Backstage with Badfish

Friday, 09 October 2009 10:39

Cover bands—we love to love ’em. They’re usually the closest you’ll come to the real thing, especially if your favorite bands have members who are deceased, in reclusion or just plain lazy.

Badfish has made national headlines as the premiere cover band for the reggae-infused rock band Sublime, and if you think “cover band” means they’re small time, think again. After making more than a million dollars on their last tour, they’re out again giving the crowds what they want—and no, in case you were wondering, they don’t practice Santeria. (We asked.)

INsite caught up with bassist Joel Hanks for the latest on the band’s tour schedule and their upcoming show on Nov. 10 at The Venue.

By Lindsay Smith

Everyone likes to cover Sublime, but what makes Badfish so good at it?
A lot has to do with the singer [Pat Downes], how the singer sounds and how good of a musician he is. I don’t know that we’re necessarily so much better than anybody else, but we’ve been doing it for a long time, and everyone plays the part really well at this point.

What's it like being a cover band for music that's so iconic?
It’s really strange. When we started this band it was really just to play at local little bars and hang out with our friends and get drunk, but the fans demanded that we get bigger. Badfish has been around for eight years now. Me and the original singer, we’re friends from high school, and I met the drummer in computer science classes in college [at the University of Rhode Island] and we all just got to it. There was a big need for a good sound, and as we started playing more and more, it happened. We just got bigger and bigger…

At what point did it stop being a college band and turn serious?
We’d been doing the band for a year and a half, and I had just graduated, and it was like, “What are we going to do?” I decided I was going to focus my energy on making it into something— when we were first started we only played one show every two months, and we reached a point where that didn’t work anymore, so we started focusing more on it.

Do you strictly cover the music, or do you find ways to give it a personal touch?
It changes and evolves over time. For a while we were playing very close to the album music, and I think more recently we started veering from that a little bit, adding some instrumental parts, more jamming type stuff, just to change it up for ourselves because we’ve been doing it so long.

What attracted you to Sublime’s music?
I grew up listening to a lot of ska, punk, reggae, so Sublime was the perfect blend of the music that I liked.

Do you think if Bradley Nowell were alive today, he would come to one of your shows?
(laughs) I don’t think we’d be a band if he was still alive.

The remaining members of Sublime recently decided to reunite for a possible tour. How is this going to affect Badfish?
It could go either way. It’s exciting that they want to do that, that they still see that there are a lot of Sublime fans out there, and that’s the reality, that there are. We play shows in front of thousands of people—it’s like a big party every time. Every college kid has the Sublime self-titled album. Maybe even if it hurts Badfish, it’ll help the Sublime.

What’s your favorite song by Sublime and why?
"Badfish" is a good one; it’s a really fun song for me to play because of the groove, and the crowd always sings along.

What’s it like performing in front of thousands of people?
Well, when the crowd really gets into it, I feed off the energy from the crowd. Most nights the crowds are just going crazy, having a really fun time, and we’ll interact with people from the stage.

Ever had any crazy fans take it too far?
One time actually, not that long ago, this guy was like “You suck so hard.” This guy kept trying to grab the security guy’s leg—you see that sometimes; people jump on stage and be stupid, but there was something different this time. I just thought he was dangerous, and sure enough, as soon as he got on the stage he made a beeline for the singer and hit him and knocked him down. That was a pretty scary moment. It turns out that he was schizophrenic and he thought the singer had slept with a girlfriend the guy didn’t actually have. It was a weird story. It makes you really think about things. What if this guy had a knife?

Good thing he didn’t! Hopefully this tour will be free from incident. How’s it going so far?
It’s going well. Right now it’s a weird time of year, everyone is getting back to college, everyone is rushing for sororities and fraternities, so there’s a lot of opportunities for shows and also a lot of competition this time of year—the numbers tend to be down a bit before they pick back up, but overall, still a success.

FREE! INsite’s giving away tickets to see Badfish on Nov. 10 at the Venue. To win, follow us on Twitter.