Santeria offers Sublime tunes
Sublime, the reggae-meetsska SoCal band from the 1990s, never got to tour with their biggest hits. Bradley Nowell, their lead singer, died tragically before the band’s most well-known songs were even on the radio.
Now, a Northwest Indiana-based band is bringing those sunny songs to the area. Santeria: The Midwest’s Tribute to Sublime, will play an all-ages show at the Hobart
Art Theater Jan. 28. The show starts at 7 p.m.
Eric Lester plays guitar and does the booking for the band; which consists of singer John Hendricks, drummer Ken Shield and bassist Joe Konefall.
Although all of the members have spent years with other bands, this will be Santeria’s first show.
Lester, Hendricks and
Shield have had a cover band in the area for about five years called Chronic Flannel. They play everything from old school hip-hop and R&B to rock, reggae and country, he said. The pride themselves on reading the crowd and giving them what they want to hear, he said. As such, they’ve built a good relationship with club owners and festival bookers.
“People love when we play Sublime. My singer’s favorite band has always been Sublime,” Lester said. “He does amazing on those tunes. He sounds like Bradley Nowell. Every show, we see the response those songs get.”
Lester saw how well tribute bands are doing right now and the types of venues they are getting booked into. When he started thinking about doing a Sublime tribute, he discovered that while there is a national touring Sublime tribute band, he couldn’t find a current Chicago-based Sublime tribute act. The next step was to make sure the idea was viable and gauge whether there were enough Sublime fans to support the tribute act, he said.
“My youngest daughter is a freshman in high school and she says, ‘Dad, I see Sublime T-shirts at school every day,’ ”
he said. “And I’m thinking, Bradley Nowell, the singer and guitar player for Sublime, passed away in 1996. I graduated from high school in 1994. We’re talking almost 30 years. So you’ve got people my age and older walking around with Sublime tattoos and in Sublime Facebook groups and then you’ve kids all the way down to my daughter’s age wearing Sublime T-shirts to school every day. It made me realize that yeah, there should be enough people around to sustain what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to bring that music to people.”
Sublime formed in 1988 in Long Beach, California, and was together for eight years before Nowell died of a heroin overdose just two months before the band’s self-titled third album was released. That album ended up peaking at No. 13 on the Billboard Top 200 and spawned the No. 1 single, “What I Got.”
“That’s the album that made them go huge. So they never even got to go out and play shows with these amazing songs. That was an important thing for us to consider,” he said. “It’s hard to make sense of all that, when someone’s that talented that they could go like that. He had that undefinable ‘it’ quality. It was such a huge loss because you realize how much of an impact his music and his songwriting and his guitar playing have had on so many people. I think that’s where their success came from. His talent is so undeniable.”
Not only does Hendricks sound like Sublime’s late singer, the other members of the group can emulate Sublime’s unique sound as well, he said. Sublime made a completely new genre-bending sound that mixed reggae, punk, ska and rock, he said.
“That is something that not many bands can pull off,” Lester said. “Sublime comes along and legitimately sounded new and a bunch of bands sounded like them afterward. They were new and original.”
Lester actually grew up loving reggae — when other kids his age were playing heavy metal, he was playing Bob Marley and Peter Tosh.
“I’ve been playing reggae my whole life and Sublime has that feel to it,” Lester said.
In addition to “What I Got,” audiences will hear “Santeria,” “Wrong Way” and “Doin’ Time.”
“When we walk out on that stage, our mindset will be that we are channeling Sublime and we will be ready to go,” he said. “We’re totally ready.”