Thumper vs. the Universe
Boston's misunderstood ska-metal masters battled religion, racism, and anyone who didn't get the joke.
When the iconoclastic Boston ska-fusion band Thumper split up in 1998, they didn’t simply say goodbye and thank the scads of loyal fans who’d supported them for the previous seven years. Where’s the fun in something like that?
Instead, they started a rumor they’d been receiving death threats—and that the FBI had been called in to investigate. Apparently, it was no longer safe for Thumper to play music in public.
But who would want Thumper dead? The question recalls a famous headline in The Onion about the JFK assassination: “Kennedy Slain by CIA, Mafia, Castro, LBJ, Teamsters, Freemasons.”
Thumper’s list of enemies included Christians, ska purists, Boston skinheads, a teen concert promoter in suburban Connecticut, and at least three well-known ’90s ska bands. Maybe the devil worshippers in Mephiskapheles were still miffed about the time in Hartford when Thumper drank all their beer. There was no shortage of suspects.
“It was great marketing,” says Thumper guitarist and lead singer Ted Riederer. “We were debating having someone ritually mock-murder us. You could get away with that shit back then.”
The truth behind the breakup was nowhere near as thrilling. The six members of Thumper—all hyper-smart, compassionate people who remain close friends—had reached a breaking point. They were pushing 30 and looking to buy houses and find steady work. You can only drive around the country in a 1977 Chevy Beauville van for so long.
By the time they called it quits, Thumper had left a gnarly scar on the face of American ska. On the essential albums No One Left the Disco Alive (1995) and Hellfire and Damnation (1997), the band cross-pollinates frantic 2 Tone–inspired ska with thrash metal, hardcore punk, and dub reggae. Lyrically, Thumper lunges from weird angles at heavy topics like racism, organized religion, and political corruption. Jokes abound for those who get them. Riederer likens the ensemble to a “performance art piece.”
“People either liked Thumper, or we pissed them off,” says Riederer. “There was no in between. We were irreverent. We rejected any kind of conformity. We rejected any kind of authority. We wanted to be satirical.”
Riederer traces his anti-authoritarian streak back to his teen years in Washington, D.C. Influenced by 2 Tone, Jamaican ska, the Clash, and the Jam, he started a terrific mod-punk band called the Reply with three high school friends. Between 1984 and 1989, the Reply released a five-song cassette and a four-song EP and played with everyone from Fugazi and Scream to Bim Skala Bim and the Untouchables.
“People didn’t really know what to do with us, because the mod-ska-skin-oi! branch of the D.C. punk rock scene was really tiny,” Riederer says. “It was definitely ruled by the Dischord punks.”
The Reply fizzled out when all four members went off to college. Riederer landed at Tufts University in Boston, where he studied art and formed Thumper in 1991. Having spent his youth as a mod and a skinhead obsessing over things like how many inches you’re required to cuff your jeans, he was ready to incinerate all rulebooks and start fresh.
“I’d already experienced how good it can feel when you’re part of a tribe,” he says. “Even though you’re an outsider, you find a group of people where you feel like you’re part of something bigger than yourself. It’s fabulous stuff. Some people never find that. When Thumper came around, a lot of us had already gotten that out of our systems. We didn’t want to own ska. We didn’t want to reinvent ska. But out of all of our shared music, that was one thing we all shared this fierce love for.”
Each member of Thumper brought their own variable to the musical equation. Second guitarist Neil Miller was big into early Metallica. Alto saxophonist and religious studies major Doug Reichgott favored klezmer. Bassist Tim Kelly was all about dub. Everyone passed around copies of More Specials, Sandinista!, and UB40’s Signing Off. Thumper’s first attempts at blending these and other influences can be heard on 1992’s self-released Rabbit Wreaking Havoc, a surprisingly earnest and personal collection of songs given the weapons-grade satire that was to follow.
Riederer credits the whole band—which included tenor saxophonist Loretta Fernandez, drummer Dave Gold, and keyboardist Dave White—with contributing music and lyrics to the album. That spirit of collaboration continued for the life of the band. Perusing the liner notes of Thumper’s various releases, it’s impossible to tell who wrote what. That’s no accident. “We wanted to be egalitarian,” Riederer says.
Whoever was wielding the pen, the songwriting voice changed dramatically on No One Left the Disco Alive, a masterful album that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as paradigm-shifting third-wave LPs like Mephiskapheles’ God Bless Satan and Blue Meanies’ Full Throttle. Disco opens with a hysterical scream—titled “Peptide Influences the Folding And Intracellular Transport Of MHC Class 1 Free Heavy Chains”—before kicking into overdrive with “Holy Roller,” Thumper’s signature tune. The gnashing metal-ska track mashes up Christian imagery with references to Obi-Wan Kenobi and his Jedi teachings.
At the time, the members of Thumper were learning about famed literature professor Joseph Campbell and his theories about hero archetypes. Campbell was a major influence on George Lucas, who revised his original Star Wars screenplay after reading Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. “Holy Roller” puts Christian mythology on equal footing with Star Wars because both hinge on similar tropes that have been recycled throughout history.
“Holy Roller” was also inspired by Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel Wise Blood, in which a character starts something called The Church of Jesus Christ without Christ. “I loved that idea—where you didn’t have to believe in the rules of the church to be a good person, to turn the other cheek, to do all that stuff,” says Riederer.
The most famous lyric in “Holy Roller”—insofar as it generated fan mail—reads like a mantra: “If you can’t create nor destroy energy/Then you will never destroy me.” The lyric speaks to Riederer’s personal beliefs about the universe being filled with an energy that unites all beings. Kids would write Riederer asking about the significance of the line. Did he mean we’re immortal, and that death isn’t really the end? Riederer always took time to send thoughtful replies.
