32 years. That's how long Mustard Plug has been a ska band. Just take a moment and let it sink in how impressive that is. These beloved Michigan natives have managed to survive the '90s as a ska band and lead singer Dave Kirchgessner chatted with Scene Point Blank about not only surviving that era but reliving it with us. Check out our interview below for all the '90s nostalgia you could ever dream of, some insight into Mustard Plug's new album, a deep dive into the genre, and so much more!
Scene Point Blank: Something I’ve been thinking about recently with bands that have been around for more than a decade is when and how often they release new music. There seems to be a point where making music is less about pressure (whether it be from a label, fans, touring, etc.) and more about just making music because the band is legitimately excited to. It’s been 9 years since Mustard Plug’s last record and Where Did All My Friends Go marks your 8th LP -- are there some key things that stick out from the making of this record vs. previous ones?
Dave Kirchgessner: What you said is totally applicable to us. In the early ’90s ska was really big at that point and there was a lot of pressure to put out new records from our label. Then as time moves on, you almost become a legacy act where people are really into more of your catalog vs. waiting for the next, new song. I know there are bands who are our peers that don’t even release new stuff, you know what I mean? So you get to the point where the only reason to do it is if you really want to and if you have something to say. Honestly, we’re at the point where every time we put out a record, we’re not sure if we’ll ever release another one.
But with this one, it was really the pandemic and being shut in our houses that motivated us to write a bunch of songs. As well as, just prior to the pandemic, there was a big upsurge and interest in ska and things coming together. Our shows were getting bigger and a bunch of new bands were happening -- all that stuff just kinda came together and it made a lot of sense to put out a new record. Once the songs were written, we were really, really happy with them too. We put a lot into this, we recorded at The Blasting Room in Fort Collins with Bill Stevenson who had produced a couple of our albums back in the '90s and early/mid-2000s. We felt very strongly about this record and we wanted to do everything we could to make the best record we could.
Scene Point Blank: Can you talk some about the music scene in the early ’90s and what it was like playing and creating music during that time vs. how that’s changed or evolved over time for Mustard Plug?
Dave Kirchgessner: If you really look at the early ’90s when we started, in the era of ’90-’93, ska was just this really underground thing, way more obscure than punk and most other music. You could find it in some of the big cities, there was a little budding scene in Detroit and Chicago, but it wasn’t something you jumped into to become a popular band. At that point, grunge was like this steamroller that had taken over the whole music industry. In Grand Rapids, which is fairly close to Chicago, there was a big industrial music scene in the alternative music world. Ska was way different from that stuff, but there was this budding community and the people that were into it were really tight. We would bring in bands to Grand Rapids like King Apparatus, Let’s Go Bowling, and Skankin’ Pickle just because we wanted to see them. One of the reasons we started this band was so there would be an opening band in Grand Rapids to play with these bands and so we could bring them in. So it started in a really great, honest, and organic way for Mustard Plug -- we had very few ambitions.
But by the mid-‘90s, things had really, really changed. All of a sudden it was like, wait a minute, there’s all this music industry attention on ska. Bands that were our peers were getting major label contracts and videos on MTV, and it happened in such an incredibly short amount of time between ’93-’96. It’s just mind-blowing to me how fast that happened when I look back at it because we’ve been doing this for 32 years now. Post-2000s, things moved at a much slower pace, and not much changed. Around ’99-2000 there was kind of a ska backlash and then it kind of went back to being underground again.
It’s kind of amazing we stuck around during the 2000-2010 era because it was such a brutal time to be a ska band and was really hard to exist and tour. And yes we had good shows, we’ve always had a good, strong fan base, but over the past three years there’s been a new influx of energy for a lot of reasons. There are new bands, new labels (like Bad Time), new festivals, there’s a ska movie, The Interrupters broke out; just a lot of things coming together to bring that energy back, so it’s been really interesting to witness the whole thing.
"As time moves on, you almost become a legacy act where people are really into more of your catalog vs. waiting for the next, new song. I know there are bands who are our peers that don’t even release new stuff, you know what I mean? So you get to the point where the only reason to do it is if you really want to and if you have something to say."
Scene Point Blank: In a recent interview you talked about the long tradition in ska that goes back to The Specials of having dark lyrics with happy, fun dance music. I mean, that’s originally what appealed to me with ska music. Can you talk more about why that juxtaposition has appealed to you personally and maybe shed a little insight on your own journey with discovering ska?
