Boulder, 1979: (left to right) Todd McKinney, Zeke Zirngiebel, Bob Harris, Stan Bush, Mithran Cabin, Marty Stinger. Permission of Gary Heery.
GO YOUR OWN WAY
“Too Many Colors” » Aleka’s Attic
“The Touch,” “Dare” » Stan Bush
“Valley Girl”» Frank Zappa
“All for You” » Sister Hazel
“Mighty K.C.”» For Squirrels
“Thrash Unreal,” “Black Me Out”» Against Me!
“Gainesville Rock City,” “The Science of Selling Yourself Short” » Less Than Jake
“Drag My Body” » Hot Water Music
The oft-quoted line from Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself”—“I am large / I contain multitudes”—could just as easily apply to the world of music and the variety of occupations inherent in the music business. The focus of this book has been musicians in bands, but among these musicians are those who branched off from or completely out of musical performance or band membership, yet retained a fierce interest in music. From the mid-sixties to the present day, the journeys of the following Gainesville musicians, bands, and music entrepreneurs are examples of creative people finding their own path through the challenges and triumphs of the music business.
THE TOUCH
Stan Bush’s musical journey is one such story. Born in 1953 in Orlando, Stan moved to Gainesville when he was twelve and by his early teens was playing in cover bands, including Hobart, the Third Degree, Frosted Glass, and Mr. Moose, who were “kind of a Top Forty band. I think we learned every song off the first Allman Brothers album,” the singer recalls. “We played Trader Tom’s, fraternity parties, the usual stuff around town. After that I started doing nightclub stuff with Mark Pinske in a band called Squash. We began to play all around the South—the Carolinas, Alabama, Georgia—and then changed the name to Riff; the original band Riff had broken up, and we just grabbed the name. That was how I cut my teeth, playing clubs for years. That’s how you get good, by playing all the time.”
By the mid-seventies a band named Helix had formed in Boulder, Colorado, whose lineup included Gainesville musicians Marty Stinger, Bob Harris, and Mark Pinske, who invited Bush to join the group on guitar and vocals. Pinske left, and Todd McKinney and Mithran Cabin joined, both musicians who had spent time in Gainesville. “We got signed to Elektra and changed the name to Boulder in 1979. I was in Colorado two and a half years.”
Bush recalls, “We did one album for Elektra, and it went plywood. The other guys in the band went on the road with Warren Zevon as his backup band. The manager had a friend who was a mastering engineer and got me into recording at Elektra Records studios nights and weekends, and that’s what got me a deal for my first solo album in 1983 with CBS Records. I got dropped after one album and a couple years later signed to Scotti Brothers and did an album for them. They were kind of shady characters; I guess their father was a longshoreman, and these were tough guys, sort of semi-Mafia kind of people.”
Sometimes all it takes for a measure of success is the synergy of talent and a lucky break. “Then Lennie Macaluso and I cowrote a song called ‘The Touch,’ and it was in Transformers: The Movie, and it wasn’t a huge hit, but all these people that grew up watching that cartoon movie are now forty, and they loved that song. Since then ‘The Touch’ has been my staple song. It was in Guitar Hero, in Boogie Nights with Mark Wahlberg, Chuck on NBC, American Dad on Fox, the Transformers game, Transformers toys. I had a deal with Hasbro; I’d go to the Transformers conventions and hang out and sell CDs and perform sometimes. When the movie was released, we did a concert at Paramount Studios. ‘The Touch’ was supposed to be in the first film, but at the last minute it was pulled.”
Boulder, 1979: (left to right) Todd McKinney, Zeke Zirngiebel, Bob Harris, Stan Bush, Mithran Cabin, Marty Stinger. Permission of Gary Heery.
Then along came movie soundtracks. “I sang in Jean-Claude Van Damme’s first two movies, three songs in each of those. It’s funny, because this ‘action genre’ became my thing; every album has a couple ‘go for it / believe in yourself’ type songs. It is true: you can do amazing stuff when you put your mind to it.”
This philosophy seemed to work, as Stan began providing vocal talent for national television commercials. “I started doing jingles, the voice for Toyota trucks and Coors beers. I was one of maybe six guys that had the big rock voice thing, so I was one of the main guys doing that back in ’89 and ’90. The 1989 Super Bowl I had six national commercials airing, three were Toyota and three were Coors beer; I did the voiceover for that, and so I got paid double. I really had a good run with stuff.”
