The Big Bad Bollocks have evolved through a number of incarnations over the past two-plus decades in the Pioneer Valley, but have always remained the brainchild of longtime local musician, songwriter, DJ/radio host, art teacher and general public personality John Allen. Allen’s British charm, wry humor and general good sportsmanship have made him a favorite son of his adopted town of Northampton, to the point that you may have even seen him selling hardwood flooring in local commercials as a bizarre, effeminate creature that reminds one of Mayor McCheese if he were staggering around taking occasional hits off a bag full of nitrous oxide. He’s also collected songs, poems and stories of his old stomping grounds in England and general Celtic rock debauchery in his novella, It Takes a Village Idiot… Collected Ramblings of John Allen, and just completed a similarly autobiographical full-length manuscript tentatively titled Marmite Cowboy: The Rudderless Trail of a Wannabe American Lad.
The other band members have been equally good sports in going along with Allen’s weird artistic vision du jour, even consenting to perform in their tighty whities in Allen’s “Benny Hill”-meets-Tommy musical theater landmark Undieworld, a stage adaptation of a story he published in the Massachusetts Review. The show’s almost vaudevillian debut at Noho’s Academy of Music Theater in March, 2006 was a star-studded hootenanny of Valley subculture, featuring various penniless musicians and assorted illiterati. An “unfortunate open bar after-party” at the Northampton Brewery courtesy of then head brewer Chris O’Connor (who guest-starred in Undieworld as Tom Jones) topped of the night, which also featured members of the Young@Heart Chorus and, according to Allen, “a bunch of children, including my own two sons and a bunch of their friends whose parents hadn’t realized exactly what they were getting into.”
When approached about a pre-St. Patty’s Day interview, drummer Bob Richards (aka Sal Vega) responded “For god’s sake, what the hell is there left to write about us? ‘Big Bad Bollocks Are Still Not Dead!? Although some might disagree with that statement. Ernie [Wilson, bass] is starting to smell a bit ripe, and John was definitely speaking in tongues during the last show in Vermont. I think that’s a sign of near-death, isn’t it?”
The band is rounded out by the guitar stylings of Paul “Pino” Scarpino, a veteran of other Valley bands such as Free Press and Stewie, whose core sensibilities came from a bizarre nexus where punk rock meets ska and The Grateful Dead and humor rules above all. Pino is now a successful software marketer in the Boston Area, and had to haul out here to make the interview, clearly identifying him as the most dedicated band member. I managed to corral everyone into the Brass Cat for some pints on a Saturday night, with the band members cringing from the camera’s flash like hung-over vampires at an obligatory press event that only the Bloody Marys seduced them into attending.
Valley Advocate: What’s a Big Bad Bollocks show like on St. Patrick’s Day?
Ernie: Hot.
John: Sweaty.
Bob: It’s a lot of people who do stuff they wouldn’t normally do any other day of the year. St. Patrick’s Day is a license to act like a buffoon.
John: It’s like New Year’s Eve, really. People get kind of sloppy-drunk.
Ernie: Yeah, it’s really hard for us to concentrate on singing all those songs about beer with all those sloppy drunk people around!
How long have you been doing it at The Iron Horse?
John: This has got to be the 21st, right?
Bob: Except for that year at Pearl Street.
John: Oh, yeah—so officially 20 at The Horse.
Ernie: I’ve only been in the band 16 years, so I’m the “new guy.”
How do you guys feel the next day after all this debauchery? Do you feel like you need to go to church, or at least call your mothers?
Bob: That is church!
Pino: I wish we could play again!
Bob: I’m digesting the communion wafer, which is the Guinness from the night before.
Ernie: That’s so poetic!
John: We’ve had a tradition for a few years of Bloody Marys in Vermont the day after.
What’s the craziest thing to ever happen at a Bollocks St. Patty’s Day show?
Pino: John remembered the words to all the songs.
Ernie: Whoa, whoa, whoa—when did that happen?!
Pino: All right, I’m making that up.
Bob: Was it the Pearl Street show that we auctioned off a date with Ernie?
John: The winner said, “Oh, I didn’t think you meant that one. Can we switch?”
