A number of Boston bands were signed to major labels and thrust into the national spotlight after Nirvana blew up in 1991. A&R scouts from labels that previously had little to do with Boston were suddenly descending on the city to scour its thriving alternative rock scene for the next Nirvana (as they were doing nationally). One Boston band that emerged from this moment was Fuzzy—a brilliant pop/rock band that mixed 60s jangle pop influence with crunchy 90s guitar riffs.
In 2016, their first single, “Flashlight” (1994), was featured on a “Top 50 Songs of the 1990s” listicle on Rolling Stone’s website. “How many other magnificent quasi-grunge tunes are out there buried on forgotten major-label albums from the post-Nirvana gold rush, waiting to be discovered,” Rolling Stone contributor Rob Sheffield muses. “There can’t be many this great.” While Sheffield ponders excavating the period for other gems, the story of Fuzzy itself deserves deeper investigation.
In 1984, Tower Records opened their first and last Boston location—Fuzzy would begin to cohere there around 1990 when Hilken Mancini, who’d moved from Syracuse in 1988 to attend Boston Conservatory, began working there. Chris Toppin, her future Fuzzy co-lead, had transferred from a New York Tower Records location a few years prior. Initially, the sprawling five story layout kept them separated.“This woman would come in every day and disappear,” Mancini recalls, “but every time she came in we really got along. I knew she was a bass player. I just felt like I didn’t want to stop talking to her… And then finally one day I was like, ‘Where do you go anyways?’” To which Toppin replied that there was a room where all the money that was made the previous day was counted.
Mancini’s transfer to that department would put three out of the eventual four Fuzzy members in one place. “Dave Ryan, who was in The Lemonheads, worked there too, so we all became friends,” she recalls.
Meanwhile, Winston Braman, who would be Fuzzy’s bassist, was doing alternative theatre acting in Boston around the time.
“Hilken had seen me in a play,” Braman recalls. “She said, ‘You should come see my friend play.’”
After seeing Chris Toppin (the friend) play a solo set, Braman said, “I think I gotta play with her.”
“I write songs,” Mancini replied.
“I’ll play songs with both of you, I don’t care.” Braman laughs as he recalls the dialog. By 1992 the three of them were writing music together.
The band Dave Ryan drummed for at the time, The Lemonheads, had been one of the immediate beneficiaries of Nirvana’s commercial breakthrough. According to Mancini, as Atlantic Records poured more money into The Lemonheads, they were able to tour extensively, freeing up their practice space by the time Fuzzy was looking for one—and Ryan generously offered it to them while it wasn’t in use.
“[Dave Ryan] came back from tour and was like, ‘You guys are great. I’ll play drums,’” Mancini says.
A friend of Braman’s, Steve “Steve-O” Matthewson, ended up pulling together Fuzzy’s first recording around 1993 when he was visiting from Austria. Toppin and Mancini, then living together, hosted him and impressed him enough with their living room songwriting sessions that he set them up with someone to record them in The Lemonheads’ practice space (though these recordings were initially sold on handmade cassettes, Nic Dalton of The Lemonheads would distribute them on CD via his Australian label Half A Cow Records). By around early 1994 they were off on their first mini tour.
Braman had been friends with J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. since around 1983 when they started school at UMass Amherst, so “J was like, ‘Yeah you got a band, alright, let’s go, here’s a couple shows,’” he recalls.
Having never played a live show together, Fuzzy panicked.
“We asked our friend who booked the Middle East Upstairs, ‘Can we please play a show before these Dinosaur shows so that we can get our shit together?’” Toppin recalls. “And he said, ‘The only thing I have is a heavy metal band on Thursday night.’ So we did that.”
It was a brutal learning experience. Strings were broken and other obstacles emerged that they weren’t prepared for. At one point, members of Soul Asylum who happened to be in the audience were offering them step by step instructions to get them through the set.
Ask someone to borrow one of the guitars, Toppin recalls them saying. Take the chord out of your guitar and plug it into the one on your body.
“We were hanging out at the bar afterward at The Middle East,” Braman says, “and I was kind of crying into my beer just like, ‘We suck, this was the worst show ever.’ And then this guy next to me was like, ‘How bad could it be?’ It was this dude from the Soul Asylum and he had just opened for Keith Richards at the Orpheum… And I was like, ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe it wasn’t that bad.’”
