The Mod, Mod World of Johnny Too Bad and the Strikeouts
“We’re more than a band. We’re a brotherhood.”
The best thing about Connecticut has always been its proximity to other places, namely Boston and New York City. To experience world-class art and culture, a Nutmegger needs only to drive a couple of hours southwest or northeast, traffic permitting. But in the ’90s, the state’s favorable geography spawned something homegrown: a fertile ska scene that rivaled any in the nation.
As evidenced by the 1997 compilation Welcome to Skannecticut, the CT scene was as diverse as it was expansive. Local kingpins Spring Heeled Jack had a poppy rock edge that landed them on third-wave bastion Moon Ska Records and later Ignition Records, a subsidiary of Tommy Boy, where they released the excellent 1998 album Songs from Suburbia. On the flip side, the super-trad Radiation Kings recorded 1999’s Early Years—a disc of real-deal ska, rocksteady, and reggae—with Stubborn Records boss King Django.
Somewhere in between these extremes were Johnny Too Bad and the Strikeouts, the scene’s coolest, sharpest, arguably greatest band.
Named for a song by the Slickers on the soundtrack to the 1972 reggae film The Harder They Come, Johnny Too Bad and the Strikeouts pledged allegiance to the British mod subculture. Lead singer Rodger Phillips was the ace face, a pencil-thin chainsmoker whose slim-cut suits and precision haircut made him look like an extra from Quadrophenia.
At a time when the most fashionable suburban ska bands raided thrift stores in search of bootleg rude-boy outfits—and the less fashionable would rock cargo shorts and baseball caps—JTB presented themselves as something more exotic and exciting. Their snazzy duds evoked an underground world of scooter rallies and Northern Soul dances and who even knew what else.
Phillips discovered ska as a teenager in the early ’90s, when he got his hands on the self-titled 1991 debut by Long Island quasi-traditionalists the Scofflaws. “I was driving around a lot in my Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera listening to that,” Phillips says. His friends in the pioneering West Hartford ska-punk band Nigel Six soon introduced him to Operation Ivy, an even more potent ska gateway drug.
In 1995, Phillips found himself singing lead in MuSKAteer, a short-lived ska band featuring Jay Adelberg on drums. Adelberg had spent the previous couple of years booking punk shows at the CT club Studio 158. Around 1994, he noticed a surge of local ska bands and fell in love with the scene.
“I was so taken by what Spring Heeled Jack and Nigel Six and JC Superska had been doing that I wanted to tap into that energy,” says Adelberg. “It was so fresh. It was so different from what anyone else was doing at the time. Third-wave ska had not really come out of its dark cave yet. It was just poking its head out.”
That’s why Adelberg auditioned for MuSKAteer, led by guitarist Melissa “Missy” Carbone. MuSKAteer was very much Carbone’s band and vision. “I remember getting in trouble for taking naps during MuSKAteer practice,” says Phillips. Craving more creative freedom, Phillips and Adelberg—alongside bassist Renee Grace Nolan and keyboardist/trumpeter Scott Neilson—quit after two shows in early 1995 and started Johnny Too Bad.
Carbone later formed Rudie Brass, a regionally popular ska act that proved a precursor to far greater triumphs. In 2013, Carbone turned up on ABC’s Shark Tank and secured $2 million in funding for her string of live Halloween attractions in Southern California. She discusses her ska past in her 2017 memoir Ready, Fire, Aim: How I Turned a Hobby Into an Empire.
As JTB took shape, the mod aesthetic was there from the beginning. Phillips became the ringleader, drawing inspiration from groups like Washington, D.C., ska-soul heroes the Pietasters.
“One of the things I remember about meeting the Pietasters and bands like them was they were like a gang,” says Phillips. “A gang you wanted to be a member of. I remember thinking of Johnny Too Bad like that: We’re more than a band. We’re a brotherhood. I was very interested in the scene aspects of it from the beginning. I definitely tried to push that on everyone to varying degrees. It just grew from there.”
Achieving the mod look was easier for some members than for others. This was before you could just order Fred Perry and Ben Sherman shirts off Amazon. If you were a larger gentleman, like Adelberg was in those days, squeezing into those snug English garments presented another challenge. “Half the band looked really good all the time, and then the other half looked pretty good most of the time,” says Adelberg. “I was definitely in the second category.”
