Only One Way to Skank: The Saga of Spring Heeled Jack
How Connecticut's ska-pop titans nearly conquered the world.
Ask any major neo-swing band from the ’90s, and they’ll tell you the prevalence of hardcore dance enthusiasts at their shows was a mixed blessing. Armed with sacred knowledge of the Lindy Hop and the Balboa, these expert jumper-jivers would monopolize dance floors and edge out regular folks who just wanted to twirl around and have fun.
This was way less of a problem in the parallel ’90s ska scene, where the primary dance, skanking, required little in the way of coordination and zero formal training. The beauty of skanking was that anyone could do it—and in fact, everyone felt compelled to do it once the guitars started hiccuping and the horns got blasting.
Connecticut ska heroes Spring Heeled Jack celebrate the unpretentious nature of skanking on “One Way,” the opening track off their 1996 debut album, Static World View. “There’s only one way to skank,” goes the chorus. “It’s universal.”
Those lyrics were written by drummer Dave Karcich, who often had to defend his declaration amid good-natured challenges from bandmates. “We were like, ‘Dave, is there only one way to skank?’” says Spring Heeled Jack guitarist and singer Ronnie Ragona. “‘Or are there multiple ways?’”
Strictly speaking, Karcich was incorrect. A person dancing the Jamaica ska of the ’60s looks nothing like someone doing the frantic run-in-place skanking popular during the ’90s. But Karcich was making a larger point that Ragona and the rest of SHJ knew to be true: If you’re sweating your face off and having the time of your life, there is no wrong way to skank. “The only way to do it is to do it,” says Ragona.
A similarly anti-elitist, fun-first philosophy guided Spring Heeled Jack throughout their glorious initial run, which lasted from 1991 to 2000. In those nine years, SHJ spearheaded Connecticut’s thriving ska scene, released two excellent albums (one on America’s premier ska label, the other on a major), and came painfully close achieving superstardom.
Their success was no fluke. Spring Heeled Jack zigzagged across America like fugitives and cultivated a hooky, feel-good brand of ska informed by classic rock and pop—influences that pushed toward the center as the decade wore on.
SHJ were lighthearted but never goofy. When they wore suits, it was because they respected ska’s history and culture, not because they wanted you to believe they were actually mods or rude boys. Their music was inclusive and welcoming. Every show was a party. They were likely the only band in the history of the world to cover Phish and Stray Cats.
Named for a sinister figure from Victorian English folklore, Spring Heeled Jack were born as a byproduct of Ragona’s passion for ska. The native of Shelton, Connecticut, discovered the genre in the early ’90s, long before most alternative music fans ever heard the word. He started with Madness and Specials records and attended shows by revivalists like the Toasters, N.Y. Citizens, and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, all regulars at CT clubs like The Anthrax in Norwalk.
“Once you started getting involved in that whole scene, you started investigating more and more,” Ragona says. This was pre-internet, so he relied on better-informed scenesters to explain ska’s history and recommend essential albums. After finishing high school, Ragona vowed to start a ska band—a pretty novel idea in 1991.
Through a friend, he met Dave Karcich, already a tremendous drummer. Ragona then managed to recruit a local trumpeter and saxophonist. The initial SHJ lineup played a handful of house parties and one open-mic gig at The Moon in New Haven. None of the musicians took the band very seriously, so after a few months, Ragona quit and moved to Boston.
While in Beantown, Ragona met some local scooter kids at a Special Beat show and became the bassist for their fledgling trad-ska band, Skavoovie and the Epitones. Skavoovie would evolve into one of the finest old-school ska outfits of the decade, but they’d do it without Ragona. After a short time in the band, Ragona realized he liked his ska with a side of rock ’n’ roll. He ghosted the Epitones and returned to Connecticut with a renewed sense of purpose.
“I called Dave and was like, ‘You want to start it back up? I think I’ve formulated a plan now,’” Ragona says.
