Duff Guide to Ska Flashback: Various Artists "Mashin' Up the Nation"

Cover art by "Milk and Cheese's" Evan Dorkin.

(Review by Steve Shafer)

While Moon Records' Ska Face: An All American Ska Compilation was the very first US ska comp out of the gate in 1988 (read The Duff Guide to Ska review of it here), Razorbeat Records/Harvard Square Records' Mashin' Up the Nation was hot on its heels, coming out in '89, and just as vital and good. As with Ska Face, Mashin' Up the Nation served notice (to anyone paying attention) that the off-the-radar US ska scene was heating up and yielding some incredible acts--many of whom would go on to become major players in the mid-1990s ska boom.

Like The Toasters in NYC with Moon Records, Bim Skala Bim and their Razorbeat Records were helping to organize and promote the Boston ska scene, and during the mid-to-late '80s, both bands often worked collaboratively on projects in a socialist/"a rising tide lifts all boats" mindset (for example, when Celluloid Records created the Skaloid imprint specifically for The Toasters to release Thrill Me Up, Bucket also arranged for Bim's Tuba City to be issued simultaneously and he hooked them up with licensing and touring contacts in the UK). Both The Toasters and Bim were on a proverbial mission from god to spread the word about ska in America, and with limited resources and practically zero access to/interest from the music industry and press, it made supreme sense to join forces in solidarity and attempt to make as big an impact as possible.

As with many compilations, there are a few tracks on Mashin' Up the Nation that perhaps would be best lost to time, but the majority of songs here sound absolutely fantastic thirty odd years on--and a couple are now bona fide ska classics. Bim Skala Bim leads off the album with a brilliant live version of their you-gotta-persevere/it's-darkest-before-dawn "Diggin' a Hole" recorded live at CBGBs: "You're digging a hole so long, now it's so deep/Getting so dark here that nobody can see/This artificial light don't brighten our day/We're all the way down here with nothing to say/Got to keep it moving/It's gone too far." Bim's also featured on the lovely instrumental "Groucho (Dub)" with The Skatalites' Roland Alphonso--an outtake from their Tuba City album that was recorded in the tiny studio at Coxsone Dodd's Music City in the back of his old and long-shuttered record shop in Brooklyn.

The liner notes on the back cover of this LP state that the (pre-Mighty Mighty) Bosstones, "showed great promise with their early recording efforts and live shows...sadly they are no longer together." Obviously, we know this was just a hiatus for that band (who would reunite and release their breakthrough debut Devils Night Out in 1990), but their proto-skacore "Drums and Chickens" (AKA "Drunks and Children") is one of their catchiest songs and features their trademark warts-and-all honesty and emotional vulnerability: "Drinkin' just the other day/I said, 'I love you,' you turned away/Maybe the drinkin' made me cry/But I'm a happy, very happy, very happy guy/Drunks and children they tell you the truth/That's what I am, I'm drunken youth/And I'll be drinkin' 'til I die." While a lot of Bop (Harvey)'s music was too reggae-hippie-jam-bandy for me, the straight-up ska of "Bread and Circuses" may be their musically finest and most politically potent moment. It's about the Reagan administration's Cold War-era involvement in Nicaragua, where they were covertly and illegally funding/training the right-wing Contras who regularly committed horrific atrocities against civilians in their prolonged guerrilla war to overthrow the socialist, Cuban-backed Sandinista government ("Washington Bullets," indeed). All of this was revealed in the wake of a bizarre, clandestine scheme involving the sale of arms to Iran (which was at war with Iraq for most of the 1980s) that also included the release of American hostages in Lebanon, and some $18 million of Iran's $30 million payment was diverted by Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council to the Contras; this became known as the Iran-Contra scandal: "The secret war is only a sham/They swear it ain't another Vietnam/If nobody dies on the American side today/But the women and children who die/Are they too Red to get by?/The news is burgers and fries and it's genocide these days/It's bread and circuses time/Who's gonna pay for Ollie's crimes?/Freedom fighters only in name/The Contra's cause is killing in vain/The pressures increase as a few Sandinistas fall/If cover-up is only a crime/Did Colonel North work overtime?/I'm telling you, I think the President knew it all."

The NY Citizens' hard-charging, razor-sharp, Bodysnatchers-referencing "Rude Girls" was the first song the band issued after their terrific debut album On the Move (1988) and was a knock-out whenever they performed it live: "Rude girls/I get so planked when I see them in the subway station/Will she be free for some tea and a little conversation with me?...And when I see them in the street/With their Doc Martens on their feet/They're looking ruder than rude/My god, they're ruder than you!" At this point in time, Detroit's Gangster Fun had just seen their debut album Come See, Come Ska released in the UK by Roddy Moreno's Ska Records (which also released Mashin' Up the Nation as Ska-ville USA, Volume 4--and "Mario's Hideout" from that LP--about being snatched off the street by goons and taken to a mobster's headquarters--is a great example of their manic, slightly twisted, New Wave-y ska (think Fishbone's debut EP).

