Francisco Ramirez was having trouble sleeping. It was January 1999, and he’d just come home from a gig at the Fireside Bowl, playing bass with notoriously rowdy local punks the Traitors. “I couldn’t get to bed because my stomach was hurting,” he says, “so I went to the hospital.”
For the first two years after his diagnosis, Ramirez kept the cancer at bay with pills and other relatively noninvasive treatments. He even managed a couple more tours with the Traitors, though not without making concessions to his illness. “I would have to inject myself with interferon in my legs the morning after a show,” he says.
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Over the next year, though, the other members of the band that would become Gasoline Fight all came into Ramirez’s orbit through his job at the Fireside. Guitarist Scott Flaster, formerly of the Michigan band Small Brown Bike, had moved in across the street and started working at the bowling alley that spring. And in the fall another guitarist, Stan Wood, a veteran of local postpunks Peralta, began doing sound there. “We started jamming and right away it sounded good,” says Wood. “We had a lot of common tastes musically.”
Ramirez is still working for MP Productions (at the Bottom Lounge, now that MP no longer books the Fireside) and plans to transfer to the Logan Square Auditorium at the end of the month. “I’m still trying to get my stamina up a little,” he says. “I lost a lot of muscle in my playing arm and I have to get that back some. But I’m almost a hundred percent right now.”
