Journey to the Center of Allston, Mass: The Story of The Allstonians

How one ska band chronicled life in their corner of Boston.

Last September, I released the book Hell of a Hat: The Rise of ’90s Ska and Swing on Penn State University Press. This companion newsletter is dedicated to telling the stories of important bands I wasn’t able to include.

From their formation in 1992 through 2017, when they played what was likely their final show, Boston ska legends The Allstonians had 108 musicians pass through their ranks. Founding keyboardist and songwriter Dana Reed Thurston, aka Nigel Knucklehead, kept a comprehensive list of members, plus their nicknames. He dreams of one day soliciting and compiling their stories for posterity.

“It really was a wild ride,” Thurston says of the band’s boozy quarter-century in black suits and ties. “We were friends. We were wiseasses. We were partiers. Most of the guys—and women—were very smart.”

Should Thurston succeed in gathering up these eyewitness accounts, he’ll wind up with not just a democratic telling of his band’s story, but also a de facto people’s history of Boston’s rough and rowdy Allston neighborhood in the years leading up to and following the turn of the millennium.

In the meantime, there’s another way to learn about what life was like in Allston during the years The Allstonians were together, and that’s simply to play through the band’s discography. Much as The Smiths captured the romantic gloom of Manchester and Madness told everyday tales about London’s Camden Town, The Allstonians wrote poignant slice-of-life songs about, well, Allstonians. They treated the neighborhood like it was the center of the universe.

They did this from the beginning. Witness “Allston, Mass,” an early Allstonians track found on the 1994 Boston ska compilation Mash It Up Vol. 3. “Staring out my window, dirty broken glass / I see the smog arising right here in Allston, Mass,” sings frontman Karl “King K” Schneider in the opening verse, as jittery minor piano chords lurk in the background. Later, in the chorus, King K declares, “We’re living, we’re living in Allston, Mass / Broken dreams strewn amongst the broken glass.”

It’s a song of defiant pride, a conflicted love letter to an urban enclave heavily populated by college kids and 20-somethings seeking cheap rental houses good for throwing ragers. Thurston is actually from the greater Philadelphia area, but he’s been kicking around Allston and neighboring Brighton for decades. He first came to Boston in 1978 to attend Boston University. Unlike many of his fellow students, he managed to make friends beyond Commonwealth Avenue.

“I didn’t hang around with BU people,” Thurston says. “I didn’t hang around with outsiders. I got to know all the people from Boston. I think that was an upside. You start writing as a Bostonian. Your life is here.”

Along the way, Thurston discovered 2 Tone and the Jamaican ska that came before. By his estimation, everyone in the Boston music scene owned both volumes of Island’s Intensified compilations, featuring OG ska artists like Toots & The Maytals, Desmond Dekker & The Aces, and of course The Skatalites. From these discs came a full-on obsession with Jamaican music. “You get drawn in, and then you realize Lee Perry is the most brilliant man in the world,” Thurston says.

Once in thrall to reggae and ska, Thurston formed The Allstonians by pulling purely from his peer circle. After a couple of false starts, the lineup coalesced around saxophonists Darrell “D Train” Morrow and Jeremy Woodruff, trumpeter Benjamin “Tyler” Oulton, trombonist John Leonard, drummer Jeff Eckman, bassist Jonathan Noel, guitarist Steve! (that’s how he was billed), and singer King K, whom Thurston had played with in a previous band. 

“Karl doesn’t take a lot of credit for what he does,” says Thurston. Even though he wasn’t really a musician—he was a singer—he was always there to push the idea.”

King K actually named the band while stoned one afternoon. He was inspired by Jamaican groups like The Clarendonians and The Kingstonians. The Allstonians naturally gravitated toward writing about Allston, a place gentrification had yet to reach. The neighborhood was pretty rough; fights could break out any time, for any reason, especially at Riley’s Roast Beef on Brighton Ave., a hub for drunks at 2 a.m.

