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Think back for a minute. In 1998 – at least in Fort Wayne – only a handful of bands played their music loud and fast.
Well, loud and fast enough for some of us, anyway.
And then – like a steel-toe boot to the teeth – Fat Ass showed up. They played harsh and cheeky two-minute songs, most of them introduced by the phrase, “This is a song about getting (bleeped) up.” The power of raw, rebellious punk rock had finally arrived.
“There were no bands in Fort Wayne that rocked at the time,” guitarist Erick Coleman says. “And there were no bands in Fort Wayne that were loud. We wanted to bring back the rock and the volume.”
Mission accomplished. On occasion, the band – Coleman, drummer Dave Trevino, bassist Jay Hackbush and guitarist and vocalist Salomon Borenstein – would set up four Marshall amplifiers near the stage. Not two. Four. Fans will tell you, the music didn’t so much blast as buzz.
“We started off pretty punk,” Coleman says. “We’d take an arena-load of gear into the smallest clubs we could find and play as loud as hell. And we always blew the roof off the place.”
But five years after playing their first gig, Fat Ass split up. Coleman moved to Ohio. Borenstein wound up working as a chef in San Francisco. The remaining members formed other local bands, most recently Streetlamps for Spotlights.
The idea of a reunion show never stopped sounding like a good idea, though, Coleman says. So this weekend – after purchasing plane tickets, packing bags and allowing two days to rehearse – the band will reunite for shows in Fort Wayne and Indianapolis.
“In a nutshell, the reason we are doing these reunion dates is because we all miss playing together,” Coleman says. “The combination of Jay, Dave, Sal and me was a perfect match on a personality level, a music level, every way you’d want a band to connect. We sure miss that.”
Fat Ass won’t get a chance to play together in Fort Wayne again anytime soon. So the band plans to run through all 22 of its songs during the Friday gig at the Brass Rail, Coleman says.
“We want to play as much as we can,” Coleman says. “If we’re exerting the effort to come this far to play together, we have to make sure it’s worth our while. We’re just counting on our old drunk friends to come out and whoop it up with us. And hopefully expose new people to our music along the way.”
