The Black Fairies

If I was a betting man (and I am), I'd reckon most people in Seattle don't recognize the band name Black Fairies, much less realize that they broke up towards the tail end of 2007. That's your fucking loss, because this band was great. They had an excellent guitar driven punk garage sound. The first time I saw the band live something seemed familiar... the lead singer's voice and the guitar sound I somehow knew, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out where from. So I just sipped my beer and nodded my head along to the music, thinking, "These guys rock!" The next day I listened to some of their songs on the Web and it clicked with me, the singer was this guy:

James from the old Empty Records band The Putters. The Putters were around in the first half of '90s playing places like The Weathered Wall, OK Hotel and OffRamp. Their debut 7" on Empty was entitled "Muscle Cars" and totally fit their sound, gasoline powered amped up rock'n'roll, the kind of music that should have been playing from muscle cars during the '80s instead of Aerosmith. The Putters went on to put out one album, "Fear of Women" in 1994.

I decade later James started The Black Faires with Tony and Matthew on guitar, Denny on drums, and him up front singing and on bass. The old saying about the apple doesn't fall far from the tree was true in this case, because if you still play your old Putters CD (OK, I might be the only person in Seattle that does, who knows) and listen to The Black Fairies, you will hear a hell of a lot of similarities. And that was a good thing. I caught the band three or four times during their existence and they rocked, usually all playing dressed in black with a guitar-driven assault of catchy rock. Check out a few songs on The Black Fairies MySpace page. These photos are from the band playing live at the Monkey Pub on May 13, 2006.

Like I said, they broke up without much fanfair in 2007, the members are now moving on to other projects. Tony is playing guitar in Lords of the North and Matthew is playing bass in Sindios. No word on what James is doing next, my vote would be for a Putters reunion!