Three Cheers for MU330
These brainy Midwesterners went from “psycho-ska” progenitors to ska’s answer to Weezer—and made some classic albums along the way.
An author’s two primary enemies are time and word count. While I was working on my forthcoming book Hell of a Hat: The Rise of ’90s Ska and Swing, the latter proved a far more vexing foe. As I got close to sending Penn State University Press my initial draft in late 2019, I realized I was roughly 2,000 words over my limit. After much weeping and soul-searching, I decided to cut the section on St. Louis ska-punks MU330.
This was in no way a reflection of my feelings about MU330. I love this band at least as much as I love life itself. Their truly bizarre song “Didgits” appears on Skanarchy, the 1995 compilation that solidified my love for ska. In 2019, the year I wrote my book, MU330 was my most-played artist on Spotify. But sometimes you have to make hard choices.
What you’re about to read originally appeared in my book’s fifth chapter: “One Nation Under Ska-Punk.” It’s the result of a lovely conversation I had with MU330 leader Dan Potthast in the summer of 2019. For more info on MU330, check out episode #30 of In Defense of Ska, the terrific podcast by my fellow 2021 ska author Aaron Carnes.
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Thank goodness Chris Diebold couldn’t slap and pop. In the late ’80s, when MU330 were getting started in their hometown of St. Louis, Diebold and his bandmates were hooked on the funk-rock of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fishbone, and local heroes the Urge. That’s the style they initially tried to play. Only Diebold couldn’t get the right thumb-thwacking sound on his bass. He was better at fast arpeggios, so MU330 went with ska instead. Bullet: dodged.
Rather than polluting the world with more white-boy funk, MU330 became Midwest ska-punk pioneers. They went through two distinct phases before hitting on their true sound: bouncing ska mixed with melodic indie-rock and topped off with sharp, emotionally honest lyrics about everyday life.
It all came together on 1997’s masterful Crab Rangoon, the album that made MU330 “the Weezer of ska.” Lead singer and guitarist Dan Potthast even wore chunky black glasses reminiscent of Weezer main man Rivers Cuomo, or maybe Elvis Costello, another apt comparison. As ska exploded and fizzled out, MU330 stayed the course and made some of the era’s smartest, most affecting music.
MU330 are named for a music class at St. Louis University High School, a Jesuit college-prep institution that has the distinction of being the oldest high school west of the Mississippi. Diebold, Potthast, singer-trumpeter John Kavanaugh, and original keyboard player Matt Struckel met there in 1988. Drummer Ted Moll, an old buddy of Potthast’s, attended a rival high school. (Trombonist Rob Bell and saxophonist Matt Knobbe joined later.) Fueled by candy and soda, they practiced in Moll’s grandmother’s basement, experimenting with funk and other styles before landing on ska.
The move was influenced not just by Fishbone, but also by 2 Tone. Potthast’s older brother introduced him to This Are Two Tone, the 1983 compilation album featuring many of the 2 Tone label’s greatest hits. He had another formative experience seeing the Toasters live in 1991.
“They made me rethink how to use a horn section,” says Potthast. “A lot of stuff I was listening to, it was more of a funk approach, where the horns would do hits, these punchy stabs. Then I saw the Toasters, and they’d sing a verse, and then the horns would all kick into a whole section that was like the horns were playing the melody. And they’d just do a whole chorus, but the horns were playing a melody. I’m like, ‘Whoa, that is cool.’”
MU330 soon began playing around St. Louis and opening for bigger ska bands passing through. Because Potthast and his bandmates were in high school, they had an easy time spreading fliers and getting friends out to shows. In 1991, right around the time they were transitioning to ska, they released an album called Salamander Stew. The now-forgotten LP contains Urge-style funk rock, a handful of ska tunes, and a couple of what Potthast calls “alternative-sounding songs” with shades of REM and U2.
The band’s ska game was strong by the time of 1994’s Press, MU330’s true debut. Heavily influenced by 2 Tone and lacking in the heavy guitars that would characterize later efforts, Press is hooky and funny and indicative of the songwriting spark that would set MU330 apart. Potthast and Kavanaugh collaborated on writing most of the songs, one notable exception being the leadoff track, “Hoosier Love.”
