- — July 1, 2009
From punk musician to firefighter and back again.
Jesse Fox (left) lives both of his childhood fantasies at once: fighting fires and playing rock ’n’ roll. “I spent my whole life wanting to be a firefighter, and in my early twenties I felt I could not combine the two,” says Fox, sitting at the kitchen table of the Central Pierce Fire and Rescue firehouse. But the financial security and twenty-four-hours-on/twenty-four-hours-off schedule of the fire biz proved to be just the thing to help him balance his music, marriage, mortgage and unquenchable urge to douse flames. “Being a fireman enables me to become the musician I have always wanted to be.”
Fox has long been the kind of musician everybody wants to be: successful. After teen years playing in bands (and serving as a fire cadet), he cut his teeth as a singer, guitarist and drummer in Mugwump, Delilah, Bangs (on the noted indie label Kill Rock Stars), Polecat and Leuko. At eighteen, he met Seaweed, Tacoma’s seminal punk rockers (who have released albums on the prestige labels Sub Pop, Hollywood and Merge Records), at the legendary weekend shows at their home, the Lakewood House. In 2006, he took the drum throne in Seaweed. He’s also frontman/guitarist for To the Waves, heard on 107.7 The End and on a compilation CD that also featured Pearl Jam.
Rock is a Darwinian world. So is firefighting. Of every three thousand people who start the grueling training process, only thirteen become professionals — less than 0.5 percent. Fox worked his way up, starting out by transporting patients to Harborview, King County’s center for emergency cases, for a private ambulance company that paid so badly he had to sell his CDs to buy groceries. He also volunteered for the Maple Valley Fire Department for four years while playing in two full-time bands.
Fox survived the fire academy, a paramilitary-style boot camp; alas, his band Leuko did not. The tattooed rocker aced the chief’s interview, and then, as far as he knows, beat all the academy and departmental fitness records, despite (or maybe because of) being the lone vegetarian. His fellow firefighters are still getting used to that.
“Being a fireman enables me to become the musician I have always wanted to be.” — Jesse Fox
Seven times out of ten, what Fox faces are not fires but Emergency Medical Service (EMS) calls: botched suicide attempts, a homeless man putting his feet in bleach for an hour to kill a foot fungus, a recent hanging. “It’s the only job in the world that you get to go into somebody’s house without a search warrant,” says Fox. “They trust us, so we have to be good people. We’re handed people’s prized possessions, whether it’s their child or their jewelry, and we’re expected to take care of them.”
You wouldn’t expect his twin careers to have much in common, but it turns out firefighter Fox has been able to apply a lot of the skills he learned the hard way as a musician. First, you must improvise. “Working an EMS call is an artform in itself — with every call being so different you have to ‘dance’ with the patient to find the root of the problem.” You have to help motivate the guys, and get along in tense circumstances. “We’re right there working with each other, and whether they’re dying or bleeding all over you, it’s a very intimate job.” And forget about solos, it’s all about teamwork: “I look less at my personal performance and more toward the overall effect of what we did.”
Both professions also involve a lot of hurry-up-and-wait. “You train and train for an event that might only last half an hour.” But when it happens, it’s unforgettable. “Early in my career, the excitement of hitting the stage and going on a call was an adrenalin-pumping event. Surrounded by smoke and flames, on your knees, working to knock down the fire with just one other guy — it’s a crazy, unique event that very few get to experience.” After years of live punk-rock shows and intense emergency calls, Fox has mastered the art of grace under pressure. Whether counting off a song or saving somebody from certain death, “my heart rate doesn’t change all that much.”
Fox’s life as a rocker, however, may be about to change, for the better. To the Waves is coming off a year of solid airplay. The band bought what Fox calls “the Red Dragon,” a souped-up GMC van, from the fire department. They’ll record a second album this summer at Two Sticks Audio, the studio owned by Death Cab for Cutie’s Jason McGerr. And Fox will continue to play drums for and record a full-length CD with Seaweed.
“I feel complete both as a firefighter and as a musician,” says Fox. It’s two dreams come true. •
