It still seems odd to me that the Garden State, which has been home to some of the greatest and most diverse bands and musicians in the history of popular music -- Sinatra, Monk, The Four Seasons, Springsteen, Fugees -- didn't have a dedicated ska band until I helped to start one in the late 80s. Its even more curious that our rag tag group of seven musical misfits culled from a poster I put up around New Brunswick, NJ would be the band to do it. But we did and it changed my life.
When I reflect back on how we started and what we accomplished in three short years, it boggles my mind. We quickly went from being a local New Brunswick band to playing and performing with a who's who of ska and reggae bands: Special Beat ( a super group featuring members of The Specials and English Beat), The Selecter, The Skatalites, Bad Manners, De La Soul, The Alarm, Jimmy Cliff, The Skatalites, Burning Spear, Boogie Down Productions and nearly every key American ska band of the 80's and early 90s.
How did I end up being in the first ska band from New
Jersey? The simple answer is that ska and 2 Tone music in particular had been a
defining hallmark of my high school and college years. I loved it so much that I
willed myself to try and learn the bass so I could be in a ska band. And though
I could barely play the bass, I did the best I could. As it turned out, my timing for wanting to play ska was
impeccable. In 1986, I had discovered a thriving ska scene in New York which was
just a train ride away from New Brunswick. I shared what that first experience
was like in the introduction to my my book:
I was paging through the concert listings in the back of the Village Voice and I discovered that there were ska bands playing in New York City! And, shortly thereafter, after, I was watching The Toasters, Beat Brigade, Second Step, The Boilers, and A-Kings all playing a uniquely New York version of ska music. Except these were American kids (well, except for that one British guy fronting The Toasters) singing in New York accents about what was happening on the streets of Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn. It looked like ska. It sounded like ska and, most importantly, it had the same intensity as the 2-Tone bands I revered. It was LIVE and it was LOUD! And what was really inspiring was that the clubs were packed with kids my age. They wore pork pie hats. They wore Doc Martens and Creepers and they were adorned with band patches heralding my new heroes: The Specials and The Beat and The Selecter. I had found my tribe. I picked up a copy of The Toasters first EP Recriminations, and The Boilers Flotsam cassette tape at Bleeker Bob’s in Manhattan, and then found my way to a copy of NY Beat: Hit & Run; a compilation featuring all the NYC ska bands I was seeing live. This was real and it was authentic and it was life changing.Between 1986 and 1988 -- inspired by that show at CBGB -- I did my best to learn how to play the bass. I wasn't pretty but I did an apprenticeship in another band formed with college friends -- including original Bigger Thomas drummer Jim Cooper and guitarist Steve Parker -- where the process of writing songs and rehearsing helped me to better understand where the notes on the fretboard were and how to play them. This college band played a mix of new wave, pop rock and rock and roll. It was fun but I kept pushing to play ska with the support of Jim and Steve -- and when the band ended, we were finally ready to start a ska-only band.
1988 was a turning point for me for a lot of reasons. At 23 I was a bit lost about what I wanted to
do with my life. I had graduated from Rutgers University a year earlier and had
done quite well in school but was at a loss about how I could turn a B.A. in
Political Science into a real job. My girlfriend at the time was career oriented
and though she supported my vague ideas about playing music or starting a band,
she also was worried about my future or more accurately our future now that we
were college graduates. She had turned an internship at Merck -- just up the
road from New Brunswick in Rahway -- into a full fledged job at graduation. She got up every morning at 6 am, put on a suit and commuted to work. It was a shock to my system just watching her do it. I wasn't sure I could do it.
In
contrast, I worked a series of minimum wage jobs before unexpectedly getting a
3-day a week, part-time job to join the New Brunswick Home News as a real estate
reporter in early 1988. Like learning the bass, learning to be a reporter in a newsroom was hard. I was
surrounded by reporters who had been trained and knew how to conduct interviews quickly and then knock out copy for stories that needed minimal editing. I quickly realized that the album reviews I had written for the Rutgers college newspaper hadn't prepared me for the task at hand. Working Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, I was expected to pick a story topic, interview people for the story and submit it for editing before it was published in the Business section of the Friday paper. I barely pulled it off. And after four months of trial and error I was unceremoniously relieved of my duties by a senior editor. Seeing my byline each Friday had been a real rush, but the pressure to turn around a story was more than I could handle. I was also clearly out of my league.
After being let go from the Home News, I was finally ready to start a band. Steve and I got together regularly that spring and early summer. He loved ska and reggae and we had bonded over that. On first glance, Steve was not someone you would expect to be a guitar god. He was skinny, unassuming and quiet. But beneath his veneer was one of most talented musicians I've ever met. And despite looking like the 99 pound weakling in those Charles Atlas ads in the back of comic books, Steve had an anti-authority streak a mile wide. That anger had caused him to miss graduating from high school because he flat out refused to go to gym class. He just wouldn't go because there were kids in his gym class who bullied him. And despite being pressured by his teachers and school administrators he held his ground. In addition to bonding over music, we also shared less than satisfactory high school experiences -- I had also been bullied in high school-- that we funneled into the angry protest songs we were writing.
Steve had turned his small suburban New Jersey bedroom into a recording studio. He still lived at home, but his parents encouraged our music making. His father had been a notable studio musician in the 60s playing on a number of AM radio hits so the apple hadn't fallen far from the tree. Steve had several guitars and basses -- including his father's Gibson Les Paul -- a small drum kit and a TASCAM 4-track. I would bring him rudimentary bass lines and lyrics for songs and he would disappear for a few days and then play me fully realized songs he had fleshed out and recorded. I was amazed by what he has created. He was able to take my aspirational ideas and turn them into real songs. More importantly, Steve respected my ideas and saw value in them and in me. After several months of woodshedding together that spring and summer, we had close to ten songs. We both agreed it was time to find other people to play them with us.
And so, I created the flyer you see above using Xeroxed bits and bobs from albums I loved to advertise for ska musicians. I stapled and pasted them up all over the Rutgers University campus, on campus busses and outside music venues and bars. And then I waited. And not two days later, I got calls from trumpet player Kevin Shields and singer Roger Apollon Jr.
Stay tuned for How Starting a Ska Band Changed My Life - Part 2!
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