The Slackers’ Vic Ruggiero talks working solo on Stuff in My Pockets

Vic Ruggiero. // photo credit Kyna Damewood

Musician Vic Ruggiero is best known for his work as the frontman and keyboard player for long-running NYC ska act the Slackers, whose mellow, soulful sounds have been getting folks dancing for over 30 years now. However, he’s a prolific solo artist and sideman, with more guest spots than Wikipedia can keep track of and a wide array of self-released material which strays from the 4/4 upbeat of his regular band, to say nothing of his KC connection, having produced the first two Hellcat Records releases from the Gadjits at the end of the ’90s.

This Friday, ORG Music releases his latest solo album, Stuff in My Pockets, a collection of songs recorded throughout the country over the past decade. It’s tuneful, thoughtful, and a genuinely perfect Sunday morning record. We used the release of Ruggiero’s latest as an excuse to hop on the phone with the musician.

The Pitch: This is your first solo record in a long time. What made you decide to go solo again?

Vic Ruggiero: I often put out small releases. I don’t make necessarily big releases, so I’ll do these little glorified bootlegs of live shows or demos or things that I do. As my mastering guy used to call it, it’s not lo-fi. He says it’s like home-fi, before that was a thing. People didn’t used to record it at home, you know? I take some stuff from live shows or, like, things I do here and there and I put them out as little bootleg-style releases and then every once in a while I get the urge to actually say, “Hey, let’s make something on vinyl. Let’s print something up.”

Andrew [Rossiter] from ORG has been asking me for years to do something like, “Hey, if you ever wanna do something–you ever wanna put something out?” and I was like, “Hey, I have all these little recordings, these little piecemeal things. I stuck them together. I got a whole record now!”

ORG Music seem to love ska and reggae music. They put out Dave Hillyard’s solo album last year, which is also really good.

I think they’re fans of more than just ska, reggae, or whatever. I think we’re all fans of a retro kind of sound. We could all agree that, that the best music that we like happened before, sometime in the mid-70s, and I think that’s where guys like Andrew and I and Dave and—I’ve met a couple of other people on that label, and I noticed that it’s like there’s a little bit of a retro thing going on there, on top of the fact that they put out a lot of reissues.

That’s an interesting way of putting it because the sound of the Slackers as well as your solo stuff has this feeling of being an homage to times gone past, but it’s not retro, per se. It’s more that you’re filtering it through your own brain.

Oh, yeah. I always like to make original music, so it’s not like I’m just gonna do covers. However, I love to play covers. It’s more like I try to follow threads that maybe weren’t followed. I think, well, if somebody else did it better than me, that’s great. I’m not gonna try to remake something that’s already better than I can do.

I noticed that every once in a while, I’ll go into a phase. I wrote a couple of Slacker songs that sound like them. And on this new record, there are a couple of tunes that sound like that. I’m always sad that that didn’t go on longer—early ’79 post-punk into the very early ’80s, like ’80, ’81, ‘and 82—pop music still wasn’t a bad word yet.

The “angry young man music” with Joe Jackson, Elvis Costello, and Graham Parker, where it’s pop, but there’s some pissed-off-ness behind it.

Yeah. There’s something punk about it. There’s something ’60s about it, like Nick Lowe is, in other words. Nick Lowe had that one hit, “Cruel to be Kind,” and nobody ever really looks into the rest of his catalog, and it’s like, “Oh my God.” The guy’s an incredible songwriter, you know? He’s definitely appreciated, but not to the level that a songwriter of his stature should be.

I guess that’s the thing, too—I like making pop music. That was before pop was a bad word. I don’t mind rock and roll. I love rock and roll. It was great when it was still saying something, when it still meant something, before it all kind of turned into this mush of just trying to please people.

That makes a lot of sense because you’ve recorded a couple of collaborative albums with Kepi Ghoulie, as he’s the flip side to the same coin that you’re on, where it’s definitely pop, but more caffeinated on his end.

Mm-hmm. I love Kepi. Kepi is one of the guys that I go to because I noticed when he plays shows, he really speaks the language of his crowd. There are a few bands that really do that. Bouncing Souls are another one. You go see their show, and they’re literally communicating with their audience everywhere they go. It’s like they have a certain cross-section of humanity that comes to their shows, and when they speak, they all speak in the same language.

When and where were these tracks recorded, and how far back do they go?

I guess there are a few tunes on there that were probably recorded around 2015 or 2016, that were in a studio that a friend of mine has upstate New York. He’d always asked me to drop in, and I traded him some music work for a recording session. I was kind of bummed-out at that time, so it was nice for me to get out of town and do this session with this guy.

Then, he said, “Yeah, I’ll give you a couple of days’ work.” He was having fun with it, too, so that was really cool. I had recorded those for a single release in Europe but the guy still hasn’t put them out. It’s been seven or eight years.

Then, little by little, I’d go to another town and record a tune with somebody. I’d just make a reggae song, or I’d sing on one of their tunes. The most fruitful of this bunch was a Philly session with a band called The Snails.

The Snails were a bit like the Gadjits. I think there were a few brothers in the band, and they were like a local band that you couldn’t put your finger on what they did. Whether they played mod music or ska or whatever, they were just a great band, and they reformed into a couple of different versions of themselves.

One day I was in Philly, and they said, “Come by. We put a studio together in our back room where we rehearse,” and I just went in there and I said, “What the hell, sure, I’ll play with you guys. I’ll teach you a couple of tunes I’ve been running through,” and man, I must have recorded five songs with them that day. Just play it a few times, get it right, and record it. They had a little old reel-to-reel machine, so it had real ’60s sound and stuff, and those guys really know how to play ’60s style, just kind of killing it.

I can hear in your voice that you had fun doing all of this. This wasn’t like work. This is spontaneous creativity.

Oh yeah. It’s a joy. I mean, I’m always writing songs, so if somebody tells me they want to play some songs, I usually have something in my pocket that I can say, “It’s not fully formed, but maybe it’s an idea. You wanna work on it?”

It’s funny how songs come and go. I mean, I guess being a guy that just writes songs all the time, it’s like that for me. I may have a song that comes into my set that I think is gonna be recorded soon, and maybe I forget about it for a few years, and then somebody reminds me that I used to play it, and they say, “Hey, what happened to that song you used to play—that ‘Garlic in the Sun’ song or whatever?” And I go, “Oh yeah, well, I forgot I always played that song over here. I’ll play that.”

Then, I wander over to hang out with some friends of mine, and I’ll say, “Check this out,” play this little riff, and then I’m gonna sing over it, and next thing you know, it’ll be on a record someday.

The Slackers play at the Madrid on Thursday, May 18. Details on that show here.