DS Interview: The Toasters and Mustard Plug frontmen Rob “Bucket” Hingley and Dave Kirchgessner reflect on their history in the ska scene

Mustard Plug held their second Ska Smackdown show at the GardenAmp in Garden Grove, California. This year, ska pioneers The Toasters joined them once again for a winter West Coast tour. With the two having a significant past there’s no doubt that they put on an unforgettable show. Frontmen Dave (Mustard Plug) and Bucket (The Toasters) caught up with Spike at the smackdown, which featured an outstanding lineup of 10 bands. What started as a quick, lighthearted check-in turned into a heartfelt conversation about decades of sharing stages, DIY and political roots, and the family first mentality that has kept ska alive, even through an industry that was never built for it. In ska, “only winners, no losers.”

Dying Scene (Spike): What made you choose The Toasters for this years Ska Smackdown?

Dave: We’ve done a West Coast tour in like January/February going back for the last decade or something like that, and this is actually the second time we’ve done it (Ska Smackdown). We always try to get another bigger, co-headliner type band to do it with us, and we actually played with The Toasters right before COVID in 2020. That was an epic tour, so we were due to do it again. We always have a blast with them, they’re one of our favorite bands. One of the very first ska bands I ever saw, so they have always been inspirational. 

Bucket: I first met Dave at the Club Soda in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1989 with The Busters. He showed up with his long hair and everything. Were you doing the radio show then?

Dave: Yeah, I was the music director of my college radio station and I was super into ska. So I met you there, and back then we used to have CMJ music marathons in New York City, right, and I don’t know if you remember this, but I thought Moon Records was like this huge thing…

Bucket: I had a little shop about the size of that toilet.

Dave: Yeah seriously, it was amazing. So I called you and I was like, hey can we get some records, and talked about how I was going to be in New York in a week, and you were like yeah! just come to this address. So I went to the address, like this 19 year old kid walking around Manhattan, or Lower East Side or whatever. I found it and I was like… this just looks like someones apartment! You had me come to your apartment, I remember that because your wife was there and you guys just had like a bookcase of records. It was the most amazing thing ever.

Do you remember the first show you played together?

Dave: I remember we played a couple shows at Rick’s Cafe. There was one in Lansing and one in Kalamazoo and I think we played both of those. It was probably ’92 or something like that. Back when he had Moon Records going, he was one of the first people to latch onto the song “Mr. Smiley”. He was like “Oh yeah this is great, we got to put this on the comp”, the Skarmageddon comp.

Bucket: That was a great comp. It’s amazing how many people I’ve talked to that have said those comps were what really provided them a portal to get into ska music in the first place. They were compilations of 2 or 3 discs with like 60 bands on there, pretty epic.

Dave: Yeah it was great. You could buy this one compilation, and at least know one song from every ska band in the United States pretty much. And the fact that you took the care to pick some of the best songs from each band, because a lot of people that do comps just want people to send whatever they have, and it can be really uneven, but that one was really good because he actually took the time to pick some of the very best songs.

Bucket: Yeah, we could very easily pick what we wanted. There wasn’t really anybody doing comps at that time, it got to a point where they felt like “too much”. I think we did three episodes and then we finally went up to three discs on Skarmaggedon 4, that was great.

Is there a specific city or state that you like to play in?

Bucket: Well I like coming out here because the weather’s nice. SoCal’s always had a really good ska scene, even back in the day. We played our first show in California in 1987 at Mabuhay Gardens, which was a Filipino restaurant in San Francisco. Then at night it wasn’t a restaurant anymore, they had a club there, like a soul club, and that was almost forty years ago now. California’s great but the ska incentive really moves around. Florida was really good for a second, Chicago has always had a big scene, it tends to move around. But now anywhere you go there’s a ska band, and it didn’t always used to be like that.

Do you see a difference in West vs. East Coast crowds?

Bucket: We get up earlier and we work harder on the East Coast. I think the bands on the West Coast have been a lot more traditional. Bands like Hepcat, See Spot, Ocean 11, all bands like that, and I think the bands on the East Coast have had a bit more of a hardcore edge. Certainly that was the case in New York because when we were coming up we were rehearsing in the same studio as Bad Brains, Cro-Mags, and Murphy’s Law for example. I think the gist is that is that people on the East Coast tend to be a bit more aggressive cause that’s how our lifestyle is.

What intertwines ska and politics so much?

Bucket: If you look back at where ska music came from in the early 60’s it was involved with the Jamaican’s gaining their independence from hundreds of years of British colonial rule, so that music was the backdrop for that. Then in England in the 70’s there was a whole 2 tone movement, which is really an anti racist movement featured around all the bands on the 2 tone label, which is black guys and white guys playing together. I think a certain part of that has kind of been lost in the states, but there are bands who have a political voice, which we definitely need a lot more of these days with all the nonsense going on.