“There was always blood,” says Thurston. “It was just part of the game. If you kept your mouth shut, you could get in and get your roast beef and your french fries and get out before anything happened. If you didn’t mind your Ps and Qs, you could really get it.”

That tension may have carried over to the music, at least initially. While The Allstonians would become known for their facility with easy-going traditional Jamaican ska, they started out playing in the anxious 2 Tone style heard on “Allston, Mass,” “B Train to Allston,” and “Spike.”

The last of those songs, picked by Moon Ska Records for the seminal 1994 two-disc compilation Skarmageddon, tells the story of a freeloading friend who crashes on couches and guzzles up gin but never wears out his welcome. Spike was a real guy—one Greg Cuneo, a 6’5” dude with long blonde hair who once played on the same darts team as Thurston and King K. 

“He was kind of goofy in a way, but he would intimidate people because of his size,” Thurston says. “He was very funny and genuine. He wouldn’t hurt a soul. But he looked like he could. A bit of a nutter.”

At one point, Thurston and company wanted Spike to come on stage during Allstonians gigs and relax in a chair while reading the newspaper. They thought he could be a kind of low-energy answer to Ben Carr, the famed “dancing guy” in The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Sadly, Spike got cancer and died at 28, but not before hearing the song written in his honor.

The Allstonians dedicated their 1994 debut album, Go You!, to Spike. When it came time to release the LP, the band had a couple of options. Rob “Bucket” Hingley, head of Moon Ska Records and its flagship band, The Toasters, wanted the album. So did Dan Vitale of Boston ska pioneers Bim Skala Bim, who ran the label Bib. “Bucket said he’d put us out sooner, and Moon had a better reputation,” Thurston says. “So we ended up going with Bucket, who was hilarious. I always loved him.”

Go You! is roughly half instrumentals, half somber vignettes about drunk, depressed people muddling through their daily lives. One standout, “Jackson Mann,” is named for an elementary school on Armington Street in Allston. There’s a story behind the song, and not surprisingly, it involves drinking. One night, while he and King K were on their way to or from a party, Thurston noticed the amazing natural echo beneath the section of the building that passes over the street. He began singing, “Echoes under Jackson Mann…” A few weeks later, King K reminded him of the line, and they joined forces to write a song about feeling haunted by visions of the past. “Another Night” and “Feeling Fine” present similarly troubled narrators.

“That’s the way Karl and I wrote,” says Thurston. “Maybe it’s that youthful poetic thing that happens. I don’t think we meant them to be sad. That’s how they turned out.”

The album found an audience via Moon Ska Records as ska edged closer to exploding into the mainstream. Thurston could sense the impending boom, and he and his bandmates thought they might have a shot at stardom. They never got called up to the bigs, but years later, Thurston heard a rumor that the major labels had gone back and forth over which Boston ska band to pursue, The Allstonians or The Bosstones. Thurston understands why The Bosstones would be the obvious choice.

“The Bosstones wore plaid,” he says. “They were jumping around on stage. And if you came to see The Allstonians, we were in black suits and black ties and sunglasses. Very acerbic sense of humor. Not the upbeat kind of thing [major labels] were looking for out of ska. The Bosstones were not a cartoon, but [they had] that cartoon kind of presentation.” 

In 1997, the year ska broke, The Allstonians released their masterpiece, The Allston Beat, an album that should’ve marked them as exceptional to anyone paying attention. By this point, The Allstonians had decided to slow the tempos, adopt more of a Jamaican feel, and open up the songwriting to other members of the band. The result was a collection of songs with even more musical complexity and emotional depth than Go You! 

Thurston was responsible for penning highlights like “Brighton Memories”—a vaguely melancholy ode to old ladies doing laundry and kids climbing trees—and “Emily Slumber,” which uses cello and violin to help tell the story of a shy beauty who, more than any other character in the Allstonians universe, isn’t weighed down by her surroundings. Thurston’s lyrics on the latter almost evoke “Eleanor Rigby,” except this girl is the opposite of the lonely Beatles character: ​​“Emily Slumber picks up the cup / That she's filled with the dust of her life / She doesn’t lumber, she dances around / ’Cause she feels she’s amazingly light.”

