Pirates of The New School

The Mad Caddies are punk as fuck. "Hold on a gosh darn minute!" you say. "Don’t they have horns?! Horns?! Haven’t they been known to use banjos?! Doesn’t their reputation as ska-core band precedes them?!" While all this may be true, I defy anyone to take a good look at the Mad Caddies and still doubt that they’ve earned more than their fair share of proverbial punk-rock points. Fat Mike (owner operator of Fat Wreck Chords, bassist NOFX) heard their demo by way of Joey Cape, and asked the lucky bastards to be on his label. Since then, these Santa Barbara boys have toured the world with more bands in more countries than you can shake a stick at. They also weathered the infamous ska-core boom of the late nineties and cemented themselves as one of the few bands in that genre with real staying power.
With the impending release of their new full length, Rock The Plank, scheduled for April, the Mad Caddies are once again preparing themselves for life on the road. This includes a stop in our humble village on Saturday at The Brick Works with none other than the inventors of new-school punk, NOFX. The Synthesis recently had the chance to talk to Carter, the Mad Caddies guitar-man, who spoke freely about these, and other pressing issues in the life of a hard-working punk-rocker.

Tell me about the new album.
It’s called Rock the Plank. We recorded it in two places; one was up in Motor Studios in San Francisco with a guy named Ryan Greene who does a lot of Fat Wreck Chords stuff, and the other was down here (Santa Barbara) with Angus Cooke at Orange Whip, who did our last three releases. We’ve got some different sounds going on it. We did this one pirate core song…

Pirate Core?
We decided to go with the whole pirate-core thing. There’s tons of bands out there who are doing different things musically; our band doesn’t know what’s going on. We just play any type of music that we want. Our whole vibe is just to go out there and play and have fun, and you know, there’s a bunch of us. So we draw the parallel to modern day pirates. We basically sail into town and it’s best to lock up the women and hide the beer.

But you guys are pleasant pirates, right? Not like Duane Peters-type pirates.
(laughing) No, we’re that that gnarly at all. But, we can get radical from time to time.

So, the music is a little edgier this time?
Yeah, the music on the actual record is a little more rocking than a lot of the other stuff that we’ve done, we kind of boiled it down and decided that we were going to play a little more rock music. It’s still got a lot of twists that are going to keep Caddies fans happy that know us from doing the Dixieland stuff or some of the ska stuff, we’ve still got that stuff going on. On the record we just do everything a lot stronger as far as every song is pretty rocking. Sonically, it’s the best thing we’ve ever done, and we’re pretty happy with it. It comes out April 10^th.

It’s kind of strange to me that you guys get labeled as ska-core. I mean, when I think of ska-core, I think of bands like…
Voodoo Glow Skulls.

Exactly. Don’t you feel that you guys have been kind of mislabeled?
Oh, completely. We’ve never really tried to peg ourselves as any one thing, but that’s kind of where we got pegged into, like a lot of bands did just because they have horns. I’ve read reviews of a band like Snuff where they’ve been called ska just because they have a trombone. On this record, there’s not a single song that I would call a ska song. We’ve definitely played some ska songs and that’s a definite influence of ours, but I call us a reggae and Dixieland-influenced California soft-core punk band.

Who are your influences?
We’re the type of band who could sit here and name all of these really deep influences, but when we started, the bands that really influenced us to start playing music were Sublime, NOFX and Operation Ivy. Then there’s bands like The Ramones, the staple bands that are around. Now that we’ve all listened to music a lot more, I could sit here and lie to you and say that our influences are like the Clash and Stiff Little Fingers, but the truth is, we’ve got a lot of influences. Sascha (other guitarist) listens to a lot of Dixieland Jazz music, he was really into the Squirrel Nut Zippers, Chuck (vocals) and I are big Bad Religion fans; I think you here some of that in our music. In some of the stuff we were doing for a while, I think we were really influenced by bands like The Cars and the Police. We (have a) sort of an anything goes mentality in our band. From song to song I think that there’s a lot of different influences.

