Passafire plays Sunday’s reggae rock Pier concert

It was during his university years in Georgia that guitarist Ted Bowne got hooked on reggae music. He and a couple of buddies at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) started playing a hybrid of Jamaican reggae and British/American rock in bars and clubs around town. They called their band Passafire, a play on the title of a classic Bob Marley album, Catch a Fire.

Passafire, celebrating 20 years in 2023, is one of a handful of successful reggae rock bands that continually tour the country – and the world – playing for festival crowds. The band shares the bill with St. Pete’s The Hip Abduction Sunday at the St. Pete Pier, part of the Rise Up concert series.

Bowne still can’t believe two decades have passed. “It’s a selfish, juvenile goal when you start a band in college,” he says. “You want to get girls and you want people to think you’re cool. That’s really kind of the extent of it.

“When we started getting paid, or getting a bar tab to play, it was like ‘We made it!’ As the perks started getting better and better, you say ‘we made it’ over and over again. ‘Oh my God – we’ve started getting chips and salsa every time we play a show – we made it!’ Then it’s ‘Wow, there’s a hot tub in our green room – we made it!’”

Within a year or two, Passafire was playing on bills with Michael Franti & Spearhead, the Wailers, and reggae/dub pioneers John Brown’s Body.

“Going from playing a show in Savannah, where we’d think we might actually be the biggest band in town, to opening shows on a tour, we’d be like ‘Man, we’re small potatoes compared to this.’ We started working our way up in that world, and the past two summers have been huge amphitheater tours with our friends, Iration, Rebelution and the Expendables.”

Passafire’s music is an amalgam of styles; Bowne is a rock ‘n’ roll guitar player, and although reggae is at the root of everything they do – eight albums’ worth, to date – the band is famous for exploring a wide range of rich musical textures.

“When we first started,” he explains, “I was learning to cover a lot of the music that I was listening to. Not just reggae, it was like G. Love & Special Sauce, Citizen Cope, stuff that was new and interesting to me at the time. For me, I feel like reggae rock started in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when classic rock bands started catching the reggae bug, hearing Bob Marley and the Wailers and other foundational reggae artists.

“Led Zeppelin dropped “D’yer Mak’er,” 10CC did “Dreadlock Holiday,” all these bands started playing their version of reggae. It created this new version. You could fuse rock and reggae, and that’s what those guys were doing – the Clash, and the Police, and they were followed by Sublime and 311 and Long Beach Dub All-Stars.”

Today the four members of Passafire live in different states; they come together to record (although much of their most recent album, Remember a Time, was done by sharing files over the internet) and to rehearse and play shows.

Between 2015 and 2018, Bowne lived in St. Petersburg. He ran a recording studio, The Lizard Lodge, out of his garage (Sound Design was his major at SCAD).

He’s married to a St. Pete native, the former Brianna Bayle, who’s been involved in the reggae rock touring business nearly as long as he has (working merch, management and more for such bands as Badfish – A Tribute to Sublime and Slightly Stoopid).

The couple make their home on Maryland’s eastern shore.

Sunday’s performance will be the last one for Passafire in 2023. “It’s crazy,” Bowne says. “Twenty years of anything just sounds like a lot of time. We have definitely put probably more than 20 years of time into those 20 years. We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished in our careers, and we’re stoked to look back.”

 Rise Up St. Pete: The Hip Abduction, Passafire, Coyote Island, Sierra Lane. At 6 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 26 at Spa Beach, on the St. Pete Pier. Find tickets here.