Emily, too, was a real person—and a reminder of what a small world Allston is. Thurston met Emily at Spike’s funeral. She was friends with Spike’s wife. “We had an intense love affair for about a day,” Thurston says. “It was probably based on the funeral. She broke my heart. She was absolutely beautiful. She really was. I think I saw her once afterward. She went back to her boyfriend. I was left out in the cold.”

The real heartbreaker on The Allston Beat is “Miss Understood,” written by guitarist Roger Fisk in the wake of the shootings at a pair of Brookline abortion clinics on December 30, 1994. Fisk knew one of the two women killed. She was the girlfriend of a close friend. Fisk got the news at New York City’s Penn Station, and in the song, he describes what went through his mind as he hailed a cab and began to process the tragedy: “Crawling through red lights while I call your name / Tears make the neon lights just run like rain / My friend’s a picture who just lost his frame.”

“Miss Understood” is also a showcase for trumpeter Tyler Oulton, by all accounts a genius musician who wrestled with demons throughout his life. When Oulton died in 2019, Fisk wrote a Facebook post praising Oulton’s “lilting, tumbling, plaintive, sad” improvisations on “Miss Understood.” “Even before today those two brief passages could take my breath,” Fisk wrote.

The Allston Beat earned positive marks and sold better than its predecessor. The year it landed, The Allstonians made their first and only trip to Europe, grabbing gigs with The Skatalites and The Selecter. But after ska reached its commercial peak in the summer of 1997, many bands—The Allstonians included—began feeling a backlash. “The scene started collapsing in on itself because of bar owners,” Thurston says. “They saw that ska was big, so anybody with a ska band could get gigs. You had ska in bars every night of the week. And people were just sick of it. They killed it for us instead of just letting it go on its own.”

In March of 1999, King K left The Allstonians. According to Thurston, King K’s wife was trying to take over the band and tell everyone how to dress. One night, Thurston told her off, and she responded by ordering King K to quit the group. “Karl said he’d rather save his marriage at that point than save the band.” Thurston says. (The couple has since divorced.) D Train stepped up to provide lead vocals, and the band carried on. In the summer of 1999, they backed ska pioneer Laurel Aitken on a cross-country tour.

Four years passed before The Allstonians returned with their third album, Bottoms Up!, a lighter exercise in trad ska and reggae that harkens back to the old days with the standout “Fear & Loathing in Allston,” a song about getting laid off and drinking all day. They recorded much of the album in the home of Steve Foote, bassist for the Boston ska-punk band Big D & The Kids Table.

Soon after, The Allstonians simply stopped. The bottom had fallen out of the local ska scene, and they were done. They returned in 2007 and continued performing sporadically until 2017, when they played their last show to date.

Thurston may consider reuniting the band to record some of the 20-odd new songs they’d been working on when they called it quits. But he can’t imagine The Allstonians will ever do another show. “I played some of those songs 5,000 times between rehearsal and performing them,” he says. “I never want to play them again in my life.” 

Which is a shame, since The Allstonians thrived as a live band. They also built a reputation for drinking that’s matched in the ska world perhaps only by The Pietasters. “There were very few times when anyone in the audience was drunker than most of the guys in the band,” Thurston says. “I’m almost ashamed to say it. Because we probably could’ve been much better if we weren’t drinking.”

In later years, after King K’s departure, The Allstonians started doing four-hour gigs. That gave the notoriously thirsty crew more time to imbibe, muck about, and enjoy a bond that only 108 people in the entire world—Allston and beyond—might understand.

“I don’t mean this in a bad way, but we never thought about the audience too much,” Thurston says. “We had more fun onstage. You’d try to make someone screw up their solo by making them laugh. That’s what playing in a band with friends does. It was never about the fame. It was always about the fun.”

For more great stories about ’90s ska, check out my book Hell of a Hat: The Rise of ’90s Ska and Swing, out now Penn State University Press.