For local music enthusiasts who love a dose of nostalgia, the hits keep coming. Fresh off last week’s reunion of 1990s and 2000s punk bands Fury 66, Here Kitty Kitty, Los Dryheavers and Good Neighbor Policy, comes another blast from the past.
And this time, with horns!
Get ready to pick it up, pick it up, pick it up as legendary local 1990s ska band Slow Gherkin reunites for a blow-out, end-of-the-season Midtown Block Party, this Friday.
“I don’t even know if we can call them ‘reunion shows’ anymore,” laughs singer James Rickman. “We’ve been reuniting so much longer than we were a band the first time around.”
Which, technically, is true.
Formed in 1993, the band lasted until 2002 when they released their final album, Run Screaming. However, they reunited for the first time in 2010—appropriately at The Crepe Place—and since then have done a handful of more shows over the past 14 years.
Most recently they played a private party on Aug. 9 for accordion player “Polka” Peter Cowan’s 50th birthday alongside another local band skankers will recognize, Dan P. and The Bricks.
This Friday’s show is also to celebrate a second big 50th. Along with Event Santa Cruz, the show is sponsored by Streetlight Records which will receive a special honor by the City Council for 50 years of business. Opening the show is Voluntary Hazing, the 11-piece ska band from San Jose, marking a full circle ska moment. A 30-year cycle from the ’90s third wave to the modern New Tone movement.
Ska—what was once a dirty word in the early 2000s—has experienced a renaissance in the past several years, particularly since the 2020 Covid lockdowns. Bands throughout the country have utilized the internet and social media to spread the inclusive, anti-racist, anti-hate message. It’s even come to the point where Aaron Carnes, author of In Defense of Ska, has ended his podcast of the same name. A genre that once needed defending has skanked its way back into the limelight of underground music.
Although it never left the hearts of true believers.
“It’s not just some phase,” explains saxophonist Phil Boutelle. “There are so many young bands now.”
Rickman agrees.
“It really looks like how I remember it,” he says. “It’s so amazing to see again.”
For those too young to remember Slow Gherkin—or those who weren’t in Santa Cruz in the 1990s—it cannot be stressed enough how much of a cult following Slow Gherkin had. Despite living in Los Angeles at the time, my friends had copies of the first two Gherkin albums—Double Happiness and Shed Some Skin—and we would listen to them on repeat alongside some of the bigger names in the genre, like The Aquabats, Save Ferris and Reel Big Fish (hey, we were teenagers, ok?)
The band was formed by Rickman and Boutelle along with A.J. Marquez and Zack “ZK” Kent (who later left the band after Shed Some Skin was released) while they were all in high school. Like many Central Coast ska bands at that time, they were inspired by Skankin’ Pickle–the six-piece San Jose ska act featuring singer Mike Park, who later signed the band to his Asian Man Records and released all three of their albums.
Slow Gherkin is the type of band that should have made it bigger but unfortunately was dealt a bad hand by fate, arriving on the scene just as the crest of the third wave broke. By the time Shed Some Skin came out, the band had quit their day jobs and dedicated 100 percent of their time to music. Yet 1998 was the beginning of the end.
In the spring of that year they had joined Park’s “Ska Against Racism” tour, playing to some 50,000 people.
“And by the end of the year we were touring with [The Toasters] and the venues weren’t filling up the way people expected,” Rickman says. “By the fall of that year it was like, ‘Oh shit, people aren’t coming out the way they used to.’”
They would put out one more album, 2002’s Run Screaming and—like many of their contemporaries—they would move away from the ska sound for a more “mature” indie rock meets Fugazi style. After that, they walked away from it all to form new bands and get “real” jobs.
However, now into their 50s, the guys in Slow Gherkin are able to appreciate what they accomplished.
“The pressure’s off,” explains drummer Zack “Ollie” Olsen. “We didn’t really break up, we just shifted.”
“It’s beyond friendship,” Cowan says. “When you’re forced into a van with eight to ten dudes and you’re spending every minute together, [the bond] is something that never goes away.”
Midtown Block Party with Slow Gherkin
5pm – 8:30pm
Midtown Parking Lot
1111 Soquel Ave.
