Big Ol’ Dirty Bucket has built up quite a following in the two years they’ve been on the scene. The 11 piece funk band from Salem, Massachusetts plays all over New England. This shouldn’t be too surprising as the band members each have years of experience and years of connections built up. Band leader and keyboard player Brett Badolato was happy to talk about his Big Ol’ Dirty Bucket.
Badolato has been busy for the last 20 years building up his street cred and name recognition. “I’ve been in bands since I was 13 years old,” he said. “They’re a broad spectrum. I’ve been in heavy metal bands, hip hop bands, reggae bands, cover bands, and I just got sick and tired of playing other people’s music. It was time to start my own project and play the music that we wanted to play.”
Badolato took a long, roundabout route toward forming Big Ol’ Dirty Bucket. He had been jamming with 60 different people at random jams, and he eventually started to click with a few of the players. “From there on, we just kept it all originals and kept things going,” he said.
Band members were chosen essentially on the basis of who was comfortable to work with and fun to play with. “It came down to who we liked to share it with,” Badolato said. “Our trumpet player (Andy Gerard) is my brother in law. When he started with the band, he wasn’t in the band. He was helping us record our demo, and at the time it was only a five piece. He had mentioned in the whole process of recording the demo, that he used to play the trumpet when he was in high school, and he hadn’t played it in years. And we thought it would be cool as a thank you for doing the demo for us to buy him a trumpet. So, we bought him a trumpet, and within a couple days he was like ‘I’m going to need to jump in.’”
Gerard, it should be noted, used to manage a studio in New York. When he married Badolato’s sister the couple moved back to Massachusetts and had a make shift studio in his basement and some portable equipment. He was bringing his stuff down to the Bucket jam space and recorded the core elements of drums, keys, bass, and guitar. Horns, percussions, and vocals were all recorded at Gerard’s home studio.
Big Ol’ Dirty Bucket debuted in 2009 at Tammany Hall in Worcester before making the rounds of North Shore rooms like Dodge Street Bar And Grill and a few smaller venues. Eventually, Big Ol’ Dirty Bucket made their Boston premiere at a packed room in the Middle East in Cambridge.
It was those numerous personal connections that resulted in the band playing at many Boston appearances, New England music festivals, and protest type rallies. Big Ol’ Dirty Bucket won the Battle Of The Bands in the Wormtown Trading Company in Worcester. Something Badolato still gets excited about.
“I was ecstatic,” Badolato said. “It was funny because our lead singer Sarah was very uncomfortable with battling. She doesn’t like being judged. It was kind of neurotic going through the different rounds. But we just kept on doing well, and we had a lot of fun, and we met a lot of really cool people, and we had a blast. We were all ecstatic when we found out we actually won the thing. We were just happy to be playing with such amazing musicians.”
One of the prizes for winning the Worcester battle was to perform in front of thousands of people at the Wormtown Music Festival last year. They also just played it again this year, a week ago.
Badolato used to play his keyboards in heavy metal bands, which was never an easy fit. Big Ol’ Dirty Bucket’s lead singer, Sarah Seminski, had made the rounds of many bands too over the years, still belonging to popular function band Search Party and a side project called Vanilla Manvelope. She also worked with Salem area bands The Sea Monsters, The Speakeasies, and Caged Birds. Badolato and Seminsky hit it off well when they were forming the current band and they are now an item.
When asked about the challenge of rehearsing and performing with ten other players, Badolato said “it can be quite the pain in the ass. But I love these guys so much. We’re all basically family with each other. I love this group of musicians. I love being friends with them. I love playing music with them. It can be hard orchestrating everything from time to time. But we all have such a tight bond with each other that we just work as hard as we can with each other and we always come up with something that we’re pretty proud of.”
Finding rooms that will hire an eleven piece band is never easy. Badolato said that almost every time they book something, the production company or the presentation company who hire them have no idea what they’re talking about as far as sound equipment, forcing him to go over their heads, directly to the venue sound engineers.
“One time we played Finz in Pickering Warf, and that is a tiny little nothing. They can really only fit bands of four people or less,” he said. “Here we were, 11 of us, jamming into that room. We were practically sitting on top of each other. But we make do with what we have. There were definitely times we’ve had to cut a few corners, but we always tend to come out on top.”
Big Ol’ Dirty Bucket always bring the entire band with them for every gig, despite the size of the room, never cutting people, unless a player can’t make it to a gig. Being such a large band, they can get through a gig without a percussionist or a horn player. “As long as the core members of the band, the drums, guitars, keyboards, bass, and vocals are in, then we can take a gig. If we’re missing a horn or two, OK. We’ll still play a good gig. If we’re missing a percussionist, OK, we’ll still play a good gig. But we really sound best when it’s all of us.”
There are actually eleven people in the band counting their lyricist. Micah Casey raps while the lead female vocalist and the others do their thing. Micah writes all of the raps that he delivers. Casey used to be in a live Hip Hop band with Badolato called Universal Truth. “We wanted to bring in a more contemporary feel,” Badolato said, “because we have a very old school funk feel to it, but at the same time, it’s 2011, so we wanted to have something more modern about it too.”
Other band members include Ryan Green on guitar and vocals; Dave Share on drums; Joe Cesarz on bass; Aaron Smith on saxophone and vocals; Doug Merrill on percussion, flute, sax, vocals; Rich Houghton on trombone and vocals; and Jim Schunemann who is the DJ/turntablist.
Badolato wrote the Bucket song “Photonic Amplifier People” that has gone over well at their gigs. It is essentially a goof on a defective keyboard amp he used to own. One day, he conceived a dream world of little people the size of photons living in the amp and banging on the walls of it while he was playing. “The lyrics,” Badolato said, “after I wrote it, it came up to be something much different. It became more about loving people and getting along and partying.”
Many of the band members also write songs. Bucket have 20 originals songs under their belts, and they have a CD in the works, with 12 tracks recorded and only needing some polish and some choral vocals. “I’d say in the next few months we’ll be releasing a CD,” Badolato said. He doesn’t know yet what they will call it, though the possible title Beantown Funk has been bandied about.
Big Ol’ Dirty Bucket pull all out all the stops to ensure each gig is a big party. Stage antics come during their song “Cuban Beef.” There is a percussion solo that finds the lead singer and or Badolato going out onto the dance floor to start people moving. “This past weekend, we actually started a conga line in the middle of it,” Badolato said.
During their song “All Night Long” the horn players travel all over the stage, and all over the dance floor, and they run through the crowd and play their horn parts in peoples’ faces. “One of our percussionists, Dougie,” he wears a big afro and he has a wireless mic, and he’ll go all around the venue and hangout with all sorts of people while he’s singing, while he’s playing.”
Big Ol’ Dirty Bucket will likely remain popular. A band that is respected by other musicians but that is also popular for keeping the party going and for keeping people dancing usually have quite the staying power.
Big Ol’ Dirty Bucket will appear at Harry’s Harvest Ball in Sparks, Maine this Friday, September 30th.
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