A young man sits at a picnic table in a park, alone. He flashes back to his childhood, celebrating a birthday in the park with just his mother in attendance. He receives a present that the tag reads is from an absent father. It’s a stuffed animal of a penguin. Suddenly, on the shore of a pond, that penguin comes to life, becomes the boy’s best — and maybe only — companion.
The story in “Fall of the Mountain King,” the new video from local band Shame Penguin, is the story told in the lyrics. It’s “my very gracious middle finger to the social norm of the nuclear family,” said Dustin Sclafani, who fronts the band. “I grew up in a single-parent household. We were forced throughout elementary school to make Father’s Day cards, even though I’ve never known my father…. We are still in a society that pushes a nuclear family without understanding that there’s so many colors of crayon that make up a crayon box.”
Today Sclafani is a single parent himself, and those are his kids in the video. His oldest son, Cash, is the one in the penguin suit. “Three hours in a penguin onesie. He’s the true hero” of the video shoot, Sclafani said, which happened on a recent Saturday in Edgewood Park, where the family has taken to going nearly every Saturday during the pandemic. Younger brothers Milez and Joey are twins; Milez is the brother doing “father-son stuff” with Sclafani in the video, and Joey “plays the younger version of me.”
The video was shot by Rick DiMichele and he and Sclafani edited it with a certain emotional impact in mind. ““He and I, shot for shot, we said, ‘is this the shot that makes them cry? We don’t want anyone being able to get through this video without going through a half a box of Kleenex,’” Sclafani said.
The song and video are emotionally raw but in the end, redemptive, “the revolution of ‘this is my life,’” Sclafani said. It bares pain but also holds out hope, That’s all part of the overall mission of Shame Penguin — with Sclafani on vocals, Tristan Powell on guitar, Jon Ozaksut on bass, and Kenny Maraczi on drums — which begins with the band’s name.
“We embrace the cute, we embrace the silly, because it alllows us to get in touch with our feelings, and everyone can take a hard feeling when you do it with a smile,” Sclafani said. “Sometimes it’s painful and not pretty,” but it can be cathartic, even healing. “There is no toxic masculinity. It’s okay to feel, and it’s okay to feel bad. We’re here for you,” Sclafani said. “We are the spoonful of sugar and the methadone as well.”
Across The Sound
Sclafani grew up on Long Island and served in the Army until 2012. “In the military, I was one of the first classes to do mental training — sit with my thoughts and think about what my motivations were.” Sclafani said. “All of my answers were music-related.” He even had a song for target shooting. “I’ve never seen such a singular focus,” his evaluator told him.
His Army service was an intense experience. “It’s a constant family,” he said of the people he met during that time. “I will support them because we have bled together, whether in training or in other situations. You are bonded to them forever.”
He visited New Haven in September 2011, when he “came up here for a month,” visiting his sister who was then enrolled at SCSU. “I stumbled into Stella Blues for a Tuesday open mic, and I fell in love with the culture.” He met Mark Lyon — now guitarist in the neo-soul group Phat A$tronaut — and felt “his love for life and passion for music.” Lyon heard what Sclafani played and encouraged him to keep going. Hip hopper Mr. Council was playing pool in the back. Sclafani recalled him looking up when Sclafani entered the room.
“You were just singing up there, right?” Sclafani remembered him saying. “You killed it up there, man.”
He moved to New Haven with his kids in 2013 when he got out of the Army. “One of the joking conditions of my release,” he said, was his Army family telling him that “you’re going to do pushups” if he didn’t play music. He had two kids going into kindergarten. He started attending Elm City Vineyard Church, which operates out of First and Summerfield UMC Church on College and Elm. “Through them,” Sclafani said, he began to understand “the importance of community. In the military, you know the value of community because you rely on them to survive. But I never truly understood the importance of a community and friendships” in regular life. As a child, he said, “all my friends were on the radio. John Lennon raised me and Joe Cocker raised me and the Blues Brothers raised me…. I remember being 16 and standing on top of a rooftop and thinking life is pointless, and it was music and a melody that brought me back in. It was someone else’s pain that made me feel like I wasn’t alone.”
At Elm City Vineyard, he said, “that’s where the healing started. I was not my circumstances. I was not the hell I had been through.” He got his first job at Amity Wine and Spirits, stocking the shelves. (“I still have to have a Sea Hag at every show I play,” he said.) He became an open mic host. Worked for Ugli Radio, and for Edge of the Woods. And he put his roots down in New Haven deeper and deeper. As Preston Wilson, who he worked with at Ugli Radio, told him, “I might be Long Island born, but I’m Elm City made. I love this city on so many levels,” he said.
