The Toasters, "Shocker!"
The first ska band I ever got into wasn’t the Specials, Madness, or the English Beat. It was the Toasters. This was over the summer after my freshman year in high school. I was taking a world history class at the Kent State Trumbull County branch. Not so long before this my good friend Hans had moved onto my street, four doors down. Hans had two older sisters, Kathy and Anna. Kathy was two years ahead of us in school. Anna was older still, already in college, and I hadn’t met her. She was home for the summer, and she must have been taking a course at KSU-Trumbull, too, because my mother made arrangements with her to drive me there in the mornings.
I was a quiet kid in those days—quieter than I am now. As far back as I can remember, I’ve been guarded around people I don’t know. Back then I was carrying around with me a nagging sense of not-quite-belonging: that I was different from the rest of the crowd, and maybe not especially welcome. Probably 90% of this came from inside me, and 10% from other kids, who either were or weren’t actively trying to push me to the margins. If they were, I took immediate note of it, and if they weren’t, I figured they’d get there soon enough, once they got to know me. I’m better about this now. There was a tipping point, sometime in eleventh grade, when it occurred to me that most every damn kid in this school building felt off-center for one reason or another. All of us were bluffing, and as we never really had to show our hands, maybe I didn’t need to sweat this belonging business quite so much.
None of this has anything to do with Anna, who was nothing but lovely toward me on those rides out to Champion and back in her car. But it would explain why, for the most part, I sat quietly in the shotgun seat, reluctant to trouble this older woman with my conversation.
So we listened to music.
It can’t have been the case that Anna played nothing but the Toasters in her car during that summer term. But it’s the Toasters I remember. An up-tempo band playing the backbeats, with a horn section featured and three distinct vocalists: a Brit, a Yank, and a West Indian. They played “downtown songs” about night life, petty crime, drinking and dating. The Toasters were basically the Specials, but based in New York. If you want to be a dick about it, they were a third-wave 2-Tone knockoff, with Robert Hingley standing in shamelessly for Terry Hall.
Of course, at the time I didn’t know who the Specials were, and I certainly didn’t know from 2-Tone Records, rude boys, or second- or third-wave ska. I only knew the Toasters sounded altogether different from anything I had in my record collection—and for that matter anything else Anna might have had playing in her car on a given Tuesday morning. (The more I think about it, the more I feel like 10,000 Maniacs’ In My Tribe (Apple Music, Spotify) was in her rotation.) And if the Toasters happened to greet me when I jerked open Anna’s passenger-side door, there was a possibility that at some point on the ride to class that morning, I’d hear That Toasters Song I Really Liked.
I didn’t know the name of the song. Today’s more advanced version of me would have done the sensible thing and just asked Anna what it was called. Not only would I have gained the information I was desperate to know, but I expect Anna probably would have been pleased to hear that I dug her cabin music and wanted to learn more about it. Win-win, yes? But as I said, in the summer of 1988 I wasn’t the sort of daredevil who just laid his cards on the table like that.
I know now that the song is called “Shocker!” (Apple Music, Spotify). As well it should be, given that the word shocker features in the chorus and is sung 40.5 times over the course of the song’s four minutes, thirty-one seconds. Yet all those times in Anna’s car, I variously heard shaka and shotgun—neither of which made any sense in the context of the song. To be fair to me, shocker isn’t an obvious fit, either. Maybe it’s a better answer than shotgun, but as often as I heard the song, I was riding in Anna’s front passenger-side seat, so maybe I was just vulnerable to suggestion.
I dug the song first for the boppy keyboard melody. Beep-boop, boop-beep: fanciful and fun like a circus calliope, if not as breathy. Those keys bopped around at the top of the mix, like the proverbial bouncing ball that scats over song lyrics to tell you when to sing them. It’s the kind of high-register ’80s synth sound that can’t fail to cheer you up, even when it’s 7:30 AM on a weekday in June and you just hauled your ass out of bed to go to school.
The second key ingredient is Hingley’s vocals. I’m forever a sucker for the English Speaking Voice, and there’s a special place in my heart for a Brit singer who not only declines to conceal his accent but goes the extra mile to exaggerate it. So get out there, Robert, and drop those H’s!
Well there’s a crack in my ’ead. It ’urts like crazy. It’s bigger than the Panama Canal. Rubbing up against ’er was really quite amazing. (The conversation was quite banal.)
This second verse is positively delicious. A Canal/ banal rhyme! I can’t say so definitively, but I strongly suspect that across the 500+ CDs and 180 records in this room, there’s exactly one LP in my collection with the word banal sung on it.
