After our first meet and greet rehearsal with trumpeter Kevin Shields, I received another call about the ad I had plastered all over New Brunswick from a singer named Roger Apollon Jr. At the time he called me, Roger was attending Livingston College at Rutgers and working part-time as an orderly at St. Peter's Hospital in New Brunswick. Roger was the oldest son of Haitian immigrants and lived in West Orange, NJ. He was musically trained and had studied piano and knew how to sing and dance. Better yet, as we we would soon learn, he was the consummate front man!
Roger distinctly remembered seeing my ad on a Rutgers campus bus:
I'm on the Livingston campus bus and I see "Calling all rude boys and rude girls." I'm looking at it. It's looking for singer, drummer, everybody. It's like seven people. I'm like alright, it's like one guy. So I see it, I'm like "Ah, whatever." I'm like that's just so weird. Anyway, I get off the bus and I see that poster again! I rip it down. I put it in my pocket, you know, no cell phones. I'll call later. I completely forget and then I go into my pocket later on at work at St. Peters.
The first time Roger called me, was from a payphone inside St. Peter's hospital. He said he was a singer and had just left a reggae band called the Caribbean Musical Ensemble . Because he was working -- I could hear him being paged in the din of background noise inside the hospital -- our first call was short, but we made a date for him to stop by to meet up with me, Steve, Kevin and Jim.
When he arrived at my door a day later, I'm not sure I looked like what he was expecting me to look like. Once he saw me -- curly Jewfro and glasses -- he was ready to split. But the fact I was wearing a Fishbone "Fuck Racism" shirt when I answered the door was my saving grace.
When you answered the door, I was like "it's a solid no!" 'Cause even though you had a Fishbone T-shirt on, I was like, "this guy can't possibly like reggae, really? Ska? No way. I was expecting to see a white version of me, right? A well dressed rude boy!" I'm thinking, "I don't know how I'm gonna get out of this."
In an odd coincidence or perhaps fate, I had seen Roger a few weeks earlier on the platform of the New Brunswick train station while waiting to catch a train to New York City. He was a short, handsome young Black man with a box fade haircut wearing a pair of cool dark sunglasses, black brothel creepers and a shirt that said SKA underneath a dancing Walt Jabsco. I was stunned and had to rub my eyes to make sure I wasn't seeing a ghost. Sadly, I was unable to work up the nerve to approach him then and there. I figured I would try and find him at Penn Station but lost him in the crowd pouring off the train. Clearly the universe was sending me a message that I was on the right path. And here he was again standing at my door.
Once inside my apartment, Roger was greeted by Steve, Jim and Kevin:
So we walk in and it doesn't get any better, 'cause I see Steve Parker on the couch, who looks like an accountant, and then I see Kevin Shields, who is this rockabilly dude with a six-pack of little Budweisers, the half ones, which I've never even seen before. He's sitting there, he's like "hey."
Here's what Kevin remembered about meeting Roger:
We meet up again and there’s yet another new face and a Black one at that! I mean, I just got kicked out of a Rockabilly band! You know how it is, on the phone he sounded… taller. Hello to Roger Apollon Jr.Introductions made, Roger was willing to give the songs a listen:
I'm just like all right, I'm here, what have you got on the table?
I'm not going to lie. It was awkward. I barely knew Kevin and I had just met Roger, who despite his misgivings hid them well with a friendly smile. That said Steve didn't help our cause with Roger, but the songs Steve had written started to grow on him:
And Steve says like two words. He's noodling on his guitar, ignoring everything. You're doing all the talking and you play the tape, and I think the first song is "Moving". On the demo it had a calypso start, and then it gets to the ska part. I was like all right. Steve's singing on it, it's too high for him. I like the beat of it, cool, whatever, what else you got? "More and More" was on that tape. And I was like you know what? Not bad.
Give the demo version of "More and More" a listen:
Kevin's first impression of Roger and the rest of us grew that afternoon once he heard him sing along to our songs and to play a melodica he had brought along for the occasion:
Neat and petite, Roger's sitting on the edge of the sofa, playing along with us on a melodica! I’m thinking “That’s a pretty cool sound, this dude’s got some music in him.”Then he starts to sing. I think we’re on to something here.
My new friends have a real good work ethic. They seem to be chomping at the bit to get something going musically, and their songs, even in their larvae stage, are quite good. Through interrogation (see: “conversation”) I find out all of these chaps have been in bands before and have some good experience under their belts.
