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Mighty Mighty Bosstones
By Scott Harrell
“I’ve been an old guy since I was a young guy. I was a forty-five year-old man when I was fifteen, so it’s fine with me. I don’t care; I do what I do.”
Dicky Barrett, gravel-throated frontman for The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, doesn’t get rankled about terms like ‘elder statesmen’, ‘godfathers’, or ‘pioneers’ appearing in conjunction with his band’s name. It happens; big deal. After all, when The Bosstones first began purveying bouncy-ass horn-inflected funrawk, MTV’s programming was still mostly music videos, believe it or not, and any number of upbeat outfits has cited them as a primary inspiration. Time marches on. But the great thing about that is, as people go through life, they get better at stuff.
Like writing songs, for instance.
“When we wrote our first few albums, the words ‘songwriters’ and ‘Bosstones’ were probably never seen in the same sentence,” recalls Barrett. “But as time went on, that’s what people were calling us, and I thought ‘well, maybe that’s what I am’. And after that, ‘am I a good one?’. As long as people are calling me that, I want to be the best one I can be.”
Their newest release, Pay Attention, is comprised of the most cohesive, fully realized, and well-written songs of this octet’s career. While their previous effort, Let’s Face It, sported some truly great tuneage, and spurred their greatest commercial success to date, it seemed a bit of the Bosstones’ furious energy had been sacrificed along the way. Nothing goes missing on Pay Attention, which meshes seasoned craft with intensity and ageless enthusiasm. From the introspection of ‘Let Me Be’, ‘Finally’, and ‘I Know More’, through the social relevance of ‘All Things Considered’ and ‘High School Dance’ to the barroom tale-spinning of ‘Riot on Broad Street’, all the trademark MMB touches are accounted for, and bolstered by the band’s eternal quest to push its own envelope.
“That’s what we planned on doing out of the gate. We don’t start making a record and go ‘what did we do on the last record’ and ‘let’s do that again’; we say ‘what haven’t we done yet’ and ‘let’s try it’. That’s been rule number one, and that goes for every song. Devil’s Night Out isn’t like More Noise, which isn’t like Question The Answers or Don’t Know How To Party. There’ll all extremely different,” Dicky emphasizes. “If you examine the records, we’ve never been one type of band. We’ve never been a ska band, we’ve probably never been a punk band. I mean, we have punk rock hearts and a love for ska music. But we’ve only ever tried to be one thing, and that’s the Bosstones. And the definition of that is whatever we say it is.”
As eclectic as they’ve always been, the outfit’s punk rock hearts are what earned them their original, and still their most loyal, fanbase. The Bosstones were embraced early on by the punk community, on the merits of their manic live show and insistence on doing things their own way. The band unfailingly reciprocates the love to this day; they’re about the closest thing there is to a staple of the Warped Tour, they continue to tap the unknowns and the underrated for support on their headlining tours, and they generally keep a close eye on those details that affect their fans, from ticket prices to security. The punk scene serves as the Bosstones’ extended family; when it is mentioned that this year’s Warped lineup seems more stylistically diverse than previous bills, Barrett is quick to correct the perceived slight.
“Every year the Warped Tour bands are stylistically different. If you really pay attention to bands,,,I don’t know, to me, every band is itself,” he clarifies. “There’s no other NOFX on the tour. Snapcase. There’s nothing that sounds like that to me. Maybe I look at music differently, but you seem to hear things as being called the same all the time.”
But isn’t that the generalization? That punk bands all sound the same?
“That’s people who just want something to say. It makes it easier on them. All those bands are a million miles apart. There are similar drum beats and similar chords, but Guttermouth isn’t Good Riddance. And if you wanna make it easier on yourself by saying they all sound the same, that’s unsophisticated and immature, and takes no thought at all. That’s like saying the Bosstones are like Reel Big Fish.
“Or make it really easy on yourself,” Barrett continues with a rueful chuckle, “the Bosstones are just like Sugar Ray. Smash Mouth and the Bosstones are identical. It’s fucking crazy. In the rush to put everything in nice, neat little packages, they don’t look at what it is they’re putting in there.”
While Barrett is right to a certain extent, he’s also vastly understating the effect his band has had on changing that very perception. Every great record, every breakthrough song, every high-profile bill, and every new fan forces the reality of underground music’s widely varied spectrum deeper into the mainstream consciousness. That’s what tours like Warped, and bands like The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, are for.
THE END
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