Pino: No, wasn’t it the lisp or something?
Ernie: Yeah, you asked her to say a few words into the mic, and she said she couldn’t because she had a speech impediment.
A Guinness speech impediment?
John: No, I think it was a permanent one.
Pino: And Ernie was in love.
Have you ever had to hand back some of your pay to Eric Suher for glass cleanup, broken chairs, whiskey-soaked microphones or mosh-pitted waitresses?
Bob: No. That means he made a lot of money.
John: The glasses are supplied by the beer distributors, so he doesn’t care about that.
Ernie: He actually gives us a bonus for broken chairs and glasses.
Pino: There were a few years where we walked in and there was Saran Wrap over the monitors.
Bob: [to John]I think the most damage ever was when I kicked my bass drum into your accordion…
John: Into me squeezebox! You snapped it in half, you bastard. That was a big one, like a $250 repair job.
Bob: I was pulling a little Keith Moon, there.
Pino: We’re pretty good with other people’s property, it’s mostly our stuff, our brain cells.
You had a somewhat legendary video shoot at the Bay State Hotel back in the ’90s—can you describe that moment?
Ernie: Oh, I wasn’t in the band then. Next question!
Pino: Of course, we all wished we had a better bass player back then. Wait… I was the bass player then!
John: That was a wonderful experience. We got to hang out on the farm all day [Bloody Brook Farm in South Deerfield]—Pudgy Wiesnowski was the farmer—he actually likes to be called Pudgy! [research suggests John is referring to Walter “Pudge” Yazwinski, Jr.].
Pino: I think John Reilly had just had his wisdom teeth out the night before—if you look at his face really closely, his cheeks are all puffy.
Bob: Chuck Papperd kept getting a bit annoyed.
John: Yeah, Chuck was playing, you know, the director, which he was supposed to be, but we kept getting drunk—especially during the night parts, in and outside the Bay State—that was mayhem.
Pino: We ended up winning the Boston Phoenix “video of the year,” and we went to the awards ceremony at The Avalon, and all these Boston poseurs are winning like “Best Guitar Player,” et cetera, and we’re like—
John: Pino says to me, “Dude—dude—John—you take off your shirt, and I’ll jump on your back and pour beer on your head.” So we do it.
Pino: And we get up to the microphone and it’s silent—you could hear the last drop of beer hit his head.
You guys have been pretty steady friends with the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and the Dropkick Murphys over the years—(the Boston Celt-rockers who went on to fame by doing the soundtrack for The Departed)—are you still in touch with them?
John: Yep.
Ernie: We just played with the Dropkicks in September.
John: Yeah, it was at a fairground outside of Albany called—er—Altamont.
Altamont? I hope nobody got hurt.
John: Yeah, right! Only me pride. I got invited out to play tin whistle on the song we recorded with them years ago, and their show—it’s like, huge, you know, lots of stuff.
Pino: I’ve got it on film. So, it was like this—the old singer for the Dropkicks—
The guy from Street Dogs (Mike McColgan)?
Pino: Yeah that guy! He was supposed to come up and do a song with us, but then it turned out he was doing a song with the Dropkicks, and John comes out sort of uninvited…
John: Yeah, I just sort of stuck me tin whistle in there. I mean—I got invited into this sort of semi-trailer to do a quick rehearsal, and there’s all sorts of weird vibes about who’s supposed to do what, and then I go out on the stage and play, very badly. Then, as I’m walking off the stage, Ken Casey—the bass player, leader of the band—says to me, “Hey, John, you sang that song on our album, right?” Yeah. “And you also played tin whistle on it, right?” Yeah. “And then you also sang and played tin whistle on the live album, right?” Yeah. “Well, I don’t even play tin whistle, and I had to re-record your tin whistle part because it sucked so bad.” I did play some hideous noise that night as well.
Are there any other big Irish/Celtic acts that you guys really love? Do you ever play shows with other similar bands?
John: The Pogues. We hate Flogging Molly. We went to see them [The Pogues] in March last year at House of Blues in Boston. I think it was their last American tour. They’ll probably still do some festivals in Europe or something.
I can’t believe that guy (Shane MacGowan) is still alive.
