Not Everyone Wants Sausage

Notes from the Edge of a Ska Scene

Before I got to college, the most I'd heard of reggae was Ziggy Marley's "Tomorrow People" on the radio and some cooler friends passing around Bob Marley's Legend. That was it. Reggae meant good vibes, sunshine, maybe something vaguely political if you squinted. The Skatalites? Never heard of them. Alton Ellis? No idea.

I didn't discover ska or reggae; I stumbled into it after generations of other people had built the runway.

Then I got to Rice and started volunteering at KTRU, the student radio station. There was Bruce—attorney by day, reggae archivist by night. While another DJ played DX-7-fronted "modern" reggae, Bruce spun OG ska. The Skatalites. Studio One. Desmond Dekker. And "The Liquidator," that organ line burned into my brain for thirty-five years now.

Whenever I hear "The Liquidator," I think of Bruce.

This wasn't radio reggae. This was faster, sharper, horn-driven. Bruce explained: before Bob Marley, before roots reggae, there was ska. Jamaica, early 1960s. Studio One. Musicians paid session rates while building the foundation for everything after.

One day Bruce said casually: "Say hi to Alton Ellis. I'm producing his next record."

I shook his hand. "Nice to meet you."

I had no idea I'd just met the Godfather of Rocksteady.

Oh, you kids. Oh, me, kid.

1989-1991

Around then, Operation Ivy's Energy circulated on dubbed cassettes. The band had already broken up, but that album moved like contraband—ska through punk velocity. The Toasters and similar bands started hitting Houston. They'd been grinding since the early 80s, building scenes city by city, and by 1990 they were reaching us.

In 1991, The Skatalites played Fitzgerald’s, the room jammed and the sound massive, three generations of ska sharing the same air for a few hours.

The Skatalites were men in their 50s and 60s by then—Tommy McCook, Roland Alphonso, Lloyd Brevett—founding members from the 1960s Studio One sessions, still touring because they had to. Some of that crowd was there because my cohort had been playing ska on our shifts, passing cassettes, talking up shows. We didn't call it work. We were joyful kids sharing music we loved. But looking back, we were part of the transmission infrastructure.

That night, all three waves of ska were visible at once: the originators onstage, 2-Tone's recent influence still resonating, and the American third wave just beginning to crest. By the mid-90s mainstream boom, that intimate convergence would be gone. Within a decade, McCook and Alphonso would be dead.

1989-91 was the window when you could still shake hands with the originators while watching the next wave form.

The Improbable Chain

Think about what had to align: Bruce volunteering at the station. Op Ivy breaking up and becoming legendary via dubbed C90s. The Toasters touring through Houston. Fitzgerald's staying open. The Skatalites surviving, reuniting, touring into their 60s. Me showing up.

Any link breaks, and I'm not in that room.

Bruce built one link, unpaid and largely unnoticed. The Skatalites built another by choosing to keep playing. Fitzgerald's built another by staying open when economics barely justified it. My cohort completed part of the chain by showing up, playing the music on air, spreading the word.

What wasn’t obvious to me then: we weren't first.

"Where the Hell Were You Three Years Ago?"

Fishbone's "Party at Ground Zero" has been stuck in my head all morning. That song's from Truth and Soul (1988)—released when I still barely knew music existed beyond commercial radio. Fishbone had been doing this since 1979. By the time I discovered them around 1989, they'd been grinding for over a decade—making brilliant records, touring relentlessly, playing to rooms that often weren't full.

Then suddenly, around 1989-91, college radio kids started showing up. Rooms got bigger.

They must have thought: Where the hell were you three years ago when we were playing these same venues to half-empty rooms?

Well? We weren't paying attention. We needed Operation Ivy to prime us, Bruce to educate us, dubbed cassettes to circulate. We needed infrastructure to reach us before we could show up.

Fishbone pioneered. We showed up for the afterparty.

Same with The Toasters, building American ska since 1981. By the time they were making waves towards Houston, they'd spent a decade toiling. They needed us—bigger crowds mattered economically—and they more than earned the right to resent our lateness.

Inheritance

Let’s consider an alternate framing: we kids inherited a fantastic pizzeria that we thought we owned for a couple of years.

Fishbone slogging since 1979. The Toasters since 1981. Bruce teaching the lore before we arrived. Fitzgerald's booking roots music for years. The Skatalites creating the foundation in 1964, still touring by 1991 out of necessity.

We walked in around 1989-90, right as the third wave started to crest, right as college radio paid attention, right as Op Ivy created curiosity. We inherited all that labor, all that infrastructure, all that history. For two, maybe three years, we inhabited it as if it were ours.

We were contractors, not creators. Inheritors, not architects.

I wasn’t even a short order cook in the kitchen. I helped take orders, bused occasionally, and chucked sausage on the pies. Definitely not the chef—that's Bruce, that's the musicians. But more involved than just showing up once. And since not everyone wants sausage on their pizzas (and what is wrong with you people?!), I'm not involved in every pie that gets made.

I stayed at KTRU peripherally until 2015—twenty-five years of on-and-off volunteering—but ska and rocksteady remained my thing. The genre I kept returning to, the albums I kept collecting, the crumbles I kept sprinkling on relevant pies.

My wife's been doing the actual work—teaching, curating, unpaid labor—at college and community radio stations longer and more consistently than I ever did. She's been on the air in Portland since 2016, doing what Bruce did decades ago. She stayed long after others phased out, which is its own kind of resistance. When I write about Bruce's labor, I'm not writing from distant nostalgia. I've watched my wife do this work for years. I know what it costs.

