Going Out

By Paul Robicheau

One of 2011’s best concert surprises was the reunion of the Del Fuegos, the scruffy local garage-rockers who flirted with ’80s fame before losing members and direction.

“We were caught up in the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle,” singer/guitarist Dan Zanes says of their heyday. “We were fearful kids and, speaking for myself, filled with professional jealousy—just self-centered fear in all its flavors.”

But with time comes maturity. Zanes warmed to the reunion idea after his mother asked the band’s original lineup to reunite in support of Right Turn, an addiction treatment program founded by Fuegos drummer Woody Giessmann.

So the Del Fuegos rocked two packed June benefits at the Paradise Rock Club, where fans sang along to fondly remembered hits like “Don’t Run Wild” and “Backseat Nothing.” With the ice broken, the quartet has been recording a new EP and will return to the Paradise on Feb. 22 to kick off a multi-city tour.

“We had a great time at the Paradise, which I guess is obvious, or we wouldn’t be doing this,” the 50-year-old Zanes says from his Brooklyn home. “It was more fun than I’ve ever had playing with those guys, and that’s saying a lot, because we did have a lot of fun along the way.”

Given that camaraderie, he offers one explanation for the group not reforming sooner. “It was for the best possible reason, which is that everybody has a really full life,” says Zanes, now a Grammy-winning performer of family music.

Giessmann went on to launch Right Turn, and the group’s other two members, bassist Tom Lloyd and Zanes’ guitarist brother, Warren, broadened their horizons by earning doctorate degrees.

Lloyd pursued geochemical engineering and has since moved on to a career in investment analysis, while keeping up his musical chops as a classical cellist. Warren Zanes emerged as a singer/songwriter with fine solo albums in addition to becoming an author, professor and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame executive. Currently working on an authorized Tom Petty biography, he has since taken a post with the Rock and Roll Forever Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Steven Van Zandt.

Sibling tensions once hobbled the Fuegos, as older brother Dan dominated the writing, resulting in Warren and Giessmann quitting two years before the band’s 1989 demise. “Things were really difficult for several years,” Dan Zanes says of relations with his brother after the split. “But I was the best man when he got married, which is a miracle in repaired relationships, and I’m the godfather of one of his sons. We talk every day, with or without the Del Fuegos.”

While the Zanes brothers hail from New Hampshire (where the Fuegos will close their current tour at the Capital Center for the Arts on March 4), the group cut its teeth in dingy Boston clubs like Cantone’s and the Rathskeller. “We were doing Elvis Presley covers,” Zanes recalls. “Everybody was listening to the Clash and punk rock, and we thought we were greasers.

We couldn’t play very well,” Zanes says. “We were limited by what we could do technically, so we shaped our vision around that.” The band’s lean, scrappy rock proved the right fit on L.A.’s Slash Records, home to X and Los Lobos.

Now matured as musicians, the Fuegos are making an EP in which the brothers share in the writing and may play one or two songs live. “It just seemed like an artistic challenge,” he says of the album. “We have no problem being an oldies act.”

In turn, the Fuegos could remain active beyond this short tour. “We probably won’t say no to anything,” Zanes says, “but we’re really not looking beyond this two-week ‘vacation.’”

The Del Fuegos play the Paradise Rock Club on February 22.