’90s-era Pittsburgh ska outfit Skankin’ Homer to play rare reunion show on Saturday
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Brian Seese returned to his native Pittsburgh in 1996 after two years in Las Vegas with a bug on his mind.
“I wanted to start a ska band,” said Seese, now 48, a utility company worker and father of two who’s planning to move from Butler County to Bellevue. “I brought that newly discovered love of the genre back home and wanted to form a band.”
It started with a simple ad Seese spotted in the alt-weekly Rock N’ Roll Reporter. A guitarist named Dave loved ska, too, and was looking to play.
The rest, as they say, is history.
This Saturday night, nearly 30 years later, the band Seese helped form out of that newspaper ad — Pittsburgh ska giants Skankin’ Homer — will reunite for an ultra-rare show at Mr. Smalls Funhouse in Millvale.
Admission is $12 at the door, which opens at 7 p.m., Seese said. The Sneaky Heat Missiles will open the evening.
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The group plans to relive all the details of its heyday:
• The endless nights playing Oakland’s defunct Club Laga and the now-dormant Coolpepper’s Hothouse on Lawrenceville’s Butler Street.
• Releasing the septet’s first CD, 1998’s “Kenny’s Not Feeling Well,” and climbing charts to earn the #1 download spot on mp3.com (once a free music-sharing service in the vein of early Napster).
• Opening for American swing group The Cherry Poppin’ Daddies at a Strip District club, or the SoCal ska-reggae outfit Hepcat, or Filibuster (a labelmate to Long Beach’s own Sublime in the ’90s).
“It was just fun, that was the best part about it,” said Tony Vinski, 44, of Gibsonia, a business analyst, part-time musician and owner of Pittsburgh indie Swade Records.
Vinski hosted Skankin’ Homer’s debut “show” in his parent’s Fox Chapel basement in 1996. (Keep that quiet; his parents still don’t know about the party.)
“It was fun to have a scene to be a part of,” he said. “This was something for a younger crowd. It was fun. It was different. And it set us apart.”
“Third-wave ska” bands such as The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, No Doubt, Rancid or Reel Big Fish — and the aforementioned Sublime — made waves nationally in the mid- to late-1990s. But Pittsburgh’s ska scene was pretty small, several musicians told TribLive.
Much of it, in fact, orbited around Skankin’ Homer and fellow travelers The B-3s, The Berlin Project, or even The Slick Olde Bishops, which might be disqualified because the group actually hailed from State College.
Vinski, though, was nothing if not passionate.
In between his studies at Duquesne University, he signed up with a budding internet firm — Geocities competitor Free Yellow — to design and launch PitSka.com in 1997.
“There was no social media but there were message boards, there were email blasts,” Vinski said. “Right now, you have access to everything but back then you didn’t have as many choices. … You lived with what was available to you.”
Pittsburgh’s ska scene bred many rabid fans.
After flirting with New Kids on The Block and, years later, Nirvana, Derick Ried embraced ska and saw No Doubt perform in 1997 at The Pavilion at Star Lake, near his home in Burgettstown.
But he had trouble catching Pittsburgh-area bands because most shows took place in city bars catering to the 21+ crowd. He was still a teenager.
Later, though, Ried trekked from Burgettstown to the city to catch local bands like The Clarks and The Buzz Poets, go to clubs to see ska-adjacent outfits like The Suicide Machines, and fetch Greyhound buses to Nashville and Boston to follow the popular Warped Tour.
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For most of 2023, he thought seeing the Skankin’ Homer reunion would check another box on his local ska list. He recently learned the band played one of the Warped Tours he attended.
“I’ve been excited to talk to Brian about this new show for almost a year now,” laughed Ried, now 41, a banquet staffer and part-time show promoter.
Ried also has extended his love of ska to the present day.
Since 2019, he’s been organizing the annual Steel City Ska Fest. The all-ages festival’s third installment was staged at Lawrenceville’s Spirit in August and featured The Pietasters and Catch-22, among many others. He’s also administering Facebook fan pages dedicated to local ska.
Skankin’ Homer, as it turned out, had a bit of a stunted lifespan.
Its first proper show took place at Coolpepper’s Hothouse on Nov. 21, 1997, and the group played regularly in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Maryland. Vinski, who served as an unofficial road manager, said he remembers gathering at Club Laga at the band’s peak at least once each week.
After a series of rotating-door lineup changes, though, the members of Skankin’ Homer called it quits around 2000.
The group appears to have an outsized influence.
“Some nights, the two bands before us were all metal and the two bands after us were all metal,” laughed bassist Jeff Byrnes, now 49, a government contractor and father of two living in the Dayton, Ohio, area. “But they were cool with us!”
Rumor has it that one of the band’s songs — whose title is a little iffy for a family news site — became the theme song for a 103.5 FM The Edge rock show in Las Vegas. Seese said “Surf Vegas,” which he wrote in the titular Nevada city, would be more appropriate.
“I wanted to surf but I was in Vegas,” Seese quipped. “I was in the desert.”
“And Brian still can’t surf because now he’s in Pittsburgh,” Byrnes laughed.
Seese bills this weekend’s show as “the 17-year reunion of the six-year reunion,” a nod to a December 2006 show the band played at 31st Street Pub in the Strip District.
The band hopes to meet listeners’ high expectations, he said.
Led by five musicians from the lineup that played Vinski’s basement in 1996, Skankin’ Homer plans to play its “hits” Saturday as well as crowd favorite “Chow Baby,” and songs like “Lupe” and “Surf Vegas.”
There might even be something rearing its head from “Live on Fumes,” a 36-song sophomore outing Vinski helped digitally piece together from a 1990s-era radio session at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. The music was released on Bandcamp about five years ago.
Vinski, who plays bass to Seese’s guitar in a new band, The Redlines, plans to sit in Saturday with Skankin’ Homer on one song, “Hawaii Time.”
He, for one, is pretty psyched about Saturday’s show.
“Personally, I love it,” Vinski laughed. “These guys, as far as I’m concerned, they’re my older brothers. They taught me which beers to drink, how to get into shows. … It’s more of a family reunion for me.
“And it’s just awesome to hear the music again.”
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