Hep cats

2Tone and more at Nashoba

by Don Fluckinger

Ska, it's crazy stuff. Punchy horns and punky guitar riffs pound the off-beats, combining to make irresistible danceable grooves. It's good-time music that makes it easy for bands to work the crowd into a foot-stomping lather. Maybe that's part of the reason why the ska scene flourishes despite commercial radio almost completely ignoring it.

Crazy ska fans will get together this Saturday for the New England Ska Festival, an all-day show at Nashoba Valley Ski Area, in Westford, where 16 bands perform and celebrate the traditional music of Jamaica first revived in the UK in '79 by the Specials and later punked up by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones here in the States. It's a perfect salve for the late-summer doldrums.

"It's so infectious, the rhythm," says Matt Collyer, leader of the Planet Smashers. "When the bands are playing well and they're playing tight, it's really hard not to tap your feet. That leads to one thing, and then all of a sudden you're flying off your feet. We've been soaked with grunge for years and years, and we're getting sick of being depressed. It's time to have a good time, and there's nothing wrong with that."

Not all the bands at Ska Fest play ska; the pure-punk Dropkick Murphys and the thundrous rockabilly of the Amazing Crowns (Still Royal to the Loyal) are thrown in for a change of pace. But for the most part, festgoers will be treated to many flavors of ska: old-school Jamaican and 2Tone style from the Allstonians, Adjusters, and Skanic; great pop from Planet Smashers, Edna's Goldfish, and Spring Heeled Jack; skacore and its hard guitars played by Mustard Plug and the Skoidats; ska-jazz by the New York Ska-Jazz Ensemble, Mephiskapheles, and Skavoovie and the Epitones.

California ska stars Hepcat joined the line-up to anchor the bill and spice things up with their laid-back lounge-swing ska sound.

The Planet Smashers derive their inspiration from the Specials and the 2Tone epoch, but have a few punk songs they pull out when on tour with heavier bands like Mustard Plug, who will be touring with the Planet Smashers for a week before they pull into Nashoba Valley.

If there's such a thing as a "Canadian ska" sound that you can hear in groups like fellow Canadians King Apparatus, Collyer says, the Planet Smashers play it. They're somewhat more pop-oriented, with more dabs of jazz here and there. Their horn section uses the lower end of the scale, with a trombone and tenor sax. "No trumpets," he says. "None of that stuff."

Canada is just discovering the ska beat, making it a great time for the Planet Smashers. In their hometown of Montreal, he says, there's about 15 ska bands kicking around, working the clubs together.

Mustard Plug prove that ska's popularity is spreading even to the heartland, despite its total lack of support from the mainstream music media. Based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the band have plugged away for seven years, getting gigs wherever they could -- local punk clubs, small joints in Detroit, even a warehouse in Lansing.

Playing a punkier, Bosstones-style variety of ska, Mustard Plug also infuse a funny, cynical sense of humor -- they do things like, in one song, refer to masturbation as "dating Miss Michigan." They never planned to be punks, but lead vocalist Dave Kirchgessner says that in their region, punk never went away, and ska never came, so they built their sound on what they had.

Where'd they come up with the name? "From the little round crusty thing that forms on top of a mustard bottle," Kirchgessner says. "Our trumpet player seven years ago was making a baloney sandwich and he saw the mustard bottle was plugged up. He thought it'd be a great name, and we thought, `Sure what the hell.'"

For their most recent album, Evildoers Beware, Mustard Plug dug up Stephen Edgerton and Bill Stevenson, grizzled veterans of the LA punk scene and members of the Descendents and All. Not only did Mustard Plug idolize the Descendents, but figured that if anyone could punch up the guitar sound like they wanted to, it would be them. Stevenson was intrigued by the notion. After he heard their demo, he got his pal Edgerton and the band into the Blasting Room studio in his hometown of Fort Collins, Colorado, and boot camp began. "[Bill] and Stephen are really demanding, they wouldn't settle for a mediocre take -- they made us do takes over and over again," Kirchgessner says. "Their pushing us helped us a lot."

You can hear the All touch in Evildoers Beware: tight arrangements, energetic vocals, and crispy dead-on guitar, horn, and drum rhythms -- just like with All and the Descendents."

Another example of a popular group no one's ever heard of: the Allstonians, who are so plugged in that Boston City Council declared July 12, 1997, Allstonian Day; the band, in fact, held a parade -- for themselves -- in a car with loudspeaker rigged to the roof.

"We drove down Mass Ave and Comm Ave, yelling things and partying," says frontman Craig Schneider, a/k/a Ken "King-K" Knucklehead. "Kinda sorta [like mobile deejays in Jamaica] except we didn't have Prince Buster working for us," he adds with a smirk, alluding to the colorful, self-proclaimed Jamaican ska progenitor Cecil Bustamente Campbell.

The Allstonians reach back to the Specials era and even further to Jamaican ska for inspiration, not only playing soulful R&B-laced grooves, but also in the way they sing about the world immediately around them in Boston, Allston, and Brighton.

"You look out your window and you see things happening around you," Knucklehead says. "This neighborhood is so hip. It inspires you. Madness wrote a lot about their town, Camden. The Clash wrote a lot about London. You see little events in your neighborhood, and you have in idea for a song."

Many original ska groups took geographical names such as the Ethiopians, the Kingstonians, and so on. It was only natural for the group to call themselves the Allstonians. And just like the original Jamaicans named their instrumentals after hep cats like Lee Harvey Oswald and Al Capone, the Allstonians named one of their instrumentals after Globe columnist Alex Beam.

The Allstonians, like many of the Ska Fest bands, signed with New York's Moon Ska Records. The record label/retail storefront will set up a store at the festival, bringing with it a comprehensive selection of ska CDs from its 15-year catalogue of recordings from groups like the Toasters (Moon founder Rob Hingley's in the band), Let's Go Bowling, the Pietasters, and even Hepcat (they're now on Epitaph) who just released, Out of Nowhere.

The 2nd Annual New England Ska Festival at the Nashoba Valley Ski Area, in Westford, starts at noon. Tickets are $20. Call (800) 477-6849.