Cardiff Reefers Trying to Grow Bigger and Better

SAN DIEGO —  One of the biggest surprises of last summer’s marathon “Ram Slam Dub Jam” at the San Diego Convention Center was the crowd’s enthusiastic response to the top-heavy reggae card’s only local representative, the Cardiff Reefers.

One might expect a local band to get swallowed up by a bill featuring international stars Steel Pulse, Special Beat, Shelly Thunder and Daddy Freddy. But people danced and cheered throughout the Cardiff Reefers’ lively, dinner-hour set of hybridized reggae.

The crowd reaction came as no surprise to the Cardiff Reefers, who have built and maintained a loyal following ever since they formed for fun five years ago, when most of the band’s six members were undergraduates at UC San Diego.

Today, four of the Reefers have college degrees (three in music, one in philosophy), and, while an unconditional enjoyment of music making and stoking the local fan fires remain on the list of priorities, the sextet is beginning to expand both its creative and geographic horizons.

Last week, the Cardiff Reefers--who won top honors in the Best Reggae or World Beat category of the recent San Diego Music Awards--released its second independent CD (“Reefer Madness,” natch), and this month the band will perform a flurry of local gigs in support of that effort. Tonight, the Reefers headline an all-ages “CD release party” at the downtown club SOMA that begins at 9. The show also features local bands Daddy Longleggs and Freak Scene.

A week from today, the Reefers will play a 40-minute set on the 91X Reggae Stage at the San Diego Street Scene, beginning at 5:30 p.m. At that hour, the band will be playing as people are walking through the gates, and Reefers vocalist-bassist Robert Melendez said in a phone interview earlier this week that the band is learning to steel itself for such tough, dusky opening slots.

“It would be nice to get a later slot--or even a longer slot--at some of these big events,” Melendez said from his office in Encinitas, where he coordinates press and radio relations for the band. “But at least we’re on the bill. We’re trying to get as many people as possible to come early for the Street Scene gig. At least the dedicated Reefer-heads will be there.”

In one respect, tonight’s all-ages SOMA show is a key to the band’s current direction, in that the musicians--all of whom are in their 20s--hope to expand their audience to include younger listeners.

“We have a solid following here,” Melendez said, “but we need to branch out, to take in more of the younger crowd. We got hot four or five years ago, and now a lot of our friends and our early fans have gotten older and moved away, and we find ourselves trying to capture a new audience all over again. We need to attract more than just the reggae crowd or the college crowd, and doing more all-ages shows should help in that respect.”

The “Reefer Madness” opus should help, too. Recorded live at the Belly Up Tavern in April, the CD is an almost seamless merger of studio-quality sound and live-performance energy. Even more than the band’s debut release, “Alternate Roots,” the new recording captures the Reefers’ hyphenated, Caribbean-spiced brew at full froth.

There is good humor. (“Morning Glory” opens with a guitar quote of the Woody Woodpecker theme; “Hemp” is preceded by a sound clip from the 1936 film melodrama after which the album is named.) There is interpretive savvy (a cool improvement on Steve Miller’s “The Joker”). There is sociopolitical soap-boxing (the loping ska groove “The Fugitive” and the “unity rock” anthem “What a Pity”). And there is sophisticated song-craft (“Only That Girl,” which features chordal turns more characteristic of progressive pop).

But “Reefer Madness” is an excellent effort just as much for what isn’t there. The band doesn’t strain to be more than it is, and, consequently, there are precious few of the patois affectations that mar the efforts of some non-Jamaican reggae acts.

What comes across during the first or the 10th listening is a pervasive sense of fun, a persuasive danceability and a coherent, albeit multihued, musical vision.

“We wanted to do the album right, so we rented a high-quality, 32-input digital recorder and a 40-input sound board for the Belly Up gig,” Melendez said. “I think people who think of us as this good-time, beach-area reggae band will hear ‘Reefer Madness’ and realize there’s more going on than just reggae.

“Some of the heavier rock influences come from me, our drummer (Andrew Rosales) and our lead guitarist (Matt Hale),” Melendez said. “Chris (Ballard, keyboardist) has more academic training, so his writing is more melodically and harmonically interesting, while remaining totally pop. Gary (Otake, pocket trumpet, percussion) is more jazz-based, and Peter (Todd, vocalist-guitarist) comes from a family that played bluegrass and folk.”

Melendez agreed that Ballard’s “Only That Girl” exemplifies the Cardiff Reefers’ eclectic approach.

“For a reggae song, it goes through way too many chord progressions,” he said, laughing. “The typical reggae song has two, maybe four chords, max, and it’s all in the groove after that. But we do like to mix it up; we never wanted to imitate the familiar reggae sounds, we just wanted to use them for backbone and heartbeat.”

As one might conclude from the care that went into “Reefer Madness,” the album is intended to create more than just a local buzz. Melendez is trying to get coast-to-coast air play for the work, with an eye toward taking the band national.

“We’ve been doing regional tours for four years,” he said. “Colorado is a strong state for us, and we’re in Northern California more than anywhere. But we did two national tours in March and May, just to find out where we should lay some groundwork and which places to skip over. In a way, we bit off more than we could easily chew, but we’re determined to break to the next level, to become a full national touring act that can go out in support of ‘Reefer Madness.’ We love to play in San Diego, but we need to refine our strategy, to cut back on our local shows in order to stress quality over quantity.”

While national exposure is a worthy goal, Melendez cautioned that, whatever the results of the band’s efforts, its collective feet will remain firmly planted in San Diego soil. Mention of a four-color, fold-out poster that comes with “Reefer Madness” elicits concurrence that the band’s identity is merely flexing, not changing.

At first glance, the insert--a photo of a refrigerator clogged with half-eaten food, maps, photos, cassettes, musical equipment, bric-a-brac and even a crumpled city of San Diego traffic citation--seems to showcase the band’s beach-rat sense of humor. More than merely a random collection of items, however, the visual synthesizes the touchstones of the Reefers’ daily existence: music, food, travel, togetherness--all bound by a youthful insouciance.

“That’s exactly it--the Cardiff Reefers in a refrigerator,” Melendez allowed, laughing. “It’s a humorous picture, and it implies that we still have a lot of fun playing. But that’s not the only way we want to be regarded. We’re moving forward, we’re always writing, and the new stuff we’re working on is the most diverse music we’ve ever done.

“I don’t know if that’s good or bad, because people like to put easy classifications on bands, and there’s a tendency not to take a band like the Cardiff Reefers seriously,” Melendez said. “But we feel that once more people have a chance to see and hear that we’re really professional, they’ll not only enjoy us, they’ll respect us, too.”

In addition to the gigs at SOMA (555 Union St . , off Market Street) and the Street Scene, the Cardiff Reefers will perform at 9:15 p.m. Sept. 18 at the Belly Up Tavern, noon Sept. 19 at the Adams Avenue Street Fair and 9:30 p.m. Sept. 19 at Winston’s in Ocean Beach. Compact disc and cassette formats of “Reefer Madness” are available at Tower Records (El Cajon Boulevard and Sports Arena), Off the Record (El Cajon Boulevard and Encinitas), Lou’s Records in Encinitas, Slash ‘N’ Crash in Pacific Beach, Assorted Vinyl at UC San Diego’s Price Center and Rainbow Country in Leucadia.