But meanwhile, there was his music. “I’d been an acoustic solo musician and failing miserably,” he said, describing himself as “not a very good guitar player.” But he was able to wear his heart on his sleeve. “I love fully going through an emotional breakdown every time I perform,” he said. He made an album of original songs that went nowhere. “I was pretty much going to be done-done with music altogether,” he said.
Then he signed up for 2018’s Rock Lottery.
Winning The Lottery
Shame Penguin owes its existence to the that year’s installment of the long-running event hosted by Bill Saunders and Nancy Shea, which has New Haven-area musicians put their names in a hat to randomly create bands, which then compete with each other to complete a set of musical challenges. The challenge of 2018 was to create a rock opera. The Chest Rockwells — fronted by Sclafani and with Ozaksut on drums — made it to the finals. So did Hector the Innocent, which had Powell on guitar. Neither band won. But some of their members gained something else.
Ozaksut and Sclafani “connected from the first moment we were in the rehearsal studio,” Sclafani said. “He and I would drive to practices together and I knew I wanted to create more with him.” And when Sclafani watched Hector the Innocent play, “I thought, ‘this is a guy I want to perform with,’” Dustin recalled, “because he gives every aspect of himself in the performance.”
Shortly after Rock Lottery, Sclafani sent Powell the EP he had made to see if Powell was interested in collaborating. “I really like your voice. The songs kind of suck,” Sclafani recalled Powell saying. “I said, ‘yeah, I know!’” But Powell was intrigued enough to get together. On their first meeting Sclafani and Powell wrote two songs. They decided the project, whatever it was, was worth pursuing. They enlisted Maraczi on drums. And though Ozaksut played drums in the Rock Lottery, his main instrument is actually bass. Ozaksut was in.
The four got together in March 2019. “There was such great energy in the room. The first time we started playing together,” Sclafani said, Ozaksut “started playing the bassline to ‘Fall of the Mountain King,’” and “we started putting songs together in a completely different way,” with all band members contributing their voices. “These guys are such incredible musicians and human beings. Even in our disagreements, there’s so much love and respect there,” Sclafani said.
Shame Penguin quickly wrote enough songs to start playing out, and their energy drew a crowd. The band played at Cafe Nine, the Cellar on Treadwell in Hamden, the Acoustic in Bridgeport, and got as far afield as Springfield, Mass. The band also got picked up by Horizon Music Group out of West Haven, helmed by industry vet Vic Steffens. The band was supposed to release an EP in the spring and was putting together a summer tour.
Sclafani now works at DaddyButter, a New Haven-based company with a line of skin and hair care products (“it has been an incredible experience”), and co-hosts “Behind the Brand” on WNHH with Preston Wilson (“Preston is one of my best friends. I trust him with my children.”) “Fall of the Mountain King” is a prelude to the full-length album coming up, slated for early 2021. “This album is done but we’ve already started writing the next one,” Sclafani said.
As the band looks toward the next year, Sclafani already finds himself feeling grateful for the city he has made his home. “Shame Penguin is 100 percent a love letter to New Haven. We formed through something that was a New Haven tradition. Everything we do, we try to pay tribute to New Haven.”
He sees tribute from New Haven back, and a sense that its citizens are taking care of each other, whether it was DiMichele showing his kids how the equipment worked during the video shoot, or the instructions given by a march organizer at a recent protest Sclafani took his kids to.
“if anything goes down, we got to take care of the kids,” Sclafani recalled the organizer saying. “Take care of all the kids — if that is not New Haven, I don’t know what is.”
And he wants to continue making his music deeply personal, emotionally raw, and honest. Comparing writing songs to lifting weights, he said, “I just lift until it hurts. It’s only when you sit down and face that pain that you can heal from it.”
He hopes that his music can do for someone else what his musical heroes did for him — “if it can make one person who’s having a bad day right now” have a good one, Sclafani said. He tries to bring that mission into his life generally. “Let’s have a conversation,” he said. “You are not alone and everyone is loved. We can disagree about everything and I’m going to love you for who you are.”
He stopped for a moment. “I’m focusing on being the change I’m looking for,” he said.
Watch Shame Penguin’s new video here. To check out some of the band’s live recordings, visit its Bandcamp page.
