To most musicians, albums are like pearls: something you polish to a high gleam and show off. Each one, they assure the media, is a gem in its own right, but the goal is to string a series of them together, so that they wind up showing you off.
But that's not true for everyone. Take, for instance, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. It's not that they have anything against albums. If that were the case, they wouldn't have released eight of them, including their new one, A Jackknife to a Swan (Side One Dummy, 2002).
It's just that some things are more important to this eight-piece outfit (six players, one singer, and a full-time dancer) than audio jewelry. What matters most now is exactly what mattered most to them way back in the early '80s, when the first version of the group came together up in Beantown and started fooling around with odd combinations of musical styles, like kids with matches and lighter fluid.
The heart and soul of the Bosstones is, and has always been, playing live. Nothing beats it — not even a new CD.
Don't believe it? Then catch this juggernaut next time it rolls into your town. Suited up like dapper assassins, they deliver a show that stomps, bellows, and roars. Imagine a herd of elephants stampeding in tempo and you're close.
The Bosstone formula was unique at one time, a volatile fusion of punk, hardcore, and ska. That combination of styles is evident on Jackknife, with trombonist Chris Rhodes and saxophonists Tim “Johnny Vegas” Burton and Roman Fleysher blaring over the rhythm section's crunchy grooves. There's no “Saturday in the Park” delicacy here; these guys are as loud as they are tight. Their mission isn't to dress up the changes; it's to join guitarist Lawrence Katz, bassist Joe Gittleman, and drummer Joe Sirois in a roiling, rhythmic battle royal.
What's the secret to their success? As with any band that's in it for the long haul, there are several levels to consider. Speaking musically, the Bosstones built their momentum early, through daring cross-genre experiments. They found an original sound and ran with it through indefatigable touring and, every now and then, a visit to the studio.
More elusively, they understood the difference between fusion and fission. Most bands that try to sew different styles of music into a cozy sonic blanket tend to work with the elements those styles have in common; they frequently ignore more essential and possibly more dangerous qualities that don't adapt so easily. That's fusion. The Bosstones, in contrast, bash styles against each other; collision is where their energy comes from. That's fission.
When explored in the studio, this approach can produce solid, rockin' results. Onstage, in the real world, it heats things up to near-lethal levels of intensity. The Bosstones know that the stage is their home. Whereas other bands might see their own discography as a measure of their progress, these guys see their lives as an unbroken string of gigs, from the small clubs they still visit to the most recent Vans Warped Tour. It's not about experimenting anymore; it's about knowing they've got a good thing and riding with it as long as the pleasure is there and the fans keep coming.
Although singer Dicky Barrett obviously has a lot to do with the impact they make at their shows, this story's essence breaks down into three primary components: the rhythm section, the horns, and the life … plus one real secret to survival, which we're saving until the end of the story. (Don't look ahead!) During one leg of the Warped Tour we caught up with three Bosstones who could address each of these issues. In their words, as in their music, there's a lot to dig in to. Let's start with…
THE RHYTHM SECTION
Way back in the pre-Bosstones era, musicians in search of an identity tended to commit to one or another school. While every player with ears and an open mind could draw from other kinds of music, it was more typical to work pretty much within clearly delineated boundaries. In Britain, for instance, this led the skinhead generation of the '70s to latch on to Jamaican reggae, ska, and rock steady — which, in turn, led to the more ecumenical two-tone movement, with its emphasis on racial harmony as well as stylistic purity.
What made the Bosstones unusual was their willingness to go after any kind of music that pushed their buttons. Bassist Joe Gittleman, who was there pretty much from the start, remembers that the band was always aware of how unusual this strategy was. “We were mixing ska with punk and metal,” he says. “But it wasn't about combining them. When we went from a ska thing to a punk thing, we wanted it to feel like they were taken from two different albums by two different bands and stuck together with a piece of Scotch tape. We wanted the transitions to be blatant and harsh. We wanted the ska grooves to be good, but when we went to the hard stuff we wanted it to slam in a way that was not at all smooth. We went from ska to punk and back to ska, like channel switching on your guitar rig.”
Their refusal to blend styles is crucial. The players instinctively dug the idea of being able to play in more than one way without having to water anything down, but they also sensed that there was a commercial hook here. “We figured this would make us stand out from the crowd,” Gittleman says. “We wanted to do something that wasn't like what anybody else was doing. We weren't interested in sounding like anybody else; we wanted to sound like ourselves, and we were willing to do anything to make that happen. We'd take the craziest ideas and hammer away at them for an hour and a half. Maybe some of it was crap, but we were willing to take that risk if it led us eventually to something original.”
