The Fuse
2024
L-R: John Neal, Laurie MacKenzie,
Don Hatcher, David Briggs, Paul Hatcher.
Photo credit:
Brook Jones / Free Press
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SONIC FUSION
Winnipeg
roots-rockers have melded their sound
through decades of highly charged
sessions
Practice makes perfect. Even when you’re
the Fuse, a legendary, Winnipeg roots-rock
band whose core members have been playing
together under one banner or another since
1975.
 For years, brothers Jeff,
Paul and Don Hatcher, along with honorary
sibling David Briggs, have been writing,
recording and rehearsing at Paul’s
Crescentwood abode, affectionately dubbed
“the Palace,” on a near-weekly basis.
Never mind the group, which counts Laurie
Mackenzie on guitar and John Neal on bass,
only performs live once or twice a year,
nowadays; the highly charged, multi-hour
sessions have become as much a part of
their common routine as a trek to the bank
or grocery store.
“No doubt about it, if more than two weeks
go by without everybody coming over to
jam, it definitely feels like there’s
something missing,” says Paul, a retired
mail carrier and the band’s drummer.
“I’m the same way,” pipes in Briggs, a
retired school teacher who handles guitar,
piano, organ and vocals. “It’s not like I
can’t write and play at home on my own,
because I do all the time. It’s just that
my life in general comes back into a more
pleasing focus, when we’re getting
together regularly.”
ESSENTIAL FUSE
For local musicologist Stu Reid, the Fuse
isn’t just the best band to emerge from
Winnipeg, all-time, it’s the best rock
band to hail from the Great White North,
period.
The longtime host of CKUW 95.9 FM program
TwangTrust jumped at the opportunity to
list what he feels are the group’s 10 best
songs. Plus, he has trouble counting to
10.
This Saturday, March 2, the group’s loyal
fans get their latest opportunity to join
in on the fun, when the Fuse appears at
the Park Theatre. The anticipated
three-hour concert, which will also
feature guest vocalist Wendy Bird, will
serve two purposes: as a  fundraiser
for Habitat Manitoba, and as a release
party for At the Palace, the band’s new,
self-produced 20-track CD.
The disc is a mix of songs that came
together while they were rehearsing for
Saturday’s show, and ones that go back as
many as four decades that they never got
around to recording, says Don, a Canada
Post employee who is responsible for
guitar, pedal steel, keyboards and vocals.
“To me, you have to remain creative your
whole life,” he says, strapping on his
six-string. “I’m thankful we still have
the band to allow us to cater to that
side, whether we’re in front of an
audience or not.”
David Briggs and Jeff Hatcher, the eldest
of the three brothers, have been friends
since 1968, when the two were Grade 5
classmates at Queenston School. They
discovered they had the same taste in
music, and very quickly, they taught
themselves to play guitar, by mimicking
what they were hearing on records by the
likes of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones
and Chuck Berry.
 Paul,
two years their junior, guesses he was 14
when he started sitting in on drums.
For over a year, the three of them played
together at Jeff and Paul’s house on
Dorchester Avenue four nights a week,
Monday through Thursday. As much as they
were learning songs, they were also
learning their instruments, until it
reached the point where they thought it
might be beneficial to try playing in
front of other people, for a change.
Briggs laughs, noting they were so green
ahead of their debut performance at River
Heights Junior High that they didn’t even
have a band name. A pal of theirs had
designed a poster to promote the dance,
listing them as “the Boys,” so that’s what
they went with, he says.
Jeff, a music therapist, credits another
buddy, former Winnipeg disc jockey Steve
Warden, for rechristening them. Bands with
“the” names like the Knack, the Cars and
the Clash were all the rage, and Warden
suggested they dub themselves the Fuse,
after a Jackson Browne song called just
that.
By 1978, the Fuse was one of the most
popular draws in the city, so much so the
new-wave sounding troupe wound up on the  radar
of a future Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
member. Although thousands claim to have
been at the St. Vital Hotel the November
night Elvis Costello joined the Fuse on
stage, following his sold-out concert at
Pantages Playhouse Theatre, in reality,
there were 200 people in the crowd, tops,
Briggs recalls.
