Ep. 014: One Cool Guy w/ Mike Struening

OCG was a ska band from New Jersey. Their members consisted of Nick, Dave, Keith, Pete, Stuart, Mark, Mike, Chris, and Dan.

They were founded in 1997 by a group of Union High School musicians. The band played a fusion of ska punk, jazz, ska-core, and what many refer to as ska-rap. OCG followed up the success of their 7 inch record "7 Inches of OCG" in early 1998, with the release "From Downtown", both released on the Pinball Records label. Hits such as "Bill Kozby You", "Xample", "Be With You", and "Skank Away" were popular with high school teenagers, often belonging to the straight edge movement.

I got extra frontman Mike Struening on the phone and this is what we talked about:

• The instant connection people from the scene have when they haven’t seen each other in decades
• How we usually didn’t know what town’s people were from
• Op Ivy
• Desmond Dekker
• The difficulty in buying music from new bands when we were all broke
• His transition from hardcore to ska
• How someone needs to find the real world video they made
• Were they all straight edge
• What happened at the last show to cause them to stop playing during the first song
• Scene points
• Why everyone besides the bands have a successful career in music
• Will there be a reunion show
• And a shit ton more

Before we being, mark your calendars for

July 21 at the Debonair Music hall in Teaneck NJ my old band Lanemeyer will be sharing the stage with our buddies Humble Beginnings and Jettison. Pre-sale tickets are currently available for $15 and then $20 at the door. You can find them at thiswasthescene.com. Go there, scroll down and click on the purple button that says CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE TICKETS. We’ll also be throwing an after party until 2 am at Debonair once shows is over. It should be swell

As always, thank you to the people who’ve donated to the podcast. Especially Omar Ahmed who gave a super generous donation this week. If you’d like to do so just go to thiswasthescene.com and send whatever you’d like. It helps me with the $20/month to keep this thing live. I’m still in the process of designing shirts to sell to help keep this thing alive so keep checking the this was the scene facebook page for updates.

Also, I own an animation company so if you head up your companies marketing and are frustrated that people don’t get what you do, then check out my animation company drive80.com

You can hear OCG here.