Buck 08/03/1999

About.com
Ska/Reggae by Bob Timm
TUESDAY, August 3, 1999

This past June, The Toasters took over the Wetlands Preserve nightclub in New York City for four straight Sundays, culminating in a 20th anniversary for the band, featuring many ex-members like Coolie Ranx of The Pilfers. Besides leading The Toasters through 20 years of American ska, of course, Bucket is also the founder and owner of Moon Ska Records, the most prominent independent ska label of the past decade. Before the last show, he took some time to provide his views on the legacy of Moon Ska, holding nothing back in his statements on the friends and enemies of ska in the late 90s.

Here are a few samples of what he had to say during this interview:

Bucket on….the climate for ska

“Anybody who’s trying to start a band now, it’s probably the worst business climate for ska music I’ve seen in like 15 years.”

Bucket on….the end of the 90s hype

“There’s going to be a major shakeout in the market and I’d say 75% of the bands are going to fold up.”

Bucket on….the alt.music.ska newsgroup

“Sometimes some of the things people say are like so stupid that you have to say something. The Internet’s a great tool, but it’s not being used in the right way. “

Bucket on….cultivating the harvest of ska music

“I see a lot of people who want to pick the fruit and eat the vegetables, but I don’t see a lot of people who want to do the hoeing and pick the weeds and take the stones out.”

Bucket on….complaints about Moon Ska’s payment of royalties

“We’ve had three different bands now claiming to have sold more records than we’ve actually pressed.”

Want to here what else Bucket had to say about what’s happened to the music he loves and the “whiney little bitches” who have turned it into “this great big shit pie?”

Bob Timm: What’s your assessment of the current ska scene and where the music is in comparison to the boom of the last few years?

Bucket: What happened was, with a lot of people getting excited about ska music, and coming out and throwing in all kinds of stupid money, essentially what it did is kind of like overprice the market, so what you see know is the bubble is breaking. And that’s making it very hard for labels like us, because all of a sudden we’re forced to run at kind of like a super-heated level just to keep in the race. Now that that support system is gone, we’ve got to move from there back to where we were, which is like the most difficult thing in business, to scale back.

“What’s having to happen is for us to go back to 1995 levels, but do that overnight, whereas it took us four years to get up to where we were last year”

So that’s where we are and the rate at which it’s happening is so quick, that literally stores and distributors are just saying, well, here’s all your product back, so we’re getting returns, for example, of product that’s been out of print for years. It’s turning back up at the warehouse, with distributors saying okay, well, we want 100% returns on that. And my question is, where the hell has this been? Okay, we have two problems: one, we have the returns, and second, we’re getting returns on records that have been out of print and which people have already been paid for, so it’s like a triple whammy, in a sense. The other thing, too, is obviously having lots of money invested in records which should be selling a lot better than they are, like records like Bad Manners, like Mephiskapheles, like The Toasters, you know, we’re not talking about some of the smaller bands, we’re talking about some of the major artists of the last ten years. But now all of a sudden can’t sell records anymore. So, in a sense, what’s having to happen is for us to go back to 1995 levels, but do that overnight, whereas it took us four years to get up to where we were last year. Now all of a sudden we’re having to undo like four years of work, but on 24 hours notice. So it’s kind of like the Internet stocks: up they go and down they come.

BT: What do you attribute the decline in sales to, in terms of the responsibility of the bands or the scene just getting smaller or the money getting smaller?

Bucket: Well, it’s attributable to a lot of factors. The main thing is, obviously, there’s a loss of confidence in retail, that they can sell ska music. So that’s where the returns are coming from. But in the same sense, I think it’s a lot of people in retail getting psyched about ska music and putting a lot of things into stock which weren’t selling and they’re giving any feedback to people like us back at the label that the stuff is just sitting in stores not being sold. So the stores would pay Caroline [the distribution company] for it, Caroline would pay us, but the stores hadn’t actually sold any of it, so essentially what they’re doing now is just emptying out their overstocks, so it’s basically creating a false image of what the economy of ska really was. It was never economically as important as everybody thought it was.

BT: As far as Moon Ska is concerned, then, would you say your main sales are still at the shows, with the bands on tour?

