California ska vets Hepcat sadly lost co-vocalist Greg Lee at age 53 after he suffered a brain aneurysm earlier this year, but they’ve been keeping the band alive in his honor. They went ahead with performing their set at the No Values festival in tribute to him, and now they’ve teamed up with dub veteran Scientist for a dub version of their sophomore album Scientific, which was released in 1996 on BYO Records. “Greg Lee believed it would be cool if Scientist would dub Scientific,” the band says. “He liked the play on names and the historic implications. Like a true fan, Greg sought out information from various sources and finally was introduced to Scientist by Brian Wallace aka: Dub Robot at the legendary Dub Club in Los Angeles. Greg worked his magic and Scientist agreed to create dub’s of Scientific. The rest is now history.”
The final mixes of Scientist Meets Hepcat: Scientific Dub Special were approved by Greg in January, two months before his unexpected passing, and the album comes out on December 6 via Trust Records, along with a deluxe reissue of the original album. Pre-orders are up now.
Along with the announcement, Hepcat are sharing Scientist’s “Bobby & Joe (Rambo Dub),” along with the “lost” music video for the original “Bobby & Joe.” Director Jamie Stern says, “I found two masters of the ‘Bobby and Joe’ video. One was ‘censored’ for MTV. I remember they wanted certain things edited and so I made a ‘f*ck you’ version that had big black bars that said censored across the screen. It was in a competition on MTV called 12 Angry Viewers. They would watch 3 videos in an episode and vote on the best one. I was in NYC shooting a video for the bouncing souls and we saw it. We had no idea it was going to be in this competition. It was up against like Alanis Morissette and another big top 40 band or something and Hepcat won! We were all so excited! Then it moved up in the competition and beat out some other huge big budget videos! Our little $2500 ska video! Not too shabby.” Check out both below.
LA’s El Rey Theatre also hosted a star-studded tribute to Greg Lee earlier this week.
Scientist Meets Hepcat: Scientific Dub Special Tracklist
01. Caribbean Tiger
02. Country Time (THC Rum Dub)
03. Bobby and Joe (Rambo Dub)
04. Black Sky (Moonbase Alpha Dub)
05. Keep On (Keep on Dubbing)
06. Home (Eye Ten East Dub)
07. Caribbean Tiger 2 (Radio Promo Calls Annete)
08. Marcus Garvey (The Ark)
09. Dollar Dance (Wedding Dub)
10. Come Out (Dancing Shoes)
11. Caribbean Tiger 3
12. Positive (Double Negative Dub)
13. Caribbean Tiger 4
14. Lovin’ Man (Born to Lub Dub)
15. The Fool (Foolish Dub)