Bim Skala Bim gets the old gang back together for a trio of shows
When the core members of Bim Skala Bim play a reunion show Saturday at the Crystal Ballroom, they’ll be taking the stage just steps away from the Davis Square apartment where they first bonded 40 years ago.
That neighborhood would be nearly unrecognizable today, recalls Dan Vitale, Bim’s straw-fedora’d ringmaster. The Davis Square Red Line station was still under construction; there were just a few thrift stores and an old Table Talk Pie outlet, where the band members often bought “dinner” for a dollar.
He’d met bassist Mark Ferranti through the Somerville Media Action Project, where Ferranti worked alongside two of Vitale’s siblings. The two new friends had each fallen hard for Caribbean music — Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff, sure, but also ska, soca, and the New Wave reggae of the Police.
“We were mad about it,” says Vitale, who has lived for 20 years on the Panamanian island of Bastimentos, where he rents out thatched huts on the beach. Back in Boston for a few weeks around the holidays, Vitale sat down with Ferranti and percussionist Rick Barry at Barry’s home in Cambridge’s Central Square to prepare for this weekend’s anniversary gigs.
In addition to the midday matinee Saturday at the Crystal Ballroom, Bim Skala Bim plays Friday night at Alchemy in Providence and Saturday night at the Starlite Gallery in Southbridge.
Ska first emerged in Jamaica in the 1950s as a homegrown, highly rhythmic version of R&B. It was revived during the punk era by the “two-tone” British bands, including the Specials, the English Beat, and Madness. Inspired by those groups, Bim in turn provided early inspiration for the so-called third wave of ska, which crested in the ‘90s in America.
Unlike most of their peers and predecessors, Bim developed a catholic approach to the stylized form of music they loved. They aligned with Boston’s punk bands, incorporated secret-agent themes and songs by classic rock acts (Cream, Pink Floyd, Neil Young) into their repertoire, and were as likely to dabble in calyplate so or New Orleans music as ska and reggae.
The band’s 1986 self-titled debut album landed them on the cover of CMJ (College Media Journal), the radio tipsheet that was highly influential at the time. That set the pace. Over the next 15 years they won a bushel of Boston Music Awards, toured with original and secondwave ska luminaries, and mentored the next generation of ska enthusiasts, including the Mighty Mighty Bosstones.
By then, the band was suffering from some burnout, Vitale says. When they began, they’d requested a 10-year commitment from each new member. They found trombonist Vinny Nobile through a Berklee professor. He left “almost to the day” of his 10-year anniversary, Vitale says with a laugh.
Sensing it was time for something new, Vitale looked into relocating to Jamaica, but he quickly learned that buying property there might be a problem. (With a laugh, he mentions the time that Peter Tosh moved into Keith Richards’s mansion on the island, then refused to leave.)
The moment he set foot on the beach in Bastimentos, he says, he heard young children giggling. He looked out to the ocean and saw two dolphins breaching the water. It was an instant hint that there’s “real magic” on the island, he says.
Ferranti, who plays these days in the Marley tribute band Duppy Conquerors, knew that Bim’s prolific run was coming to an end.
“He’s finally on his journey,” he remembers thinking about his old friend and roommate.
In the years since, various configurations of Bim have reunited periodically. In 2013 they made an album called “Chet’s Last Call,” paying tribute to the defunct second-floor hole-in-the-wall above Causeway Street, where the band played its first-ever gig. More recently, Vitale and his brother, Ted, who died in 2020, co-directed a documentary about the club and its namesake, the Richard Rooney.
The band released its 12th album, “Sonic Tonic,” in 2021, but the pandemic prevented any touring promotion. There’s still a lot of love for Bim’s music among latter-day ska fanatics: Last May, the long-running, New Jersey-based ska label Stubborn Records released the first of a proposed five albums — 60 bands in all — of Bim cover songs, “Bim Bam Boom Vol. 1.” (Two more have dropped since.)
This weekend’s reunion shows are expected to feature guest appearances by two of the band’s early female voices, Lauren Flesher and Jackie Starr, as well as guitarist Jim Jones (who wrote many of the band’s songs with Vitale), drummer Jim Arhelger, and keyboardist John Cameron.
They’ve all lived full lives since Bim’s heyday. Cameron, based in Gloucester, is a renowned cabinetmaker. Flesher (now Cortesi) owns a cake-baking business. Ferranti, Barry, Jones, and Arhelger play together in another local groove band, Swampanova.
Bim, which has always been “super-democratic,” according to Vitale, in terms of financial decisions, has made some pretty good money over the years. Beginning in the ‘90s, for instance, snippets of their songs were used as incidental music on MTV programming, including “The Real World” and “Road Rules.” Such windfalls have amounted to “hundreds of thousands of dollars” over the years, Vitale says.
That’s a far cry from the old days, when band members allotted themselves a $1.25-a-day per diem whenever they went out on tour.
Many of the folks who will attend this weekend’s shows have been part of Bim’s world since those early days, when they made their own fun while washing their clothes at the “Jah Laundramat,” as one youthful song put it.
“It’s a tight community still,” says Vitale.
Bundled up in layers, he’ll have some extra laundry to do after this weekend.
“I don’t like coming back in the winter,” he says. “I don’t like the cold anymore.”