Bucket: No, I wouldn’t say that. I mean, that’s going to be a much more important factor in the coming future, as it was in the past. We encouraged the bands to sell the stock at shows, because, one, it was an important distribution outlet for us when people didn’t want to carry ska at distributors. And at the same time, our philosophy is, I’d much rather have the bands making the money anyway, because traditionally in the music business, the bands are the ones who get paid last and get paid the least. So it’s always a policy of ours to have bands sell stuff. I mean, it’s difficult sometimes to get bands behind the notion of, yes, you can sell other people’s records. If you want to sell a Skavoovie record or a Toasters record at your shows, there’s no shame in that, to be happy to be involved with the fact that if they sell your records at their shows, then everybody can help each other. And we’ll keep for ourselves the money that would have gone to retail, that would have gone to distributors. We can keep it in the family. But that was kind of like a hard sell for some bands who only really wanted to sell their record and why should we sell somebody else’s record. Well, because it would help not only them but also yourselves. Dealing with the psychology of the bands has always been kind of like a hard thing. But it’s interesting to see how, in a way, things have come full circle. As ska music goes underground again, it’s going to be important to have that kind of retail profile at shows, bearing in mind the fact that at the moment it’s very hard for a ska band to get a show anyway. So it’s going to be a rocky year or so. Hopefully, people will be able to ride it out, ourselves included.

BT: Well, excepting yourselves, who would you say is out there, Moon or otherwise, who is in you opinion doing it right or would be in your nominations of bands most likely to ride it out?

Bucket: Well, the bands which will really be in good stead will really be the bands which have always had kind of like a do-it-yourself mentality. And those bands that didn’t really set their expectations too high. Those will be the bands which I think will continue, so I think it’s going to be on a band-by-band basis. You’ve seen already that a lot of bands have split up, mainly I think because they didn’t get what they expected.

BT: False expectations?

Bucket: I don’t know if it’s false expectations, but it’s over expectations. And a lot of people, when they get thir heart set on something and expect to get it, and the reality of the situation prevents it, that discourages a lot of people and that has very delitirious and negative impact on them. The first reaction of bands is to blame people for that, so it’s like, we’re not where we are so it’s gotta be X, Y, and Z’s fault, which is normally the label, the booking agent, and the manager, in that order, never the band.

“Anybody who’s trying to start a band now, it’s probably the worst business climate for ska music I’ve seen in like 15 years.”

Maybe the fact that the band didn’t really come back with a strong second record or doesn’t really appeal to the fan base, in the band’s mind that can never have anything to do with it. It’s gotta always be somebody else’s fault. But anyway that’s the nature of the beast. But as we go forward, I think the bands who have worked hard to develop their own fan base will be around. some of the more established bands have a little more fat to trim than bands that are trying to start up.

“there’s going to be a major shakeout in the market and I’d say 75% of the bands are going to fold up.”

Anybody who’s trying to start a band now, it’s probably the worst business climate for ska music I’ve seen in like 15 years. So it’s kind of like what we were trying to do in the early 80s, but the added burden of it now having been done, in the eyes of the business. So it’s a tough spot. I mean, ska music will continue, because that’s what it does, but there’s going to be a major shakeout in the market and I’d say 75% of the bands are going to fold up.

BT: A lot of people would jump on that say, “Bucket Declares the End of the Third Wave.” Does the phrase “third wave” mean anything to you?

Bucket: Not to me. I mean, ska music has always been to me more of a continuum and to say, well, now it’s here and now it’s not there, shows when people don’t really have a good grasp of what they’re talking about, because it’s always been here. The mere fact that some people didn’t notice it doesn’t mean that it was never here. It was just off people’s radar. For those people who knew about it, yeah, it’s always been there, but I think most people just weren’t conscious of it. So ska music isn’t going to go away. It may move out of the limelight, it may move out of the public eye for a while, but it’s going to go to the spot it always goes, which is underground, and it will continue there, so the next manifestation of it in some way, shape, or form heretofore unknown, let’s see what it is. It’s gonna stick around. I think people might go away from it, but it isn’t going to go away from us.

BT: With the introduction of Moon Ska Europe, I think a lot of people have the impression that the label is setting its sights more globally.

Bucket: Well, that’s something I’ve been trying to do for like the last 20 years, but it’s been hard. Trying to bring ska back to Europe is kind of like trying to bring sand back to the beach and in a way it’s much harder to get anything going there than it was here, simply because there’s a credibility problem within ska music.