John: Yeah, me either. When we saw him he had great big man-boobs.
Pino: And severely blown-back disco hair.
John: He almost couldn’t walk; he was like, limping around, and we felt bad for him.
Ernie: But he did have a professional music stand to hold his drinks and smokes.
Didn’t he get his teeth fixed or something?
John: He had no teeth. Had ’em all out. (mimics a jabbering toothless man).
Bob: He had dentures.
Pino: He had stage teeth.
John: I was dancing with a meatball, an Irish meatball.
Was that someone in a costume?
John: [pauses] She looked like that all the time. She was about—how tall? Like, four-foot-ten high and four-foot-twelve wide, and she came rolling through the crowd, hit me in the back of the legs. I looked back and couldn’t see anyone until I looked down, and there’s this bright red-haired meatball leprechaun, at my feet, and she’s like “I love you!” I actually fell in love for a minute.
Bob: I think I can speak for all of us when I say that was the first time where we sort of could feel what it was like to be in a Bollocks crowd.
John: Yeah, it was scary, wasn’t it?
Pino: We should quit and hire four other people to be the Bollocks!
John: Yeah, franchise it.
Pino: Franchise it! [laughs] Put an ad in the paper: “Come up with twenty grand and you could be the Big Bad Bollocks!”
Have you guys done any new recording lately? Is there another Bollocks album in the works?
John: Um. Well, Pino and I were rehearsing three new songs for the show before we came here. Well, two old ones and a couple new ones. So, more than three.
Pino: [to the other members] Yeah, we don’t need to tell you guys how they go.
Ernie: Yeah, don’t bother telling the rest of the fucking band! Goddamn douchebags. That’s exactly how it is at a show, too! We’ll get up there and I’ll be like, “Bob, what song is this?” and Bob will be like, “I don’t know, he said it’s ‘Whiskey,’ and I’m like, “We have four songs called ‘Whiskey!’ and then John’s like, “ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR…” and now there’s two more new songs—and I’m sure they’re also called ‘Whiskey!’ Wot, me whistle.
The Bollocks then degenerate into guttural Cockney sounds, all the while insisting that I learn to correctly spell utterances such as “Oough!” and “Baugh!” and demand they be punctuated with exclamation points. A pizza delivery guy walks into the Cat at this moment, and though we haven’t ordered a pizza, Pino offers to buy it anyway. Discussions continue about getting naked in the recording studio and more pints of Guinness are ordered. The band goes on to admit that taken as an average of the members’ ethnicities, they’re probably more Italian than Irish, including Allen, who claims that he’s probably even more Italian than full-blooded Pino because the Romans occupied his English town for 400 years, and he has hair on his back. This is followed by tales of a plan he once had to shave a full-body Mohawk into his chest hair, in the shape of a Union Jack.
John: We had an aborted idea for a second video where we’d bring a sheep shearer on stage, with a sheep, and several oiled-up girls in bikinis. The girls would shave my back using Guinness foam, and sort of have it be a race to see if they could do it faster than the sheep-shearer could sheer the sheep.
You were semi-finalists in the millennial WBCN Rock & Roll Rumble (ultimately won that year by Darkbuster). What’s it like to play the Rumble?
John: We were.
Ernie: Oh yeah! We went head to head against Waltham—they knocked us out.
Pino: Yeah, but they had like 300 fans, and a lot of ’em were chicks, and all we had was like one drunk bald guy.
Ernie: And that was me!
Bob: They were bringing back the Bryan Adams.
John: The singer took out this handkerchief and wiped his brow with it, and held it out to these screaming girls. Thing is, I don’t think there was any sort of irony to it, it was… for real. It was pretty weird.
Which is pretty weird for Waltham—isn’t that the Brandeis town? I mean, what else is Waltham known for?
John: [with an air of certainty and erudition] Watches. Didn’t they make watches there for a long time? Waltham pocket watches. My great-grandad was a train driver and he used to have one—I’ve got it, actually, and it’s a Waltham. It’s weird, I’ve ended up in Massachusetts, and I’ve got this watch… sort of a thing that you get from your great-grandad, you know? It was a Waltham.
Did you guys ever party with any Boston rock stars like Evan Dando or Juliana Hatfield?