In some songs it seems almost the influences are battling each other; there’ll be a little jazzy horn breakdown followed by a crazy, distorted, punk riff…
I think we did that a lot when we were younger, and I think a lot of people really dug that sound, but I think it was a little sophomoric. We all kind of grew up in this band; we’re a little bit older now, 23 or 24, but back then we’d have different songwriters write different parts of the song and then we’d kind of toss them together like a big grab bag. But, what I really like about our last EP, The Holiday Has Been Cancelled, and our new album is that it’s a lot more focused from song to song. We’re not battling within the songs as much. A lot of that is due to the fact that now when writers are doing songs, we pretty much went with the policy of whoever brought the song to the table, they need to make sure that from start to finish it’s what they want. Others ideas are totally killer, but from song to song, let’s have less of those battles. If there’s something that sounds like it should be a different song. That’s something I think we’re doing as we get older and we figure things out a little bit more. Not to say that we’ve figured everything out, but I think we’re doing things a little less discombobulated.

How come all the sweet bands come from Santa Barbara? I mean, you guys, Lagwagon, and The Ataris, all pretty much came out of the same place at the same time.
I think the punk tradition in Santa Barbara starts with R.K.L and goes on to Lagwagon, and Nerf Herder, then there’s us and The Ataris. There’s always been tons of really cool bands that come out of Santa Barbara, and in the punk circle, there’s always been guys that come out of Santa Barbara like Chris Schiflett who played in No Use For A Name, and now he plays in the Foo Fighters. It’s weird about this town, I don’t know where it comes from, but we’re stoked to be one of those bands to come out of the indie scene down here, and brought their music all over the place. I don’t know what it is that makes that happen, but I’m not gonna question it, I’m just gonna go with it.

So, what’s next for the Mad Caddies?
It’s gonna be pretty gnarly, we’re heading into a lot of touring. We’re doing these shows with NOFX, which we’re really happy about, because those guys are a lot of fun to play with.

I would think the crowds at those shows would be kind of weird, I mean, most of the people are probably there to see NOFX and don’t really care about you.
Actually, NOFX is probably one of the best bands to play with, I think. Mike’s not afraid to bust out with different kinds of music, Hefe plays trumpet, Melvin playing accordion now; they’ve always been a band that’s never been afraid to mix it up, play ska or whatever. They’re a huge a band and everyone’s definitely there to see them, but I think that we go over pretty well. After that, we’re going over to Europe for about a month with a band called Fabulous Disaster, and that’ll be a lot of fun. Then we fly from there, we fly to Japan to do more shows with NOFX and another band called Mock Orange. Then we go to Australia for seven weeks and New Zealand for two. We’re actually playing every single place that you can possibly play on that whole continent. We’re doing all that with a band called Frenzal Rhomb who’s also on Fat, but over there they’re like the Foo Fighters; they’re really big over there, which is cool because all the shows should be huge.

I would assume that you guys probably do pretty well over seas.
The European territories have gotten really good. With an indie label like Fat, you get really good distribution over there. When that whole explosion thing happened in 97, the whole market was totally saturated with a lot of ska bands, who we never really associated with anyway, and a lot of those bands weren’t very good, in my opinion. Between those bands and the swing bands, I think it made people get really sick of bands with horns.

Horns seemed to be kind of the trendy to throw into bands for awhile.
It was a total bummer because a lot of people didn’t really use them that well and it just kind of burned people’s ears out. So, there was a real backlash, at least in this country which definitely affected us, although the cool thing was is that we never were really that big anyway.

So, it wasn’t really that big of a deal for you guys.
Yeah, we just kept playing and kept drinking beer, and just had fun. That’s always been our attitude, just to have fun with it. We’ve never expected to get really big. Ever since we started we’ve all just said, as long as we’re having fun, playing music, and seeing the world, who can argue with that? But, even when this country was totally saturated, Canada was still really cool. And then we went to Europe and it was totally gnarly. Tons of people came to the shows and were really fired up to see us, and I think that’s because a lot of those bands didn’t get over there. So, we’re going to concentrate on over there for the first part of touring on this album then we’ll see how it goes.

It sounds like you’re pretty stoked on the future.
We can’t complain at all. We’re really pleasantly surprised that we’re still around. But, Fat Mike really stuck by us. I mean, we’re a band that will never be in Rolling Stone magazine. It’s not us; we’ll never go that route. To do that you have to be part of a completely different scene that we’re totally comfortable not being a part of. It was a question for us for awhile, but Mike kept telling us to just stick by our guns and things would work out. Sometimes we didn’t believe him, but I have to say that things are working out pretty well. We’re excited to spend the better part of our youth touring around, just setting sail, throwing caution to the wind, and going for it.

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