I'm sitting here getting ready to go see Wilco tonight at the university ballroom. I'm a little apprehensive, as anything in a university ballroom is likely to be a little too squeaky and bright.
It's got me thinking about the last times I saw something in a university ballroom. Outside at the university? I cought two songs of the Roots a couple of months ago. In a basketball arena? I saw the Flaming Lips in Fairfax on the Yoshimi tour. And I saw the Monkees at the O-Dome in Gainesville. The Reitz Union ballroom was the last time I've seen a show at a student union (until tonight, that is). And who did I see at the Reitz Union?
Debbie GIbson and the Violent Femmes
No! Not together!
I got dragged to see Debbie Gibson by the cute boy Dave from next door in Beatty Towers, the one who wasn't out yet, but we were all waiting and hoping would be able to be soon (except one of my roommates who was waiting and hoping for him to be straight so he could be hers). Debbie Gibson was still a kid, and she wasn't bad at all. Very much a showperson, and it doesn't surprise me at all that she ended up on Broadway. She even did a really lively version of Crocodile Rock, probably because someone on her team thought it would be cute to play a song about crocodiles for a bunch of Gators.
And I saw the Violent Femmes with a boy named Rusty, who was a fellow poli sci major. I was really fond of Rusty, which, reading that now, you must know means the kiss of death, and every boy-who-invites-a-girl-to-a-concert's least favorite words, along with "I really like you as a friend." I don't know what it was about Rusty. He was definitely hot. He was dark and brooding. He was an artist, but tortured, because he had to be in ROTC to pay for school, and they didn't let you major in stuff like art. And he had chosen the Marines (I remember he said that he did it for the challenge) so he was really fit. He was unerringly polite, and very sweet. He was very very smart. And I was totally clueless. We would study together. I went to his apartment complex to swim in the pool and study. We went to a show. But somehow, the day that he leaned over and kissed me, it was a total surprise. I wasn't repulsed or offended. I wasn't thrilled. I just... wasn't. And when he told me that on his summer vacation to Berlin he had spray-painted my name on the Berlin Wall, I felt like the biggest shithead ever.
My involvement with the regular music scene in Gainesville was more peripheral. It seemed like everyone I lived around was in a band. One of the guys on the hall was in a band called Bumble. It was bass led, and as I recall, there weren't really any vocals to speak of. His girlfriend Karin had a band called Touch and Go Bullethead. She was close with my roomie Jen, and they were all close friends with and hung out with the Mutley Chix at the Blue House downtown. The story was that Jen even met the members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers at an after party there, and ended up driving around Florida with them on part of their tour. There were bands with great names that totally didn't live up to them, like Aching Void (industrial... I think they were beating on pieces of metal or something... very arty, but not my thing so maybe they were good after all). Or dumb names that were still really fun and appropriate for the time, like the Trash Chute Arsonists (people who lived in Beatty and other dorms would send flaming pizza boxes down the trash chutes both to watch them go and to cause fire alarms in the middle of the night to make all the dorm dwellers head outside in their jammies). People used to go to MFP (My Friends Place) which was a gay bar, then an "alternative" scene, and ended up getting taken over by frat boys like everything else in Gainesville. We'd eat at Kesel's Coney Island down by the Hippodrome. People went dancing at the Vatican, the protoGoths calling themselves Progressives, back in the day when there was still a lot of earnest distinction about the difference between kinds of skinheads (racist and not) by the color of their bootlaces. Jen would come hom covered in bruises from slam-dancing, and then stay up to paint on acid. I remember walking around the neighborhood behind the Krystal burger (where Brother Jed supposedly converted the future Sister Cindy to Jesus and a path to being proud of being her husband's servant) with Jen when she didn't want to be alone eating maybe too many mushrooms.
Again, I was totally clueless. I'll never forget Karin saying to me "you're pretty cool for a preppie." I didn't even know I was a preppie. Fuck, I didn't know that there was such a thing as a preppie. I was just a kid from the south Florida suburbs.
So, yeah, I was a preppie.
And once, just once, I tried my hand at charity concert promoting. I was getting into the Latin American student activism thing, and protesting apartheid, and trying to save the world from Gainesville. There were Mayan refugees in Florida, near Indiantown, who had moved their whole town from Guatemala to escape the genocide. One of my professors worked with their community, and I had been to the Yucatan part of Mexico near Chiapas and Guatemala. Needless to say, I was very earnest. And so I'm not sure how it happened, but I volunteered or was volunteered to organize this benefit concert, that would start with Mayan marimba players, and end with local bands.
Have I said, I was totally clueless?
It was at the Hogsbreath Saloon on 13th Street. I never thought to see if any of the bands had their own amps, and the Hogsbreath pretty much extorted money from the charity concert to cover rental of their built in equipment. I ran the door and checked ID. The folks from Guatemala came early, and left quickly, as did the professors. The only band I remember for sure playing was Touch and Go Bullethead, with Karin. In the fog I remember some guy named Rusty who had blond dreads. I'm pretty he played in both Bumble and TaGB, but I wouldn't swear. I think we were there for hours, and made like three hundred bucks. But we felt really noble. And my poor older sister came over from Tampa and sat through some of it like a good sibling, until she went home to my little apartment with the tiny Guatemalan ladies who had come up for the event and were staying there for the night.
And in thinking of all this, I went seaching for an old website called the Gainesville Bands Family Tree, that listed all those bands, and people, and their connections. There was even a movie that included the Gainesville punk scene. It looks like, in the last year, that the family tree has faded away. But while searching for it I found Snarkland, which is mostly not about the Gainesville music scene, but had a thread which turned into old home week of Gainesille bands. Some of them I had seen, some that I had heard, some I wished I had seen, and of course, Aleka's Attic which was famous mostly because it had River Phoenix in it. The list had the Smegmas, which were one of the most well-known in the area at the time, Less Than Jake, which is one of the best known over all, and the Psychic Violents, who my roomie Jen talked about all the time. The thread even had a dust up with a guy using the name Rusty, who I have to assume was the white kid with the blond dreads.
There was no mention of Cindy Brady's Lisp, but hey, who ever said the internets had to indulge my nostalgia?
Posted by binky at October 18, 2006 07:51 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Music | Random Thoughts