Not many San Diego musical acts have reached the Top 10 of the pop charts, but reggae band Big Mountain pulled it off in 1994, when their sweet-groove cover of Peter Frampton’s 1970s smash “Baby, I Love Your Way” got onto the “Reality Bites” soundtrack and hit No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100.
That commercial peak paved the way for a long and fruitful career, but it also created an identity crisis for Big Mountain, whose original songs often were more connected to the social activism from which reggae initially arose.
“We have this strange character about our repertoire because of our pop success,” frontman Quino McWhinney acknowledges. “I grew up loving pop music, and it was something that came very easy to us. But we also have this very political activist side because we grew up in a protest-march kind of culture.”
Big Mountain leaned into that history during Donald Trump’s first term with 2018’s “Deportation Nation,” in which they sang, “I live in a deportation nation/ That don’t want to hear about no civilization/ So they can round up the population/ With no explanation/ Right in front of our faces.”
Recent releases from Big Mountain have included the 2023 album “Hear That Sound” — with socially relevant songs such as “Revolution Times” and “Freedom Is Not Free” — plus a handful of collaborative singles, including “Vida” with Oscar de la Rosa of Houston Tejano group La Mafia, and “A New Wind Blowing” with Brazil’s Biquini Cavadão. Last month they issued two more: “Lose Your Power” with New Zealand’s Katchafire, and “Forever Yours” with Honorebel.
These days McWhinney spends much of his time south of the border, where he’s building a straw-and-adobe house just outside the Ensenada city limits. “I’ve been really interested in natural building,” he says. “I’m just a hippie rasta, trying to do what I can to cause as little damage as possible to our Mother Earth.”
Big Mountain performs Friday at the Holding Company in Ocean Beach with guests including Pier Project, Beta 7, Coyo and Supercool (7:30 p.m. doors, $23-$30). For this latest installment of our “Five Questions” series, we spoke to McWhinney by phone earlier this week.
1. How often does Big Mountain play shows in San Diego these days?
Probably twice a year. We usually play at the Music Box, so this is going to be my first show at the Holding Company. It’ll be nice to be back in our old stomping grounds. Ocean Beach was the hangout if you were young and starting music — bumming around, couch surfing, trying to find your way through whatever you were going to become. Rent was generally cheap and you could always find a place to sleep or a room to rent.
Before Winston’s was called Winston’s, it was called McDick’s, and that was our first gig. I guess it was Rainbow Warriors. Before Big Mountain was Shiloh, and then before Shiloh was a band called Rainbow Warriors. Reggae was still very obscure, but we were dead-set on being a reggae band way before it was commercially viable. And then Winston’s ended up becoming associated with reggae. There were three bands — us, the Cardiff Reefers and Common Sense. We would all take turns there and that was how it got all started in the late ’80s.
2. After a fairly long hiatus starting around 2005, the band has become more active recently, with a full-length album in 2023 and several collaborative singles. What led to the break, and the return?
There was a time when I was going through some disillusionment with the music business and wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep it going. Around 2015 I decided that I had no choice, I wasn’t going to be able to switch careers and feed my family at the same time. I taught high school from 2005 till about 2013 in the Sweetwater Union High School District, mostly at Olympian High School in Chula Vista. And then I did a couple years teaching elementary school at King-Chavez in Barrio Logan. I was teaching multimedia for most of it, and then the last two years of elementary, I did actually teach music.
It kind of scared me straight, you know. Once you face a classroom full of kids, you’re not afraid of anything. It made me realize that what I didn’t like about the music industry was my own insecurities about success and songwriting and dealing with record companies and all that kind of stuff. It helped me figure it out and reassess how I was going to approach the music industry. I would have loved to be a teacher, but at that point I was too old to build up any tenure, and the compensation packages are tough.
3. When you released “Deportation Nation” with John D. Marquez in 2018, it was certainly timely, but it wasn’t a new subject for the band. The 1994 album “Unity,” which included “Baby, I Love Your Way,” also had the song “Border Town,” which addressed similar issues. Is that something you might revive in your current live sets?
I think the timing is right. Back then, there was a lot of activist energy going on, and reggae was in the middle of that. Reggae was sort of a musical component of that world, and revolution was was always on the tip of our tongues. We all were hoping we could be a part of it somehow. We were just commenting on our experience growing up and seeing people chased around by Border Patrol, but that ended up being sort of the crux of what the world would become.
We grew up in San Diego, so that was sort of, that was something that we knew well, that we felt we could inject into our music. We could honestly give a good account of what immigration meant to us growing up — seeing a barbed-wire fence turn into this military triple-fence with helicopters. We witnessed that as kids.
The music we loved growing up had very bold messaging. Whether it was the Wailers or Peter Tosh or Bob Marley or Black Uhuru, that’s just the way they sang. They were very straightforward. And Jamaican culture really gave us a backbone to not be afraid to express yourself and to not worry about the consequences.
4. Whether it was playing Jamaica’s Reggae Sunsplash in the 1990s, or performing everywhere from South America to East Asia, one of the legacies of Big Mountain’s music is that it took you all over the world. Is international travel still part of the band’s mission?
We still get enough work around the world throughout the course of the year to help. We always get called for some reggae festival somewhere. Last year we played the Hornbill Festival in northern India, and we played on the Mauritius Islands, which are in the middle of the Indian Ocean. We played in Vanuatu, which is in the middle of the Southern Pacific Ocean.
In the ’90s, we were touring everywhere, playing to 50,000 people in Japan and Brazil. We were the only American component. There were a lot of reggae bands from England, a lot of bands from Jamaica, of course, and then there was us. A lot of times we were closing the show and I had my heroes opening up for me, which was just the strangest thing to wrap my head around. I learned a lot about the world back in those days.
5. When you look back at a lifetime of playing music with Big Mountain, what do you think is central to the band’s legacy?
It doesn’t really make sense until we are onstage, and then I’m looking around me at these guys that I’ve played with for so many years. We all saw our kids grow up, we’re still together, and we’re still good friends. It’s special to share this with my brother James (Big Mountain’s longtime percussionist and secondary vocalist).
We’re proudest when we’re onstage making people feel comfortable and happy and united with multicultural love and family. That’s what you’ll see at the Holding Company. We’re a bunch of hippies who love to talk about how humans should love each other.
We’re blessed to have wonderful families and to be a part of a strong tradition of maintaining decency. It’s so important to us to be decent people and try to raise decent human beings and to encourage people to remember that it takes all of us to build this society. A certain amount of our attention and focus has to always be on that responsibility,