Bush then returned to the world of rock and roll. “Scotti Brothers licensed a 1987 album of mine called Stan Bush and Barrage that included ‘The Touch,’ and their affiliate label in Germany got behind it on their own, and it went to the wall. I had a photographer come to my house in Van Nuys with my little toddlers, and they put me in magazines with a three- or four-page spread like I was Bon Jovi or something! It was crazy.”
And so Stan Bush began to record albums and release them in Germany. “I would write songs with Jim Vallance or Jonathan Cain, and I’d have these master recordings, and I’d have enough to make an album. I’d get twenty-five thousand dollars from some German label for a record. I kept on doing it; they’d bring me over, and I’d perform.
“But it’s not really a living, and I went through this period in the late nineties where I thought I’d just totally had it.”
Then Bush found another way to make a living with sound. “After that I fell into audio books, books on tape. I’ve probably read a thousand books in the last ten years. I edit the recordings. They bring in narrators, actors, and then give it to me on a hard drive with mistakes and all, and I just take out the retakes and so forth and make it seamless and put it in CD format. It’s the coolest job in the world because I love reading, and I have a Pro Tools setup at home.”
As the Fixx observed in their eighties hit, one thing leads to another.
TAKIN’ CARE OF BUSINESS
Sister Hazel is a Gainesville rock band named in honor of Gainesville community activist Sister Hazel K. Campbell, who opened a rescue mission and thirty-five-cents-a-meal diner in the mid-seventies. From the very start the band built a self-sustaining career through a vertically integrated business structure that allowed them to leverage the success of their hit single.
With a group sound alternately described as punchy country-rock, blues pop, and rootsy alternative rock, Sister Hazel played extensively throughout the Southeast, eventually leading to a national hit single with “All for You” that brought their debut album, Somewhere More Familiar, into the Top Fifty. They gradually and methodically built their huge fan base (known collectively as Hazelnuts), and the intense interaction between band and audience was duly noted early on by the marketing director for Universal Records: “When I first went down to Gainesville and saw Sister Hazel play, there were two thousand people there and the band just stopped [playing] while the audience sang the lyrics [to “All for You”]. Fans relate to the lyrics through a lot of times in their lives. It’s hard to find a song that strikes you like that these days.”
Guitarist and vocalist Drew Copeland is a true Gainesville native—his grandfather was one of the founders of Copeland Sausage, a well-known local brand, and his father owned the Huggins-Copeland Funeral Home. Copeland recounts how Sister Hazel formed: “Ken Block moved up from Miami when he was six weeks old, and he and I are the two original Gainesville residents of the band. Dub’s was happening back then in the early eighties, and Ken played in a bunch of cover bands there like Redline and Scorcher.”
The two did not hook up musically until 1991, when “we were tailgating with some friends at a Florida-Tennessee game. Ken picked up a guitar and started playing ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling,’ and I started singing harmonies with him, and everybody around us was very socially lubricated, but, you know, they say, ‘Hey, you guys are great!’ so I started doing that right when I finished school at Florida.”
There were plenty of local venues for the duo to play around town. “There was a period where it was just me and Ken playing acoustically around Gainesville five nights a week, from Napolitano’s to Cafe Calypso to what is now called the Swamp on University Avenue, at the Denny’s downtown, and at Rickenbackers.”
With the addition of three more members, Sister Hazel began touring as a five-piece band throughout the region with a simple strategy in mind. “When the band formed and we began playing out of town, we did those concentric circles thing where we would hit venues multiple times, and we went from having a few people show up to having a few hundred. We made those circles a bit bigger every time we went out. The first rounds were Gainesville, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, Orlando, Tampa, and then we made it a little broader, to Athens and Columbia, and Atlanta, sometimes into Mississippi, and kept building that following until we kind of earned the Southeast. It was spreading quick about us—I say it’s quick, but it was really ’93 to ’96, three years we kind of beat the pavement that way.”
The band released two albums on their own Croakin’ Poets label before being picked up by Universal Records, who rereleased the second album soon after learning the band had sold out their own initial pressing of thirty thousand records.
One song in particular was receiving massive response at live shows. “All for You” was written for a competition for placement on a compilation album. “The guy called and said, ‘You’ve got till tomorrow to get it done,’ so Ken got two cassette players and recorded the basics for ‘All for You’ in his apartment, got the song on the record, and then we rerecorded it as a band on a sixteen-track at Mirror Image in Gainesville, and a couple years later when it got picked up by Universal, we went in and tweaked it in the studio up in Memphis.”