Let's Go Bowling, hailing from Fresno, CA, were represented by their own cheery, mostly instrumental theme song, "Let's Go Bowling" (from their 1988 cassette-only debut) that urges the listener over and over to head to the lanes for some wholesome fun (one can almost imagine this cut being the jingle from a 1960s TV ad for a local alley)! For this compilation, The Toasters reached into their vaults to fish out one of their first recordings "No Respect" (which was more than good enough to have been included on their debut Recriminations EP). It's from the early days when the band was a lean five-piece playing New Wave-influenced ska with some surf and rockabilly guitar mixed in, and because it was nowhere near representative of The Toasters' late '80s sound circa Thrill Me Up, Bucket must have jokingly credited the song to Not Bob Marley. Nonetheless, "No Respect" is great song, offering haunting social commentary on income inequality and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's cruel policies toward working class and down-on-their-luck Britons: "Well a rich man counts his time/While the poor man counts his money/Down on Leman Street the search for work goes on/For the poor man and his family/Life is a joke, no longer funny (ha ha ha ha)/When there is no respect, there is nothing to draw upon/There is only fear of unemployment/Bad times up ahead/It is cold in winter, it is cold in winter/When your queuing in the morning/Three hours just to sign your name/On the banks of the Thames, there is no self respect."

I've always really liked The Now's English Beat-sounding "Get Out," which shares a fair amount of DNA with "Best Friend" (whatever happened to this Washington, DC band?). This track, however, is about a romantic co-habitation situation gone real bad (and, no doubt, delivered tongue-in-cheek): "Now I don't know where things went wrong/But it doesn't make sense to try/To revive something that was obviously meant to die...You mean as much as lint lying in the pocket of my coat/You were once very pretty/Now you're just a big fat dope/Now, I don't mean to hurt your feelings or cause you pain/But this is the way it must be and I guess I have to say again and again/Leave town or I'll throw you out/There's nothing that I can't do/One of us has to go/And I've decided it's you..."

Mashin' Up the Nation is an essential document for anyone interested in the history and development of the US ska scene--and it's a damn fine record to boot.

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Duff Review: Bim Skala Bim "Chet's Last Call"

Bim Skala Bim Music
2013
CD

(Review by Steve Shafer)

I first encountered Boston's Bim Skala Bim when I picked up the Skankin' Round the World compilation (Unicorn Records) in 1988 and heard their song "Bangin'," which is about two people in a relationship driving each other crazy, not the cruder meaning of the word: "You've got me bangin'/my head against the wall!" (This compilation clued me in on how there was a whole lot of ska music being created outside of the USA--I had assumed everything had pretty much ground to a halt in the UK after the demise of 2 Tone; imagine how psyched I was to find out that Bad Manners was still active; incredible acts like Laurel Aitken and the Potato 5, The Trojans, and The Deltones even existed; and that there were even other ska bands in Europe, like Mr. Review, Saxawhaman, Kortatu, and Spy Eye!). I heard more Bim on the first (and brilliant!) US ska compilation, Ska Face (Moon Records, 1988), which featured their "Shoes," and then picked up their tremendous second album Tuba City (1989) at either Bleecker Bob's or CBGB's Record Canteen because it was released around the same time and on the same label as The Toasters' extraordinary sophomore album, Thrill Me Up. (I caught both bands at The Ritz--along with the NY Citizens, who were supporting their debut LP On the Move--in March 1989, just before Tuba City and Thrill Me Up were released; I'm pretty sure the gig was supposed to be one giant record release party for both bands...) I had been a huge fan of The Toasters since first hearing their first EP in 1985, so their close association with Bim Skala Bim was significant and compelled me to learn as much as I could about them (which wasn't easy in the pre-internet days!). And it turned out that Bim's story was strangely intertwined with The Toasters'.

The parallels between Bim Skala Bim and The Toasters were striking: both bands formed in the early 1980s; their original line-ups featured male and female co-lead vocalists (Toasters: Bucket and Vicky Rose; Bim: Dan Vitale and Jackie Starr); their debut releases came out within a year of each other (The Toasters' Recriminations EP in 1985; Bim's debut LP in 1986); they helped foster vibrant ska scenes in their respective cities; both established long-running ska labels and issued some of the first ska compilations in the USA (see Moon's New York Beat: Hit and Run from 1985 and Razorbeat Records' Mash It Up! from 1987); and they worked collaboratively to support the burgeoning ska scene in America (that eventually gave rise to the so-called Third Wave of Ska in the 1990s).

