Author’s note: This piece was published on February 15th, 2022, 2 days before an interview with BossTones frontman Dicky Barrett on a talk show known for Covid misinformation that essentially confirms all rumors and gossip mentioned here. Barrett makes several unsubstantiated claims in this interview, including but not limited to natural immunity being more effective than vaccine immunity (it isn’t), vaccination being a traumatic event for children (fear of needles continues to be addressed by the scientific community, but a vaccine injection is at worst far less traumatic than debilitating illness), and the idea that taking a stance against vaccinations and CDC guidelines is a punk rock anti-establishment stance that Joe Strummer might have taken (can’t speak for Joe Strummer, but increasing your chances of spreading a deadly virus, particularly one that inordinately affects low income communities smells more like fascism than punk). Needless to say, Dicky Barrett’s opinions do not reflect the opinions of this author, this site, or the band that presumably broke up over them. I apologize to anyone who has been upset by me publishing a nice eulogy for this band following this interview, but moreso I feel sorry for the band having to deal with the aftermath of it, and for myself for having to write this bummer of a disclaimer at the start of my dream article about my favorite band.

January 1, 2022. Over 200 million Americans fully vaccinated. Restaurants, bars, movie theaters, and gyms reopened. Offices bringing employees back in, or at least discussing plans to. Optimistically-scheduled concerts, some of them quite ambitious. Even cruise ship companies were cautiously airing ads like it was 2019 again. Sure, this was all set over the backdrop of the Omicron variant wreaking havoc around the country, but Americans were at least peeking out of the bomb shelter that was 2020 and 2021 and looking ahead to a year that we could potentially live with.

On January 27, 2022, a dark event turned everything around and assured us that we were wrong to hope. I am referring of course to the Mighty Mighty BossTones social media announcement that they were calling it quits.

Listen, I didn’t want to write this article. I made excuses not to. It seemed crude to swoop in on the death of my favorite band like some kind of content vulture, adding more fuel to rumors, gossip, and speculation the band has actively discouraged. Luckily for the band, most other content vultures have been warily circling this corpse, keen to remember the time they broke up in 2004 and came back 3 years later. Fool us twice, shame on us, right? Lastly and most importantly, for as big of a BossTones fan as I am, I know I’m not even in the top 10% of their fandom. I know folks in the 10%, people who will probably message me thanking me for writing this before turning to private message threads and asking, “Who the hell does this guy think he is?” Don’t worry, I know I’m not the right person to eulogize this band. But I have to. Not for you, not for this site, but for me. Acceptance is the first step toward healing, and it’s time to accept that my favorite band is done.

I hadn’t even heard of the BossTones until most of the rest of the world had, after the release of their fifth album Let’s Face It. There was a radio single that fans know as “The Impression That I Get” but most Americans recognize it as “that Knock On Wood song.” You couldn’t turn on an alternative radio station without hearing it. I was 10-years-old. My favorite music was the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack. I had no idea what I was listening to. Few people in the country did. But damn if it didn’t sound good. A clean, beautiful opening guitar riff, a blast of horn fanfare, and three minutes of pure energetic fun driven by a charmingly gravelly voice that would put Cookie Monster to shame. Seven instruments being orchestrated together in a way that music at the time simply wasn’t. It was an undeniable piece of art. But I was 10, my attention span was short, and I was able to forget about the song minutes later as the DJ put on a Third Eye Blind track.

Three years passed. My sister and friends introduced me to the music of Green Day, Blink-182, and the Offspring. I attended my first local punk rock show at a northern Virginia venue not worth remembering and met cool people with patches and leather jackets that looked and acted the way I wanted to look and act. Then I entered high school as the biggest anti-social, straight-A dork you could possibly be unlucky enough to have to sit next to. I went to a school band recruitment event in which we were allowed to mess around with all of the instruments and decide which ones we had aptitude for and which ones we wanted to play. Like every other kid going into high school, I had great aptitude for drums and wanted to play them. My parents rightfully decided that drums were too cool for me and decided that I should rent a baritone horn, a smaller version of a tuba that went a long way in securing my place as a true loser.

When I needed them the most, the BossTones reentered my life. They released an incredible album called Pay Attention in 2000, with an MTV video single called “So Sad To Say.” I probably saw it at some point. More importantly, my fellow band losers whose parents had either allowed or forced them to play low brass instruments proudly showed me that they could play the hornline from “Impression That I Get.” I remembered the song. And I was finally old enough to love it. I was going to have to learn it too.

I went to a local Tower Records, a beautiful relic of a lost age that I don’t have to memorialize (it has its own movie). I looked through massive, meticulously-stocked shelves for the Mighty Mighty BossTones and flipped the first album I saw around to see if it had the Knock On Wood song on it so I could listen to it enough to learn it. It did. It was the first album I ever paid for with my own money, if you count allowance money as your own. I ran home faster than Charlie Bucket after he found the golden ticket in his chocolate bar, barely able to contain my excitement for this record.