Karcich was game, so they set about assembling a new and improved Spring Heeled Jack lineup. Because he was struggling to sing and play guitar at the same time, Ragona suggested they find a second vocalist. Karcich brought in his buddy Mike Pellegrino, a charismatic singer and guitarist schooled in rock but excited by the energy of ska. It didn’t even matter that he kind of looked like Bon Jovi. After SHJ’s initial bassist didn’t work out, the group tapped Rick Omonte, a long-fingernailed classical guitar student whose tastes veered more toward metal. Omonte was supposed to be temporary, but he stayed the next eight years.
As the band’s resident ska expert, Ragona was tasked with educating the newcomers. “They knew Fishbone, Madness, stuff like that,” he says. “I was like, ‘You gotta see N.Y. Citizens.’ Going to shows was always the No. 1 thing that sold people. [Ska] is such a great live experience. The energy really sells people on why you should be into it.”
From his Specials fandom, Ragona knew Spring Heeled Jack needed an all-star trombonist. Fortunately, Karcich played in a college jazz ensemble with the incomparable Chris Rhodes, who wowed his future bandmates with a performance of Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon.” “I was like, ‘Yes, get him,’” says Ragona. They added trumpeter Pat Gingras and saxophonist James Riley in time to record their aptly titled 1993 demo tape Connecticut Ska.
Even at this embryonic stage, Spring Heeled Jack were writing accessible, often motivational songs bound to attract listeners outside the ska scene. The cassette includes three tunes that would follow the band for years and turn up on future releases. “The Running Man (Looking Through the Mirror)” extolls the health benefits of twice-daily skanking. “Time” urges listeners to seize the day and the ass: “Time is what you make of it / So don’t waste your time being celibate.” “Freedom,” another blast of wisdom from Karcich, is about outgrowing selfishness and being good to your friends.
Although Ragona and Pellegrino had established a winning songwriting partnership, everyone in Spring Heeled Jack contributed ideas. “It was free reign,” says Ragona. “You always want people to add something of themselves to songs. It makes it more engaging. People feel like they’re part of it. Not just mine, mine, mine.”
Ragona slipped a copy of Connecticut Ska to Rob “Bucket” Hingley, leader of the Toasters and Moon Ska Records. Before long, Spring Heeled Jack were playing gigs with the third-wave pioneers. The CT newcomers even landed the song “Addicted”—another ode to ska—on the seminal 1994 Moon compilation Skarmageddon.
Having made a name in the tri-state area, Spring Heeled Jack entered Edge Studios in Fairfield, Connecticut, the following year and recorded what they thought would be a demo they could shop to labels. They were overjoyed when Bucket expressed interest in releasing the music on Moon, then the gold standard for American ska. But things didn’t go exactly as planned.
“We were like, ‘Oh my god, Moon! We’re gonna get a budget to record all these songs correctly, with money behind it,’” says Ragona. Then Bucket told the band his plan was simply to release the recordings they’d given him. “We were like, No, no, no! So we’re putting out a demo again?” says Ragona.
Despite its sonic imperfections, 1996’s Static World View brought Spring Heeled Jack’s aerobic third-wave vibes to many thousands of Discmans across America. (The CD ends with John Cusack—in a clip sampled from the 1988 cult comedy Tapeheads—asking, “What kind of production value did you have in mind for no money?”) Alongside perky dance tunes, the LP features the strolling instrumental “Rufus Shakeedoo,” the anti-conformity ska-punk jam “Pigeon-Holed,” and the well-executed joke “Alicia Silverstone,” 30-second medley of then-recent Aerosmith hits.
The album’s closer, “This Song (Has Probably Been Played Before),” finds Spring Heeled Jack justifying their rock-tinged ska on the grounds that (a) it’s music and (b) it makes them happy. “Do you think it was right of me, mister, NOT to rob Desmond Dekker that time?” Pellegrino sings. Spring Heeled Jack wrote “This Song” as a kind of preemptive response to genre purists who might hate the record. “No one really gave us any shit,” Ragona says. “It was probably our own insecurities in those situations.”