Sure enough, people took note, faster even than the band itself had expected. “Once we recorded our first record [Devils Night Out, released in 1990 by Taang Records], it was literally a month between when we played our first all-ages show and when we started selling out 800-capacity venues in Boston and Providence,” Gittleman says. “With all the work we did, we could immediately see the fruits of our labor. We didn't have to do, like, our third tour around the country, playing to nobody. These clubs had no idea we would be selling out, but the audiences knew what was happening. If you were anywhere in and around Boston, our shows were like, ‘What the hell is this?’ It was a cool, underground energy.”
Much of their success depended on careful manipulation of their image as well as their sound. Their checkered suits helped them stand out from other bands on the Boston scene, while also acknowledging the black-and-white patterns worn by some of their favorite British two-tone artists. The look was tough and tuned in to the sound, but Gittleman admits to another reason for the fashion statement: “The suits were originally to distract from the fact that we didn't have our tunes together,” he laughs. “It was always our opinion that if somebody was going to plop down five bucks to see us, we had to make an effort to let people know we're there to entertain. If that meant putting on a clean shirt, well, that's the least we could do.”
The band's lineup has undergone occasional adjustments, but the theory behind the Bosstones beat hasn't changed. The most difficult switch came when Lawrence Katz signed on a couple of years ago. Given the guitar's importance in ska, the band had to be extremely careful about choosing a replacement for founding guitarist Nate Albert. They wound up auditioning about 20 candidates before agreeing on Katz. The deciding factor? “We had given him eight or so tunes, and he learned them exactly as they were on the record,” Gittleman explains. “We heard a lot of great players, but nobody else did the ska stuff, the punk stuff, and all the different things we do as well as he did.”
Bosstone dancer and business manager Ben Carr agrees. “He was nervous at the audition, but when we hit the songs he played exactly the guitar parts that were on the albums. He didn't add his own stuff or step out of the groove. Now that he's in the band, of course he adds his own flair and does it his way. But he understood that when you're trying out for a gig, you really need to fit in to the sound of the band.”
By keeping the original essence of their sound intact, the Bosstones have sustained themselves over some 13 years, with no sign of exhaustion in sight. It's important to play your best whenever you hit the stage, but as Gittleman sees it, you also have to focus on what makes your music unique.
“So many bands have come and gone — even successful bands,” he muses. “The Bosstones have survived dozens of trends. We've been unpopular, popular, and unpopular again. For the first seven or eight years of our existence, radio wouldn't touch us with a 20-foot pole. We were on a label that was begging us to bury our horns. We were like, ‘Fuck that, we're the Bosstones!’ The best thing we ever did was to play exactly what we want and just have fun, because as long as you can make a living, it'll all swing back around eventually.”
THE HORNS
Sure, they were a hassle at first. On some of their first club jobs, when the horn section consisted of just one trumpet and one sax, it was hard to find a place for the “extra” guys on cramped bandstands, especially with all the jumping around that everyone enjoyed doing during the show. But that horn sound has been vital to the Bosstones from the start. It's not icing; it's baked into the cake itself.
In fact, the horns are so intrinsic to the Bosstones that, unlike most other bands with brass and reeds, they've never conducted sectional rehearsals. New tunes are thrashed out by the entire group at the same time. “Ideas come from everybody,” says tenor saxman Tim Burton. “The drummer might come up with a horn part, and we might tell him he needs to do a half-time beat here or whatever. We play by ear, all of us; nothing gets written out. One or two times through a song and we've got it. The only problem is that you can have a hard time hearing yourself in rehearsals, so sometimes your part doesn't get worked out until you take the song to the studio. Then it's like, ‘Oh, that's what you were playing there!’”
Arguably, this isn't the most efficient way to put an arrangement together, as Burton acknowledges. “A lot of times I'll just play notes until they sound good or bizarre, depending on what we need,” he says. “Horn parts, like everything else in our songs, will change 20 times in rehearsal, until they're completely different from where we started. In the end we usually have one tenor and the trombone playing in unison, with the other tenor on a higher part, either with harmony or the same note an octave up. But we can go off the wall at any time too.”
