The Sound of the Fury : Angry Young Band From O.C. Has Aversion to Complacency in Its Punk-Metal

Some people see the mark of the devil in bands that play hard-core punk-metal.

Aversion’s blitzing style certainly is capable of conjuring visions of Armageddon. Most of the songs on the Orange County band’s two albums hurtle and buzz with such swarming ire that unwary listeners might think they’d stumbled into a nest of agitated wasps.

But Aversion doesn’t sing about Satanic stuff and occult mumbo jumbo, the way Slayer and its emulators do. Although Aversion’s rapidly oscillating guitar sound might sometimes suggest the fluttering of Beelzebub’s wings, you’d have a hard time pegging these social critics as agents of the Antichrist.

Instead, think of them as the AntiMcFerrin: “ Do worry, be very unhappy” might be an apt motto for a band whose current album, “Fit to be Tied,” consists largely of tirades against complacency, conformism and a perfidious social order that destroys rain forests (“Dry Up, Blow Away”) and breeds violent sociopaths (“Bratattack”).

But don’t get the idea that Aversion goes around angry all the time. During a recent photo shoot in downtown Fullerton, the two principle members, singer Christian Fuhrer and guitarist Dash, were perfectly calm. So calm, in fact, that a photographer who had been told of the angry essence of the band’s music was having misgivings about the looks of relative equanimity that Fuhrer and Dash were shooting back at the lens.

“We’re angry, man, but we get all of our anger out with the music,” Fuhrer said when prodded to appear more irate for the camera. “Outside of the music we’re happy-go-lucky guys.”

That seems to be truer of the more-or-less easygoing Fuhrer, 24, than of Dash. If Aversion ever gets famous enough for a bio-pic, he could be played by Bruce Dern in a repeat of his frazzled combat vet role in “Coming Home.”

Dash, who gives his real name as Gerald Russell Tuso Jr., says he began life as a hyperactive child and is now coping with it as a tense, ulcer-plagued adult of 30. During an interview, he spoke in a low, tight-lipped, dryly ironic voice, except when the topic turned to music in its purest state. Get Dash talking about technical stuff like riff-construction and the manipulation of musical dynamics to structure songs, and he becomes as eager, effusive and visibly delighted as a kid who got to bring his pet bunny to class for show-and-tell.

One thing that Dash and Fuhrer say needs to be understood right from the start is that they didn’t make up those names.

When they hear that Aversion is fronted by a guy named Christian Fuhrer, scores of punks and hard-core metal-dudes around the world will kick themselves and wish they’d thought up such a cool stage moniker, what with the built-in sensationalism of its Jesus-versus-Hitler, good-versus-evil duality.

The only thing is, Christian Fuhrer is his real name--Christian after a great-great-grandfather, and Fuhrer. . . . well, it was a respectable-enough German word for “leader” until the Nazis came along and anointed Adolf Hitler as der Fuhrer.

“It was kind of a bad joke on young Chris,” Dash said with a humorous glint in his voice. “They couldn’t believe in Germany (where Aversion toured in 1991) that it was his real name.”

The last thing Aversion wants is for anyone to assume from the singer’s name that the band has neo-Nazi leanings, like some infamous racist-skinhead punks. In “Inertia,” a song from Aversion’s 1990 debut album, “The Ugly Truth,” Fuhrer sang a tirade against a fascistic, Hitlerian ruler. And, as Dash points out, “we’ve run away from skinheads on more than one occasion.”

While Dash’s stage name is descriptive of his approach to the guitar (his clean, hard-edged riffs fly by as quickly as Fuhrer’s tongue-twisting rattle of words), he says he got the name from a high-school soccer coach in Texas.

“I’ve been Dash for 15 years, and when people hear it they think it’s some pseudo rock star name. But it was my name before I was a star,” he said with a self-mocking laugh.

Stardom hasn’t quite arrived for Aversion, which records for the independent label Restless. (a video, “Let It Go,” has been getting play on MTV’s hard-rock specialty program, “Headbangers Ball.”) The band, which includes bassist Skelly Cason and drummer Mick Palmesano, is hoping to latch on as opening act on a major tour, and if that doesn’t work out, they’ll settle for latching on as opener on a minor tour. Meanwhile, they all work day jobs and practice three nights a week to keep up the precision and stamina required when 75% of your material sounds like the soundtrack to a Mario Andretti tribute video. Aversion also plays about once a month in area clubs.

Dash, who founded Aversion about five years ago, says he first learned to articulate anger in song lyrics while serving in the Air Force during the early 1980s. The guitarist says he entered the service after finding himself in a downward spiral of drinking, crime and generally antisocial behavior during his late teens. Deciding that some regimentation was in order, he enlisted, with the idea of training as an air traffic controller (his dad’s profession).