Every Pacific Northwest winter in my basement office, I shuffle through our ska and rocksteady collection accrued over decades. The listening never stopped.

So here I am, the sausage-adder, doing the remembering. Not because I was important, but because I was there, stayed somewhat involved, and if I don't write it down, who will? Bruce might not remember me. The Skatalites are mostly gone. My cohort moved on. Fitzgerald's is still there, but venues don't write memoirs.

The Sliver

What I'm describing is a tiny sliver. I never went to Jamaica. Never saw Studio One. Never experienced the sound system culture that birthed this music. Too young for 2-Tone. Never saw Operation Ivy live. I caught one Skatalites show in one city during one brief window when multiple generations happened to be visible at once.

There were scenes in New York, Boston, LA, Tokyo, London—all developing their own relationships to ska. I knew nothing about them. My keyhole view: Houston, 1989-1991, as experienced by a suburban kid who started with Ziggy Marley and got lucky enough to have a seasoned DJ teach him.

That's the sliver. But if I don't write it down, it disappears.

I think about bands like Sprawl—a Houston funk band from that era. They were there, working. Nick Cooper was a persistent presence who didn't believe in the middle bands of the EQ spectrum. Do they show up in online Houston music histories? As slivers of search engine hits.

That's what I worry about with Bruce, with our cohort, with that 1991 Fitzgerald's moment. If I don't write it down, does it become another Sprawl—remembered by a few people in the room, but invisible to anyone searching later?

“I‘m still here, man,” I can imagine Nick saying. Yes, indeed, you still are, you glorious mad man.

Documentation as Resistance

I don't remember when or why Bruce left the station. Scenes are complicated. People are complicated. The scene I inherited and thought was fantastic also contained things I didn't see, dynamics I was oblivious to. Every inheritance contains ghosts and invisible men.

And the broader complicity: I was late. I arrived after Fishbone and The Toasters did a decade of groundwork. I benefited from Bruce's unpaid labor. I watched The Skatalites perform at 60+ because the industry never paid them fairly. I shook Alton Ellis's hand without knowing who he was. I consumed this music from privilege—suburban, American, with access and time to just enjoy it. The people who created it rarely had that luxury.

So what do you do when you're enmeshed in systems you didn't create but definitely benefit from?

What if we start with this: everything is compromised, everyone is complicit, and complicity is acknowledgment rather than shame. If everything's compromised, there's no "pure" listening position—not for me, not for anyone in 2025. The music itself has been compromised by commercialization, decontextualization, global circulation. Silence is complicit. Engagement is complicit. Complicity isn't an indictment; it's the water we're already swimming in.

The question isn't "how do I avoid complicity?" (impossible) but "given my complicity, what do I do?"

Listen honestly. Learn the history without claiming it as yours. Support living musicians and archival work materially—money, not sentiment. And follow that money to see who ultimately profits. Acknowledge asymmetries: your access versus creators' precarity, your timing versus their decades of labor. Speak when you have something to contribute. Accept correction. Don't perform virtue—just do the work.

Maybe the act of documenting—in the midst of complicity, aware of limitations, knowing I was barely important—is a tiny act of resistance. Not against systems that create economic injustice (I can't fix those). But against forgetting.

Against Bruce's erasure, who taught for free. Against Sprawl's disappearance, who were there and working. Against The Skatalites flattening into a lifestyle playlist. Against the market determining what's worth preserving based solely on what sold.

I can't restore economic justice. I can't undo my lateness. But I can write it down. Name names. Preserve specifics. Insist this mattered, even if it didn't scale.

Just a tiny act of resistance against forgetting. In the midst of complicity. With no illusions about importance. But refusing to let it vanish.

Complexity Is the Baseline

The music is transcendent and came from conditions I never experienced. I can appreciate it meaningfully and my appreciation is inherently limited. Bruce's teaching was genuine gift and I benefited from unpaid labor. The scene was joyful and probably contained harm I didn't see. We did help fill rooms and we arrived a decade after others did the hard work. The Skatalites were brilliant and they toured at 60+ from necessity. I was there and I barely understood what I was witnessing.

Multiple things true simultaneously. Trade-offs without perfect answers. Positions better or worse, not right or wrong.

We inherited a fantastic scene, thought we owned it briefly, then handed it off. That's how it works. Scenes are built by people doing unrewarded labor for years, inherited by people who show up at the right moment thinking they're discovering something new, then passed on again.

I'm grateful for what we inherited. Grateful Bruce was there. Grateful Fitzgerald's stayed open. Grateful The Skatalites kept touring so we could see them once. Grateful Fishbone and The Toasters did the groundwork so we could walk into something alive.

We were sausage-adders who thought we were running the kitchen. But the kitchen was already operating. We just showed up, added what we could, kept adding it for years, and now I'm trying to document what it looked like when everything converged.

This is a tiny sliver of a much larger picture. But it's the sliver I witnessed and stayed connected to.

Complexity isn't the obstacle to engagement—it's the condition that makes engagement worthwhile.

Every winter I'm still shuffling through those albums. My wife's still on the air. The work continues. Someone has to remember what that specific moment looked like before everyone who was in that room is gone.

Not everyone wants sausage on their pizza. But for those who do, it matters. And someone has to keep adding it.