With the experience of that show, they maxed out some credit cards to stock up on gear and more adequately prepare for the Dinosaur Jr. shows that began the next night. Those didn’t go much better.
“We played and Dave was on tour with The Lemonheads so we had to get a fill in guy,” Braman says. “We didn’t play very well. It was kind of terrible.”
Toppin recalls of the first night, “You have this big stadium full of kids who… they can tell that you’re nervous… It’s almost like when a dog can tell you’re nervous and they want to bite you.”
Around this time, Braman’s friend Steve-O was able to get Fuzzy’s cassettes into the hands of John Bernhardt, who played them on his influential WMBR radio program Breakfast of Champions.
“Both Tim O’Heir and Paul Kolderie heard it,” Toppin says, “and they pulled over and called the radio station and asked who it was.”
O’Heir and Kolderie were producers affiliated with an acclaimed local recording studio called Fort Apache, where Fuzzy would record their three full length albums.
“We were really into the Come record 11:11,” Mancini says. “We knew that [Come] recorded with Tim O’Heir at Fort Apache.”
Though they paid out of pocket for the February 1994 recording sessions that would become their first album, they were quickly swept up by a major label. Mancini recalls, “We got signed in that really silly way where we played a show at the Middle East Upstairs and some guy came up to me after and was like, ‘Hi, my name is Steve from Atlantic Records and I’d like to sign you.’ And we were like, ‘Really?’”
Steve Yegelwel, then in A&R at Atlantic Records, signed them to what was called an “imprint” or subsidiary of Atlantic proper—Seed Records. The word “Atlantic” appeared nowhere on the cover or liner notes of their self-titled debut album, which instead was identified only with the Seed Records brand.
Of TAG Recordings, the imprint that Atlantic folded Seed into in early 1995 (Fuzzy’s second release would carry the TAG brand), Atlantic CEO Val Azzoli told Billboard magazine in early 1995 that “TAG will be independently minded, but it will have the backing and support structure of the entire Atlantic machine… It’s a way to keep the small-label spirit alive within a big company.”
Braman had a different perspective on the purpose of Atlantic’s imprints that Fuzzy was shuffled between. “It was kind of like trying to trick the buyer, I thought,” because “at that time, if you were on a major label it was kinda considered bad form…”
On June 14th, 1994, their self-titled debut LP was released via Atlantic’s Seed Records, setting off two years of their most extensive touring. Toppin recalls of one of their tours from 1994, “Some headlining band was supposed to tour with us and they cancelled at the last minute and all the clubs said, ‘Well let’s just let Fuzzy do it alone. We won’t charge and people can come in for free.’ …So we did this whole tour by ourselves.”
After nights of playing sizable venues to small crowds (including one show in Dallas where Braman begged a man to stay and be the sole audience member), they stumbled into a memorable evening in Iowa. “At the end of that tour we played somewhere in Iowa…” Toppin continued, “and we were kind of used to playing these empty rooms now… So this is one of the last nights on the tour and we’re thinking, ‘OK, it’s a Sunday night, probably not gonna be too many people tonight.’ So we just tried to get ourselves to be excited to be able to do it anyway… Right after sound check, we realize people are coming and lining up at the door before the door opens. And we’re like, ‘Wow, I wonder who they think—they must think that other band is playing.’ So we said, ‘Can you guys make sure to tell these people that so-and-so is not playing, that it’s Fuzzy.’ And they came back and said, ‘No-no, they’re lining up for you.’ So by the time we start the show, the place is sold out… and everybody knows every word of all of our songs.”
As it turned out, a radio station in Iowa had been playing Fuzzy quite a bit more than other stations around the country, and simultaneously an interview Fuzzy had done with Tabitha Soren for MTV was airing several times a day. Iowan alternative rock fans were left with an outsized impression of Fuzzy’s popularity.
