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Comeback Kids Take Action! PDF Print E-mail
ImageAfter three years of silence, local ska rockers The Action! regrouped for a 2006 benefit concert at Tipperary Hill’s Ukrainian National Club for the band’s singer-trumpeter Brandon Hall, who had been diagnosed with leukemia six months prior. Despite the grave news that brought them together, Hall’s ailment also became a catalyst for the childhood comrades to renew their passions for music and friendships.
Two years after that gig, The Action! is currently recording a follow-up to the 2007 EP We All Make Mistakes (independent). They will also perform during the Big Kids Dodgeball Tournament at the CNY Family Sports Centre, 7201 Jones Road, on Monday, May 5, 7 p.m.
Brass master Hall and Mike Gibson, lead vocalist and guitarist, recall the weeks before Hall graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2006, when he had discovered that the fatigue he was then experiencing wasn’t caused by stress over final exams. “When we heard about Brandon falling ill, we all felt sort of helpless,” Gibson says. In 1998 Gibson and Hall were founding members of the West Genesee High School outfit Skatos, specializing in an upbeat mix of ska, reggae and punk. Gibson and trumpet player Chris Nolan then got the idea to summon their former band mates, in the hopes that by surrounding Hall with friends and music, something positive could happen.
“I had no idea that the guys were getting together,” Hall remembers. “I wanted to play with the band up on stage, but in my condition I couldn’t dance, let alone play and jump around.”
Without goals or expectations, the band commenced with weekly meetings in August
2006. Gibson brought in a song that he and Nolan had messed around with back in 2003.
“Nolan wrote a great horn section for a song before we all went our own ways,” Gibson says. The song was revisited and turned into a new, more complex number. “It was then that we realized that we were all happy making music together.”
The re-formed septet acknowledged that they were not the same band, so they changed their name. “We weren’t the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, hair-dyeing teens that we were in Skatos,” Gibson says with a laugh.
During the Skatos hiatus, each member had stayed musically active with other projects. Gibson and Hall were part of the surf-rock trio The Amazing Shakes. Bassist Adam Carkey played with the Ukrainian band Vorony. Drummer Craig Chamberlain experimented with jazz, as did trombone players Dave Piwinski and Dan King. And Nolan continued carrying the ska torch with The Benefits.
“The Amazing Shakes project allowed me to write from a different perspective,” Gibson says. “Writing songs in the ska and reggae genres felt limiting.”
The Action! has been recording with their longtime sound engineer Sam Paterelli as well as Ron Keck, operations manager at SubCat Music Studio in Skaneateles. The final track list will hold 15 new songs penned primarily by Gibson, such as “Please Don’t Leave.” Gibson says, “The writing has matured, and for the first time a song of ours has vastly different sections. It is musically more complex, with tempo changes and with the chorus being in a different key than the bridge. We took the horn section Nolan wrote three years ago and found a way to incorporate it into a more meaningful piece of music.”
The Action! will also pay homage to their adolescent music heroes Reel Big Fish at the Big Kids Dodgeball Tournament. “We learned the a-ha song “Take On Me” that Reel Big Fish covered in {the 1998 movie} BASEketball. It was fun playing on the upper deck over the {Sports Centre} field as the teams battled it out for dodgeball glory,” Gibson says.
Admission to the tournament is free. For more information, call 256-3922. The Action! will also perform June 6 at the Taste of Syracuse’s SubCat Emerging Artists stage in downtown Syracuse. Admission is free. For more information, call 685-9064.
-John Martin Goot
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