Like a diver prying a beautiful pearl from the jaws of a clam, I reached into my fluorescent yellow Tower Records bag and pulled out Live From The Middle East, the BossTones’ live album recorded over the course of 5 days during their Hometown Throwdown of 1997. I didn’t know that The Middle East was a venue in Boston. I didn’t know that Hometown Throwdown was a yearly event that the BossTones did in the city that drew crowds for 5 nights straight. I was frankly annoyed when I put it in my CD player and immediately heard the sound of an audience screaming. It was the loud sound of reality staring me in the face: I was such a loser I didn’t even get the right Knock On Wood album. Three minutes later, as the band wrapped up “1-2-8,” I was hooked. I played the living hell out of this CD for the entirety of high school. I still play the living hell out of this album. Turns out accidentally buying a BossTones live album was the greatest mistake I ever made. I immediately understood that this wasn’t a band that you just listen to studio albums of, this was a band you had to go out and experience.

I wouldn’t get a chance to go out and experience the BossTones for another couple of years, so I instead went to a Less Than Jake show at the Nation nightclub, fell in love with the entire genre and started my own ska band called Oskama Bin Laden and the Jihad Jammers, which is the type of band name that someone really cool would come up with. We experienced an unnotable level of popularity that was nonetheless undeserved and driven entirely by our controversial name. I had to switch from baritone horn to trombone, but that was no hurdle at all. At this point I was ready to do anything ska required of me. It was while I was playing and writing songs for Oskama that the BossTones finally came to D.C. and showed me their whole thing. I was floored. The horns were perfect, just as clean as the album recordings. The drums never lost a beat. The energy was immense. This wasn’t just another ska band, this was the ska band. It was everything I wanted to be.

High school continued. I experienced my first suburban white-collar tragedies. My parents divorced. The first girl I ever kissed cheated on me. My childhood house nearly burned down. I wrapped myself in a trauma blanket of ska music, never spending more than a couple of months without a band. I listened to the BossTones 2002 release A Jacknife To A Swan a lot, and even played the title track to my English class and analyzed the lyrics for an assignment. I studied at a conservatory of music where I learned that ska is something you don’t need a four year degree in, so I left Virginia and moved to Philadelphia, where the community was thriving. This was about the time that the BossTones first broke up.

This will be okay, I thought, there are plenty of ska bands out there, and the loss of the BossTones might even leave some room for smaller bands like mine to rise up. I still got to see their trombonist Chris Rhodes play with The Toasters, and he was still a monument of energy and talent. I remember surrounding him with a group of my dorky friends and telling him that I was learning his solos from Jackknife To A Swan. “Oh man, you’re learning my stuff?” he said, “Don’t learn my stuff, man. There’s better stuff out there.”

Despite Rhodes being a personal hero of mine, I ignored his advice. I had to learn his stuff; I loved it. I experienced a previously-unseen level of success with a band called Last Martyrs of a Lost Cause, and got to play and hang out with the likes of Mustard Plug, The Pietasters, and Bomb The Music Industry. These name drops mean nothing to you but say them at a ska show and watch heads turn. Things were okay for three years and they went from okay to quite good when the BossTones returned and released a CD of old B-sides called Medium Rare.

I stayed in the loop with the BossTones’ return through a fan calling himself evrock who released a 6-part video documentary entitled “The Mighty Mighty BossTones – Road to the Throwdown.” This was how I learned just how deep the fandom rabbit hole went. Yearly convention-style shows deep. Closets full of merchandise. I wanted in, but I’d never even been to Boston. Besides, didn’t they also have kind of a douchey fraternity fanbase? I definitely didn’t want to have an association with that. 

Pin Points & Gin Joints came out in 2009 and changed everything. I stopped caring if listening to the BossTones made me a douchebag, these songs were too good. “Graffiti Worth Reading” is maybe the most fun intro to an album I’ve ever heard. “Nah Nah Nah Nah Nah” is a subversive singalong that borders on self-satire but still sticks in your head for days after listening. “The Route That I Took” takes a bittersweet nostalgic tone while still maintaining the album’s fun bouncyness. I could keep going song-for-song, but you get the idea. Medium Rare may have announced the return of the BossTones, but Pin Points showed that the BossTones were fucking back. At this point, I was incapable of missing a BossTones show in the Philadelphia area, or even Baltimore or D.C. But Boston was so far north, and so damn cold, it couldn’t possibly be worth it.

I moved to New York City for an ill-fated failure of a 6-month stint, my attempt at going out and chasing my music dreams. I played some shows around Boston and greater New England with a band called Hey Stranger and lived in an old warehouse that had been converted to Never Never Land by a bunch of 20-somethings in a state of suspended adolescence. The apartment across the hall had a treehouse in it, the one next door had a skate park. We made depression look cool. I hope. It probably didn’t look cool when I returned to Philadelphia, though, admitting that I wasn’t ready for the big leagues. Then the BossTones released The Magic of Youth.