“Trying to bring ska back to Europe is kind of like trying to bring sand back to the beach.”

But now we’ve set up in Brazil, just in time for the financial collapse [sarcasm]. We set up in Japan and their economy went south so the label got sold up, so let’s see how we do in Europe. It’s going to be through lack of trying. Sometimes, in a way, I kind of like the adversity, because it makes it very real. I mean, it’s a little scary sometimes, obviously now as I get older and have a wife and kids to support, you gotta think, well, I’d like to keep working at the same level as I have for the past 20 years. Whether or not I’ll be able to remains to be seen.

BT: Now, with the “20 years” or the 20th anniversary party, what exactly are we celebrating?

Bucket: It’s not really an anniversary. It’s actually 20 years of it, because the nugget of the band started in 1980. So it’s 20 years of me doing this.

BT: Were you still in England at the time?

Bucket: No, I was here in 1980. I came here in January of 1980 and I started the rehearsals of the band that evolved into the Toasters in May or June of that year.

BT: And over those 20 years, do you have particular favorite lineups or albums that you’re most proud of?

Bucket: It’s all different, I mean, the album that I’m most proud of is the first one, because it basically took a lot of fighting, kicking, and scratching to make that one happen, and getting the distribution of it was really very hard, so I think that’s the one I’m really the most proud. I think there’s others which are better sounding and maybe have better material on them, but I think that’s the one I’m the proudest of. Certainly, later records have sold a lot more, but the thing with Skaboom is I’ll never really know how many have sold of that, anyway, because we never got a royalty statement off of Celluloid. I mean, on Moon, I think we’ve sold about 30,000, so you gotta add on about double, and the bootleg that’s out has sold around 12,000, so it’s probably up around 60,000 that that record has sold, which is okay for a no-name little band like The Toasters.

BT: What things do you still want to do with The Toasters? What do you see the band doing in the next 5, 10 years?

Bucket: Well, I never went to Australia, and I never went to Japan, so it’s not like a disappointment, but that’s still up there on the list of things I still want to do. I’d just really like to keep playing. I always that I’d be quit by now, but there seems to be always something that keeps me interested in doing it. I’m kind of more interested in keeping the band going now, because it’s difficult. But there are still undone things on my to-do list.

BT: In the past decade or so, with the big explosion in albums and bands, do you have a few albums that you think are some of the best to come out of that, some that will not disappear off the radar?

Bucket: I’d say, like, the first Let’s Go Bowling record, the first Hepcat record, the first Scofflaws record. I mean that’s all like really classic stuff, I’d say. And The Pietasters have some good stuff. But I think things will become a lot more obscure, and it’s unfortunate to see bands who are all of a sudden “not” ska bands anymore. It’s a shame to see that, but I think there are a lot of really great records that came out. It’s tough to put the finger on which one’s best, because there’s just so many of them, really some great records. But some of the best records were from bands that I felt didn’t get any recognition at all, like The NY Citizens. I mean, there’s a really great band, an underrated band. And a band like this Canadian band, Arsenals, where this guy died, unfortunately, but it was really a tremendous, tremendous band we never really got a chance to see. There’s a lot of great stuff out there. Let’s see what history remembers and what history doesn’t, y’know? History tends to be a little cruel. History has a short memory. But it’s been a fun time, now it’s an uncertain time. I’ll have a better idea of where things are gonna go when we get there.

BT: How big of a role do you think the Internet plays? I know you pop up once in a while in Deja.com and the newsgroups. Do you like to be involved?

Bucket: Not really. I mean, I try not to really get down with too many balls and strikes, but sometimes some of the things people say are like so stupid that you have to say something. The Internet’s a great tool, but it’s not being used in the right way. Newsgroups should really be that, a way of exchanging information, but it’s turned into a bit of a pissing competition. It’s a shame to see something that’s got so much potential being used in the wrong way.

“Sometimes some of the things people say are like so stupid that you have to say something. The Internet’s a great tool, but it’s not being used in the right way.”