“The good part is, it helped me get my life back on track,” Dash said of his nearly four-year hitch. The bad part was, he came to hate the authoritarian, bureaucratic fundamentals of military life. Dash says those feelings came out in songs he wrote and recorded on a home-taping machine in his spare time--that is, before he got edged out of the service for smoking marijuana.

Dash gravitated to the Orange County rock scene in 1984, seeking musicians who’d play his metal-tinged punk songs, which recall such bands as Suicidal Tendencies and the early Metallica.

“I came into town with my noise, and people were telling me I was an idiot. I had a hard time finding people to play my music.” Eventually, Dash hooked up with brothers Joe and Edward Tatar and formed Aversion in 1987. Fuhrer, who had spent his teens in the Orange County punk-rock scene, joined within a year. The band got its early experience playing at local parties. At its third club gig, a scout from Enigma Records, the now-defunct parent company of Restless, heard Aversion and signed the band.

After its debut album in 1990, Aversion went on a two-month tour of the United States, Canada and Mexico with British punkers G.B.H. Last year, it toured Europe for six weeks with the horror-rock theatrical band, Gwar. Aversion survived some internal turmoil earlier this year when drummer Joe Tatar was fired before the recording of “Fit to Be Tied,” and his brother, Edward, left after the album was finished. They were replaced by bassist Cason, who had fronted his own band, Attaxe, and drummer Palmesano.

Fuhrer, who comes off as a more relaxed, younger-brother sidekick to the intense Dash, said that for the first 13 years of his life, “I was a very structured kid. I was getting straight A’s and did everything I was told. I was in student government, the whole trip.”

Then came his punk rebellion--partly, he says, because all his junior-high buddies suddenly ostracized him for reasons that he says he never could figure out.

“I got into punk right away. It was a big, happy gang, a big, happy family.” Fuhrer said his parents didn’t object to his involvement in the punk scene (he served as a roadie and photographer for bands including D.I. and the Adolescents), except for one occasion when “my dad pinned me down and shaved my Mohawk off.”

As a band that feeds on opposition, it’s not surprising that Aversion would rebel against the very music scene from which it sprang.

On “Hung,” the leadoff track of the new album (and the inspiration for a striking cover painting that portrays the four band members swinging from a gallows in their death throes), Fuhrer pronounces the Orange County punk-rock scene all but kaput (“Orange has rotted to the seed”), and gets off oblique lyrical salvos against such old-line punkers as D.I. and the Adolescents.

“We didn’t get a lot of support from all those other bands (when Aversion was starting out), and I resented that to death,” the singer said. “They liked me personally, but they were apathetic and lazy” when it came to helping newcomers on the scene. “I don’t want to make it sound like a personal vendetta” against those bands. “I thought the whole organization of the Orange County scene was wrong, so I used the Adolescents as a symbol.”

While never averse to flinging thunderbolts at targets of its wrath, Aversion is capable of turning the mirror on itself too. In “Down This Way,” songwriter Dash paints a vision of himself following in the path of artistic complacency and atrophy he feels has seized the bands criticized in “Hung”: “Years go by, I get slow / The edge gets duller every day, chipping pieces off my soul.”

“It’s about a guy scared of dying without being able to articulate his Angst to the world,” Dash said. “He wants to leave his mark. It’s what I’m trying to do in this band. All of us are trying to get our aggressions out and leave our mark.

“Hate can be a very positive thing,” he said, elaborating on Aversion’s chosen method of leaving its mark. “It can take something as extreme as hate to get anything accomplished. I dread the day that I become placid. I get scared that one day I’ll step on stage and I won’t have any anger to release. I want to stay young and angry as long as I can. ‘Live fast, die young’ is BS. ‘Live a long time and never grow up’ is the vibe I’m into.”

That last goal being somewhat incompatible with perpetual anger, the Aversion duo acknowledges the importance of more moderate off-stage pursuits.

“We like to hang out down at (Dash’s) house at the beach, get a keg and have a barbecue,” said Fuhrer, who was in the process of moving from Fullerton to Huntington Beach to be closer to his band mate and to leave behind the rubble of a recently ended romance.

“You can’t live that way and survive,” Dash said of the bleak outlook that dominates Aversion’s songs. “I have to concentrate to keep myself normal and mellow. I try to slow down and enjoy the simpler pleasures of suburban life.”

Onstage, Dash said, the less pleased he appears, the more pleased he’s apt to be with the way a show is going. In the heat of things, he said, he might even start directing some of his rage at band mates in ways that might strike onlookers as abusive.

“I’ll go off and be completely out of my head (at them). It’s nothing personal. I’m into releasing my anger. After every show, I shake every band member’s hand and say, ‘Thanks, man.’ It’s like therapy.”

“There were times on tour when I wouldn’t be angry,” Dash added. “It got to where I could smile on stage.”

Progress?

Well, no.

“To me,” said Dash, “those are the more unsatisfying shows.”