Penned entirely by Potthast, who takes lead vocals, “Hoosier Love” pokes fun at trashy Midwestern teens who spend their time riding around in El Caminos, listening to Mötley Crüe, and having sex in Dairy Queen bathrooms. It’s all very lighthearted until the end, when Potthast sings, “Got real drunk and slapped you around/You told me not to come around no more.” It’s like John Mellencamp’s “Jack & Diane” turned suddenly toxic and ugly (and ska).
“Somewhere I read somebody talking about songwriting, or just writing in general, and they said, ‘Try to write about stuff you know,’” says Potthast. “So I’m like, ‘Alright. I'll stick to things that I directly observe around me, rather than trying to imagine some kind of fake scenario.’ And that’s worked for me.”
After Press dropped, MU330 began touring a ton. Potthast and the gang had moved on to college, and they made the bold decision to drop out and pursue music full-time. That led to even more touring. After all, what was the point of leaving school if you were just going to sit around your parents’ house? Things went OK until one week in Colorado when the band wrecked two vans and had to borrow a bunch of money to get home. That left them short on funds to repress Press, as the initial 1,000-copy run had sold out. Fortunately, the band had recently met Rob “Bucket” Hingley of the Toasters, and he offered to reissue the album on his Moon Ska label.
Bucket put up the money for the repressing and kept shipping the band CDs whenever they ran out. MU330 were hawking way more copies on the road than Moon was selling in stores or through mail order, so Bucket offered to give the album back to MU330. It was an act of kindness and generosity with seemingly no precedent in the dirty-rotten music business. “He was super-great to us,” Potthast says. “I’m always indebted to Buck for helping out MU330.”
The band underwent some lineup changes before recording their next album, 1996’s Chumps on Parade. Kavanaugh left to go back to school, and Knobbe also gave his notice. Potthast filled the two vacancies by hiring singer Jason Nelson and two horn players, saxophonist Tratgen Bilsland and trumpeter Nick Baur. Now MU330 was a mighty seven-piece, all the better for the faster, louder music they were gravitating toward.
Potthast attributes the punky sound of Chumps on Parade to a 1992 show MU330 played at The Outhouse in Lawrence, Kansas, with Blue Meanies and Skankin’ Pickle. “When I saw Skankin’ Pickle and Blue Meanies, I realized you can do anything with the genre of ska,” says Potthast. “The Blue Meanies were playing whacked-out, crazy circus music mixed with ska, and Skankin’ Pickle was doing more punk mixed with 2 Tone. We were like, ‘OK. Let’s do whatever we want with this.’”
Chumps on Parade arrived via Dill Records, the label run by Mike Park of Skankin’ Pickle. Despite the heavier ska-punk sound, the album features the kind of outwardly funny, secretly insightful songs that were becoming MU330’s calling card. One example is “Fat and Married,” wherein Potthast and Nelson imagine domesticity as a kind of prison: “A lifetime of wondering/Just doesn’t seem that appealing.” It’s an ironic song given the circumstances that would lead Nelson to leave the band. He got his girlfriend pregnant and quit to get married midway through a tour with Skankin’ Pickle. The couple tied the knot at the Little White Chapel in Las Vegas, with members of MU330 and Skankin’ Pickle in attendance.
Nelson’s departure left Potthast as the lone frontman, something he’d never been. He scrambled to learn all of Nelson’s lyrics so MU330 could finish the tour, and soon after, he began writing songs for what would become 1997’s Crab Rangoon. “It was the first time I was really able to see a song all the way through, from the idea I had in my head to how it was sung,” Potthast says. “That album felt the most like my voice finally after the first two records.”
There’s a good reason Crab Rangoon sounds so much like Weezer playing ska. “I was totally into Weezer,” says Potthast. “Pinkerton hit me hard when it came out.” Weezer’s dark and gloomy 1996 sophomore album was a tough sell for many fans. It wasn’t until years later that Pinkerton emerged as a critically revered cult classic and inspired a new generation of sad-bastard emo bands. Potthast was way ahead of the curve in terms of realizing it was a masterpiece, and the influence is all over Crab Rangoon.