It’s like, one of the things that really bugs me these days, is ska music has really forgotten how stick together and support itself. It’s turned into kind of a rat race and a competition and it was never really designed to go that way, so it’s a little disappointing to see the direction it’s taking. It’s all about people’s egos and how much money they can make rather than how we can support this great music.

BT: Do you think that’s just the young, American scene…?

Bucket: It’s gone global. You put money on the table in front of people and people just get really funny. It’s like, when there’s nothing on the table and there’s money being lost, it’s on my dime, that’s perfectly fine. But as soon as there’s ten cents to divide up, everyone’s there with their metal cutters trying to get the biggest slice. It’s really quite unbelieveable what happens. But the most disappointing thing is people having benefitted from the scene to launch their own careers, then when the time comes, won’t give back to the scene once they’ve made the step up. So it’s a shame to see people dissing ska music or dissing bands that helped them get where they are. Whatever happened to the unity? What ever happened to the us-against-them mentality? It used to be here and unfortunately isn’t anymore.

“It’s a shame to see people dissing ska music or dissing bands that helped them get where they are. Whatever happened to the unity? What ever happened to the us-against-them mentality? It used to be here and unfortunately isn’t anymore.”

BT: How do you feel about a lot of the Two Tone bands coming back, with Madness and reports of the English Beat reuniting?

Bucket: I’d really like to see that on one level, but on another level I wish that it could be a lot more of the original members.

BT: Well, Madness is all the original lineup and there are reports out there that the original English Beat is reuniting.

Bucket: English Beat will never reunite. There’s no way the guitarist and the bass player are ever going to get on stage with Wakeling. There’s no way that’s ever going to happen. I know that for a fact.

BT: False reports then?

Bucket: Well, where do reports come from? You know, I believe everything I see and only a fraction of what I hear. But there’s no way the English Beat are going to patch things up. It’s the same with The Specials. There’s no way Dammers is going to get on the stage with those guys, there’s no way that’s gonna happen. So, for me, to see The Specials coming back, it’s great, but it’s not really The Specials. Without Terry Hall and Jerry Dammers, it ain’t really The Specials. But it sounds good.

BT: I kind of felt that the recent album was really good, but they were competing against this Specials legacy that they could never be.

Bucket: Yeah, which is a shame, because on one level, people should like cut them more slack than that, but in a way that’s kind of the pitfall, that you’re going to be able to get away from. But I thought it was a great record. I thought they really captured the original sound well and it sounded like, you could put it on and say, wow, this is a Specials record, which is great. I always think that’s a great tribute when people say to me, well, I put that on and they know that’s The Toasters, it sounds like The Toasters. I think if you’re at the point when you can get a signature sound, then you’ve achieved something. People say, well, everything sounds the same. But in a way, that’s good. So for The Specials to get back to that sound, to recreate that, I think is great. There’s a couple of songs on the album, I mean, if it was up to me I probably wouldn’t have put them on there. I know Adam [Birch, trumpeter for 90s Specials], who’s playing with us now, was not happy at all with the way the album was mixed, and the mix which they did had a more attacking, more proto-punk Specials sound, a 1978 sound. But that’s not really what happened when the re-mixes started happening and the egos came out and the pop star record was attempted to be made. I’d really like to hear the original mixes on that album. I think that could have been a much more slamming record than in fact it was. But there’re some tunes on there which I thought were really good.

BT: You were talking about a breakdown in the unity of the bands. How do you feel about the unity of the fan base?

Bucket: It burns me when people say, the music should be this, or the music should be that, or say, who are these kids listening to our music. I mean, it doesn’t belong to anybody. Music comes from God. We’re just here to play it.

BT: When you speak of it that, it always strikes me that whenever you hear any of the Skatalites, or any Jamaican music for that matter, talk about the music and ska and reggae, they always speak of it in those terms, it’s a gift to the world and it’s for everybody. Nobody speaks of it as a possession.

Bucket: No, they don’t speak of it as our music. But that’s the thing, this is not like our music, we’re just privileged to be able to play it. And hopefully history will say that I’ve done my part when the time comes for me to not play music anymore and stay home and play with my kids, hopefully other people will love it as much as I’ve loved it and water the garden a little bit.

“I see a lot of people who want to sit in the garden and enjoy it and leave their trash lying around and let their dogs piss in it and drink their beer and throw the beer bottles in the bushes. I see a lot of those people, but I don’t see a lot of ska janitors.”