Spring Heeled Jack toured like madmen in 1996 and 1997, as ska finally emerged from the underground and their friends in the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Pietasters were blowing up. “Everyone was on the cusp of doing big things,” says Ragona. “We wanted to get a good recording budget so we could do a bigger, better record.” They would’ve liked to have stayed on Moon, but Bucket’s label wasn’t able to match the offers coming in from majors.
The band wanted a record company that would put some promo money behind the album and pay for a real music video—not the kind of cheapo clip they shot for the Static single “Pay Some Dues.” In the end, they signed with Ignition Records, a subsidiary of Tommy Boy.
“With Ignition, we were the only ska band on there,” says Ragona. “Whereas with Moon, we thought we might just be lumped into the conglomerate.”
Spring Heeled Jack met the major-label moment with 1998’s Songs from Suburbia, their strongest collection of songs to date. Their friend Ted Olsen from the Connecticut punk band Big Mistake worked as an engineer at the Hit Factory, and he got SHJ in to record at the legendary NYC studio. “I remember us going to sing, and the guy’s like, ‘That microphone, that’s the one John Lennon used on Double Fantasy, and Michael Jackson used that one,’” Ragona says. “I was like, ‘Oh, thanks. No pressure here!’”
If Spring Heeled Jack had once been a ska band with rock edges, Songs from Suburbia inverted the formula. They were now a poppy rock group with ska tendencies. Lead single “Jolene” is mega-catchy pop-punk with blaring horns and a yearning lyric about the group’s beloved Dodge touring van. On highlights “Beggin’” and “Waiting, Watching,” SHJ tastefully weave ska bits into what are essentially big rock tunes. Only the sublime “Morning Sun” is a straight ska track.
Ragona calls the stylistic change a natural progression, kind of like when Madness went pop after their first two albums. “After you’ve been doing things for that long, and you’ve played so many shows, you just want to start branching out,” Ragona says. “It’s an age-old tale, wanting to do something different … It was rock ’n’ roll dreams, I guess. You grew up in the MTV generation—it’s that weird thing where you just want to be out there rocking and rolling.”
At the same time, Ragona was genuinely concerned about how the ska community would react to the new songs. “I remember being like, ‘We can’t go too far over,’” he says. “We wanted to blend it all together and find a happy medium.”
Deftly written and recorded, Songs from Suburbia should’ve been a smash. Every song is killer—even the cover of Phish’s “Makisupa Policeman.” The candy-colored and kinetic music video for “Jolene” received airplay on MTV’s 120 Minutes, but the single never became a national hit. There were two humongous things working against Spring Heeled Jack: Ignition Records folded, and ska became uncool.
“I remember feeling this weird vibe in the air,” says Ragona, thinking back on the dark mood that began creeping into ska shows around 1998. People were still coming out to see the band, but it was clear tastes were changing. “I think it was the way [ska] was portrayed on TV and things. It was jokey, almost like kids music.”
It was a heartbreaking turn of events for a band that had rightfully felt it was on the verge of getting somewhere. “We put the work in,” says Ragona. “That was the whole thing. We had a real mentality of focus. The Pietasters used to call us a football team, because we were very in tune with each other and very team-oriented.”
Around 1999, the members of Spring Heeled Jack began asking themselves some tough questions. “We were touring so much, and it wasn’t like we were a band like Less Than Jake or the Bosstones that was making money,” says Ragona. “We were like, ‘How much longer can we go on doing this—seven guys in a band, splitting it seven ways?’ You’re getting older. You’re going, ‘How can we sustain it?’” On top of that, everyone was unable to reach a consensus on what musical direction to pursue next.
