In 1989 Big Bad Bollocks was just two guys wandering up and down Pleasant Street in Northampton each Wednesday night doing the “Open Mic Tour”, which meant we signed ourselves up for the sessions at Sheehan’s Café and Ye Old Watering Hole.We weren’t actually known as Big Bad Bollocks at the time, just Pat and John. One evening the host at Sheehan’s tried to deny us access to the stage by informing us, “Only acts with proper names can get a slot now, it’s a new house rule!” He and many of the other performers (mostly his friends) thought we sucked and, to be honest, we probably did, but what they disliked was the style of music we played (It wasn’t “White Guy Blues” – almost a prerequisite for taking part in the sessions.) Besides us, The Rock Gods From Chicopee were the only other act they tried to bar on aesthetic grounds. I wasn’t about to let the lack of a name keep us from performing so I spat out three words, “Big Bad Bollocks!”
In the interests of full disclosure I should tell you it was a name I’d recently come up with for a group of us, who rode our bicycles to work – as in…“Hey were a biker gang now, we ought to have a name – I know…Big bad Bollocks!” The rest is a twenty-year history involving copious amounts of alcohol, oversized women’s underwear, fighting, playing, camaraderie, loads of fun and song writing.
Our first paying gig was at Knightly’s Pub in Easthampton, Steve Westfield of legendary Valley punk band The Pajama Slave Dancers booked us to open for his new outfit The Gypsy Stretch Mark Orchestra. In the audience we found ‘Bob the Bastard’, he joined us on stage using an old snare drum we’d pulled from a pile of junk in the corner of the basement bar. He’s been a Bollock ever since, except when he’s being a Killbilly. The next to join us, on bass, was John Rielly of WRSI - DJ fame and by 1992 we’d signed with local label Jama Disc and done a 29 date pub tour of the U.K. We were also the first band to play at the old Bay State Hotel (Now The Sierra Grill) in 1990 for one of Ed Charla’s ‘Mysterious Floating Nightclub’ shows. Ed is now sadly departed and missed by many.
In 1994 we won The Boston Phoenix Best Video Award’, and almost fifteen minutes of fame on MTV. We became a fixture at The Phoenix Landing in Cambridge, The Rat in Kenmore Square and later The Middle East. By this time we’d already lost guitarist Patrick Owen and the bass and mandolin player John Rielly.They were replaced with Pino, on guitar and Ernie Wilson on bass (both former members of Free Press, where they’d played that band’s brand of Funk on the opposite instruments). A number of musicians passed through the Bollocksphere; Anna – the only female Bollock, was beautiful and classy and for some reason liked to slum it with us when she wasn’t playing violin for The Springfield or Baltimore Symphony Orchestras, Zeiv from Israel was a classically trained pianist who played accordion for a while, which reminds me… Hank played squeezebox before him. There were also sundry string players on banjo, cittern and mandolin. One of them we called “Folk-Boy”, he was the best mandolin player ever to set foot on stage with us, but it is not his playing we remember him for – it was his complete unwillingness to spend another night with the band and our friends at The Chicken Box band house on Nantucket.
We’d played a weekend-long gig in February and were forced to stay for two extra days of drinking and carrying on because a raging storm with 15 feet standing waves had shut down The Ferry service. “Folk Boy” put his life at risk flying across Nantucket Sound through the “balls out” storm in a 4 seater-airplane to escape our drunken debauchery. He survived, but we never saw him again.
When I think of the Big Bad Bollocks, it’s the four of us who’ve been playing together for the past 15 or 16 years: Pino (The Guinea Cowboy) on custom tuned twelve-string guitar and vocals, Ernie (Bwooaaarrhhh) on electric bass, Bob (The Bastard) on drums and myself Johnny (Where’s me Whistle) Alien on lead vocals, squeezebox and tin whistle. There’s no denying we’re a motley bunch of lads producing a bawdy and eccentric musical mutation – equal parts: Punk, Pop, Vaudeville, Folk and Rock ‘n’ Roll; Oscar winning screenwriter William Monahan described our pedigree in his 2000 New York Press, front-page story about us:
"The best way to think of the Big Bad Bollocks is to imagine a hot fusion of the Sex Pistols and the Pogues. No version of the Bollocks has ever been bad (fusing knees-up, large sideboards Liverpool pub-entertainment and Northampton rock smarts, which are not bad drinking partners nor bad in a band either, but the latest incarnation of the Big Bad Bollocks rocks like a motherf****r, and the songs are great. John Allen is the real f*****g article."
The Big Bad Bollocks have recorded four of our own CDs, played on recordings and gigged with The Dropkick Murphys and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and performed in venues ranging from Liquor Stores to the Warped Tour. We’ve shared stages with such unlikely acts as Cypress Hill, Bo Diddley and Staind. And we almost got to play with the man who inspired the Big Bad Bollocks into existence – Shane McGowan, but he broke his arm, falling off a stage in London, and had to cancel the show. Perhaps most bizarre of all our song ‘Tidza’ was featured on the TV show ‘Dawson’s Creek’?We are Big Bad Bollocks; we’re 20 years old and we don’t rehearse – Hell the four of us haven’t even been in a room together in 6 months. But that’s part of what makes the shows so special these days, they’re a reunion for the band and audience alike. Once the music gets going and the Guinness starts to flow – everything and everyone falls right into place and there’s nowhere else you or us would rather be (excepting “Folk Boy”). If you’re up for a bloody good session, we’ll be at The Iron Horse on March 13th, where we’ve celebrated, on or around, St Patrick’s Day for 19 of our 20 years.
Erin Go Bollocks!
-John Allen
Get your tickets here.
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