After they had released the The Toasters' smash debut album Skaboom in 1987, Bucket had convinced Celluloid Records to give The Toasters their own ska imprint--Skaloid--which issued The Toasters' Thrill Me Up, Unicorn Records' Skankin' Round the World comp--and Buck arranged for Skaloid's release of Bim's Tuba City. Even though Skaloid's parent label went under about a year later (though Celluloid was revived in the mid-1990s and issued bootleg copies of all of these releases), it provided some desperately needed resources to some of the major players on the US ska scene--it had the money to press up LPs and CDs and a reliable distribution network that made sure the releases hit the right record shops and reached the fans, something Moon had struggled with for years (a series of distributor failures had plagued Moon in the late 80s, swallowing up whole pressings of releases like Ska Face and denying the label of desperately needed cash and ska fans of amazing recorded music).

While Bim Skala Bim was strongly influenced by 2 Tone like The Toasters, Untouchables, and Fishbone, their sound (and vibe/look) incorporated elements of 60s hippie rock (see their cover of Cream's "Sunshine of Your  Love"), making them stand out from their contemporaries (and, no doubt, giving them an avenue to appeal to those beyond the ska faithful). Like these other pioneers of US ska, Bim had an enormous impact on the American and world-wide ska scene (Bim were so popular amongst European ska fans that they played the first London International Ska Festival in 1988--a recording of the festival released on Buster Bloodvessel's temporarily revived Bluebeat Records captured one of their best early tunes, "Jah Laundromat," which features the lyric: "We'll wash all our sins away/down at Jah laundromat today"; The Toasters played the second LISF in 1989). Now, twenty-eight years (!) after their debut album in 1986 and thirteen years after their most recent album Krinkle in 2013, Bim are back with a fantastic new CD, Chet's Last Call, which serves up another set of terrific songs about everyday life and is sure to please their legion of fans.

Even though lead singer Dan Vitale now lives in Panama (Bucket now hangs his baseball cap in Spain!) and some other members of the Bim have spread out across the US, for the past several years, the band (largely unchanged since the early 1990s: Vinny Nobile on trombone and vocals, Jim Jones on guitar and vocals, John Cameron on organ and piano, Mark Ferranti on bass, Rick Barry on percussion, Jim Arhelger on drums, Dave Butts on sax) has reunited for summer shows in the Boston area and on Cape Cod, which, no doubt, yielded the laid-back, t-bone driven instrumental "Summer of Ska" and the more tense "Buses, Boats, Planes, Trains, and Taxis" (this upcoming summer is no exception--Bim's playing dates in Boston, Cape Cod, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island this August). But the best songs here concern work and play (mostly play, really)." Get Us Out" is a sweet, shambling, and chivalrous rocksteady cut about going to a party with a girlfriend/wife and promising you'll facilitate the quick exit if things go south ("I know how to get us out of here/if we need to get out of here/I know how to get us out of this/We can stick around for just a little bit/I know how to get us out of here/if it gets to late/if this party's strange/We don't have to stay." The upbeat "Dance with Me Darlin'" suggests that the party turned out to be alright--good enough to hit the dance floor for some close dancing that feels mighty good.

My favorite track on the album, "On the Dance Floor" (and the one that reminds me the most of all of Bim's signature sound--as embodied by a song like "Diggin' a Hole") is a scorcher of a tune about having a crush on someone at work who seems demure and distant--and then bumping into them at a club and discovering they're a completely different animal: "I see your light on after quitting time/I wonder if you notice mine/Do you even know I'm here?/We share a wall, never talk at all, till you said/"I'll see you Monday, on the other side"...That night I went out to the dancehall place/Where I saw a familiar face/From the side, your profile/You're wild, on fire!/We all just can't believe what you've been keeping up your sleeve/and, good god, now you've revealed it and everybody knows/On the dance floor, on the dance floor/Now everybody knows."

"Phony" is a frenetic flip-off to all the soul-sucking fake people that plague us at times ("I see you coming with your plastic smile/I see you coming from a hundred miles/Phony, baloney/Oh, what a wicked way to start the day/So many words, nothing to say/Phony, baloney/I can see, I can you coming/I can smell, I can smell a rat/Can't afford all the noise that keeps on coming from your mouth..."). "Hat When You're Not" is a loping reggay-ish cut about the toll that long road trips take on your body and soul ("Driving all night and your eyes are bloodshot/You feel like you're wearing a hat when you're not"). I think the dancehall-ish "Papa Don't Put Too Much Pepper" is about doing the pepper seed dance ("It's such a fine line/the way you dance and grind/Papa don't like it/and says it that it has to stop"), but there are also references to food and cooking--are all the peppers making the dancing too hot? Could be... The album is bookended by the catchy rocksteady track "Everybody's Got Their Style" and its version--part mission statement, part plea for tolerance and multiculturalism: "Not counting colors/Not taking sides/So many various shapes and size/Culture-wise."

It's always great to see the ska greats back in action, creating new music, and not merely relying on past glories and nostalgia simply to help fill the coffers. Here's hoping that the members of Bim continue to go on finding the time to keep on moving forward and doing what they sure do best.