Five tough gongs
L.A.’s Aggrolites hit Santa Barbara with dirty reggae
By Matthew Singer 06/21/2007
“Tough” is a word that appears often in conversations with Jesse Wagner. He doesn’t use it to describe his upbringing nor his image of himself, but rather the music that inspires him and that which he hopes to make with the band he fronts, the appropriately named Aggrolites (in British parlance, “aggro” equals “aggressive”).
“What I mean when I keep saying that is, if you listen to the Skatalites in the ’60s, that is not skip-to-my-loo, pick-it-up shit. Shit was tough,” Wagner says from a hotel room somewhere in Oklahoma City. “The Specials in England in the ’70s, that shit was tough. They were punk rock, jumping around, all crazy and mean. When the ’90s roll around and you think of ska, even Sublime was tough as hell.”
The Aggrolites were born out of a small, tight-knit community of Jamaican music aficionados who, in addition to performing with their own groups, would also serve as makeshift backing bands for legendary island singers booked at clubs around Los Angeles. Wagner, along with future Aggros guitarist Brian Dixon, bassist J. Bonner, keyboardist Roger Rivas and drummer Korey Horn, were among the musicians on the promoters’ speed dial. Whenever they happened to get matched up, the results were stellar. Revered vocalist Prince Buster said he hadn’t heard his songs played better since he recorded them, and Derrick Morgan was so impressed he recruited the band to back him in the studio. They wrote and recorded an entire album of original material for him to sing over, but when they mailed the instrumentals to Morgan, he sent back a CD of what he wanted: synthesized versions of his past hits. The record was scrapped, and “we put together the Aggrolites instead.”
The concept behind the band is highly specific: to pay homage to the era of Jamaican music between 1967 and 1972, the years in which rocksteady — the slower, guitar and piano-based successor to the up-tempo, horn-driven rhythms of ska — gradually evolved into reggae. Don’t think of the Aggrolites as revivalists, though.
“We can’t play reggae like they did,” says Wagner, which is why they have branded their personalized version “dirty reggae.” A fan of funk and soul (thanks to his father’s record collection) even before discovering reggae at age 14, Wagner sings with a voice obviously learned from a childhood spent listening to the likes of Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding, filled with both sweetness and grit. And the music, raw and sharp, is marked by a distinct punk edge, adapted from such forebears as the Clash and Operation Ivy.
But their mode of operation, however, is borrowed directly from their Jamaican idols. As Wagner explains, musicians in the rough ghettos of Kingston eked out meager livings through their instruments; thus, an average work day for them meant banging out dozens of songs in a matter of hours, picking the best ones and #voila# — new album. The Aggrolites take the same approach to their recordings, jamming live, creating on the fly and aiming for an urgent, unified and “dirty” sound — like “one big reggae machine in the middle of the room.”
This is how they made their most recent album. Returning from the road touring in support of their self-titled 2006 debut for Hellcat, the band immediately went back into the studio, and within two days had written and demoed 25 new songs. Two weeks later, they had Reggae Hit L.A. Hearing the final product, it is remarkable to realize only one track, the breezy “Free Time,” was actually composed prior to going in to record it: “Faster Bullet,” with its driving rhythm and call-and-response vocals, comes across as a studied reinterpretation of Motown; “Reconcile” is nearly gospel; and the title track boast dusty grooves a la the JBs.
The album stands a testament to the group’s chemistry and to their ability to appeal to a wide cross section of fans, from rude boy refugees to skinhead punks to hippies and hip-hoppers. Rancid main man Tim Armstrong signed the group to his Hellcat Records label (and hired them to lay down tracks for his recent solo album), and last year they successfully toured Europe with English ska kingpins Madness (saxophonist Lee “Kix” Thompson told them they were the only band to open for them and receive a positive reaction from their rabid crowd).
“This band is starting a revolution,” Wagner says. “We’re building our own scene, and everyone is welcome.”
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT