came back, I just started writing.”
Bell says he had the new songs “Keep It Away” and “Landslide” when the new Fuel first got together, but by March had finished “Don’t Say I.”
“This is all brand-new stuff,” Bell says. “I just climbed back in the saddle and started writing again.”
Miller laughingly says, “He would remind me, weekly, too, by going ‘I hate you, Kevin.’ “
“Yes, yes,” Bell says. “I’ve quit the band like a thousand times since.”
Regarding the album’s aural connection with the Fuel of old, Bell says, “I wanted one foot in the past — I didn’t want to just completely abandon anybody that was a fan of the band. You can’t do that. But at the same time, I think there’s songs on the record, too, that I’m looking to broaden what we do and bring fresh ideas to the situation.”
‘Weekend warriors’
Miller says the revived wants “to start off kind of weekend warriors … kind of get the sea legs back and all that kind of stuff. Because a lot of us maintain day jobs. No one can just fold up the tents, like, ‘OK, I’m going on the road.’ Because I’m not 22 years old anymore. I got a wife and kids, mortgage bills and all the real life adult stuff like the rest of the guys.”
But if “a full-blown tour would come our way and it’s financially suitable, where everybody could go back to being full-time musicians, I guess, that would be something we would entertain at that point,” he says.
Bell agrees.
“I think we’ll follow wherever it goes,” he says. “One of the things that I think I wanted to do and I think was interesting for us to do was just to have a new record. That was kind of something I just kind of wanted to prove to myself. … We’re doing it one step at a time, but the first step was to do a record. And then let’s see what the record does. If you’re a Fuel fan, I think you’re gonna like the record. And the response we’re getting on social media and all this has been great so far.
“But we’ll follow it as far as it goes. Obviously, if Metallica offers us a tour, or whoever, Guns ‘N Roses, obviously, we’d be, like ‘That’s interesting,’ you know? For sure. So we’ll just kind of see what happens. It’s a lot of fun. We’re hoping that we can just avoid some of the pitfalls that bands fall into and just enjoy a nice little round here, and we’ll ride it as far as we can ride it, of course. We’re not shooting for the middle,” he says, laughing.
As for the task of relearning Fuel’s materials, Bell says the tables have now turned, and he’s teaching the band’s other members the secrets of the songs.
“It’s been curious,” he says. “Now, they’ll go, ‘Ohh, that’s how you did that!’ and ‘That’s how you played this.’ So it’s been a bit of a journey both ways for us.”
Miller says, “Carl had his revenge, because when we actually sat there and started to step out, he goes, ‘Well, gentlemen, it’s actually this chord. You’re all playing it wrong.’ ”