Fast Eddy's Arj Narayan Clobbers His Drums...and Cancer

From the sound of Fast Eddy's music, which falls somewhere between hard-driving metal and the swaggering ’70s rock of the New York Dolls, you would think the brash Denver band must have gotten its name from the late, great Motörhead guitarist “Fast” Eddie Clarke. However, Fast Eddy drummer Arj Narayan, an Albuquerque native firmly planted in Colorado since transferring to Fairview High School as a teenager, paints a more colorful picture of the moniker's origin.

“It was kind of a nod to an old friend who was a cab driver who used to pick up my bandmates,” Narayan explains. “He used to sell them…illicit substances.”

Back when this cab driver was selling drugs to Narayan’s future bandmates, Narayan was playing in such local bands as Black Acid Devil and Il Cattivo. Fast Eddy frontman Micah Morris also played guitar for Dirty Few. Essentially, Fast Eddy was a side project that slowly became a main attraction.

“At that point in time [2014], everybody else had something else going on,” Narayan recalls. “I remember they came to the Il Cattivo show and they were like, ‘Hey, let's jam. You’re a good drummer.’ So we jammed after that show, wrote one song on the spot, and we’ve been at it ever since.”

Fast Eddy’s new album, To the Stars, is its third full-length release, and was dropped along with an entertaining video for “The Rapture,” which showcases Nuns of Brixton singer Jim Yelenick, a Denver fixture, as a greedy pastor. Although the quartet’s concerts are famously loud, explosive affairs, when heard on record, Fast Eddy comes across as a more expansive, ’70s-inspired outfit with diverse inspirations.

“Power pop definitely played an influence,” says Narayan. “The Strokes, Oasis. We love Motörhead, definitely, and on the more dynamic songs, like ‘Grey Day,’ that was more of a Beatles influence. ... It was a keyboard-driven song that Micah had already come up with, with the melody, and we whittled it down to what it is now.”
Narayan is ubiquitous in the Denver underground scene, “chasing rock-and-roll dreams” and playing heavy music for the last decade-plus. But he's confronted a different kind of heaviness in his life lately, and it took him away from drumming until just recently.

“I was diagnosed with cancer in October 2023,” he says. “I’ve been in treatment and finished chemotherapy. Right now, I’m on to radiation and eventually surgery. I’m on a positive track for healing.

“It was not a good thing that happened, by any stretch,” the drummer adds, “but I had stomach pain that wouldn’t go away, and I went to see my doctor and needed to know what was going on with my body. Luckily, I had good doctors and figured it out pretty quickly.”

Narayan, who studied English in college and was once a Boulder Weekly contributor, has been encouraged to start a blog about his journey with cancer, but he isn’t quite ready yet.

“Everybody was, like, ‘Why don’t you write about it?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know.’ Maybe I will. It’s kind of hard to write about it when you’re in it.”

Narayan says that his break from performing to undergo chemotherapy presented a first for the rock-and-roll lifer. “That was the only time I’ve actually really stopped playing music since I’ve been living in Colorado," he notes. "I told the band I was having some health issues. We had plans, and we had to put some things on hold last year, just while I figured out how long all this is going to take.”

Fast Eddy played one show in February and one in March — the February gig was the day before a chemotherapy session — and Narayan and company are carefully getting back to rocking while the drummer battles.

“It’s felt good,” he says, “slowly dipping my feet in the water.”

Narayan also plays with the local band Cleaner, and says he’s getting back to gigging with both bands as 2024 unfolds; in particular, he hopes that Fast Eddy puts together a European tour at some point soon. Things are just different at the moment, of course.

“We definitely want to go to Europe,” he says. “The reason we made the album was because we had tours scheduled in April of 2023 and the dates were not lining up; we just had a bunch of empty holes and were not wanting to go over there and try to figure it out when we were there. We were kind of like, ‘That’s too much of a financial risk. Why don’t we record an album instead?’ We ended up spending all of our money to go record an album here in town.”

To the Stars is the impressive result of that choice, and a sign of strength from a band that’s been together a long time but still hasn’t peaked.

“We've been doing it for ten years,” Narayan says. “In the beginning, we took the music seriously, but we didn't take it so seriously and invest everything into it. That came along later. We grew together as musicians and came to enjoy each other's company. I think we just have an ability to communicate with each other and get along. Sometimes not everybody gets along, but we seem to just kind of thrive off of the chaos of touring and stuff. And just being in a rock-and-roll band, I think everybody's just kindred spirits."