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.38 Specials Education is a Specials tribute band from San Diego. They recently performed at the Belly Up Tavern with The English Beat, and played the entire first Specials album, plus “Guns of Navarone” from front-to-back. Lead sing Adam (Terry) Gimbel recently subjected himself to the latest in our “9 Questions With…” interview series. Hopefully we’ll be seeing these guys performing live before too long!

(At the end of the interview is a link to Youtube video of the band performing “Do the Dog” – filmed by Andy Platfoot, bass player for Buck-O-Nine.)

Q:  What inspired you to come up with the idea of doing a Specials tribute  band?

A: Well, I’ve been doing fun cover band stuff on the side for years as Cover Me Badd.  Everything from an Oasis parody to a tribute to famous Jewish rock folks but nothing ever serious or long term.  I’ve got a long list of stuff I’d like to do someday and I’ve always loved ska. Doing the whole first Specials record was always a fun little fantasy but doing it right would be a ton of work so it was always on the back burner.  Last Halloween, our live mash-up band Blasphemous Guitars did Ghost Town mixed up with One Step Beyond at San Diego club the Belly Up and afterwards backstage, someone suggested we open for the English Beat, who regularly play there.  My guitarist joked that I could finally do the Specials set and suddenly it was on.

Q: How did you go about recruiting the band line-up?

A: I’m lucky enough to know a ton of cool San Diego musicians, so every time I do a new band, I get to play with different friends.  A few years ago, I started asking a few guys that liked ska about doing the Specials and realized I had a whole band ready to go.  Some people ended up being too busy and one flaked out but had some friends recommend people they knew that turned out awesome.  The hardest part was finding another singer that wasn’t white.  Being integrated and preaching it was such a big part of what made the Specials important so I really didn’t want someone as pale as me fakin’ Jamaican.  When our first guy couldn’t do it, I spent a couple of days noticing every black person I saw.  I kept saying that it must be what being racist is like.  We lucked out when local singer/comedienne Allison Gill
recommended her friend John Johnson, who’d been listening to the Specials for 20 years.

Q: For your first show, you performed the entire “Specials” album, plus “Guns of Navarone.” Any plans to perform more Specials songs?

A: Absolutely!  Sometimes I had to take a break from listening to the debut album and would listen to More Specials or some of the singles. I’d start getting excited about doing things like “Enjoy Yourself”, “Ghost Town” or “Rude Boys Outta Jail” and have to not get too distracted.  Like most Cover Me Badd acts, we’re all about breaking the rules, so a lot of the ideas we’ve thrown out have been non-Specials songs.  The list is pretty ridiculous.  I could die happy if we did the Colourfield’s “Pushing Up The Daisies”.  It’s probably my favorite Terry Hall song.

Q:  The band’s first-ever live gig was opening for The English Beat. What was that like – was it nerve-racking to open for one of the original 2-Tone era bands?

A: It was less nerve-wracking than just feeling really lucky.  We had six or seven hundred Beat fans who were pretty likely to love us if we didn’t completely blow.  My friend John Roy, who’s been in original ska bands in years and played with Dave Wakeling, asked me how the show was and I told him that I honestly felt a little guilty knowing that no original ska band could bring the house down like we did because people just love hearing songs they know.  Still, Dave came back and told us we did a great job and their bassist, Warren, who was from Coventry and had played with Special Beat was almost embarrassing with his praise, insisting that we sign our set list for him.  Unreal.

Q: Learning all those Specials songs must have given you new insight into their music. Any thoughts about what it was like to get so intimate with every song on such as classic ska record?

A: It’s pretty incredible stuff.  I listened to the album almost nonstop for the three weeks before the show and never got tired of it.  That’s saying a lot. Like any music, you don’t realize how much is going on until you perform it.  We’ve been doing Weezer songs dressed as old men (Geezer) and you can’t get any simpler than that.  To go from that
to something where there’s eight musicians onstage all playing their ass off is pretty unreal.  Not everyone was a hardcore fan, so it was fun to bring in folks who played more reggae or no roots stuff at all and get them loving the Specials.  For folks like myself, John, Craig, Scott, Jeff & Chris who had loved ska for so long, it was a dream come
true.

Q: Tell us a little about the .38 Special connection, it’s quite a  juxtaposition – southern rock and ska. Any plans to incorporate .38 Special songs into the set?

A: I’d thought of the name a long time ago and loved it for how silly it is, even though most people have never heard of .38 Special, which is probably a good thing.  Then I started thinking how totally ridiculous it is for a southern rock band that grew out of Confederate flag-flying Lynyrd Skynyrd to be associated with an integrated band that sang about racial equality.  It hadn’t even occurred to me that I could front the band as a redneck but kept it pretty low-key and felt
good about heading backstage mid-set to ditch the white trash threads and moustache before the joke could get old.  We were going to do a little .38 Special but smartly decided to concentrate on getting the 16 songs down for the first show.  It’ll happen but we’ll definitely keep it short.

Q: What was your favorite Specials song to perform, and which one was the most challenging?

A: Nite Klub is probably my favorite just because the band sounds so great with horns.  Little Bitch was easily the hardest for me because of how many words there are.  I had to listen to it on endless repeat to get it and just stare at the back of the club at the show so I wouldn’t mess up.  Singing like Terry is hard.  There’s a great Youtube clip of one of their early producers saying that the great thing about Terry is that he can’t sing.  “No one wants to hear me singing like me and doing the fake British accent is…..fake.  Whatever, we’re both Jewish anyway. You can’t win but it’s good fun. ”

Q: Any plans to do more gigs, and if so, who would you like to perform with?

A: We can’t wait to do more gigs even though we’re not looking forward to coordinating our eleven schedules.  We’re really hoping we can get to play with bands like Hepcat, Aquabats and the Aggrolites and it’d be fun to play with some of the tribute bands who cover the Clash, Oingo Boingo, Sex Pistols, etc.  There’s also a bunch of great local bands
like the Self Made Men and the Amalgamated plus we’ll no doubt play with Buck-O-Nine at some point with Jeff, Craig and founding member Scott in our band.  I’d love to do a show with the San Diego School Of Rock.  Educational indeed.

Q:  I usually reserve question #9 as a place to plug projects, add comments, > > summary, shout-outs, etc, so feel free to do that here. Thanks for agreeing to do the interview!

A: .38 Specials Education doesn’t have any gigs yet but we’ll be confirming something soon in both San Diego and LA.  The best way to keep in the loop is checking http://www.CoverMeBadd.com or becoming a fan of the Cover Me Badd Facebook page.  Plus, you’ll get to hear all of the other stuff I do as Cover Me Badd: the olde man Geezer thing, the mash-up band Blasphemous Guitars, the weekly Too Cool For Karaoke (bringing back Are You There Mod? It’s Me Rudegirl VERY soon) and quarterly Musical Pursuit trivia night.

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