Aaron Carnes, host of the Consequence Podcast Network series In Defense of Ska is back with the second edition of his book of the same name. To celebrate the updated release, we’ve already put together a list of the 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 Now More Than Ever Edition.
In this chapter from the expanded edition of IDOS, Carnes explores a niche subgenre within an already niche scene: Christian ska. Specifically, he focuses on the return of Five Iron Frenzy, a band that returned after a 10-year hiatus with a record-setting Kickstarter campaign to fund their 2013 comeback album. Eight years later, they released Until This Shakes Apart, a record that puts a microscope on the Republican party’s alignment with Trumpism.
As Carnes puts it,
“It wasn’t about simply 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 very day: Five Iron Frenzy. They’re still so popular that when returning in 2011, they broke a Kickstarter record to fund their newest album, Engine of a Million Plots. What I wanted to know was, how did a Christian ska band — in 2011, even when ska was supposedly dead — raise so much money to make another album? This excerpt answers that question and gives some Christian ska history for context.”
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Read the excerpt below, and then snag a copy of In Defense of Ska here. You can catch Carnes on his book tour throughout the fall by checking out dates here. Also, make sure to 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 do, with new episodes dropping every Wednesday.
Five Iron Frenzy are playing 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 an urge to record a new album by 2013, ten years after their final show. They asked their fans for $30,000 to fund the record via Kickstarter. “Some might call it beating a dead horse. We call it recording an album,” they wrote. They assumed $30,00 would be a tough ask, so they gave themselves sixty days to reach that goal. They hit $30,000 in twenty-four hours. By the end of sixty days, they’d raised $207,980, a new record for Kickstarter. “We were like, this is nuts. People are stupid. Why are they doing this?” says guitarist Micah Ortega.
During the early 2010s, the sting of ska shame faded, and ’90s nostalgia was amping up. Asbestos Records proved that there was still interest in records from this era by reissuing third wave ska on vinyl. The label started in 1996 with a primary focus on local bands and promoting shows. By 2005, they shifted to vinyl, releasing 7” and 10” records, and the first three Bomb the Music Industry and the final Arrogant Sons of Bitches LPs. By the late 2000s, they started to reissue popular ’90s ska albums. Mustard Plug’s Big Daddy Multitude, the Slackers’ Better Late Than Never, both Spring Heeled Jack records, 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 the Underground Communique out of Chicago. Pilfers’ S/T, Edna’s Goldfish’s Before You Knew Better, Pietasters’ Oolooloo, Stubborn All Stars’ Back With a New Batch, Thumper’s No One Left The Disco Alive, and others. Most of the titles sold out over the following decade. “My friends and I all loved these albums, and as record collectors, we felt they needed to exist. They were received well and were a good number of years ahead of the vinyl boom,” says Matt Flood, co-owner of Asbestos Records.
Still, the reception for Five Iron was unrivaled when they returned. Christian ska was a niche genre with only a handful of bands. During their time, Five Iron impacted many people’s lives by challenging their idea of God and the notion that Christianity went hand in hand with American conservatism and hard-right capitalism. When they returned, many of their fans were grown adults who looked back at the group as an instrumental part of shaping who they’d become. Funding a new record was the least they could do to repay them. “The legacy [of Five Iron] is that there’s a whole generation that blew up their houses and kept the foundation,” says Five Iron Frenzy saxophonist Leanor Ortega Till (Micah’s second cousin). “I do think for American Christianity, Five Iron had a small place in changing the status quo the way some people think.”
The godfather of Christian rock was Larry Norman, with his 1969 concept album Upon This Rock. The genre evolved from scrappy ex-hippies to a major industry that could compete with Nashville’s music row (many Christian labels also happened to be in Nashville). By the ’90s, Christian rock was big business. An alternative Christian music scene evolved, much of it in basements and churches in Southern California with hardcore bands like Unashamed and Focused. Tooth & Nail Records and a handful of other labels seized the moment. Whatever criticisms can be lobbed at the label, it felt authentic; punk, hardcore, alternative, and ska bands formed by Christian kids as opposed to groups that felt assembled to mimic what was popular to preach the gospel to young impressionable minds. And it operated 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 Washington-based pop-punk band MxPx. Their record Life in General (1996) brought Tooth & Nail to the mainstream. They toured with bands like No Doubt, Dance Hall Crashers, No Face, and Reel Big Fish. Tooth & Nail sold lots of copies of Life in General and Ebel put most of the money he made into promoting MxPx. When MxPx was offered a deal with A&M in 1997, they left. Ebel took the little money he had left and decided to invest it all in one band. He chose the Supertones, a ska band. Their first album did fine, and with the rise of ska’s popularity in the mainstream, they were starting to draw crowds on par with MxPx and were the buzz at every festival. “Nail identified the potential of the Supertones to break and threw resources behind the record and were correct. Not to mention that in order to break, we actually had to make a good record,” says Supertones lead singer Matt Morginsky. The Supertones’ second album, Supertones Strike Back (1997), released on Tooth & Nail imprint BEC, hit hard. The band was immediately headlining festivals and playing to crowds of 1,500 kids a night. The success of Strike Back allowed Tooth & Nail to pay off all its debts, expand the staff 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 reeled in so many ’90s kids, like writer/podcaster Jordan Morris, who attended Mission Hills Church in Southern California as a kid. “I got really into my hip youth group, which is like a little scene where a dude with tattoo sleeves turns a chair around backward and wants to rap with you about a cool guy named Jesus who had some pretty wild ideas. That stuff, it’s just catnip to a certain kind of teenager,” Morris says. He adds that the church did a good job replicating the punk atmosphere and flyers to make it seem like a DIY punk event. They were DIY in a sense because Supertones’ drummer Jason Carson put on the Mission Hills shows on his own. He was part-time staff at Mission Hills, and the church leadership permitted Jason to use the venue for the 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 doorway the morning of the show and demanded Ebel sign Saved to Tooth & Nail. Ebel said no. “We continued to gain a following in SoCal, and they eventually did come around on us,” says Morginsky. Though, when Ebel signed the band, his one stipulation was that they had to change their name.