INTERVIEW: And now for something completely different from Badfish
Photo: Badfish has always been a Sublime tribute band, but now the members are venturing into new original music. Photo courtesy of the band / Provided by Michael J. Media Group with permission.
Badfish, perhaps the most respected tribute band to the songbook of Sublime, will play a special concert tonight, March 22, at the Brooklyn Bowl in Brooklyn, New York. Audience members can expect some of Sublime’s most iconic tunes, including “Santeria,” “Wrong Way,” “What I Got” and “Smoke Two Joints.” Sprinkled within the set will be an original Badfish song or two, which is a novel adventure for this group. They are staying in the tribute business, but finally, after more than 20 year of asking, they are giving fans some original material.
“We finally got around, after over 20 years, to the endeavor of writing our own music,” said drummer Scott Begin. “So we’re really excited about it.”
Begin and his bandmates, including Joel Hanks on bass and Pat Downes on vocals and guitar, have bene incorporating the new single “High With You” into the set list, and the early reviews are solid.
“For the most part, right now we’re playing our new single in our set,” he said. “It seems to be well-received. We’re going to feel it out and see how things go, maybe add another to the set, but we really do want to be mindful of the crowd and the audience’s response to that and the feedback that we’re getting because obviously people come to see us play Sublime songs. We don’t want to disappoint those people or make them feel shortchanged, but our hope is that these songs will catch on a little bit and people will be happy that we’re playing them. It’s going to be a test-it-out-and-see move for us.”
“High With You,” featuring Little Stranger, definitely has a Sublime feel, existing on that edge between rock ‘n’ roll and reggae. After all, Badfish is a tribute band and has been playing this beach-infused music for two decades. It’s only natural that their original compositions would feel Sublime-ish.
“There’s definitely some rock-reggae elements,” Begin said. “It has its own flavor, too. I feel like it’s definitely modern in a different way and will track well with people who are fans of Sublime and also some of the newer reggae bands, many of whom we share the stage with when we’re doing our tours.”
This new chapter for Badfish comes at a time of reflection for Begin and the band. They have been rocking out for so long that they have outlasted many bands in the business. Every time they make the touring rounds, fans continue to show loyalty and buy tickets.
“I can’t hardly believe it,” the drummer said. “It seems insane, especially when you think about it in the context of some of my favorite bands. I’m a Led Zeppelin fan. They were a band for just over 10 years. Holy shit, we’ve been doing this for 22 years, almost 23 years. It’s just insane. … When we started in ‘01, it hadn’t been that long since [original vocalist / guitarist for Sublime] Bradley Nowell had passed away, and Sublime was no longer a band. But the music was very much still in the consciousness of everybody — people I was in college with, friends. Everywhere you go, people were playing Sublime. It was just ubiquitous — house parties, in dorms and what have you. We definitely felt like, well, we like this music, too. Maybe there’s a space for us to put on a live show performing this music and see how it’s received. It turns out it was very well-received, so we just kept going.”
Although Badfish is a three-piece band, similar to Sublime (which itself has announced a summer farewell tour with the singer Rome), they almost always have four or five players on stage. For this tour, they are planning to add to the family.
“There’s a lot of room to kind of fill in those gaps, and it really makes the live show I think that much more entertaining and fun because there’s a lot we can do if there’s spots in the set where we improvise or go off and jam a little bit,” Begin said. “People can have fun with it, take solos and really just have fun with the arrangements of the songs, without straying too far from the arrangements that people are used to hearing. But, yeah, it really makes it fun.”
Begin found Sublime in the 1990s because they were being played everywhere, even up in Rhode Island, where Badfish started.
“Sublime was popular enough that it was just part of everyone’s musical language that I was going to school with, even though they are a SoCal band,” he said. “Our ocean vibe is a little different than Southern California in Rhode Island, but the music nonetheless was just very popular. Maybe our proximity to the ocean had something to do it. You remember back when Sublime was popular, songs like “Santeria” and “Doin’ Time” and “Wrong Way,” every other song on the radio felt like it was Sublime there for a good couple years.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Badfish is currently on tour, and the band will play tonight, March 22, at the Brooklyn Bowl in Brooklyn, New York. Click here for more information and tickets.
