Scott Begin, drummer for Sublime tribute act Badfish, contemplates the life of a tribute band.
I’m not sure if any band is deserving of a tribute band. Any band whose music reaches people and stays with those people over time doesn’t need any special tribute, award, good review or praise. Sublime, like many great rock bands, has done their job by simply affecting a group of fans. That is their legacy.
What we’ve found over the past four years in playing Sublime’s music is that the people who they affected at the height of their popularity (and the people who they continue to affect 10 years after the fact) want to experience a Sublime show. We don’t claim to be Sublime, we just try to give people an energetic live show with Sublime songs they want to hear.
I became a far bigger Sublime fan after I started playing in this band. Their “radio songs” are great, but hearing their entire catalog of music – including the gritty live tracks and keg-party acoustic jams – really made me appreciate what they were about. Musically and lyrically, they were honest, humorous and true to all of their roots. How could so many people crave this music?
I think the answer is that they were different. It’s easy to see why there are Zeppelin and Floyd tribute bands out there. These bands had careers that spanned decades of popularity, with numerous world tours to boot.
Not Sublime. Their duration as a functional band was a mere four years.
Then there were the three “radio hits” that charted after Brad Nowell’s passing, which have remained radio staples from the late ’90s to this day. Is three hits enough to make a band this enduringly popular? I think it’s more than that.
They played an unclassifiable style that just happened to get lumped in with the mid-’90s punk/ska craze. They most certainly were not bandwagon jumpers. And they had songs that would rock Sebastian Bach’s boots off and dub-reggae jams that turned on younger listeners to a new world of music.
This unique and eclectic style that they possessed, along with incredible songwriting and the ability to play infectious, danceable music, is what made them different. To say their music is the perfect party music seems to sell them short, but that’s part of it too.
Their party lifestyle is well-known, almost infamous at this point, and although there are a lot of stories, lies and exaggerations, their association with the “good times” is undeniable.
Badfish continues its trek through Colorado with shows tonight at Sherpa & Yeti’s in Breckenridge and Saturday night at Vail’s Club 8150. Information: badfish.com.