JTB’s genesis came as Adelberg was embarking on his junior year at the University of Connecticut. When not studying or playing drums, he booked shows at the ska-friendly El ’n’ Gee nightclub in New London and hosted the show Encased in Carbonite on the UConn radio station, WHUS. Adelberg initially figured his listenership was somewhere in the neighborhood of nine people, but when he was pulled from the air after missing a deadline to submit paperwork, ska kids from across the state flooded the station with calls. The WHUS program director agreed to put Adelberg back on the air—so long as he urged his fans to stand down.
Clearly, there was a local appetite for ska. By early 1996, JTB had solidified an eight-member lineup that would remain in place for the next year and a half. Joining the aforementioned core founders were guitarist Nick Kain (formerly of the wonderfully named CT ska band Spicy Gribblets), baritone saxophonist Mat Jones, tenor saxophonist Dan Delacruz, and trombonist Mara Breen, aka “the Disco Queen.” This was the version of JTB that would release a cassette tape, a 7-inch EP, and a CD—the trifecta of ’90s formats. There was also a fever dream of a VHS movie packed with bizarre skits and live performances. Those who’ve seen it will never be the same.
The band’s debut came with the self-released 1996 tape Memoirs of the Hunted, named for a snippet of dialogue sampled from the 1989 film Penn & Teller Get Killed. The songs were written communally, though Neilson handled much of the music, bringing his own unique sensibility. “He was basically writing pop songs with minor chord changes to a ska beat,” says Adelberg. “Ska bands weren’t using minor chords. Ska is all major keys. It’s happy-go-lucky, dance-’til-you-fall-over music. And that’s just not really who we were at all.”
Neilson’s angsty, grabby instrumentals fit perfectly with Phillips’ menacing lyrics and craggy-voiced delivery. Phillips fantasizes about shooting his boss dead on opener “9 to 5” and reminisces about his wayward adolescence on highlight “220,” a celebration of skateboarding and smoking cigarettes. There’s also a cover of “Hello Baby” by the U.K. skinhead icon Judge Dread, a Phillips favorite whom Adelberg would regularly spin on Encased in Carbonite.
Memoirs of the Hunted features uptempo rock-style drums and occasional bursts of distorted guitar. But it never comes across as ska-punk—not in the Less Than Jake or Suicide Machines sense. The music belies an appreciation of traditional ska that would manifest itself more noticeably on the group’s one and only album, Patchwork Girl, released in 1997 on Ska Satellite, a subsidiary of Moon Records.
The Moon deal came about after JTB played with the Toasters at 7 Willow Street in Port Chester, New York. Toasters frontman Rob “Bucket” Hingley, the man behind Moon, took a shine to JTB and told Adelberg to call his office the following week. Adelberg did, and that’s when Bucket told him about Ska Satellite, an imprint that would allow lesser-known bands to reach Moon’s loyal fanbase via lower-priced CDs. It was the next best thing to getting on Moon Ska.
“I didn’t have any ill feelings about Ska Satellite versus Moon Ska proper because we were in good company,” says Adelberg, praising labelmates Edna’s Goldfish and the Checkered Cabs.
Working on a tight budget, JTB recorded Patchwork Girl in Cheshire, Connecticut. Adelberg laid down the drum tracks for all 12 songs in one day, but even so, the band burned through its money and had to borrow $800 from Moon Ska employee Noah Wildman to finish the record. As a condition of the loan, Wildman insisted that he be credited as “Chief Booty Knocker” in the liner notes. The band obliged.
Opening with the sizzling instrumental “McCookin’,” Patchwork Girl announces itself as more traditional than anything JTB had recorded up to that point. The band members had been listening to more and more first-wave Jamaican ska and playing shows with trad-minded groups like the Slackers and the Stubborn All-Stars. “We wanted to be able to hang with those bands,” says Adelberg. “It was just kind of a natural evolution of the things that were around us at the time and the things that were happening.”
But just as Memoirs of the Hunted isn’t ska-punk, Patchwork Girl isn’t straight-up trad. “Cider Song,” featuring guitarist Kain on lead vocals, is a stomping boozer anthem with a chorus perfect for pint-raising sing-alongs. Scuzzy guitar drives the chorus on the title track, an anxious tune whose second verse begins, “Skinhead, lace your boots up tight/There’s sure to be some blood tonight.” The disc also features new versions of old punky Memoirs favorites like “220” and “Doesn’t Matter” (retitled “Sad Taco”).
