‘Beyond Excited’: Lucky Boys Confusion — with their local frontman — to headline Skokie’s Backlot Bash

Growing up in a traditional Indian household, Kaustubh “Stubhy” Pandav recalls his father limited access to Western music. The first song he ever learned was the Super Bowl Shuffle after his mother snuck him the lyrics from the west-suburban Downers Grove Public Library.

So when Pandav was invited to a friend’s band practice in his senior year of high school, all he had to contribute were his poems, he said. No one had really paid attention to them before, but when he took to the mic, the others wanted to know who had written the lyrics he sang.

“There’s very few things I remember that distinctly but feeling like, ‘He hates it? They don’t like it?’” Pandav said about first singing his poems. “And then it took a second like, ‘Oh, you think it’s good? That’s the way you’re saying this.’ Then I kept doing it.”

Pandav formed the punk rock band Lucky Boys Confusion a few years later in 1997 with Adam Krier, Jason Schultejann, Ryan Fergus and Joe Sell, and the band has been performing ever since. 

The group has put out nine records — with genre influences ranging from ska to hip-hop to punk — and gained a devout cult-following playing hits like “Fred Astaire” and “Hey Driver” while touring the country. The band regularly sells out shows at major venues like the House of Blues Chicago and are slated to release a brand new album next year. 

In 2020, Pandav relocated with his family to Skokie. This Saturday, Aug. 29, he will take to the stage once again when Lucky Boys Confusion headlines the village’s Backlot Bash. The band is scheduled to perform at 8:45 p.m. on Aug. 29 on the downtown street festival’s main stage.

“What to expect is a fun show, a lot of enthusiasm from the crowd, singing along,” Pandav said. “We’ll play ‘the hits.’ But these kinds of shows, half the spectacle of the show is watching the crowd. Like, I just stop singing and the whole crowd sings.” 

The Backlot Bash is Skokie’s flagship summer event, a three-day celebration Aug. 28-30 in downtown Skokie (Oakton Street between Lincoln and Laramie avenues) with live music (18 bands, two stages), a carnival with rides and games, a beer tent, 13 food vendors and more.

The Lucky Boys Get Together

After growing up on Bollywood musicals, Pandav recalled he started rebelling when he was 14.

While some teenagers form an identity around a music genre, he devoured anything he could listen to, tuning into every radio channel between WBBM 96.3 to Q101.1.

The first band Pandav joined, Farmboy, regularly drew audiences of a couple-hundred kids to shows at house parties in the west suburbs, he said. Likewise, so did a band Krier was in. So when each of their respective outfits split up, a mutual friend made an introduction. 

Pandav picked up his future collaborator in a van and the two wrote their first song together in minutes. While they were each the leads of their previous bands, they decided to swallow their pride and work as equals, knowing even then they’d learn from each other, Pandav said. 

Thus, Lucky Boys Confusion was born. The band sold out their first show in 1997, merging the band-leaders’ west-suburban audiences. But the group did not start touring outside the midwest until a few years later, when one of their songs “went number one” on the radio, he said.

Pandav was working in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange then and his boss, both a trader and apparent audiophile who learned of the band’s growing popularity, told Pandav he’d be fired if he came back to work — saying the stock market wouldn’t be going anywhere while he pursued his music. 

The band proceeded to play 200-250 shows a year, touring almost six years straight, Pandav said.  

‘Everything All Comes Out’

Unlike other bands, Pandav said Lucky Boys Confusion agreed they’d continue performing until fans eventually stopped showing up. As in, “instead of burning out, let’s fade away,” he said.

Pandav and Krier stopped writing new music and announced in 2006 that, outside of occasional shows, Lucky Boys Confusion was going on a hiatus. Their supposed last album, consisting primarily of unreleased songs, was released in 2009 with an appropriate title: “Closing Arguments.”

Then tragedy struck in 2012 when Sell, one of the band’s guitarists, was found dead at age 33. 

While Pandav has always been fascinated with music, he described himself as “not really a musician-musician.” His emotions drive his song-writing, and that approach is exactly what led him to sit down one day and write a song about Sell he would go on to title “Stormchaser”.

“I’m very driven by feelings. I don’t write songs like normal people. I get upset. I grab my guitar, and the song is done,” Pandav said. “There’s no like, ‘I’m going to play this progression and I heard this’ — no, no. That’s not how it works with me. Everything all comes out in a piece.”

When Pandav played the song to Krier, the bandmate immediately recognized what the song was about, Pandav said. There wasn’t even a discussion, he said; the band agreed to get back together and independently record another album called “Stormchasers.” 

Twenty years after the band first got together, the Lucky Boys Confusion 2017 album debuted on the Billboard charts. Another decade later, the band has 10 songs recorded for yet another album slated to be released next year, Pandav said. 

A Local ‘Pebblestar’

If Pandav was expecting Lucky Boys Confusion’s popularity and its audiences to dwindle and disappear, releasing new music certainly has not helped.

But after becoming the father of two daughters and being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2018, Pandav said he’s become more selective in committing to anything other than 5-10 major performances a year. 

He is content to continue creating music without chasing top Billboard success or trying to write new songs aimed at relating to 20-year-olds, he said. 

Though that doesn’t mean he hasn’t remained busy. Pandav’s worked his way back into a job at a brokerage firm, written a novel slated to release later this year and he hosts MS Sucks: Singing For a Cure, which organizes events aimed at funding research for multiple sclerosis.

“I just got lucky. My diagnosis is really bad, like where my lesions are. But exercise works for my body for some reason. I should be in a wheelchair so I take that — it’s here all the time,” Pandav said, pointing to his temple. 

Just as it’s not outwardly apparent that he suffers from multiple sclerosis, Pandav said it’s not always obvious to new people he meets that he’s the lead of a three-decades-running rock band. That’s why, in part, he likes to refer to himself as a “pebblestar” instead of a “rockstar.”

Jim Bottorf, the Skokie Park District’s head of communications, said in an email that the Lucky Boys Confusion was “high” on the Backlot Bash planning committee’s list last year and so the district “jumped at booking them” when the band was available this summer.

For Pandav, he’s looking forward to playing on Saturday for an audience that will be populated both by old fans “singing every word” and Skokie residents who’ve never heard of Lucky Boys Confusion. 

He also said he’s looking forward to friends he’s made at the local library, coffee shops and bars to witness what kind of music and what kind of a band he’s been involved with nearly all his life. 

“I’m beyond excited more after the show when I’m going to all my Skokie haunts, and they’ll be like, ‘I know you said you were in a band but you didn’t say it was like this!’” he said.

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