Pino: We mostly hung out with the Dropkicks and the [Amazing] Royal Crowns—those guys were cool.
John: Yeah, the Royal Crowns—we did a bunch of gigs with them.
Weren’t they sort of a Stray Cats/rockabilly sort of band?
John: Ayup.
Pino: We’ve had a couple brushes with fame, though. We had Lars, from Rancid.
Ernie: He played my guitar, dammit!
John: Oh, yeah, Lars—that was at Phoenix Landing in Cambridge, right after we’d been in the studio with The Dropkicks, on their first album, Do or Die.
Ernie: Yeah, he was the producer of their first album. He came up onstage and played a song with us.
Have the Bollocks ever had any sort of record deal?
Ernie: Well, there was that guy who had the contract that said, like, “We’ll give you $500 for everything John Allen’s ever thought of and ever will think of in the future. We own it.”
Bob: Syrup-suckers.
John: Yeah, they were based in Southern Vermont, but the one guy was a little wiry guy from L.A., though I think he’d been sort of chased out of L.A. for non-payment of somethin’, but he’d obviously Xeroxed a huge record contract before he left, and just whited out whoever’s name, and we’re looking at it like, “What the fuck?”
Ernie: There was a paragraph explaining what “past material” was, and then it would say “that’s ours,” and then a paragraph explaining what “future material was,” and then it was like, “that’s ours.” It was like, “if John Allen leans over and picks up a nickel, that’s ours!”
Bob: It was like he found an old Chess Records recording contract. “You each get a Cadillac.”
John: [laughs] Yeah, but you’re on your own after that, boys!
Ernie: And it’s a leased Cadillac.
Pino: We never signed it.
Ernie: We never signed it?!
Pino: Ernie might have signed something.
I describe having once taken a girlfriend to a St. Patrick’s Day Bollocks show at the Horse on a first date, prompting Ernie to say “Oh, no, that probably didn’t last long,” and Bob to say “I can picture a first date going better at a Holocaust Museum,” but Pino sees the upside:
Pino: I think it’s a good barometer. If she likes the Bollocks, at least you know she’ll probably do you in the parking lot.
What’s the most memorable moment—for each of you—throughout all your experiences with the Bollocks?
Ernie: I think that time when we went skinny-dipping after a gig at the Beachcomber [in Wellfleet], but for some reason I took my clothes off while we were still like a mile from the water, and then I basically got caught in a pricker bush…
John: This is like two in the morning, and we’re like, “Ernie, there’s still 300 yards to go!” But it was too late to go back for his clothes, so he just had to sort of forge on through the bushes, stuck and squealing like a pig.
Ernie: I’d had no sun that year, and the full moon was reflecting strongly off my pale white body, and I just hear this cackling while I’m caught in the bush.
Bob: [Shifting the conversation to detail his candidate memory] Plattsburgh, New York. Two shows—maybe three shows that day.
John: And we were drinking all day. We played a Mexican restaurant in the evening, and there was a guy, like a neighbor, who was yelling at us to shut up, saying “Shut the fuck up! I’ve got a gun!” But the owner of the restaurant was just like, “Ah, don’t worry, he’s always like that.”
Bob: So Pino and I found these empty trash cans and tiki torches in the street, and for some reason decided it would be a good idea to use them to joust, so we put the trash cans over our heads and ran at each other with the torches in the middle of the street.
Pino: And then we just started wailing on each other—’cause you couldn’t see each other.
John: We had to pick them up when they’d fall over because they could only move their wrists—
Ernie: Sort of like turtles that get flipped onto their backs.
Bob: And funnier than that—a year, year and a half later, I saw an episode of The Simpsons, where Bart and Homer have trash cans on their heads and are charging each other, and I swear to god, whoever wrote that was at that show, and saw Pino and I doing it!
Pino: We spent that night up in these cabins, and we had to go back into Plattsburgh to pick up this fan of ours, Dave Moreau, and we get back to town, and there’s this abandoned car, and Dave crawls out of it! And we were like, “oh, that was easy!”