“Kids were really searching for meaning they couldn’t find from the traditional outlets, because those were so repressive and hypocritical,” Riederer says. “Especially if you were a queer kid going to church in the Midwest and you didn’t feel like you belonged … I’d write back and be like, ‘Look, I’m not going to tell you what to believe. But I will tell you that you have to figure it out yourself. Don’t just take what’s in front of you. The answers are past that facade.’”
Thumper doubled down on the blasphemy on Hellfire and Damnation, a worthy sequel to their masterpiece. This time around, they were minus the services of Dave White, whose twinkly keyboard flourishes give Disco much of its character. Hellfire is consequently a harder, wilder album on all fronts. Thumper lampoons capitalism and U.S. foreign policy on “American Ninja” and imagines being overtaken by murderous Shriners on “The Red Fez.” “All Fall Down” recalls one of Thumper’s most infamous stunts: burning Obi-Wan Kenobi’s face onto a tortilla shell and displaying it like a religious artifact at their merch booth.
Hellfire deeply offended Thumper’s booking agent in Columbus, Ohio, forever tainting their relationship. By that time, Thumper had already run afoul of several prominent ’90s ska bands due to misunderstandings involving money and damaged equipment. To hear Riederer tell it, it was all pretty silly, though the drama that unfolded one night in Wallingford, Connecticut, was especially ridiculous.
Thumper had agreed to play a VFW or Elks Lodge show organized by a Wallingford teen. By this time, Thumper had instituted a rule: They had to get paid something for performing. It was a matter of principle. They were a bunch of broke 20-somethings struggling to pay their light bills. In the case of the Wallingford gig, they only wanted $200—not even enough to cover food and gas for six people driving three hours from Boston.
The organizer agreed to the terms, but on the night of the show, only 20 people turned up. That meant the kid would have to pay Thumper $200 out of his own pocket. The band turned down the full amount; they didn’t want to bankrupt the poor guy. But they did take $100 for their troubles. In the parking lot, some local teens accosted Thumper, accusing them of being “in it for the money.”
Before leaving town, Thumper swiped a poster-board sign that had been used to advertise the ill-fated show. It seemed like a harmless souvenir of the demoralizing gig, but when Thumper was 20 minutes down the highway, they saw a car racing toward them with lights flashing. It was the teen who booked the show. He needed the poster board back. His high school science project was on the other side.
Riederer finds these and other feuds hilarious. He was not about that drama. “You couldn’t find a warmer bunch of people than Thumper who didn’t buy into all that shit,” he says.
One band Thumper didn’t have any relationship with—good or bad—was the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Which is funny, since both were mixing up metal, punk, and ska in the same city at the same time. Thumper and the Bosstones never once played together, though Riederer did unsuccessfully audition to be the Bosstones’ guitarist after Nate Albert left the band in 2000.
Riederer later bumped into Bosstones frontman Dicky Barrett at a club owned by a mutual friend. “I go, ‘I tried out for you guys,’” says Riederer. “And he goes, ‘Well, you must not have been good enough to get in.’ And I go, ‘Eh, they were just worried I was going to upstage them.’”
This might’ve been a legitimate concern. Thumper always made an impression in their “American Ninja” getups, which were confused for KKK robes when the group played the New England Ska Festival one year. This despite the fact that Thumper performed songs like “Guts,” one of the most rabidly anti-racist songs in the third-wave canon.
Thumper even had enough live ferocity and showmanship to hold their own with theatrical metal lords GWAR, whom they opened for in Hartford in 1997. “We were shitting in our pants,” says Riederer. “When we got out there, I just said, ‘We’re the opening band. If you think we suck, GWAR’s gonna come out here and kick your ass!’” The crowd roared, and Thumper won over a roomful of metalheads. Afterward, Riederer and Thumper bassist Bill Fallon pilfered fellow opener Mephiskapheles’ booze stash and had themselves a lovely evening.
“That was the special GWAR tour when they used more fake blood and jizz than they’d ever used,” Riederer says. “You had to pump these fire extinguishers to get the fluid to come out. I’ll never forget Bill and I drinking Mephiskapheles’ beer on the side of the stage, and Slymenstra coming over to us screaming, ‘More jizz! More jizz!’ We had made it at that point.”
In the years since Thumper’s demise, the multi-talented Riederer has focused on his art—everything from paintings and sculptures to Never Records, an installation piece that’s taken him around the world. Never Records invites regular people to enter a studio and record themselves talking or singing or doing whatever, free of charge. The recordings are then pressed onto vinyl. Each participant gets a copy, and a duplicate goes into the Never Records faux storefront, which travels with the exhibition.
Riederer produced a feature-length Never Records documentary, and this September, he’ll release 10 Years of Never Records, a limited-edition book about the project. He sees Never Records as a “social, political act,” a chance to foster communication and listening. It’s very much an extension of what Thumper was all about. Riederer is still in regular contact with his bandmates, and two years removed from a 2019 reunion in Cape Cod, he imagines Thumper will unleash their freak-ska fury again before too long.
“I love the community of it,” Riederer says. “That kept the band going even when the gigs were shitty. That kind of fellowship is what drew me to music in the first place.
“That’s why, in some ways, we gravitated toward the ska community, more so than punk, which still had a lot of posturing and varsity-athletic elements to it—I’m tougher than you and all that shit. Ska didn’t have that. It was the freaks, the band nerds. The kids with mohawks who wanted to dress up and wear a tie. The misfits.”
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.