Toppin recalls, “So all of these people in Iowa thought we were just as big as these other bands. In fact they started a fan club for us, this guy from Iowa. He came to visit us in Boston and he stayed with Hilken and Winston in their apartment in Boston… Hilken got up in the morning and realized that they didn’t have any cream for coffee, and said, ‘I’m gonna run to the store, I’m just gonna get some cream.’ And he said, ‘Do you want me to come with you?’ She was like, ‘No, why? I’m fine. Are you afraid of Boston?’ He was like, ‘No, I just think, like, y’know, you’re kind of famous. Aren’t you gonna get mobbed?’”
In March of 1996, still not quite at the level of fame of getting mobbed by Bostonians, Fuzzy released their album Electric Juices under Atlantic Record’s imprint “TAG”. “I remember recording that record and just sweating all the time,” Mancini recalls. “I remember [producer Tim O’Heir] being like, ‘I’m not feeling well, I think we should stop today.’ And we were like, ‘Alright, why, what’s wrong?’ He’s like, ‘I don’t know, maybe it’s because I drank zima or something.’ We were like, ‘OK.’ And the next day when we came in he was like, ‘I didn’t want to tell you guys, but it was so fucking hot in here that the tape machine, the tape was… it looked like it was starting to melt, and I just had to stop.’ He had like 25 fans on it.”
Fuzzy toured nationally that Spring, including a tour with Velocity Girl and The Posies that went from May through June. Unfortunately, this was the year that Atlantic executives decided to divest from “indie rock”. They dissolved their TAG imprint and dropped Fuzzy. As Braman recalls of Fuzzy’s relationship with Atlantic leading up to that, “This guy Steve Yegelwel really loved us and he was kind of like the little indie rock guy that was somehow in the corporate wheel… There’s a point though when they start changing who’s in charge at that level and above Steve Yegelwel, and then you start to get ignored if that’s not that guy’s thing.”
According to what an Atlantic insider told Fuzzy at the time, there was initially a debate at Atlantic about whether to drop them, and at least one of the factors that led to the decision was their supposed over-similarity to Veruca Salt. As Toppin recalls, the music industry even beyond Atlantic had decided that the two bands were too similar. (In a sexist industry, the similarly gendered lineup of two women guitarists as the primary vocalists/songwriters backed up by male rhythm sections meant the bands were “too similar.”)
Since Veruca Salt had made the biggest splash early on with their single “Seether,” the music industry considered Fuzzy to be “the band that was like Veruca Salt.”
“Every time we wanted to do something,” recalls Toppin, “somebody would say, ‘We already have a band like that…’ We wanted to go with this one company to set up our tours, and they were like, ‘I already have a band like you.’ And we were like, ‘Who’s that, what are you talking about?’ And they’d say, ‘Veruca Salt.’ And… we were supposed to be on one of the late-night talk shows and they were like, ‘Oh, but we already have a band lined up like you.’”
After being formally dropped by Atlantic in mid 1996, some of the Fort Apache producers helped connect Fuzzy to an indie label called Catapult that would release their final album, Hurray For Everything, in 1999. “Atlantic is connected to all these huge things,” Mancini recalls of the period, “so we lost Nasty Little Man who was our publicist, we lost Bob Louden as our booking agent… so we were more DIY at that point. The tours we went on were more small, or they would be just us, or we’d hook up with friends.”
By that point, Toppin was focused on raising her new son, Braman was playing with Come, and Ryan had moved to New York to pursue graduate school. There was no formal breakup, but the band became largely inactive by the 2000s. In the years since, Toppin and Mancini have performed Fuzzy songs intermittently, most notably for the concert series commemorating the 25th anniversary of the WMBR show Pipeline!—perhaps the most important radio program of Boston’s indie rock scene in the 1990s (bootlegs of live Pipeline! performances can be found in local record stores even today).
Fuzzy’s legacy is perhaps most concretely embodied by an organization Mancini launched in 2010: Girls Rock Campaign Boston. The camaraderie she found with other women in Boston’s ‘90s rock world now reverberates through the GRCB and Ladies Rock Campaign Boston programs that give girls, women, and nonbinary persons the opportunity to rock out with a supportive community. While reminiscing about touring with Belly in the ‘90s, Mancini recalls, “Partly why I wanted to start [Girls Rock Campaign Boston] was experiences with women like that that I had. I never felt like women in Boston were like, ‘check me out,’ or being competitive. It seemed like they wanted to help us, so I felt like starting Rock Camp made sense in that way.”