The sonic shift on Crab Rangoon was also due in part to more lineup changes. Horn players Bilsland and Baur left, and trombonist Gerry Lundquist, formerly of Skankin’ Pickle, joined up. MU330 were now a quintet with an unusual dual-trombone brass section. The horns on Crab Rangoon are less overpowering, more cleverly deployed. It’s precisely what’s needed for songs like “Neighbor,” wherein Potthast loses his girl to a local tough guy (“He could squash me like a bug / and fix your car at the same time”), and “Father Friendly,” an especially Weezeresque rocker about abuses in the Catholic church (“Hats off to the nun who beat up my best friend”).
On a similar note, “The Struggle of Helen” is an acoustic ska song about how Potthast just can’t be the true-believing Christian his great-grandmother wants him to be. There weren’t many ska bands in 1997 putting this amount of heart and nuance in their lyrics.
Crab Rangoon is easily one of the best ska albums of 1997, the year the genre broke wide open, but it didn’t earn MU330 fame and fortune. “We were already on the path to being the size we were going to be,” says Potthast. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, when the big ska boom happens, all these bands got showered with wealth and notoriety.’ It was more like any other time. There’s going to be bands that are going to break through and be popular.”
For MU330, the only real noticeable effect of the ska boom was the sheer growth in the number of ska bands. Whereas MU330 used to be the weird band with horns on every bill, they now pulled into places like Springfield, Illinois, and headlined bills stacked with local ska groups, many of them terrible. “It’d be like, ‘OK, this show starts at 2:30 in the afternoon,’ and you’re sitting through like six bands of out-of-tune horns,” says Potthast.
In 1998, MU330 took part in Mike Park’s Ska Against Racism Tour. While some observers criticized the tour for not focusing enough on racism, Potthast remembers skepticism of another kind: People didn’t think racism was that big of a problem in America.
“I still have stickers from that tour where there’s a stick figure throwing a swastika in a trashcan,” he says. “I remember people being like, ‘Well, that’s kind of extreme. Why are you so worried about.’”
Potthast knew there was something to worry about. For years, he’d seen racist skinheads turn up at ska shows and ruin everybody’s good time by starting fights. For all the talk of Ska Against Racism not focusing enough on the message—or on the other hand preaching to the choir—Potthast says the tour seemed to drive boneheads out of the scene for a while.
“It was like, ‘Oh, the people that come out to shows are just nice kids that like music, and there’s not this tension of a potential fight,’” he says.
Just a ska’s boom didn’t make MU330 superstars, its bust didn’t sink them. The group returned with a terrific self-titled album in 1999 that picks up where Crab Rangoon left off. The highlight “Rocket Fuel” is probably the sweetest ska song ever written about fatherhood. It’s sung from the perspective of a new father who’s sleep-deprived yet fully invigorated by his young son saying “dada.” Potthast doesn’t have children; he wrote the song about his old bandmate Nelson, who stayed with that girl he married. “One of the things he told me is, ‘Man, when I see that kid in the morning, it’s like rocket fuel. It gets me going,’” Potthast says. “He was so psyched to be a dad.”
Potthast moved to Santa Cruz, California, shortly before the release of 2002’s Ultra Panic, MU330’s last studio album to date. His relocation, plus the fact that more of his bandmates were starting families, resulted in the group going part-time. MU330 have played almost every year since, though it’s mostly been Midwestern gigs and select festivals elsewhere. Potthast has continued making music with his side project Dan P and the Bricks, which has released two excellent albums. He’s also toured and recorded with universally beloved ska booster Jeff Rosenstock.
Back in ska’s commercial heyday, Potthast says, MU330 talked about maybe signing with a major at one point. He’s glad they never went that route. “It’s nothing we ever really wanted to do,” he says. “We were in a position where our friend was putting our records, where Mike Park was releasing our stuff. And I didn’t see why we would want a big label to put our stuff out. It seemed like there was more risk involved than there was reward.
“From the start, I was thinking more long game. I’d rather continue where we’re at and cruise, and hopefully it grows a little. I wasn’t that drawn to becoming a huge band.”
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!