DANGEROUS: The guitar might say “reggae,” but the anger level is in the red. |
Last summer, Chad Stokes (né Urmston) had the ultimate New England jam-band experience: he and his comrades in the reggae-loving Dispatch headlined a sold-out three-night stand at Madison Square Garden to raise money for humanitarian aid to Zimbabwe. “It was funny even walking to the rehearsals at Madison Square Garden and seeing our name up on that big jumbo billboard,” he recalls of the experience, which is documented on the Dispatch Zimbabwe DVD that he self-released back in January. “That was a trip. And walking out on stage there was one of the only times I can remember getting weak in the knees recently. I was just hoping the equipment would work and that we’d sound good.”
Which is all well and good. But it’s also very much in Stokes’s past. In early February, the trio are once again on hiatus, with Stokes turning his focus back to the politically fueled trio he now leads, State Radio. As we sit in the Brookline apartment he shares with his girlfriend, there’s a flurry of activity as the rest of the band — drummer Mad Dog and bassist Chuck (no last names, please) — finish packing up the gear for an in-store performance at Newbury Comics to support their boldest disc to date (after an EP and 2006’s Us Against the Crown), the Tchad Blake–produced Year of the Crow (Nettwerk). It’s the last time Boston fans will get to see the band until this summer, when they’ll return from touring Europe with punk standard bearers Anti-Flag and a club tour of the States to headline Bank of American Pavilion on June 28 and then again on August 2 for a “Bikes Not Bombs” benefit.
This marks a major step up in terms of audience numbers for State Radio, just as Year of the Crow goes farther than the band’s previous releases to depart from the lite reggae ’n’ funk of Dispatch. There are still traces of Stokes’s faux Jamaican patois and a few funky reggae breakdowns on the new album. But you get the sense that he picked the muscular feedback and distortion-laced “Guantánamo,” with its references to “the war machine,” “torture advocates,” and a “war president,” as the disc’s opener for a reason.
“We had to fight our manager on that. It’s a slap in the face, and it’s definitely the angriest song on the album, so he wasn’t sure we should open with it. But Tchad wanted ‘Guantánamo’ to be first as well. Tchad was great: he was just about getting the right take, getting the energy right. He had us using an old drum kit and not tuning it or anything to get a nice trashy sound. He’d be like, ‘Take four of that song sounds like a good recording, but take two sounds dangerous.’ And he’d want to go with take two.”
Even when State Radio find themselves locked into those familiar reggae upstrokes on “C.I.A.,” the anger level remains in the red — “Where are the Americans now that they’ve fractured your country,” Stokes sings with a sneer just as Mad Dog shifts into a pounding beat and the guitars get heavy and dark. On “The Story of Benjamin Darling Part 1,” Stokes trades his electric for an acoustic guitar and what sounds like a campfire folk tune with a slight African feel, thanks to the African shells Blake tied to Mad Dog’s arms and the shakers he made him play drums with. Stokes may not have come back from Dispatch’s trip to Zimbabwe with any specific musical ideas, but the trip did have its impact.
“More than anything it was a lifestyle thing. Music in Zimbabwe isn’t something you do every now and then or something you do once a week in church. It’s every part of everyday life. I was also amazed at what a huge star Bob Marley still is — just how a band or a man could speak for so many and be a catalyst for change for the better.”
But the MSG shows didn’t change Chad’s thinking on the status of Dispatch. “It made me think that we should keep the door open so that every three or four years if we feel really passionate about something, then we can come together and do a show. But it doesn’t really feel like a band. It’s really just about seeing my old friends again and playing some old tunes. State Radio feels like a real band — like we’re creatively or artistically on the edge of something.”
STATE RADIO | Bank of America Pavilion, 290 Northern Ave, Boston | June 28 + August 2 | 617.931.2000