Patchwork Girl ends with the mournful slow jam “What Will the Neighbors Say?,” inspired by romantic traumas Phillips can no longer remember. “Like a lot of teenagers or people in their early 20s, I had a lot of breakups that I thought were the end of the world,” Phillips says. “And of course they weren’t, but at the time you feel it super strongly.”
Having just completed a terrific record, JTB invested in their future. The band bought a van and booked a string of tour dates. Adelberg even quit his job at Hot Topic. It was the summer of 1997 and ska was reaching its peak of popularity. “The intent was we wanted to go out and go on tour and never come home,” Adelberg says.
Unfortunately, things turned ugly somewhere in the South. While shows with Skif Dank and the Siren Six! went well, JTB’s headline gigs were miserable. In New Orleans, they played to nobody but the bartender. In Florida, their van broke down. Long-simmering tensions turned into raging grease fires. At one point, roommates Adelberg and Neilson came to blows.
“He was much stronger than I would’ve guessed he was for a nerdy-looking trumpet player,” says Adelberg. “He really fucking kicked my ass. I flew home with a black eye that afternoon. I quit, and that was the end of that.”
With Adelberg’s departure, JTB lost both a drummer and a manager. Looking back, Adelberg kicks himself for being such a killjoy scold on the road, telling everyone to curtail their drinking and act responsibly. But Phillips maintains that JTB needed Jay to play grown-up and keep everyone in check. That became clear after the group relocated to Boston and struggled to keep the momentum going.
Prior to the Beantown move, Kain and Breen also left. (Breen joined up with the Siren Six! and had an L.A. adventure that nearly ended in major-label glory.) The guitar slot was filled by Anthony Rossomando, a CT native went on to achieve some level of fame in the 2000s as Pete Doherty’s replacement in the Libertines. (He also won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for co-writing Lady Gaga’s “Shallow,” from 2018’s A Star Is Born.) Rossomando was fantastic, and Phillips remembers the Boston-era JTB lineup playing some killer headline shows. But by 1998, morale had dipped, and certain members had lost their taste for ska.
“They were a little embarrassed by it because it was on the way out,” says Phillips. “There was a lot of tacky, corny music in the ska scene. They wanted to do something more like a garage-rock-type sound. A lot of the songs we wrote but never recorded were in that vein. It was inevitable the band would’ve fizzled out at that point anyway.”
However disappointed he might’ve felt after the band broke up, Phillips never lamented the lack of mainstream commercial success. Watching the 2019 documentary Pick It Up! Ska in the ’90s, he was struck by how many bands were concerned with “making it,” a completely foreign idea to Johnny Too Bad. “We were just having fun and enjoying the music we made,” Phillips says.
In the years that followed, Neilson and Adelberg reconciled and formed the Johnny Too Bad Roots Band, which morphed into the Soul Merchants. With the American ska scene basically dead, the Soul Merchants focused on reggae and rocksteady and won a whole new audience. Adelberg left the band in 2001 to move to Los Angeles, but not before the Soul Merchants opened for Toots and the Maytals in New Haven.
Around 2006, the band members reestablished their friendships and planned a reunion show that wound up falling through. Another eight years would pass before they finally got it together for a pair of gigs—one in Connecticut, one in New York City—featuring most of the classic lineup. There was talk of another reunion in 2019, but venue issues forced the band to pull the plug.
Adelberg is happy with how things ended in 2014. He was able to rewrite his final chapter in the band and leave on a high note. But he says there’s “no lack of desire” among his bandmates to get the gang back together for another go. It’s only a matter of logistics.
“I’m an American,” says Adelberg, who now lives in Houston. “You can never have too much of a good thing. It’s not like the English, who understand how to have enough of a good thing. We had two seasons of a great show? That’s OK—we don’t need to make a third season. I want to go to Season 12. I want to jump the shark.”
“If I lived in Connecticut or even remotely closer, I would probably make sure we were playing like once a year,” he adds. “To the point where nobody cared anymore. ‘Eh, fucking Johnny Too Bad. I saw them last year. Fuck those guys!’”
For more great stories about ’90s ska, check out my book Hell of a Hat: The Rise of ’90s Ska and Swing, out September 21, 2021, on Penn State University Press. Preorder here.