Aaron Carnes, host of the Consequence Podcast Network series In defense of ska is back with the second edition of his stock book of the same name. To celebrate the updated release, we've already put together a list of 20 artists you didn't know started their careers in ska bands, and now we're sharing an exclusive excerpt from In defense of Ska: Ska Edition now more than ever.
In this chapter of the expanded edition of GONECarnes explores a niche subgenre within an already niche scene: Christian ska. Specifically, it focuses on the return of Five Iron Frenzy, a band that returned after a 10-year hiatus with a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign to fund their 2013 comeback album. Eight years later, they released Until this falls aparta record that puts a microscope on the Republican Party's alignment with Trumpism.
As Carnes says,
“It wasn't just about documenting the Christian ska scene. I wanted to focus on the one band with an overwhelmingly positive legacy, a band that retains its rabid fan base to this day: Five Iron Frenzy. They remain so popular that when they returned in 2011, they broke a record on Kickstarter to fund their new album. Million Plot Engine. What I wanted to know was how a Christian ska band (in 2011, even when ska was supposedly dead) raised so much money to make another album. This excerpt answers that question and offers some Christian ska history to contextualize it.”
Read the excerpt below and then grab a copy of In defense of ska here. You can catch Carnes on her book tour this fall by checking the dates. here. Also, make sure follow the In defense of ska podcast for interviews with the biggest ska bands and artists you didn't know loved ska as much as you, with new episodes released every Wednesday.
Five Iron Frenzy will be performing a few more “Old School Shows” in the coming weeks and you can get tickets here.
Five Iron Frenzy came out of retirement in 2011 with the need to record a new album for 2013, ten years after their last show. They asked their fans for $30,000 to finance the album through Kickstarter. “Some might call it beating a dead horse. “We call it recording an album,” they wrote. They figured $30,000 would be a tall order, so they gave themselves sixty days to reach that goal. They reached $30,000 in twenty-four hours. At the end of sixty days, they had raised $207,980, a new record for Kickstarter. “We thought, this is crazy. People are stupid. Why are they doing this? says guitarist Micah Ortega.
By the early 2010s, the heat of ska shame faded and '90s nostalgia grew. Asbestos Records showed that there was still interest in records from this era by reissuing third wave ska on vinyl. The label began in 1996 with a primary focus on local bands and show promotion. In 2005, they switched to vinyl, releasing 7” and 10” records, and the first three LPs from Bomb the Music Industry and the final LP from Arrogant Sons of Bitches. In the late 2000s, they began reissuing popular 90s ska albums. Mustard plugs Big daddy crowdthe lazy Better late than neverboth Spring Heeled Jack albums and the Suicide Machines/Rudiments split Skank for brains.
The success of these records led to the 3rd Wave Ska Preservation Society, a joint project with Justin Schwier, who runs Underground Communique in Chicago. thieves STREETEdna's goldfish Before you knew betterPietasters' Oolooloostubborn stars Back with a new batchThumper Nobody left the club aliveand others. Most titles went out of print over the next decade. “My friends and I loved these albums and, as record collectors, we felt they needed to exist. They were well received and were many years ahead of the vinyl boom,” says Matt Flood, co-owner of Asbestos Records.
Still, Five Iron's reception was unrivaled when they returned. Christian ska was a niche genre with only a handful of bands. During his time, Five Iron impacted the lives of many people by challenging their idea of God and the notion that Christianity went hand-in-hand with American conservatism and far-right capitalism. When they returned, many of their fans were adults who looked to the group as instrumental in shaping who they had become. Financing a new album was the least they could do to pay them. “The legacy [of Five Iron] “It's just that there is a whole generation that blew up their houses and kept the foundations,” says Five Iron Frenzy saxophonist Leanor Ortega Till (Micah's second cousin). “I think for American Christianity, Five Iron played a small role in changing the status quo in the way some people think.”
The godfather of Christian rock was Larry Norman, with his 1969 concept album On this rock. The genre evolved from struggling ex-hippies to a major industry that could compete with Nashville music (many Christian labels were also in Nashville). In the '90s, Christian rock was big business. An alternative Christian music scene developed, much of it in Southern California basements and churches with hardcore bands like Unashamed and Focused. Tooth & Nail Records and a handful of other labels seized the moment. Whatever criticisms may be thrown at the label, it felt authentic; Punk, hardcore, alternative and ska bands made up of Christian kids as opposed to groups that felt gathered together to imitate what was popular to preach the gospel to impressionable young minds. And it worked like a punk label. “Tooth and Nail made records at a fraction of the cost of albums made on Nashville labels like Sparrow or Word,” says Leah Payne, associate professor of American Religious History at Portland Seminary.
The label's first star was the Washington-based pop-punk band MxPx. Your record life in General (1996) brought Tooth & Nail to the mainstream. They toured with bands such as No Doubt, Dance Hall Crashers, No Face and Reel Big Fish. Tooth & Nail sold many copies of Life in general and Ebel spent most of the money he earned promoting MxPx. When MxPx was offered a deal with A&M in 1997, they walked away. Ebel took the little money he had left and decided to invest it all in one band. He chose Supertones, a ska band. Their first album did well and with the rise in popularity of ska in the mainstream, they were starting to draw crowds on par with MxPx and were the buzz at every festival. “Nail identified the Supertones' potential to break and put resources behind the puck and got it right. Not to mention, to make it big, we had to make a good record,” says Supertones lead singer Matt Morginsky. The Supertones' second album, Supertones fight back (1997), released on Tooth & Nail's BEC label, was a huge success. The band immediately headlined festivals and played to crowds of 1,500 kids a night. The success of Strike back allowed Tooth & Nail to pay off all of its debts, expand its workforce to twenty people, and open a retail store.
The peak of Christian ska was the Skamania tour in 1998 (the Supertones, Five Iron Frenzy, the Insyderz), where these bands played to thousands of kids every night. But it was those church basement shows that attracted so many '90s kids, like writer and podcaster Jordan Morris, who attended Mission Hills Church in Southern California as a child. “I got really into my hip youth group, which is like a little scene where a guy with tattooed sleeves turns a chair back and wants to rap with you about this cool guy named Jesus who had some pretty crazy ideas. Those things are just catnip to a certain type of teenager,” Morris says. He adds that the church did a good job of replicating the punk atmosphere and flyers to make it look like a DIY punk event. In a sense, they were DIY because Supertones drummer Jason Carson organized the Mission Hills shows on his own. He was a part-time staff at Mission Hills and the church leadership allowed Jason to use the venue for shows.
Carson was the first to book MxPx in Southern California. He, of course, put the Supertones (then called Saved) as the opener. Ebel and MxPx crashed at Carson's parents' house. Carson stood in front of the door the morning of the show and demanded that Ebel sign Saved to Tooth & Nail. Ebel said no. “We continued to gain a following in Southern California and eventually they accepted us,” Morginsky says. However, when Ebel signed the band, his only stipulation was that they had to change their name.
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