The 100: Deftones, AROUND THE FUR

When I first started buying music, it was on cassette tapes. By the time I got around to selecting my own tunes, it was that squishy period in the early ‘90s when vinyl had already been put on the back burner (I remember when Pearl Jam released Vitalogy in 1994 and it was kind of a big deal there was a vinyl version because nobody really did that anymore). The CD had basically overtaken all other formats as the primary source for albums, though I think people forget just how long cassettes continued to coexist alongside their CD counterparts.

I didn’t have a CD player of my own until I was a teenager, so if I wanted to listen to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Into the Great Wide Open or Michael Jackson’s Bad, I had to either throw it in my Walkman or put it in the tape deck of my mother’s car. And even after I became a CD boy, cassettes remained a big part of my musical diet: I loved making mixtapes, and by the time I got around to having my own vehicles I only ever had tape decks in the stereo.

Thanks to that cassette player in my car (which was a very fancy piece of technology, by the way), I was still buying new music on cassette deep into the ‘90s, largely because they were cheap and because there was certain music I only listened to while driving. At some point during the summer of 1998, I took a lunch break from my bank internship in downtown Hartford, walked three blocks to Record Express (RIP), and spent the ten bucks I had for a sandwich on a copy of what ended up being my favorite car album of all time: Deftones’ sophomore release Around the Fur.

I was only vaguely aware of Deftones’ 1995 debut Adrenaline; I had only heard the single “7 Words” and treated it mostly as a novelty song (which it basically was). Deftones were always lumped in with Korn as early adopters of the sound that would come to be known as nu metal, but they were really doing two completely different things. I loved loud guitars and I loved hip-hop (Method Man’s Tical 2000: Judgment Day was another in-car cassette favorite), but outside of Rage Against the Machine and the Judgement Night soundtrack I had no real use for rapping over metal riffs.

So I was a little taken aback when my local modern rock radio station started (briefly) spinning Deftones’ gauzy anthem “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away).” Though there’s some hip-hop DNA on Around the Fur, “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)” has a big bright midtempo momentum to it, and frontman Chino Moreno wails and bellows and moans and struts like a shoegaze Michael Hutchence. It sounds like the type of song you would write if you wanted to get on the radio and only listened to Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream  and Tool’s Aenima. Since that was in my wheelhouse, I invested in the cassette version because it was cheaper.

I made the right decision. As I said, Around the Fur is the best thing that ever spent quality time in the tape deck of my car (the first one being a 1987 Sterling 825SL, and when the transmission on that blew to smithereens I got myself a 1990 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme). Nothing on it is quite as pop-forward as “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away),” but it has an incredible series of riffs and a rhythmic punch that has always directly triggered my adrenal glands. Moreno has a way of making a repeated phrase into a singalong refrain even if there’s no real melody, which is definitely the case with my favorite track “Lotion.” I love the way the verse kind stumbles around, then the chorus shows up out of nowhere to pull everything into focus, only for the bridge (which features Moreno repeatedly chanting “I feel sick”) to simultaneously bond the two and tear the whole thing down again. Those type of musical magic tricks happen again and again on Around the Fur, particularly on “My Own Summer (Shove It),” “Lhabia,” “Headup” and the title track.

I’m convinced that production on Around the Fur was optimized for cassettes. Years later while I was working on a story on the cassette revival, Chuck D of Public Enemy told me they specifically engineered albums like Fear of a Black Planet to sound good on cassette boom boxes because that’s how their audience was going to absorb them. I believed at the time that Deftones made sure their second album sounded ideal cranked up super loud as you used a gas pedal. I once asked Moreno about whether they considered how Around the Fur would sound on cassette, and I think he thought I was just a crazy person. When I listen to Around the Fur now on streaming, I still love the songs but it doesn’t quite hit in the same way it did when I was young, dumb, and in the driver’s seat.