The picture above was taken after my first Halloween show at Fats. I chose the date of that event as my reference point for how long I worked for the room.

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Before the late-middle of 2010, I didn’t really remember Fats Grill. I had been there once before, many years earlier. I had a vague notion of the downstairs being a comedy club.

But I really didn’t have a history with the place. What I did have was the rise and fall of another small venue: New Song Underground. Underground had been an “on then off then ON” pet-project of mine for a good while, but the host church had moved and plans for a restart had fizzled. (It’s a long story.) After Underground closed, I had finally finished my IT degree. For some reason, I couldn’t find a job. I couldn’t even get interviewed.

I applied to deliver pizzas and was turned down.

Needless to say, I wasn’t feeling so hot as summer wore on. For all intents and purposes, my already shaky self-confidence had slammed into the ground and left a smoking crater.

And then Wes Furgason invited me to a gig.

Wes had played some shows at Underground with the Assent, and maybe also with Molly Drive. He had developed a pretty solid fondness for the place, enough for him to say that losing the venue was a tragedy for local music. Wes remembered me as a guy who knew his way around a live-sound rig, and also as a dude who enjoyed interacting with local musicians. He dropped me a line about this Sugarhouse show, letting me know that his group of melody-makers would be playing in my neck of the woods – and that the event was free.

Surprisingly, I made up my mind to go.

I’m a bit of a hermit. I generally prefer to hole up, especially in the face of an unfamiliar destination. I’m also not a bar-goer at all. I certainly had been in clubs and watering-holes while mixing shows for the band Puddlestone, but I wasn’t there as a patron. Being at a night-spot in a non-working capacity really wasn’t something I was used to. So, it was pretty amazing that my thought-process took the turn of “I should get out of the house and actually put my money where my mouth is regarding the support of live bands.”

As I walked into the basement of Fats for the first time, I really had no clue as to what my expectations should be. I knew basically nothing about how the place worked. I managed to convince myself to walk up to the bar, where a fellow wearing a nametag that read “Mario” was standing. Mario had that sort of ease which gives you the feeling that he was very definitely in charge…which was appropriate, given that he was a majority owner in the establishment. (I found that out a little later.) I asked Mario if folks were allowed to order food from the upstairs and bring it down.

“You can order it right here,” said Mario, and rang me up for a burger and fries.

At some point, I caught Wes’s attention, and Wes started to try to bring me to Mario’s attention. It was mentioned that I was pretty handy with mixing consoles and loud noises. I tagged along like a puppy when Mario and Wes went up on deck to look something over. I listened intently as Mario described how the house mixer worked. It was a simple affair with a few channels, which had once been the nerve center for a church’s system. I knew that I wasn’t going to do anything impressive with that console. There wasn’t anything wrong with it by any means, but at Underground I had been using all kinds of goodies to massage and cajole live-audio into something that resembled a decent mix. I was used to channel-per-channel compression, four-band parametric EQ per channel, and all kinds of system processing being available “post console.”

I would have none of that this evening.

Even though there was no way I would do much better than what Mario could do by himself, I still wanted to get my mitts on that little desk. The craft of audio has a call like the mythological Sirens. Besides, having something to do would make me feel more comfortable. Heck, it would me feel actually USEFUL, which was a feeling I had been missing for months on end.

So, Mario went back to running the bar, and I hauled my burger over to the sound booth. In between bites, I made adjustments. I probably looked pretty funny, frantically tearing a chunk out of my food, chewing and swallowing in a big hurry, and then reaching out to ride a vocal up or down.

Amongst all the other bits involved, the night ended up being another lesson in the smallness of the Salt Lake City music scene. I’ve said on multiple occasions that the industry in this town is the size of a postage stamp. Everybody has played in everybody else’s band, and everybody has “run sound” for everybody else. Put two bands in a room, and there’s a nearly zero percent chance that the players won’t know each other. Well, there I was, and much to my surprise, there also was General Harrison in the closing slot. General Harrison was the offshoot of another band that had played Underground (Crashing at Dawn), and they had gotten hooked up with Wes via playing the Magna Arts Festival (coincidentally, playing that festival on the same day that the new Crashing At Dawn played that festival), and here they were on the day that I actually decided to get out of the house.

So, it was a treat to be hands-on with a rig, playing rock and roll amongst friends.

And I guess I did a pretty okay job, because Mario asked me for my phone number. He assured me that Mishell would get ahold of me soon.

So, when it’s all said and done, if anybody likes what Fats ultimately became as a live-music venue, they should make sure to thank Wes Furgason at the same time as they thank anyone else.