Dave Kirchgessner: When I first just started getting into ska I was coming out of the ’80s hardcore scene and it’s at that point in high school where you discover music that really changes you, and the hardcore punk scene was that for me. We’re talking like ’86-’87 and that thing had run its course. I felt like it wasn’t being creative and the shows were becoming less diverse with more negative energy. Then I started discovering two-tone ska: Fishbone, The Toasters, and Gangster Fun from Detroit and it was so incredibly appealing to me because it was like a completely different vibe and could express different things. The positivity of just dancing is an amazing thing too -- like myself and Colin our guitar player, we spent a lot of time in high school to post-college at alternative dance clubs. Colin even used to DJ for a few years and we have a lot of respect for dance music in general. The type of dancing people do to punk, it’s cool, but it just kind of expresses one thing. Whereas I think ska is inherently positive in the way people dance -- the horns and the upbeat tempos, you can still lyrically express a whole range of emotions -- that’s what originally drew me into ska.
Scene Point Blank: That’s a really interesting point, I didn’t even think about the impact of dance clubs, especially during that era.
Dave Kirchgessner: That’s a really unique thing about going to a ska show, everyone is dancing. That’s the one thing we’ve always tried to encourage our crowd to do and I think it’s just a wonderful thing. It brings people together, you get great exercise, you can express yourself physically and become more part of the show than just being a casual observer. You feel like you’re a part of it.
Scene Point Blank: Something I’ve always found interesting is that ska produces such visceral reactions with people -- in a lot of ways ska always felt like the nerdy kid at the table who was cool in middle school but got picked on all the time in high school. Then subgenres like ska-punk tended to yield different results with audiences depending on how many horns you had or band members. Do you think ska has always been this sort of misunderstood outcast or what’s your take on this?
Dave Kirchgessner: I agree, it feels kind of like an outcast music genre and it’s misunderstood in a lot of ways too. And I think part of it is when it started coming up in the United States, it was so radically different than everything. Alternative music then was Nine Inch Nails and Nirvana, and that’s all great music, but it’s not in the same boat as ska for sure. People’s first impression would be listening to this happy, horn-driven music and they were attracted to it because it was so different and positive, but if you didn’t get super into the genre you didn’t really understand the depths of it. If you go down deep in the history of The Skatalites, that was its own thing with elements of politics and social commentary and just amazing musicianship. The two-tone era was stuff like The Specials and their lyrics are super dark and political, but even if you just got there as a casual listener, you’d probably just see a bunch of people in suits dancing around. Then the third wave stuff, I think the same thing, you really have the scratch the surface. Mustard Plug has always had some very serious and dark lyrics mixed in with goofy party songs. For whatever reason, casual listeners just focus on the latter part. I think that’s part of the reason why ska is so misunderstood: it’s complex in its culture and makeup.
Scene Point Blank: I think oftentimes music invokes nostalgia just by its storytelling nature and the fact that music and memories go hand in hand for many people. Nostalgia quite literally means the state of being homesick. This record felt like that in many ways: the name itself Where Did All My Friends Go?, songs like “Rebel Youth Face,” and the fact that it was created during the pandemic. Can you talk about what nostalgic qualities this album has for you and maybe some memories you hold close to the duration of its creation?
Dave Kirchgessner: A lot of it was written while we were sitting at home during the pandemic when we couldn’t leave and even practice together as a band. We have various family members that have different health conditions and we had to be very conservative about that sort of thing. We had just gotten off an amazing year with the band: a west coast tour with The Toasters where the crowds and energy reminded me of the mid-’90s; we had been to Japan, which we hadn’t done in a long time; and we were literally in Australia when this whole thing happened (that was a crazy thing by the way -- I’m glad we made it home). To go from that much excitement -- and speaking of nostalgia, like I said it really felt like the ’90s part two, but maybe even a little better because there wasn’t the major label feeding frenzy aspect of it -- and the shows having that energy, to being stuck at home, and go from one extreme to the other was just really harsh. We finally got to feel that same energy of the ’90s and then everything shut down. It was tough because you didn’t see your friends anymore and get to do what you love. I spent a lot of time just thinking about that and also revisiting some of the music I used to listen to back in the ’80s and ’90s.
We’re at the point where we’re 32 years old as a band, and Colin and I (the original members) are pushing our mid-50s now. You can’t help but be a little nostalgic about things. It’s cool and a great thing that we have this new group of kids coming to shows and seeing a lot of Bad Time Records fans getting into it and rediscovering ska and Mustard Plug -- seeing these 16-17-year-old kids going to shows again brings up a lot of nostalgic feelings and I wonder if they feel the same way I did when I was 16? I hope they do. So nostalgia is definitely something that formed the songwriting. I mean “Rebel Youth Face,” I wrote as kinda a lark, it wasn’t something that I took super seriously. I think I wrote all those lyrics and the whole thought behind it is: sometimes nostalgia can be used as a marketing tool and can be commodified. It’s sad when that happens because I feel like if kids are being sold a product that’s commodified nostalgia, they’re not creating their own thing and that’s kind of dangerous.
