It was a bit of an early Turn-Back-The-Clock night at Boston’s Big Night Live last Saturday as long-running ska punk favorites Big D and the Kids Table resurrected their epic Halloween show tradition at Boston’s Big Night Live. Joining them for the festivities were a couple of regionally iconic bands – Thumper and Folly – and a relatively new supergroup (The Kilograms), a sort of Voltron made up of some longtime scene heavyweights – Sammy Kay, Joe Gittleman, Michael McDermott and J Duckworth. Despite being a four-band bill (seriously…a four-band bill? In this economy?) the 5:00pm doors, speedy changeovers and hard 9:30 curfew meant this was a perfect show for “The Olds” such as myself.
Hailing from the wilds of northern New Jersey, hardcore/ska crossover band Folly kicked off the evening’s festivities in blistering fashion. Accompanied by a nearly seizure-inducing endless strobe-lit stage show (that did wonders for a rank amateur photographer such as myself), the five-piece blazed through a half-hour set that set the stage for what was to come. The band got back together a couple years ago, nearly a quarter-century after their original run began, and while they might be older and wiser, they haven’t lost much of a step in their ferocity.
Next up was The Kilograms. Now I would be lying if I said this wasn’t the set that I was most interested in catching. While the collective number of shows that the band’s members have played in their previous endeavors numbers well into the thousands, this event marked not only the fifteenth show in the band’s history together but their first-ever show in Boston, which is obviously the place where Joe Gittleman earned his status as a genre-defining scene pioneer. I’ve been hip to the project – which came together fairly organically and almost entirely existed in the virtual world of Al Gore’s Internet before finally playing a show together back in May – since essentially the beginning, so it was great to finally see them together in the same room. Outfitted as the Gallagher brother’s New Jersey nephew, Kay takes center stage, although he and Gittleman and Duckworth take turns sharing vocal duties, at least when the latter isn’t spinning like a top at stage right. McDermott, who I hadn’t seen play in the almost dozen years since he left the Souls, kept the beat as steady as ever, letting the three-headed monster out front bob and weave and create their blend of rocksteady ska. Special shoutout to Craig Gorsline on the keys, providing layers of texture and filling out the rocksteady live sound. Extra special shoutout for the reworked version of the classic “Lean on Sheena” which Gittleman wrote and performed with Avoid One Thing and McDermott brought to the Souls, yet when they combine, it’s for a new, fresh version that only vaguely resembles the versions you’re used to hearing. Stay tuned for more from The ‘Grams soon, but for now you can listen on bandcamp.
Thumper was up next, and I’ll admit that I was almost as stoked to see Thumper as I was to see the Kilograms. I fell in love with Thumper in the mid-1990s, during the peak of what I guess we’re still calling ska’s third wave. They weren’t your average ska-core band, with a two-tone-meets-thrash-metal-infused sound and sense of humor and intelligence that were all their own. The last time I’d seen Thumper was coincidentally with Big D and the Kids Table at Tune Inn (R.I.P.) in New Haven, CT, on Valentine’s Day 1998. I don’t know if I knew at the time it would be my last Thumper show for many years – the band broke up later that year and I never made it to the scattered reunion shows they’ve done – so it was a welcome treat to see them dust off the cobwebs and jump on this bill. “Burn Baby Burn” and “Holy Roller” and “Backstabber” still go as hard as ever (especially the latter, which featured Folly returning to the stage for a big group throwdown).
And finally the witching hour – in this case around 8:00pm – was upon us, and it was Big D and the Kids Table’s turn to entertain the masses. Not only were the band celebrating Halloween as per usual, but they were also celebrating the 25 years of their 1999 Asian Man Records full-length debut Good Luck. It may be a bit of recency bias to say this, but though I’ve lost track of how many different live incarnations of Big D I’ve seen since 1997, this one – centered as always around the energetic bordering on theatrical David McWane – might be the tightest. The band blistered through Good Luck in what seemed like record time, perhaps due to the hard curfew. With a lot of my ska-core listening days behind me, I guess I’d forgotten how fun that record was, as it’s been overshadowed by Strictly Rude and Fluent In Stroll in recent times. If you’re like me, you can relish in those old days by watching the Good Luck tour documentary that finally found its way to YouTube after a quarter-century. Those memories seem like both just yesterday and like two lifetimes ago.
Check out more shots from each band’s sets below!
