There was a good chance Big Mountain’s rasta version of Peter Frampton’s “Baby, I Love Your Way” would be on the radio anytime you turned it on throughout a whole phase of the ’90s. The tune was a Top 10 single in 1994, reached No. 6 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and owned the No. 2 slot in the U.K. for the entire year. “Baby I Love Your Way” helped the San Diego reggae band sell over a million copies of its album Unity and was also included on the popular Reality Bites movie soundtrack.
Big Mountain unsuccessfully tried to match that success for the next seven years, until frontman Joaquin “Quino” McWhinney said, “Enough for now.”
“Big Mountain took its course and I needed a change,” he says today. “Bands involve a lot of people and you want to keep everyone working – you find yourself running around searching for gigs. The touring life can leave you in a state of needing something else.”
For McWhinney, that was education. After finishing his degree, he took a position as the director of a media department that included a state-of-the-art recording studio at a San Diego high school near the Mexico border.
“It was nice to get a regular paycheck and not be focused on the pressure of keeping a band together,” he says. “I learned a lot about life and the real world.”
The break benefited the band too.
“I came back to music in a good headspace,” he says.
With Big Mountain’s first new record in 14 years, Perfect Summer, there isn’t the pressure there was in the past since it was released independently without any expectations. Except for a reggae twist, the group’s latest single, a cover of The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun,” isn’t much different than the Fab Four’s original version, but the video is closing in on 100,000 views on YouTube.
“You get to a certain point in life and you stop sweating the small shit,” McWhinney says. “You start seeing the fragility of life and you start putting your priorities in order.”
BIG MOUNTAIN 9pm Saturday, July 2. Doors open 8pm. Fox Theater, 241 S. Main St., Salinas. $20. 758-8459, www.foxtheatersalinas.com
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