“All for You” was released in June of 1997 and rose to number eleven in the Billboard Hot One Hundred and number one in Billboard’s Adult Top Forty chart. The album sold more than a million and received a platinum award. Sister Hazel had arrived nationally.
The band is a self-contained business, as are several Gainesville bands that have learned to go their own way through controlling every aspect of the creative and business sides of music. Having released many albums on their own label since being dropped by Universal in 2003, the group’s internet presence and website includes merchandise featuring the band name on T-shirts and caps and even on such items as license plate frames, barbecue grill accessories, and Christmas ornaments. Then there is the Rock Boat, Sister Hazel’s annual “floating music festival” co-organized by a travel firm specializing in themed cruises, where bands and fans gather on a chartered cruise ship and enjoy a five-day musical party in the sun. “This year will be the fifteenth year we’ve done the Rock Boat. The last couple of years we’ve gone to a private island and one other stop, a cruise with twenty-five or thirty bands, and we plan the music for the entire four nights. Ken and I will do about six shows during that time. He and I both put out solo records, and we’ll do solo sets, and then a Ken and Andrew acoustic set and then Sister Hazel.” The group has released a dozen albums, and they continue to record, participate in the Rock Boat cruise every summer, and tour throughout the Southeast and overseas.
PLANET OF MY DREAMS
Sometimes opportunity knocks through the side door. After arriving in Gainesville in the early seventies from Arlington, Minnesota, musician Mark Pinske was a member at various times of Homer, Bouquet, Frosted Glass, Hogtown Creek, and other local bands, easily finding work as a bassist in a town filled with guitarists. After graduating from the University of Florida with a degree in electrical engineering, and with a job offer in Los Angeles, Pinske moved there to work for a company that manufactured professional audio-mixing consoles.
In 1980 Mark auditioned as Frank Zappa’s audio engineer and thus began his seven-year relationship with the iconoclastic composer and musician. Pinske eventually recorded more than twenty Frank Zappa albums and mixed the live sound and recordings on his concert tours.
Mark remembers the audition. “He auditioned each engineer for about one day in the studio, and then you’d go down to a sound stage. The band was rehearsing for a tour and the sound system was all brand-new Midas mixing consoles, and he had a guy kind of mess them all up and say, ‘OK, make it sound good.’ Zappa had me put the mix on a cassette while we were doing it. He was going to take the tape in the studio and listen and get back to me in about two weeks.”
After two weeks had gone by with no word from Frank, Mark was at work as usual. “The phone rings and he says, ‘You ready to go?’ He didn’t say who he was, he just said, ‘Are you ready to go?’ So I accepted the gig.”
Among the twenty Pinske-engineered Frank Zappa albums is Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch, a 1982 release that included “Valley Girl,” featuring Zappa’s daughter Moon Unit reciting a comedic monologue in “Valleyspeak,” a social dialect born in the San Fernando Valley. The song reached number thirty-two on the charts and was Zappa’s only Top Forty single in the United States.
Mark Pinske continued to engineer studio sessions and mix live sound with a variety of artists, including B. B. King, Ray Charles, Weather Report, Bobby Brown, David Lee Roth, and Men at Work and is currently head of sales and marketing at an audio engineering and manufacturing company in Orange, California.
AUDIO INNOVATOR
Music at its most basic level is sound, and creative control of sound became the path for another local musician. Doran Oster moved to Gainesville during the mid-sixties to pursue an electrical engineering degree at the University of Florida and upon graduation in 1971 opened Sabine Strings, a guitar repair and flute manufacturing shop, eventually adding accessories and guitars to the inventory until the store became the largest music and instrument retailer in north central Florida.
Oster was a well-known musical presence around town as a banjo player and singer. In addition to his solo performances, Doran played flute as a member of the 34th Street Laundromat String Band, a group of musicians who in 1973 routinely met at a Gainesville coin laundry to perform Appalachian and old-time folk tunes as their clothes were washed.
Oster combined a strong musical background with his knowledge of industrial design and electrical engineering to create Sabine, Inc., a musical products design and manufacturing company with a large facility in nearby Alachua. Sabine’s first electronic product was the MT-4001 compact metronome, followed by the ST-1000 digital tuner in 1987, which quickly became the best-selling chromatic tuner in the United States. A few years later Sabine introduced the FBX, the first automatic feedback controller. The company continued to expand and release new audio products.