Maybe it was just projection (okay, it was definitely projection), but it seemed like the BossTones were in a similar place to me in their life. There were big aspirations, evident from iconic songs like “Sunday Afternoons on Wisdom Ave” and “Like A Shotgun,” and great talent evident throughout, but it felt like the album just wasn’t fully clicking as a whole, at least to me. They had their big exciting “we’re back” album, and then Magic of Youth marked a return to the grind as that excitement died down. Hometown Throwdown tickets stopped selling out within minutes, and less and less celebrities like Jimmy Kimmel continued being sighted at Throwdowns, especially as more and more years ticked by after the release of this album. It was a full five album-less years before I went to my first Throwdown.

My buddy Eric talked me into it. We were old concert friends going all the way back to my high school days in D.C., kindred spirits that couldn’t help but stop and recognize one another as that one guy at every ska show. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse: we split the cost of a huge nice hotel room across the street from the venue, he drove me to and from the hotel, and he even got me an in with The 737, the infamous group of BossTones superfans that attend Hometown Throwdown every single year. On top of that, two of the openers were Rude Bones and Kicked In The Head, two ska dork superfan deep cut bands that felt like they must have been added to the line-up specifically for me.

Boston was freezing. More accurately, it was below freezing. The 2017 cold snap drove temperatures below zero, and the wind was brutal. Leaving the hotel for any reason was an outrageous act of willpower. Lucky for us, there was little need to leave the hotel Buckminster for anything but the concerts. The place had been taken over by BossTones fans, who were presumably the only reason it wasn’t closed down for the winter season. It was the ideal environment for making friends instantly, and that’s exactly what I did, drinking from the morning into the wee hours of the night with people who felt like a family I didn’t know I had. And even in the freezing cold, Boston was the perfect backdrop for this party. The city was walkable, pristinely clean by comparison to Philly and New York, and the Irish pubs were downright phenomenal. I forged a number of lifelong friendships and watched a legendary band play spectacular shows three nights in a row. I returned to Philly exhausted, hung over, and beat up, and resolved to go back to Throwdown every year.

And so I did. 2018 marked the release of While We’re At It, a triumphant 7-year return that was met with mixed reviews. I liked “Green Bay, Wisconsin” and thought “The West Ends” was one of the BossTones’ best tracks ever, but more importantly a new album was a new reason to get excited about the year’s Throwdown. Never content to merely impress their fans on one level, the Bosstones also organized the Skanking And Cranking Festival in Worcester, MA that summer with a number of my other favorite bands. This was a damn good year. Throwdown was warmer, and it was a glorious family reunion. The hotel parties reached such a level of notoriety that opening bands came up to join them, and Boston felt like a home away from home.

In 2019, I saw the BossTones at the Cranking and Skanking Festival, Hometown Throwdown, and even the South Florida Garlic Festival. Yeah, you read that right. They played a garlic festival. It was weird. But it wasn’t the only thing that was a little off this year. The sets were still great, but they were less diversified, with the same tracks coming up set after set. There were a number of reasonable explanations for this: their amazing saxophonist Leon Silva was playing outside gigs with Justin Timberlake during the shows as often as not (Less Than Jake saxophonist JR did a great job filling in his place), they wanted to keep fans’ focus on their relatively-new album tracks, and their singer Dicky was in Los Angeles most of the year working as the announcer for The Jimmy Kimmel Show. Could I really complain about a little bit of repetition? I was seeing more BossTones than ever before, and I was loving it. Well, I loved it until the end of the 2019 Throwdown, when the back of a mosher’s head hit Eric in the nose hard enough to break it. That drive home was a bit of a bummer.

2020 hit and I guess you know how this story goes from here. The band played no shows that year, but scheduled some outdoor gigs in 2021, assuring us that they’d get back together and play for us again as soon as it was safe. The Throwdown family patiently waited for our next family get-together. It was no different than waiting to see my real family during the lockdown. They even got a huge quarantine gift in the form of 2021’s WHEN GOD WAS GREAT. Sure, the album name was a bit of a hurdle, all of the track names were in A Prayer For Owen Meany-style caps lock, and the giant circus-like ska “We Are The World” cameo track “THE FINAL PARADE” was maybe a tad bit long at 8 full minutes, but this was still a classic BossTones album, and just what we needed to sit tight a little longer. Surely the party would be wilder than ever when we got back.

Then January 26 pulled the rug out from under us. I’m not here to comment on any rumors or gossip about the breakup, but given the information at hand, the only conclusion that does seem verifiable is this is the real end of the band. After 40 years together as a band and 11 studio albums, I’m not sure there’s much more we can ask for, either. Nothing’s forever, and so perhaps we’ve lost one of the more extraordinary bands out there. Their influence lives on in all things ska-punk and beyond, and I hope to continue hearing people’s BossTones stories at every concert I attend. They were the kind of band that changes lives. But shit happens. And if it’s happening to me, I’m as happy as someone like me could be.

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