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The Aggrolites \"Work It\"

The Aggrolites play Brixton Saturday night, June 6.

It happens time and again.

Take the Van’s Warped Tour. The punk kids come for the thrash. So when somebody says a reggae band is going to play, the general expectation is for a slow, sleepy thump and probably some white guy singing in a fake Jamaican accent and thanking Jah for all of creation. A reggae band? What the hell?

Then the Aggrolites take the stage and turn everything upside down. The stew begins with a big, thick old bass line and the sharp crack of drums. An organ swirls in and around, up and down. A skanky guitar slinks into the mix. Everything is grooving just right when bandleader Jesse Wagner starts singing in a gravelly soul voice that sounds straight out of Stax, circa 1968. By the time he yowls, “Alright!” the crowd is one big collective bounce.

This isn’t just reggae. “We call it dirty reggae,” Wagner says.

And the Aggrolites have been its sole practitioners since they busted out of East LA seven years ago and started taking reggae music to places it had never gone before: gigs with Social Distortion, Rancid, 911, the Dropkick Murphy’s and Flogging Molly and a festival circuit that includes Coachella and Warped.

The band, which plays Brixton Saturday night, is on a mission to restore reggae music to its grittier origins. And over the course of three records (a fourth, titled “IV”, will be released June 9 on Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong’s Hellcat Records) and several hundred thousand miles of touring, they have been wildly successful.

“That is why we like to play gigs like that – if you are going to keep playing in your little circle, you are going to pigeonhole yourself, and then pretty soon it’s just not going to go anywhere,” said Wagner in an interview this week. “You know, you might as well try things. We figure reggae is a good music. Hip hop people like reggae, hippie kids like reggae, skinheads like reggae, punk rockers like reggae. So it’s like, ‘Let’s play all those gigs. Let’s do them all.’”

The Aggrolites robust sound comes from LA by way of Kingston, Jamaica, digging deep back to the roots of reggae music – the earlier days of ska and Rock Steady, which in turn grew out of the Jamaican adaptation of American soul and R&B music.

This was a music scene that largely grew from the work of the legendary producer Coxsone Dodd, a Jamaican who became enamored of American soul music while traveling to the U.S. as a fieldworker in the Deep South during the 1950s. He founded Studio One when he returned to Kingston in the 1960s and launched a whole musical movement. Studio One was Jamaica’s answer to Motown, producing such stars as Toots and the Maytalls, Lee “Scratch” Perry and the Upsetters, the Skalatites, Prince Buster, the Melodians and the very first recordings of Bob Marley and the Wailers.

This was a rich chapter in musical history that isn’t particularly well known outside the island. Wagner stumbled across it when he was a 12-year-old fledgling guitar player with a taste for old school soul music. His father, Lenny, had been a musician, and Wagner grew up listening to old vinyl at a time when most of his classmates were into the latest Pearl Jam CD. Then one day he asked his older sister’s boyfriend for a music tip.

“Like any 12-year-old kid, I’m looking at my sister’s boyfriend like he’s the coolest guy in the world, and I hit him up,” he recalled. “I asked him, ‘Is there any music nowadays with horns in it?’ ‘Cause at the time I thought music with horns created soul… and he told me about ska and brought me down to this record store and bought me a couple CDs. I fell in love with it.”

By 2002, Wagner was a part of the LA ska scene and was frequently booked when old Jamaican legends from the Studio One days passed through town in need of a backing band. The Aggrolites first formed as a backing band for one such star, Derrick Morgan, but when that project dissipated the band decided to strike out on their own. What the Aggrolites set out to do wasn’t to reverentially create some bygone past, but rather to bring that music alive in a distinct way. They wanted to make it their own. They wanted to make it dirty.

“The whole vibe was just like, ‘We can never play it as good as the Jamaicans, and we are all influenced by so many different things, let’s just try to start our own thing,’” Wagner recalled. “You know, call it dirty reggae – that is what we named it – because we are fans of a lot of soul music and reggae, of course funk and things like that.”

“We felt it would be okay to mix,” he added. “I’m not going to get up there and fake Jamaican and sing patois and all that, being an American guy from Southern California. But, you know, a lot of that early reggae stuff was soul influenced. They were covering soul songs left and right.”

They wanted to make music with grit in it, music with that rougher-hewn soul, like the Upsetters or the classic New Orleans funk band, the Meters.

“Mostly, the Jamaican stuff, if you hear an out of tune part in this song or something slightly different, it brings that signature to a song, that thing you are looking for,” Wagner said. “It gives it the soul, the feel… I don’t’ know. Stuff like that is captured… we were calling it dirty. We loved how it was raw, dirty, natural, organic, rather than overproduced and overdubbed.”

The Aggrolites have become known as the ultimate goodtime party band. The Rolling Stone called their first record “a glorious, surprising treat… ideal for your next soul shakedown party” and Alternative Press called the band’s sound “rootsy, analog dirty ska that not only ranks among the new school’s best… it also sounds like it was beamed in from 1960s Jamaica.” Even old school Jamaican legend Prince Buster has weighed in, noting that the Aggrolites took him back to the streets of Jamaica. “I can’t believe that this young band from America could play my music just as good as the day it was recorded,” he said.

But Wagner said the band’s most frequent compliment is that their records play well at BBQs.

“We hear that a lot,” he said. “BBQ, man. We put on a BBQ and listen to your album… It’s all a party. That’s what it’s all about.”

The Aggrolites play Brixton June 6 at 8 p.m. $18 advance, $20 at the door. See www.brixtonsouthbay.com. Check out www.myspace.com/theaggrolites for streaming music samples. ER