Dave: It’s always kind of crazy when you have people online or whatever who are like “keep your politics out of your music”. I’m like, you have no idea what ska is, it’s history, or anything.

Bucket: Yeah keep your partying frat boy nonsense out of our social political scene, please. Ska has always been a social political thing, and in my mind there should be more of that and not less. People really listen to music as one thing you can agree on, whether you agree with people politically or not, so hopefully we can sway some of the lug nuts to come over to our side of the fancy.

What do you think is different about ska today compared to the past waves of it?

Bucket: I think I’d point toward the Bad Time Records phenomenon, which is a whole new way of approaching ska music. It’s a lot more punk, to my mind a little less ska. Equally so with what happened with ska punk in the late nineties, that was a bit of a curveball. Nobody really saw that coming. In fact, I turned down The Might Mighty Bosstones and Rancid from Moon Records. Oops!

How are you keeping up with the modern punk scene? Are there any bands that you’re into right now and want more people to know about?

Bucket: If I see or hear a band I like, I just try and take them on tour with us and hook them up with some gigs. That’s the best way to do it. You can’t send records to radio stations anymore and Spotify kind of sucks, so really the way to get people to listen to a band that you like is to put them on stage with you. Do it that way.

Dave: I can’t really speak for the punk scene because I’m not as hip to it as I used to be. I still love punk music, I just don’t know too many of the new bands. Unless they’re hyperlocal, like Rodeo Boys, kind of a breakout band out of Michigan. But in the ska scene and being able to tour and stuff, you see all these upcoming artists, and that’s kind of what I focus on as far as learning about new bands. Like Bucket said, we try to help them out, and it really is a family. That’s the cool thing about ska music, it’s always had a really great community about it. It’s one of the things that attracted me to ska in the early nineties because I had come from the ashes of midwest hardcore. In the eighties, I was going to all these hardcore punk shows because that’s what was there. Back in the day they were all friends, and would trade ideas, communicate, network and that sort of thing. Then that whole scene really fell apart in the late eighties, and then the ska scene was like this new fresh breath of air. I was really attracted to it because it did have the politics to it, it was danceable and fun, and a lot of other reasons. One thing that really stuck out to me was that it is like a network, a family, and that’s really stayed in a lot of ways as far as the ska underground, we all know each other.

Bucket: You’ll find that a lot of the bands that have been around for a long time are amenable to finding younger bands starting up and help them out, take them on tour, and give them advice. Be an uncle to them. The Toasters have always done that, and I think it’s one of the things that’s endemic in the scene. It makes it so it’s not every man for himself.

Dave: Bucket can take a lot of credit for that. He took us in when we were a little band and helped us out. He’s been like a role model in that way, and he’s responsible for a lot of third wave stuff and the philosophy behind it. He helped us out, and we help other bands out now that we’re a little bit bigger, and so it’s kind of injected into the scene.

Bucket: We really just made it into like a ‘do it yourself’ thing because it came pretty obvious to me early on that the music business and major labels weren’t interested at all in what we were doing and playing. I mean, they told me it was circus music when I went to CBS records in New York. So I realized that if we were to do this, we’d have to do it ourselves. So we just created a model of going on the road and doing your own merch, and marketing yourself. That’s been built up over the years and now everybody’s doing it, so it works.

Do you have any advice for ska bands trying to come up and make it in today’s industry?

Bucket: Play as many gigs as you possibly can. That’s the only thing that makes sense. Play as many gigs as you possibly can because your music now isn’t worth anything being diluted by Spotify and P2P sharing and stuff, so you can’t make money there. You have to put everything into your live performances and shows, and network with people like Dave and I, and other people like that. Make it work by using those kinds of resources. It was true in the eighties and it’s still true now.

How did you rack up this lineup today?

Bucket: We’ve known Half Past Two for a bit. The Goodwin Club, we played with them in San Diego last year. In fact, I turned them onto Dave Romano.

Dave: Yeah we actually played here a year ago with Voodoo Glow Skulls, and they played at that.

Bucket: It tends to be people either Mustard Plug or The Toasters know. You got to be in la familia.

And who do you think is going to win the smackdown?

Dave: We both won. We’re both winning. The crowd wins.

Bucket: Only winners, no losers. I wouldn’t hurt a hair on Dave’s head.

These two perfectly encapsulate what ska has always been about: staying driven, helping each other out, and being a family. Treating the scene like a community instead of a competition is what has kept The Toasters and Mustard Plug so great over the decades. If you haven’t seen them live yet, you need to fix that. You can find tour dates and everything else you need at thetoasters.band and mustardplug.com, and watch the full video to hear the conversation!