I’m not a horns guy. Never have been. And saxophones in particular are a real problem for me. Oh, I loved me some Wham! back in the day, but then Careless Whisper (Apple Music, Spotify) came out.1 And Bill Clinton breaking out the sax on The Arsenio Hall show to demonstrate his hipness in 1992? This was the single most generationally divisive event since Woodstock: Boomers on one side, cheering, while right-minded Xers stood by appalled on the other. In that very moment we might have risen up en masse and overthrown them, but instead we hung back, taking direction from MTV to “rock the vote” in favor of a ticket promoting itself with “Don’t Stop” (link withheld). Three decades later these clowns are still on the bridge, full speed ahead, grinding the leaky ship’s hull ever deeper into the reef.
But all that’s for another post. I was talking about saxophones, which—and let me be crystal clear on this—have no place in rock music, unless you’re X-Ray Spex or a ska or ska-adjacent band. “One Step Beyond” (Apple Music, Spotify)? Fine. And in that tradition, the not one but two saxophone solos in “Shocker!” aren’t just acceptable, but value added. I realize I’m making these allowances on the regular—already for the Waitresses and the Waterboys, see “No Guilt” and “The Whole of the Moon,” and now the Toasters, too—so that you might think the accumulated exceptions are swallowing the rule. But the point is that sufferable saxes are few, far between, and noteworthy. Hat tip to the Toasters here, who went so far as to feature them.
On that same subject, the horn section—trumpet, trombone, and sax—open and close “Shocker!” with a slightly-off (minor key?) rendition of “God Save the Queen” (the anthem, not the Pistols song). This turns the track into a bit of a Non Sequitur sandwich, for sure, but Ninth-Grade Me wasn’t out looking to enforce thematic coherence in my music. Throw in the masterful bongo drumming and dub delay effects, and it’s clear this was a case of “throw everything at the wall, including the word banal, and see what sticks” production and arrangement. And the end result was a recording that I thirsted to hear every time I stepped into Anna Mah’s Honda.
I ultimately did get hold of a cassette copy of this Toasters LP, not from Anna directly, but through the good offices of my friend Hans, who you’ll recall was Anna’s younger brother. The album was called Skaboom! Looking back, one unintended upside of audio cassette technology was that rewinding was such a pain in the ass that you eventually let the tape play all the way to the end, and in this way you would come to appreciate songs other than “Shocker!” Standout tracks on Skaboom! include “Weekend in LA” (Apple Music, Spotify), “East Side Beat” (Apple Music, Spotify), and “Manipulator” (Apple Music, Spotify), the last of which covers much the same territory as “She’s Crafty” (Apple Music, Spotify). When you consider that both the Toasters and Beastie Boys were New York acts and that Skaboom! came out not even six months after License To Ill, you have to wonder if Hingley and Ad Rock got burned by the same girl.
I suppose there’s room left here for me to write a word or two about my relationship with goofy music, toward which I harbor a certain incoherent ambivalence. Ambivalence in the sense that I can bring myself to adore exactly some of it. I’ll take the Toasters, They Might Be Giants, songs like Afroman’s “Because I Got High” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Fuck Off” by Mindless Drug Hoover (YouTube), and Liam Lynch’s “United States of Whatever” (Apple Music, Spotify), no questions asked. But then an artist like Poi Dog Pondering, also sourced from Hans’s older sisters, makes me want to put my head into the dry wall. Likewise, there’s not a song by Squeeze I can stand, and most everything2 Barenaked Ladies ever did lands instantly on my last nerve. Incoherent because I couldn’t tell you what it is about a song that puts it in the Friendly column. I can get on board with “Weird Al” Yankovic but have no use for Dr. Demento. Why is that? I may have to dig deeper into this later, but give me the Toasters all day long.
I just looked up Anna. These days she’s a radiologist in Connecticut. Winner of the Sigmund L. Wilens Prize for Excellence in Pathology, which certainly sounds like something. Her practice has offices in Brookfield, New Canaan, Southbury, and Danbury. I like to think that at any given time during business hours, at least one of them is playing Skaboom! over the waiting room PA.
You get links here because over the decades I’ve softened on this track. Beloved Cleveland busker Sax Man is one big reason why. These days when I hear “Careless Whisper,” I’m transported to the outskirts of Progressive Field, with the crowd filing out after a then-Indians win and Sax Man’s bleated notes filling the humid air.
See “Hotel Yorba,” where I found room for “Pollywog in a Bog” (Apple Music, Spotify).