Everyone’s learning the songs, ol’ Steve and Marc have been busy lads ‘cause they’ve got lots of them and there ain’t a dog in the bunch. Yes, I find out, Mr. Cooper has drums and he knows how to use them. Everybody makes suggestions, everybody takes direction. Seems Roger’s got some song ideas hisself, as does Jim. The multi-headed beast is beginning to stir.
It was exciting to learn that Roger knew how to write songs. In fact, it was at this rehearsal or the one after when Steve and I played him a new song idea, that he quickly, on the spot, wrote the lyrics for what would become our most popular song "Ska In My Pocket." Like all the best songs, it took about five or ten minutes to write from start to finish.
Like me, Roger was drawn to 2 Tone while in high school. Being one of the few Black families in the predominantly white New Jersey suburb of West Orange had a huge impact on him and he dealt with racism on a regular basis and 2 Tone spoke to how he was feeling:
You know, racism was pretty right in your face. People didn't really care. It was kind of like standard. I was called all these names and so for me the political stuff I heard in 2 Tone music, I felt like that was the answer to the messed up stuff I was seeing happening to me.
Song by The Specials, The Selecter and English Beat spoke directly to Roger and his experience as a young Black man and became a philosophy for living:
2 Tone just made instant sense to me. Black and white, working together, doing music together, collaborating, right? Why work separately? Why not work together and look what happened. So 2 Tone was more than the music. It was the look, but it was also a way of life and how to live.
I later learned, Roger had yearned to be in a band for some time, and that desire was stoked when he met a fellow Black classmate and real live rude boy and son of Jamaican immigrants -- Ken "Miggy" Gayle -- who would later join our band for a short time (more on that in a later post).
Ken was the only other rude boy at Rutgers. You know, 40,000 students, there's two rude boys and we're on the same campus, you know? So we're fast friends. He tells me this band called The Toasters is coming to town, and says he knows the band. Ken is a great guy, but talks a lot of shit, right? Like he embellishes. So we get there, and sure enough he knows Lionel. That show just blew my mind.
At The Toasters show he attended at Rutgers with Ken, Roger was was able to finally see a live ska band:
There was maybe 100 kids, not too crowded. This was when it was Lionel and Sean up front. And at the end of the show Bucket had people come up. He waved to me. I was like what? I got up on stage and I was like "aw, this is it!" I'm on stage dancing with Lionel, and I'm like, "I have to do this. I have to figure out a way to do this."
Ken took Roger to another Toasters show at CBGB where he experienced first hand the vibrant NYC ska scene, but it was seeing Fishbone at Sarah Lawrence College a few weeks later with Ken that truly opened Roger to the idea of joining a ska band:
I went to Fishbone at Sarah Lawrence, I'm literally the only Black guy there. The band start playing, and girls are coming up to me like "Are you with the band?" I'm like no, I'm not." The second girl was like "Are you with the band?" I'm like, "no, I'm not." Third or fourth girl came up like "Are you in the band?" I'm like, "I am." That was the first time I was the most popular black guy in an all white space. Like, I could actually get laid now. All the girls were looking at me. Even the white dudes were like what's going on? Ken came and then played it up, "Yeah, yeah, he's in the band." My point is, I was popular 'cause of Fishbone. And they destroyed. It was awesome. They vamped, they improvised, they crowd surfed, they threw instruments, they caught them, they played the songs perfectly. It was incredible man. And they were all Black. I mean, these were Black guys. I'm like all right.
And while Roger may have been still making up his mind about our songs and us as potential bandmates, it was my massive ska and reggae record collection which sealed the deal and convinced him to sign on with us:
And then I saw your room with all the records and that was like, "okay!."Because I saw records in there I never even heard of. And I thought I knew a lot about reggae and ska. The truth is I knew nothing about ska. The Skatalites? I knew nothing about them until I met you. I mean you had ... it was like a library. Once I saw your record collection at least I knew you were all right. So for me that was an in. And then you seemed like the spokesman for the band. 'Cause Kevin had quips, but he didn't know what was going on, and Steve said nothing. I'm like, "Marc is kinda running the ship, then alright, this should be fine."
As a way to hook him in, I loaned Roger two albums I thought he would like and would introduce him to 60s ska. One was a Skatalites compilation and the other was a Prince Buster greatest hits record which he said he listened to obsessively for a weeks the rest of that summer.
A few days later, after several more living room rehearsals, I invited Roger to go to City Gardens in Trenton, New Jersey to see a Ranking Roger solo show!
Stay tuned for How Starting a Ska Band Changed My Life - Part 4!
No comments:
Post a Comment