The guys welcomed another famous face
three years later when, as the Six, they
were booked for a sold-out week of dates
at Broadways, a club located in the
basement of the Hotel Fort Garry. British
rockers the Police were in town that same
week, and the night before a show of their
own at the Winnipeg Arena, the group’s
leader made a point of checking out the
Six, which now counted Don in the fold.
They were standing in the kitchen area
between sets when Sting’s bodyguard poked
his head inside, saying his boss wanted to
 meet them. “I remember
him saying he really liked our song My
Elizabeth,” Paul recounts. “He was also
curious about how long we played. Back
then, we were doing four, 45-minute sets,
per night, and he was like, ‘oh my, that’s
a lot of work.’”
In 1986, two years after the dissolution
of the Six, the guys resurfaced as Jeffrey
Hatcher and the Big Beat. Their debut
album, Cross Our Hearts, drew rave reviews
in Rolling Stone magazine (“infectious,
upbeat and deeply felt”) and the Globe and
Mail (“classic rock and roll”). That led
to opening dates for the likes of Steve
Earle and John Hiatt. (In 1988, a
then-little known band, the Tragically
Hip, warmed up for the Big Beat at
Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern.)
In a 2005 interview, Hugh Swandel, the
group’s longtime manager, said, “I firmly
believe that if there had been an internet
back then, the Big Beat would have broke.”
In the same interview, he blamed the Big
Beat’s demise on their record company
Upside Records folding shortly after the
release of Cross Our Hearts. “It’s hard
when… for 10 years, everybody’s always
telling you you’re going to make it. Then,
when you finally get close, the rug gets
pulled out.”
Briggs tells a funny story about
Hatcher-Briggs, the group he, Paul and Don
hatched in the 1990s, a couple years after
Jeff moved to Vancouver to form
alt-country band the Blue Shadows with
American singer Billy Cowsill.
Hatcher-Briggs was booked at the downtown
Pyramid Cabaret. On their way into the
Fort Street club, they spotted a placard
advertising the show, only the
corresponding photo looked nothing like
them.
“It turned out there was another
Hatcher-Briggs band in the southern U.S.,
Alabama, I think, and the promoter, not
knowing who we were, threw up their
picture, instead of ours,” he says,
explaining that was one of the reasons
they reverted back to the Fuse, about 10
years ago.
As ever, Saturday’s setlist will touch on
every phase of the guys’ 49-year odyssey,
including a cover of Little Richard’s
Slippin’ and Slidin’, one of the first
songs they mastered, and Writing on the
Wall, one of the first tunes they wrote
and recorded.
 “We’ll also be
playing parts of the new record, keeping
in mind that it’s a party atmosphere and
people are there to dance, so we might
park some of the slower (songs),” Paul
says.
“There are also a few songs people would
probably like to hear that Jeff would
rather not do, simply because he doesn’t
identify with the lyrics the way he did
when he wrote them at the age of 22 or
23,” Don adds, mentioning Saturday will
mark the first time his two adult children
hear him play saxophone on stage. “We
respect that, plus we have enough songs
regardless. Heck, if we did everything
from our catalogue, we’d be up there for
days.”
About that; everybody chuckles when
quizzed about the 8:30 p.m. start-time,
which is markedly different from the “old
days,” when they rarely kicked it into
gear before 11 p.m., before proceeding to
play into the wee hours of the morning.
“Well, there is a noise curfew at the
Park, so we have to be done by midnight,
whether we like it or not,” Briggs says.
“That’s true,” Paul interjects, “but
honestly, at this point in our lives, we’d
happily go on at four in the afternoon,
right after David’s nap, and be home in
time for supper. Real rock ’n’ rolly,
right?”
David Sanderson
As
published in the Winnipeg Free Press,
March 2, 2024
Photo credit for all
images in the above article:
Brook Jones / Free Press
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