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In junior high I went through a nasty Led Zeppelin phase. After a childhood filled with Milli Vanilli and Paula Abdul cassettes, by the 8th grade I was in dire need of something with a little more testosterone.

The first week of school that year my friend JJ lent me a Led Zeppelin tape. I took it home, stuck it in my pop-up cassette player, and was instantly hooked. Spine-bending bass lines, exploding drums, piercing guitar, and Robert Plant's distinctive howl had me under a spell that I didn't want to break. I'd stay locked up in my room, blasting Houses of the Holy as loud as that little tape player would go and air guitar until I could air guitar no more. I was a mudflap and a twenty-sack away from full-on hesher status.

Almost a decade later, I had almost forgotten about the power of Zeppelin and other like-minded bands. Various other types of music were on regular rotation in my disc changer and my poor Zep CD's were gathering dust on the shelf.

One day while browsing for CD's at a record store in San Luis, the employees put on an album that gave me flashbacks to my Zep-filled adolescence. This band was taking no prisoners, rocking so hard that even the pope would have to restrain himself from raising his lighter and flashing the metal sign. "Who the hell is this?" I wondered to myself. Luckily I was able to overhear a conversation between a couple of hairfarmers near me in the used CD section:

"#&@ dude, is this the new Fu Manchu? Dude, I haven't heard this yet. It totally rocks."

"@#$& yeah! It kicks ass, dude! Their old one was, like, my favorite album ever but this one is, like, ever better."

Normally I'd be dismissing these neck-bearded fools as clueless stoners, but the music was too good to ignore. I quickly picked up the "King of the Road" CD and began to listen in awe at the type of rock I had been missing since my adolescent musical obsession with big-haired guitar bands.

Fu Manchu is everything that is good about stoner rock. Big and fuzzy bass lines create a groove that is inescapable even for the sober listener, let alone the legions of potheads who have made this music their personal soundtrack. Channeling the spirits of bands like Black Sabbath and Kyuss, Fu Manchu rock on about subjects like cars, women, and... well, more cars. Typical lyrics include the following from the title track off of King of the Road:

Laughin' at the notion of a signal light
Knew we'd gone too far
No one knew what happened but it seemed all right
We quickly jumped in the car

Yeah, pretty silly stuff, but it really doesn’t even matter. When it comes down to it, the subject matter is pretty much irrelevant in Fu Manchu's songs. The core of their music lies in the sheer power of their primal riffs and irresistible grooves.

Their CD’s are good, but Fu Manchu is definitely a band that should be experienced live. I was able to catch them at a small club in San Francisco and they kicked serious ass. I was kind of thrown off at first because the band members had cut off their trademark stoner hair-do’s and the lead singer looked, well, kind of nerdy. I had been expecting this bad ass guy from the pictures on the CD jacket. Instead I was peering up at the stage at this goofball in a Hawaiian shirt.

I was a bit worried that their new clean cut look might affect their ability to rock, but once the music began I knew that the haircuts had done nothing to stop the band from destroying amps and bursting eardrums. The entire set was impossibly loud and almost nonstop. The singer took one break to introduce the band members and plug the new CD, but the rest of the hour-long set was jam packed with back to back sonic destruction. I left the show nearly deaf, completely drained, and giddily delirious over this band’s live power.

Since the show, my Zep and Sabbath CD’s have ended their near decade long retirement and jumped back into rotation on my changer. My neighbors may hate me for it, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.