Boston Ska!

Boston Ska Home Page

SKA (skä) n. a form of dance music, popular in Jamaica in the 1960s, characterized by the use of saxophones and brass, a heavily accented offbeat, and the influence of New Orleans rhythm and blues, jazz, and calypso.

Welcome to the "original" Boston Ska Home Page. I started this page in 1995 when Netscape and the WWW were first breaking into the public consciousness. I was playing guitar in Steady Earnest and created the first version of the Steady Earnest web page using Mosaic and a browser called MacWeb.

Soon, with help from Jonathan Noel (then of the Allstonians), the website expanded to cover the Boston ska scene as a whole, and the Boston Ska Home Page was one of the first regional ska pages on the WWW.

I updated it fairly regularly for a year or two, and later created a perl-based calendar of upcoming ska & reggae concerts to complement the collection of links, ska trivia and band in-jokes that made up most of the rest of the site.

Times changed, the web changed, my life changed, and after a while the Boston Ska page fell pretty far down on my list of priorities. But websites aren't fanzines (as much as their prose might seem similar), disappearing into closets, shoeboxes and recycling bins as your interest wanes. Old websites stay around as long as you keep your account active, frozen in time, like pictures of old friends and bands you used to play in.

Fortunately, by the time this web page had become a snapshot of another era, Grant Thayer had registered bostonska.com and started a website which he maintains, along with a weekly email newsletter, to this day. I recommend Grant's page for all up-to-date Boston ska information.

Special thanks to those who helped me out when I was first making this website; Jon Noel, Scott Lanes and Padgett Arango.

Band Websites

Secondary Allstonians Page

A Tribute To
7

Big D & the Kids Table

Clever
Brickmaster
Scmods