Karcich was the first to walk away. The others tried to keep it going with Curtis Reaves of Baltimore ska greats the Smooths, but it was too far for the replacement drummer to travel. “We were like, ‘Let’s call it quits—we had a good run,’” says Ragona. “It was super hard. It was very emotional. It was very upsetting. At the time, we had a website, and everyone was writing, ‘No, we don’t want you to go!’”
By the time Spring Heeled Jack took the stage for their supposed final show at Toad’s Place in New Haven in May 2000, Rhodes had already found a new job in the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. The night of SHJ’s finale, the Bosstones were booked on Late Show with David Letterman, so Rhodes couldn’t be there for the farewell. His SHJ bandmates broadcast the Letterman appearance over the club’s TV screens and teased their absentee trombonist with “Where’s Chris Rhodes,” a reworked version of the Bosstones’ “Where’d You Go.”
Rhodes wasn’t the only Spring Heeled Jack alum to graduate to a famous ska band. In 2000, saxophonist Peter Wasilewski, who’d come aboard midway through the Static World View sessions, joined up with Less Than Jake. Then in 2001, trumpeter Tyler Jones—a SHJ fixture since the mid-’90s—began a multi-year tour of duty with Reel Big Fish. Ragona (who spent much of the 2000s in the punky rock ’n’ roll band Lost City Angels) likens Spring Heeled Jack to a “training camp” for big-league ska bands.
It would take a tragedy to get Spring Heeled Jack back on stage. On April 5, 2002, Karcich died after suffering a brain aneurysm three days earlier. He was 28. At the time, Karcich was a member of the punk supergroup Avoid One Thing, featuring Bosstones bassist Joe Gittleman. Spring Heeled Jack reformed in Karcich’s honor and played Toad’s Place in December 2002. Through a raffle, they raised thousands of dollars for a scholarship fund in the drummer’s name.
When the band regrouped again in 2010, Wasilewski told the Hartford Courant he was seeking closure, and that he doubted there would be future reunions. But Spring Heeled Jack bounced back in 2013 with a new roster featuring none of the horn players from the classic lineup. Ragona and Pellegrino have kept the band going ever since, and in 2017, they released Sound Salvation, an album of dance-rock and power-pop with faint whiffs of reggae. It’s fantastic for what it is.
In November 2019, days after Thanksgiving, Rhodes and Wasilewski rejoined Spring Heeled Jack at Toad’s Place for a show marking the 21st anniversary of Songs from Suburbia. A snowstorm threatened Connecticut that night, but plenty of fans braved the weather to scream along with “Jolene” one more time. “It’s still a brotherhood,” says Ragona. “I almost call it the Spring Heeled Jack Collective, because we have this whole cast of characters.”
The combination of the pandemic and the death of Tyler Jones in 2020 has given Ragona even more incentive to keep Spring Heeled Jack active. It’s now about keeping the memories of two fallen bandmates alive. As the world opens up post-covid, Ragona plans to play more shows and record a new album with Pellegrino. They’ve even talked about reviving the ska sound of their youth.
That music still means a lot to Ragona. It doesn’t take much to get him reminiscing about the sheer joy of dancing at ska shows, and all those times he’d leave clubs on cold nights to find his clothes literally steaming. And then there were the times Spring Heeled Jack played local haunts like The Boiler Room in Tolland, Connecticut, and electrified rooms full of teenage skankers, all dancing exactly the right way.
“We’d be in this hot little box with everyone just going nuts in there, having a great time,” Ragona says. “We’d walk out of there and go, ‘That was the most amazing thing ever.’”
For more great stories about ’90s ska, check out my book Hell of a Hat: The Rise of ’90s Ska and Swing, due out September 21, 2021, on Penn State University Press. Preorder here. If you’re in New York City on Tuesday, September 28, join me for a Hell of a Hat launch party at Mama Tried in Brooklyn. DJ Ryan Midnight will be spinning all your ’90s favorites, and because it runs from 7 to 9 p.m., you don’t even have to stay up late!