How do you capture the power and spirit of your live show when going from a sweaty, fan-filled club to a frosty, sterile studio? If you’re the Slackers, you use the stage as your studio. When the veteran New York ska/reggae band tracked the bedrock for their new studio disc, Peculiar, that’s exactly what they did.
With a batch of new tracks, some social and political songs, others touching on family and loved ones, the Slackers returned to one of their favorite haunts, Ernesto’s in Sittard, Holland, where they’ve cut a pair of live albums. In front of another batch of sweaty, easy-skanking Dutch ska freaks, the band cut the core of Peculiar— the rhythm tracks. After stripping out the rhythm tracks from Ernesto’s, the Slackers overdubbed vocals, horns and guest spots from the likes of Alex Desert of Hepcat back home at ex-Slacker Jeff “King Django” Baker’s New Jersey studio, and in L.A.—where they used some of the very instruments heard on some of Motown’s later-era classics.
As a result the band has blended the best of both worlds: the clarity and balance of a studio record with the spirit and fever they’ve generated onstage across the globe for nearly 15 years.
“A lot of times our records are groovy and mellow, and the live experience is a little more aggressive and over the top,” says trombonist/vocalist Glen Pine. “When you go into a studio, your head’s in a different place, but when you’re live, you have to project. Sometimes that’s fantastic for you as a player, because you have to pull it out of you.” Initially the Ernesto’s plan was merely an experiment. “But after we heard it,” Pine says, “We were like, ‘Wait, we’d be real hard pressed to beat that in the studio, because the vibe is there, we’re feeding off the audience.’”
In the spirit of the great ska, reggae and punk of the ‘70s, out of which the band’s sound was born, Peculiar reflects Americans’—and, specifically, New Yorkers’—growing displeasure with the leadership (or lack thereof) coming from Washington in songs like “International War Criminal” and “Propaganda.”
“My Congressman to my president are all businessman just scheming/They tell me who’s my enemy and who’s my friends, and I’m not sure that I believe them/Streetside posters are encouraging me peeping/Well, to report my local terrorist and the company their keeping,” vocalist/keyboardist Vic Ruggerio opines on the former over a gritty, box-rocking bassline.
“Half of the songs are really political, written with the intention of just voicing our opinions,” Ruggerio says. “It seems like nobody was voicing their discontent with the way things are going lately.”
“At the time we were writing these songs and recording them, there weren’t a lot of people, artists and musicians that were willing to talk about how they felt about what was going on in the country,” notes Pine, referring to the controversy triggered by the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. “It’s all very confusing, and nobody seemed to be talking about it. At the same time, there’s a bunch of love songs and love lost songs.”
In its packaging and design, the album embraces the vibe of a freak show, via vintage 20th Century photos snapped at New York’s best slice of Americana weirdness: the forever trashy and tacky—and forever American—Coney Island. It works on multiple levels: Some of Peculiar’s more political fare embodies the very essence of what it is to be an American—challenging authority and speaking your mind—so what better for a bunch of New Yorkers to represent their country and culture with than the Big Apple’s funkiest slice of Americana. What’s more, the band has always sort of felt like a bunch of freaks, playing these out-of-time Jamaican musics, says Pine, so why not portray that through out-of-time Coney Island freakshow photos?
That out-of-time music journey began in New York in the early 1990s, when the band formed their own vehicle for/tribute to Jamaica’s greatest export after being charmed by both vintage vinyl and reissues of classic recordings like the three-disc Ska Bonanza, the British 2 Tone revolution and the growing NYC third-wave ska scene centered around the Moon Ska Label.
Blending reggae with the faster ska, and the smoother, poppier rocksteady, along with the many, deep influences of the band’s seven members—from soul and rock to bebop and country—the band combined members of Socal throwbacks Hepcat, NYC’s revered Stubborn All-Stars and Agent 99, finding steady, albeit initially low-paying gigs in Gotham.
“The band was basically attempting to embrace Jamaican ska, reggae and rocksteady and play it as best as it could, and be true to it, and to ourselves, and bring up other influences that were inspiring us, from bebop jazz to Latin salsa music to British Invasion music, country music. It all comes into the band. We’re listening to so much music that we integrate all kinds of styles and influences. But we started out trying to play this music as close as we could to the original and from there, use it as a launching pad.”
One of a handful of bands in the mid-’90s attempting to revive traditional, roots ska, the Slackers bowed in 1996 with the Moon Records disc Better Late Than Never, a straight-up tip of the hat to Jamaica that featured a guest appearance by vocalist Doreen Shaffer of the legendary Skatalites.
After Ruggiero, Baker and Hillyard joined Rancid in the studio and on tour for the band’s Life Won’t Wait disc, the Slackers moved to Hellcat Records, the then-new Epitaph imprint founded by Rancid’s Tim Armstrong. With 1997’s Redlight (featuring percussion from reggae royalty Larry McDonald, of the Melodians and Toots & the Maytals), their Hellcat debut, the band took its first step toward blending their other influences with a ska/reggae foundation, nodding to Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound and even the salsa and Latin music filling the streets of their hometown. “Living in New York, sometimes you don’t realize how much of an influence Latin music can be,” says Ruggiero, “Your hear it on a daily basis—every time you go into a bodega. You hear it on the street.”
A completely collaborative effort written as the band began ramping up to its annual gig average of some 150 shows, 1998’s The Question was written on the road and was a watershed of sorts that blending ska with bebop and jazz rhythms, Nyabinghi percussion. And if you listen close, you’ll even hear the influence of Beatles classics like Revolver. That experimentation continued on Wasted Days, which even brings a little pedal steel to the mix. “That album is the sound of us maturing, we were really taking chances and trying some new stuff,” says Pine.
Issued in 2003, Close My Eyes, was a reaction to 9/11. On the day of the attacks, the band was on the road in Europe, and decided to play not only that night, but the rest of the tour, spending hours huddled around televisions and radios, searching for the BBC, or a stitch of a news report in English. “It was almost like we were in World War II,” says Pine. “It was really eerie, like we were just staring off into the distance, wondering what was going on.”
Peculiar comes at a time when the band members are getting older. Half of the group has children, and they’re just more concerned with the future. As, a result, the album’s lyrics reflect that, from a track lamenting the passing of a loved one to the uncertainty of the future of this and other countries. “When you have children,” says Pine, “you start worrying about the future and if we’re establishing a future that is safe and peaceful, or will our children suffer the consequences of our decisions now? This album is a document of where we are as people, and where we are as a band.”
Building a diverse catalog, with Jamaican music as its foundation, and after spending more than half the year on the road on average, the band has built one of the most diverse audiences of its generation. You’ll find families, rudies, rastas, punks and everything in between at a Slackers show. You’ll see the hardcore Agnostic Front freak who spends his Sunday afternoons grooving with his girl to Slackers records.
And after a decade, the mission is still very much the same. “We try to stay within our influences,” says Ruggiero. “We love those sounds, those beautiful sounds. It’s a great music to write over, a great beat to write over, between reggae and ska, you can do everything you can do in rock, and on top of it, people can dance.”
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