John: Valentine’s in Albany. There was this guy who owned The Metro—sort of like The Advocate in Albany—and I’d met him out here because he used to do sales for them, and he was always very enamored of us, and he says, “If you guys ever get a gig in Albany, let me know and we’ll hook you up.” So I call him when we get this gig at Valentine’s, and he’s like “We’re gonna pull out all the stops. We’re gonna do a cover story, a full-page article, a preview and a review, et cetera. et cetera.,” and I’m thinking, “This is the best response we’ve ever had from a newspaper. I think we might be on to something big.”
Unfortunately, we forgot that New York State stays open till four in the morning, and we got there way too early, at like 8:30, and we were the last band scheduled to go on, at like 2:30 a.m. or so, so of course we start drinking—the bar owner says we can have all the draught beer we want, but only the draught beer. So we’re playing pool, and we’re getting kind of bored with the draught beer, and wandering all around this place—it’s like two floors—and Ernie had discovered downstairs that they had one of those Jaegermeister chilling machines. They were brand new at the time, none of us had ever seen one before.
I think they were secret Russian technology until after the cold war ended.
John: Yeah, exactly! So Ernie had been talking to this woman down there who turned out to own the club, and he’d given her this tale of woe about how we’d gotten here too early and we were sick of drinking draught Rolling Rock, and she invited us down to sample the Jaegermeister from the machine. And she didn’t cut us off. And we drank Jaeger. And we drank Jaeger. And we drank Jaeger. And we drank Jaeger. And then all of a sudden it was time to play, and Bob strips off his clothes completely and Pino starts playing something, but I was just sort of numb, holding the microphone—I was trying to sing, but I couldn’t remember what I was doing. And the guy from The Metro is right in front of me—they’d done this great big preview—and he’s anticipating a great show, but I couldn’t do anything. It was all just a blur, so I laid down and went to sleep—passed out on the stage, before one song was complete.
That’s pretty Spinal Tap.
Pino: Yeah, but tell him the best part.
John: So, finally, they tell us, “get the fuck out of here, you’re not sleeping in here.” And these guys carried the gear out, and then they carried me out, and they laid me in the gutter and piled leaves over me—it was November, and really cold, I remember that much, though I was mostly unconscious. And a guy comes out of the club and sees them covering me with leaves, and he freaks out and starts saying “you can’t do that! You can’t leave him there, he’ll die! He’ll die!”
The club owner?
John: No, I think it was just a punter—some customer, but he was very upset. So Pino says, all right, I guess we’ll have to put him into the Volvo [Ernie’s wagon, a storied touring vehicle]. And the back of Ernie’s wagon is full of motherboards and computer parts, underpants and socks, and Pino just sweeps it all away into the street and throws me in. I woke up back in Northampton and I don’t remember much else.
Pino recounts another infamous gig in Newark, New Jersey.
Pino: Okay, so, I don’t know if you guys remember this bar in Newark. I think we played there twice.
Ernie: I’m suuurrrre we can sleep over…
Pino: Right, so the first time we played there they wound up letting us crash at somebody’s house.
John: Actually it was in the bar. They took us out into Manhattan to some Irish bar—Lucky Sullivan’s—and they let us sleep in the bar.
Pino: So I ask John, “do we want to play there again?” And he’s like, “Yeah, that was a great time!” So the second time, we’re there, we’ve got our sleeping bags and the bartender’s like “Who wants shots?” and we’re like, “Hell, yeah!” So we all start doing shots, this whiskey, that whiskey—hey, let me try that whiskey! And I don’t usually drink as much as these guys, but I was fucked up that night, and then the guy goes, “well, I’ve got to get up early in the morning”—what did he say? He had something to do.
John: He said he had to paint the house.
Pino: Yeah, he’s like “I’ve got to get up and paint the house,” and so he’s like, “Have a good night, you guys have got to go.” And I’m like “What?” It wasn’t like we could sleep in the car—we were in Newark.
John: I’ve never seen Pino so pissed off. That crowd was tough there, too, like, expecting a lot from a band. I remember I started going on about how much New Jersey sucks, and how it’s like a transistor radio out there with tubes and wires and smokestacks, and I’m like “How can you live here?” And they’re all looking at me like, “Who’s this coont?” So after I’ve gone on, eventually I said, you know what sucks the worst about New Jersey? We live in Massachusetts, and we have drive through Connecticut to get here! That sort of got them on our side.