But I don’t really see that happening right now. I see a lot of people who want to pick the fruit and eat the vegetables, but I don’t see a lot of people who want to do the hoeing and pick the weeds and take the stones out. I don’t see a lot of those people. But I see a lot of people who want to sit in the garden and enjoy it and leave their trash lying around and let their dogs piss in it and drink their beer and throw the beer bottles in the bushes. I see a lot of those people, but I don’t see a lot of ska janitors. I don’t see a lot of the ska janitors and the gardeners.

“All of a sudden it’s grown into like, this big huge shit pie where everybody’s complaining they don’t have enough money or we’re not famous enough or you didn’t get our video played enough times on MTV.”

The janitor wants to ride in the golf cart now. He doesn’t want to pick up the garbage because he’s too much of a rock star to do it. I don’t understand that. In a way, it’s like, I’m more confused than anything else. I mean, how did we get to where we are now, where it’s like ska music, instead of this like noble thing with 300 spartans where it’s kind of like, we’re gonna keep this music together and we’re gonna do what we gotta do, and it grew slowly over the years, and all of a sudden it’s grown into like, this big huge shit pie where everybody’s complaining they don’t have enough money or we’re not famous enough or you didn’t get our video played enough times on MTV. I have to laugh. One band, who will remain nameless, I got a shitty letter from their manager, which is funny, after talk to a band for like 5 or 10 years, all of a sudden you gotta talk to a manager, okay, you want to waste your money on that, that’s fine. But this manager goes to me, you haven’t done enough for the band, and this the day after we just got their video played on MTV. The day after.

“We’ve had three different bands now claiming to have sold more records than we’ve actually pressed.”

I guess if that’s what you call not doing enough for the band, I guess I haven’t done it. I’m more kind of bemused than anything. I’m surprised it’s really come to where we are, where it’s kind of like a bitch fight. Like, we’re better than you are or you should have done this for us, I mean, the one I really like now is when they have a lawyer call me and say, “Moon Ska Records owes our client money.” I’ll say, okay how do you figure that? And he says, well, according to the last statement you sent us, that’s not what Soundscan shows and the band feels that they’ve sold X amount of records. So my point is, well, if you think these figures aren’t right, what you should do is come on over to the office with your calculator and we’ll take a look at all the money that’s come in from Caroline, our distributors, and our shops, and we’ll add that all up. And we’ll add up all the money we’ve spent on the band, and we’ve sent them all the receipts anyway, and then we’ll see what the reality is. We’ve had three different bands now claiming to have sold more records than we’ve actually pressed. So that’s the other thing that makes me laugh at the moment, bands “feeling” that they’ve sold 40,000 records, which is a magic number. I think it’s a number that they get told from a major label, that in order to get a look at, they going to have to show 40,000 sales. I think that must be an industry number. So the three bands in question were all convinced that they’d made 40,000 in sales and in reality that was actually more records than we’d physically made. That’s happened three times in a row. It’s a funny little thing that makes me laugh.

BT: How do you balance being in a band and also having to deal with bands from the perspective of the label?

Bucket: The label’s turned into a nightmare, really. I’d never really envisaged it getting to be what it is and in a way it’s kind of much more fun just to play in a band and just have to deal with that. But it’s turned out that the most difficult people to work with in every instance has been the artist. Now I understand why in the early days, I used to get these really shitty contracts from record labels. But now in a way I wish I’d never really set Moon up as an artists’ cooperative and just in the beginning had signed people up to these shithouse deals that everybody else gets. In that way, I would have actually made some money out of it.

“The music is always going to be there and I still love that.”

There’s an old adage in the music business, from the label’s perspective, that no matter how much you do for a band, it’s never enough. My next-door neighbour works with bands like U2 and other Island bands like PJ Harvey and it’s exactly the same thing. So I think it’s just like, artists are artists. And that artists “feel” that they should be doing better than they are. So, the music is always going to be there and I still love that. I just don’t like the fact that everybody in the ska world turned into a whiney little bitch all of a sudden. I don’t get that. So we’ll see what the reality is. It’s going to be really hard times and we’ll see what bands, including my own, are going to go out and work a lot harder to stay in the same place. So let’s see who’s still standing when the dust clears.