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During the Nixon Administration, Chris Fuller was given a tablet of drawing paper, water based markers, pencils, and crayons. For the next three years, well into the Ford Administration, he drew pictures of ghosts, vampires, men transforming into werewolves, bloody knives, men in cloaks, firemen extinguishing burning houses, tornadoes, and Spiderman. During the Carter Administration, as his drawing skills developed, he progressed to portraits of Dracula performing a variety of bloody-mouthed tasks, honed his werewolf portraiture chops, and illustrated imagined scenes from Alfred Hitchcock Presents Ghost Stories for Children. t was also during the Ford Administration that he saw all of the classic Universal horror films from the 30’s and 40’s. Rather than frightening, the soothing gray and black tones as well as the (by the 1970’s) heavily iconographic gothic and graveyard imagery was very cozy and pleasing to him. It was the Hammer Pictures film Horror of Dracula (1958) with its gaudy harsh color and throat puncturing violence that frightened yet fascinated him. |
Jumping ahead to the first Bush Administration, Fuller formed with two other fellows the pre-emo, math-esque, rock band dis-. Dis- produced three albums, enjoyed four different drummers, embarked on a handful of small tours, and conducted a thrilling Gary Numan tribute in 1994. By the time dis- threw in the towel, Fuller had relocated from his Milwaukee homeland to Chicago and took a position playing guitar in the touring band for Fred Schneider’s (B-52’s) solo project at that time. One U.S. tour and a handful of European festivals later, he returned to Chicago to form the goth-ish, 1981-ish, post-punk with arena rock affectations band Sixto. As in dis-, he played guitar and sang but this time wore his guitar much lower. One album, one smoke machine, and two strobe-lights later, Sixto segued into the gentler Shiny Ghosts which combined the guitars, bass, and drums of Sixto with violin, organ, and piano, etc. After that, Fuller took the organist of Shiny Ghosts with him and played the same set of ten songs over and again for two years as a solo act.
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It was late in the Clinton Administration that Fuller began to spend more money than he technically had on computers and recording equipment as he started down the path of digital audio and acquainted himself with that mysterious mistress known as MIDI. What began as a desire for a glorified 4-track recorder grew into a vocation of designing sound and composing music for theatre productions and now, during the younger Bush Administration; film.
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a scary bodega production |