"We’re at the point where people will tell us, “Oh we’re so excited for your new album,” just to be nice. We have a lot of friends and fans and they’re going to be nice to us and not tell us our record sucks, even if it does. But you can tell when people are singing along, when people are dancing -- you can’t fake the live reaction. So it was really inspiring to see that and people really got into the new stuff and matched our energy."
Scene Point Blank: Yeah, it’s kind of taking out the organic part of music that naturally creates that nostalgia.
Dave Kirchgessner: Totally, and it’s wild. One of my new favorite bands in Michigan, Rodeo Boys, considers themselves a grunge-influenced band. They don’t dress up in flannel, and they aren’t Kurt Cobain, but they have somehow managed to take some of the best things about grunge and bring in completely new influences. I don’t think recycling stuff is necessarily bad, that’s what ska has done. There are probably a few genres where that’s pretty much the whole definition. The whole two-tone genre was recycling Jamaican ska, the third wave is recycling two-tone ska, but it was done super organically -- kids discovered this music and then put their own spin on it and I think that’s wonderful and inspiring.
Scene Point Blank: I think that’s the history of music that sometimes people forget, where it’s all really more integrated and intertwined than people realize.
Dave Kirchgessner: Absolutely. And even first wave ska was pulling mainstream influences from American R&B, and they were probably pulling stuff from something else as well!
Scene Point Blank: I want to deep-dive for a minute about the legend Bill Stevenson who produced this record. A lot of times we hear about the integral role of a music producer, but so often I don’t think the value they add is fully understood, purely because some things in the music industry remain elusive to the outside world. I know you’ve worked with Bill before, can you shed some light on what it’s like working with him again and how his expertise shines through on the record?
Dave Kirchgessner: We kind of dumb it down and say the record was produced by Bill Stevenson, but the real thing is that it’s Bill Stevenson and he has like three different engineers that work with him and he works very collectively with the rest of the staff of The Blasting Room. It’s very hard to name four to five different people and explain exactly what their role is, especially because I don’t even know what their role is: there’s one person recording the horns, one mixing it -- Jason Livermore did most of the mixing but we weren’t there, so I don’t know exactly what he did and how often Bill was there making suggestions. We would just send tapes back and forth over the Internet-- that’s how our input went.
I think this is the fourth record we’ve done with Bill and he has a different philosophy and approach each time. I think it was our second record where he actually flew out to Grand Rapids attended our rehearsals and was more involved in arranging the songs. He’s worked with us enough that we can just jump in the studio instantly and there’s no warming up. He knows what our strengths are, he knows our weaknesses, and he knows when to push us to do another take. He’s getting to the point with vocals more that he embraces the digital way of recording, but has gotten really good at keeping the humanity in the vocals. And he knows when to push me vocally to do it again, try to hit that note, try to hit that timing -- but when it matters. And when it doesn’t matter, probably leaving a little of that in just so it doesn’t sound like a robot. Because he knows the band so well, he’s just an expert voice at giving us really good advice. It’s also cool because he’s become a really good friend of the band, we’ve always had a lot of trust in him and it’s a pleasure to work with him. So that just helps the vibe of the whole process.
Scene Point Blank: You’ve just finished a handful of shows with the Toasters and Half Past Two, what have those shows been like to play, and have they felt differently from pre-pandemic shows?
Dave Kirchgessner: The whole ska thing had been building for the last three years prior to the pandemic and I was really kind of nervous that that energy would go away, that certain people would be like, “Oh that was cool, but nevermind, I’ve moved on to the next thing”. Part of that is from experiencing the ’90s were people were that fickle. Three years of the ’90s was like an eternity, they weren’t just going from one thing to another, they were going from grunge to ska to swing to whatever came next, nonstop. That time period was nerve wracking, wondering, “Jeez, are these people going to hang out while we record and do the artwork and release this album?” So doing these four release shows -- two of them sold out and the other two were still packed -- the energy was fantastic, everyone was dancing, there were smiles on peoples’ faces. I think, post-pandemic, people just appreciate it even more. They appreciate the whole live interaction, they appreciate jamming themselves with 400 other people in a cool little club. And we’ve gotten really good responses from the new songs that we’re playing which is a nerve wracking thing because we’re at the point where people will tell us, “Oh we’re so excited for your new album,” just to be nice. We have a lot of friends and fans and they’re going to be nice to us and not tell us our record sucks, even if it does. But you can tell when people are singing along, when people are dancing -- you can’t fake the live reaction. So it was really inspiring to see that and people really got into the new stuff and matched our energy.
