Photo: Riki Tanaka for The Current
Badfish is a tribute band, which is a band that performs to pay homage to a particular artist or group. The most famous examples of tribute usage are Elvis impersonators. Badfish is a Sublime impersonator and tribute duties are fulfilled by playing Sublime songs with a rigorous attention to their nuances. Badfish played for an hour and a half at Pop’s in Sauget, Ill. on Feb. 19.
Sublime enjoyed immense popularity during the 1990s, particularly after their No. 1 hit “What I Got” was released in ‘96. Sublime was a very good performing band and had many Grateful Dead songs memorized, some perfected. Punk performances, the Wailers of Jamaica as well as a variety of hip-hoppers like KRS-1 influenced Sublime’s music. Bradley Nowell, the lead singer and brainchild of Sublime, died in 1996 of heart failure during a heroin overdose and Sublime was disbanded.
Badfish is loyal to Sublime—the people that go to their shows are loyal to Sublime. Nowell died at a tragically young age, before Sublime’s popularity really took off, and many people believe that going to tribute concerts like the Badfish act is the best way to experience what a Sublime concert would have been like. The music is almost undeniably good, which goes a long way to enjoying the memories that Sublime has created.
In many ways, Badfish is exactly like Sublime. They sing the words. They play the chords. They keep the rhythm.
But Badfish is not Sublime. They are imitation Sublime, with worse vocals and infinitely less ingenuity. Badfish is not really punk, West Coast, rhythmic, or reggae because they are a tribute band. Badfish is very good at paying tribute, so much so that on Friday hundreds of people paid $18 to see Badfish and ignore the sense of complacency that goes along with revisiting a band through an external vessel. Badfish probably kept the money though, because contributing money is not part of being a tribute band.
The members of Badfish also comprise the punk/ska whirlwind Scotty Don’t, which played a set before Badfish. The two acts are apparently incapable of commingling. If a Scotty Don’t song turned up during the Sublime tribute set, for example, someone would probably be shot for heresy. Between sets, the singer changed his shirt to complete his transformation.
The shows are fun so long as 1990s nostalgia is fun, which for many people, it is not. Tie-dye is not pretty either, but many people in the crowd wear it. Also, since the show was at Pop’s, many men thought taking their shirt off would add extra funk to the hot, sweaty, beer puke mess in the middle of the room. They were right, in a way.
The people wearing tie-dye were okay though, and most of the crowd was too. Most people at Badfish shows remember Sublime fondly in one way or another. Sublime created wonderful music, and Bradley Nowell wrote beautiful songs.
The audience at Badfish shows remember Sublime so fondly that they sing Sublime songs during the tribute performance. It makes for an odd quasi-religious experience—a building of 500 people and a band singing songs written by a dead man. Granted, Badfish is better at singing Sublime songs than most people, including the crowd, but one has to wonder whether the wholly contrived show is Ba
dfish’s fault or the over-enthusiasm with which their fans remember an unfortunate past, the price they are willing to pay to relive it, and their eagerness to say, “the king has died, long live the king.”