After a long interview, the band makes me turn the recorder back on to recount the legend of “Folk Boy.”
Pino: All right. So this is back in the day. We hired a mandolin player named Adam Rothberg, who was actually a really good player. We had a gig on Nantucket—in February—at the Chicken Box. So, the gig there was, you took the boat out, you played all weekend, and you stayed in a little band house.
Sort of like The Beatles in Hamburg.
Pino: Yeah. So, he thought we were this slick Celtic band.
John: I think I told him that. A “traditional” Celtic band.
Pino: So then, all these drunk guys from Holyoke show up, and all of a sudden, after the first show, there’s like 20 people back in the band house—which is like the size of this room. Cushions are flying around, and Pat [Owens, founding and still occasional member] and I were telling every chick in the bar to come back to the band house because we had “cupcakes.”
John: We were actually having a competition at one point where we were filling up ashtrays with packets of ketchup, mustard, soy sauce, and seeing who could drink the most out of an ashtray.
Pino: So, needless to say, he was horrified.
Bob: Pat’s sitting, buck naked, on the couch right next to Folk Boy.
Pino: So, long story short— after an entire weekend of this, Sunday morning we’re getting ready to leave, and Folk Boy’s had enough. He was being cool—but he was ready to go. So, Sunday morning, this guy comes in [to the band house], and he’s got a case of Guinness, and he says, “I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is: huge snowstorm, ferry’s not running. You’re stuck on the island for another day. The good news is—here’s a case of beer! And there’s more where that came from!” So we’re all like “Wooooo!!!!” but Folk Boy’s like “Nooooo!!!! I’m stuck here!” So we wind up skinny-dipping, jumping into the ocean.
Ernie: Ah, so there is some ball-slapping in this story!
John: Actually, it was February, and our balls were all shrunk up inside, there was nothing slapping.
Pino: When we get back to the cabin, we find out that afternoon, they go, “Hey, we’re getting some Chinese food flown in from the mainland, do you guys want any?” And Folk Boy’s ears go up and he’s like “What, planes are running?!” So he’s like “Get me on that fucking plane!”
John: I think what actually happened was he found out planes were running, and he chartered a plane, and we got the Chinese food because it came over on his plane!
Bob: Andrea [Bob’s girlfriend] and I drove him to the airport to get on the plane, and Andrea wasn’t having the greatest time with us, and Folk Boy—there was kind of like this Casablanca moment where he turned as he was getting on the plane—and I know he didn’t really grab her hand, though I kind of got that vision in my head, like “Come with me, Andrea. I’ll take you away from all this.” And when he came at her and said this I took my hand and pushed it into his face and said, “Get the fuck out of here!”
Pino: But I remember it was also this thing where the runway’s here [makes a surface with his hand] and the plane’s coming in here, and the wind just whips it down onto the runway, and we’re like, “Whoa! Who would get on that plane?”
Ummm, JFK Jr.?
Pino: Folk Boy. And he looks back ut us with our case of beer and then out at the storm and he’s like, “I’ll risk it.” He risked his life rather than spend another night with us. It wasn’t even like he quit or anything, we just never saw him again.
Was he a regular band member?
John: We were giving him his chance.
Ernie: He’s actually getting a percentage of the checks that I’m supposed to be getting. The “legacy” checks.
Regardless of the shenanigans the Bollocks have been steeped in over the years, Allen emailed me the next day imploring me to mention that, aside from all the cheeky fun and R-rated Monkees antics, it’s really been the creative camaraderie that’s been most important thing in keeping the Bollocks going, and from killing each other. Some young men go to war; others join a rock band that drinks like a war’s on. At least when it’s the latter, the stories are pleasant to remember, and, mostly, no one gets hurt.
The Big Bad Bollocks play their 21st annual St. Patrick’s Day gig March 17, 7 p.m. at the Iron Horse Music Hall, 20 Center St., Northampton, (413) 586-8686, www.iheg.com. Tickets are $12.50 in advance and $15 at the door.
