This is a book about people and music. Specifically, it is about the music played in and around Gainesville, Florida, for roughly a dozen years, and about the people who played it, heard it, and supported it—musicians, students, fraternity members, music and record store owners and their customers, radio station DJs, club and bar owners, hippies, entrepreneurs, hucksters, hangers-on. These people include born-and-raised Gainesville residents, long-term residents, and the uncounted number of people who passed through town, arriving and leaving for reasons of their own—all inseparable from the music. From the early sixties to the mid-seventies, the music and the people combined to create a bustling music scene that thrived and sustained itself in a highly supportive environment. This book is the result of a desire to document events of forty years ago and longer, to show who was there, what they did, and when and where they did it.
Music is a constantly evolving art form, always born from the music that preceded it. The roots of Gainesville rock and roll were nourished by many musical sources, whether live or recorded—church music, folk music, African-American gospel and soul music, white gospel music, country music, blues, Top Forty hits, R&B. For a laid-back small southern town of the time, Gainesville was diverse in the extreme, bringing together people from differing cultures and varied backgrounds—intellectuals and rednecks, liberals and conservatives, racists and civil rights activists, farmers, businessmen, students, and hippies. This clash of cultural forces kept Gainesville vibrant and made for exciting and occasionally violent and chaotic times. Music was an integral part of this culture.
Chronologically this book documents the rise of the Gainesville rock band scene and the social and economic forces that helped bring forth such an abundance of musical activity. Archival research uncovered primary sources of information documenting the music groups and artists who performed in Gainesville from the early 1960s through 1976. Interviews with people who were on the scene as players or as part of the world that surrounded live music provide a personal viewpoint that helps bring to life events from a cultural period that took rock and roll and created rock music.
A welcome source of information was the collective memories of those who joined a Facebook group I created, Gainesville Rock History. This website page became a virtual community of fans and participants of the Gainesville music scene. The result has been the collective sharing of photos and ephemera such as concert advertisements, posters, and tickets, band business cards, radio station playlists, and abundant comments triggered by this sharing. Some of these postings have become part of this book.
At times there are moments in the narrative that could be considered autobiographical, as I describe my involvement or an observation at a particular time. The book is by no means a memoir, but not including my memories and involvement would decrease relevant content. My story will occasionally surface now and again, but in a way that I hope enhances rather than distracts.
This book is a history but also a love letter to Gainesville, as it was a place that encouraged and supported music, bringing plenty of wild rock and roll energy to what otherwise could have been just another small southern college town. Music made Gainesville a more interesting and exciting place to live. In retrospect, the amount of live music you could hear in Gainesville on any given week now seems remarkable: national, regional, and local bands and pop groups playing the university’s many venues, indoor and outdoor, day and night; regional and local bands playing clubs, bars, concerts, fraternity parties, lounges, after-hours bottle clubs, dances in the high school gym … it was all going on, and it was built around the twin joys of performing music and listening to the music being performed.
The music brought pleasure to those who played it; the music sold lots of beer for the bar and club owners; and the music brought pleasure to an audience that listened, drank, danced, cheered for the bands, and had themselves what southerners call a large time.
Without the popular songs of the moment, there would be no book and nothing to write about. For this reason selected songs trending at the particular time period of the narrative are listed at the beginning of each chapter. To enhance your reading experience, these songs should be revisited, as they inspired the musicians when they were new songs and brought people into the music venues to listen, dance, and keep the musicians working. Social media sites allow virtually all these songs to be heard free of charge on demand, a major change in the music business that cannot be undone.
Several Gainesville musicians have experienced tremendous success as songwriters and musical performers and are members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an honor that is based on more than simple longevity. This fact supports the theory of Gainesville’s providing a unique social and economic environment that consistently nurtured music in a way that produced not just one well-known rock music performer but rather several rock superstars over a span of years. Their stories are here.
No history is truly complete. The narrative that follows cannot be and is not the definitive history of the Gainesville music scene; it is a history of the formative years as understood through my eyes, with the intent of presenting the details of a musical culture that developed in the South and grew to be heard around the world. The stories of Gainesville’s rock and roll roots are an undeniable chapter in the history of American popular music. Other books can and should be written about this time and place. I hope this is one of many.