This mob-rule approach to practice brings every element of the Bosstones into the song, from the rhythm bed on up. “We want it to be over the top,” Gittleman says. “We like being off the rails at times. Especially on some of those early records, there might not necessarily be room for the horns in some of the songs, but we shove 'em in there anyway.”
The roots of the Bosstone horns lie mainly in ska, with only a dusting of jazz. “Our biggest influence was Bad Manners, the ska band from England,” Burton says. “They had this really aggressive horn thing going on. We were really affected by those two-tone bands, and bands like the Clash that had a reggae sound, and Fishbone too, even though we started out independently of them. Personally, I was influenced as much by Sid Vicious as I was by John Coltrane.”
THE LIFE
Gittleman does a lot more than lay down burnin' bass lines. In many respects he epitomizes all that's right about the Bosstones, from his entry-level climb into the music business to the initiative he's taken within and beyond the band.
If you had been backstage at Warped, you'd see what I mean. Where most musicians might spend their downtime staring into space, Gittleman decided to do something more productive. That's what led to Jittery Joe's.
“At every show I set up a stand, came up with a cool name, and sold iced coffee to the 600 employees of the Warped Tour,” Gittleman explains. “It's a good way to pass the time — and not only that, it put a couple hundred extra bucks in my pocket each day.”
The lesson here to up-and-coming musicians is to think beyond your role. Sure, you're part of a band effort, but ultimately it's your career, and the more you can handle on your own, the better the odds of staying in the business.
Gittleman, for example, didn't start off as a player. He toured as a roadie with a metal/punk Boston band called Gang Green for over a year before getting the gig as their bassist. He also put in time on road crews with the Del Fuegos and Treat Her Right, Mark Sandman's band before he put Morphine together. Consequently, when he signed on with the Bosstones he had more travel experience than anyone else in the group.
“But truth be told,” he confides, “working as a guitar tech or a roadie is going to make you more money than being in a band. The guy who just plays the guitar really great isn't going to get as much work as the guy who can play the guitar, the bass, the drums, the accordion, and the keyboards pretty well, and also knows how to take care of the gear. Plus, it's fun. I wouldn't mind doing more of it, to be honest.”
Like Gittleman, dancer Ben Carr came up through a roadie gig. He started off as a high school kid, schlepping amps for the nascent Bosstones; today he's the “Bosstone” himself, the guy you see hoofing it onstage as the band tears through its set. More than that, he's their tour manager — in fact, by his own reckoning, he's probably the only dancing tour manager in music today.
With a wisdom earned in and out of countless spotlights, Carr has one bit of vital advice for aspiring road warriors: “Club managers and promoters are not bad people, but they will try to rip you off every chance they get. Go into each deal with that knowledge, then try to cover all the bases. If you're going on sales at the door, and they say that only 20 people paid, count the ticket stubs. Your best bet is to bring someone to do that, like a tour manager, who might have other duties too, whether it be sound or merchandise or driving.”
From musicians to stage techs, the Bosstones road show operates as a family, with everyone accorded pretty equal status on the bus. There was a time not terribly long ago when all 12 (the band, the crew, and the driver) somehow contorted themselves into a single van; the survival skills they learned eyeball to earlobe guide them today in less crowded quarters.
“That is the real key to sticking it out as a band,” Burton says. “Everybody in the band is a good guy. We respect each other, but we definitely bust each other's balls. People from the outside can't believe the way we talk to each other. We gamble a lot. We drink a lot, although not as much as we used to; that helps keep things light.”
Okay — drinking, gambling, and mutual respect help make things hang together. But what's the real secret? What's the one thing that explains how a dozen party-animal — road-warrior types keep it together enough to rock houses throughout the world and keep cranking it for who knows how many years to come?
Golf.
“Four or five of us play, on average, every other day,” Burton estimates. “Here on Warped we usually finish by 4:00 in the afternoon, and if we can find a golf course in the area that'll take us at 5:00, we might get 18 holes in.”
But … golf?
Burton laughs. “Hey, there are tons of golfers on Warped — probably 40. We play with NOFX all the time. We've been playing with American Hi-Fi — Stacy Jones shot a 79 the other day! But it's also a sport you do by yourself. You challenge yourself to do the best you can do. It's creative and individual. It's punk!”
Actually, anything that's based on beating your best, hanging out with your buds, and staying creative for the long haul is Bosstones, pure and simple.
