The Band Formerly Known as Fuel

You have to dig to find it, but in the A.V. Club Blog (part of The Onion website), writer Kyle Ryan reviews Fuel. It’s strange to think of new reviews appearing nearly 20 years after the fact. I would be pleasantly surprised if we still manage to win over “new fans” at this late stage from reviews like this.

The recent media attention is due to a certain degree of us now being hip to people who want to show off some contact with the original Bay area scene. The backlash against the punk explosion has faded and people are comfortable being nostalgic about that time period again.

The review is flattering, while not exactly breaking much new ground in terms of criticism - yes, someone once called us Fuelgazi (probably coined by Tim Yohannon or Martin Sprouse). I appreciate this comment: “…Fuel didn’t come across as obnoxious P.C. scolds, just earnest guys who wanted their music to do more than start pits at 924 Gilman Street. You can’t begrudge bands who take themselves seriously because they believe so fervently in the transformative power of music.”

Under “Current whereabouts” he says that - After Fuel, Allison moved back to his native Canada, where he pursued a career in law.

After Fuel, I moved back to Canada to finish my BA in philosophy at UofT. Four years later I was back in the Bay area. Although I spent a few years in an interdisciplinary PhD program about law and society at U.C. Berkeley, I never worked in the legal field. I dropped out of grad school, moved to Switzerland, got married and became a “web strategy consultant”. Hey, it was 1999. Anyone with a computer could become a business consultant. I rode the dotcom wave in one of Switzerland’s big web agencies at the time, Netvertis. And I’m still working in the web today.