Oster had found a highly successful career path through his interest and skill in both music and audio engineering and eventually sold Sabine to a large company that, in the words of corporate newspeak, “provides voice and visual communication solutions to the world.” Another Gainesville musician had found success on his own terms.
GAINESVILLE ROCK CITY
For a few years in the nineties a Gainesville music organization named GAMA gave birth to a series of local music festivals that brought hundreds of musicians and thousands of music fans together at an outdoor concert setting just north of town.
It all began with an idea from college student Codi Lazar, whose interest in music reached beyond his role as drummer in the group Loose Fragments. His look back at the Gainesville scene of the early nineties illustrates the perennial power of nostalgia and the “good old days.” What GAMA achieved in the early nineties is strikingly similar to the work of the Rose Community promoters Nearon, Goldstein, and Ramirez in the early through the mid-seventies: get bands out of the clubs and onto a concert stage in a concert setting.
“I was in a band in Gainesville in 1992,” Lazar recalls, “and it was really an amazing town for music at that time. Those of us who were there talk really wistfully about what it was like then. You would go around the student ghetto—you just get on your bike and go listen to the band, keg parties with bands, outside, all over town. It felt like everyone was in a band. It was such an extremely vibrant town for music.”
In the spring of 1993, Lazar was invited to play drums backing blues artists at the Florida Folk Festival, and he found both the festival and his involvement equally inspiring. “What I had thought was just another music festival by the Suwannee River turned out to be more of an annual convention and networking event for independent folk musicians of Florida. I thought, if it worked for the folk scene, why not for the indie rock crowd?” Lazar consulted with two promoters of previous festivals, Joe Nicholson and Bill Hutchinson, and attended a Special Events Planning Public Panel Discussion at the Thomas Center. “I wanted the festival to be big and substantial, and the pitch was to do a nonprofit festival where the bands were going to play for free, a ‘Yay Gainesville!’ festival highlighting the great Gainesville music scene, all about the bands—tell them, ‘You’re not getting paid, but we’re not getting paid either,’ all nonprofit—that was the big pitch.” His partnership with roommate and fellow musician Marshall Lowe led to “a friend that lent us some money; his parents lent us some; we did some fundraisers, a few nights around town where bands would play for free.”
Gainesville native Geoffrey May, drummer in Jam Sandwich and a friend of Marshall, became involved, and together they began choosing the final lineup of two dozen bands for the two-day event. “We tried to have this objective committee; it ended up being me and Marshall and Geoffrey, and acts brought their demo tapes, such as Whore Culture, the Tone Unknown, Big White Undies, some of the bigger bands. Also we expanded; some of the other bands selected were from northern Florida—Woodenhorse from Pensacola, Common Threat from Jacksonville, one from Daytona, one from Ocala.” Lazar and Marshall then formed the Gainesville Alternative Music Alliance (GAMA), an organization whose sole purpose was to promote independent and alternative music of Gainesville and North Florida.
After more than a year of planning, the first Alachua Music Harvest took place at the Alachua County Fairgrounds January 15–16, 1994, with five thousand in attendance. The event continued in that venue through 1999. Geoffrey May recalls the process of putting on the first show: “We rented a stage setup from Canada. They drove the semi down; we set it up. January 1994, Big White Undies, Green, Soma, Sister Hazel, Less Than Jake. Did that for two years. By the third year, we said, ‘Hey, we want to get people to notice it; let’s bring in a national act,’ even though it kind of went against what we were saying, but we convinced ourselves if we brought in a national act, more people would come to the show and see the local bands. So we brought in Gov’t Mule, and Widespread Panic. We went on to do it several consecutive years, growing it to five stages, presenting Herbie Hancock, George Clinton, Blink 182, Matchbox Twenty.”
After the first festival Lazar bowed out of future involvement: “I told Marshall just to take it over; he was the director of GAMA. He continued, and it became a three-day festival, and twenty thousand people showed up, and it became a really big deal. People would drive some distance to go to it; there were three stages; there were some headlining acts to bring people in, but it still maintained its focus on promoting local bands.” Marshall and the GAMA crew continued on for several years, growing the production into a full-time business. The festival grew to exceed twenty to thirty thousand in attendance and added many national acts such as James Brown, P-Funk, They Might Be Giants, Ben Harper, Widespread Panic, and others and continued through 1999.
Lazar is now an assistant professor of geology at California State University in San Bernardino, but in the early nineties he, Marshall Lowe, and Geoffrey May were three young Gainesville musicians with a desire to support the music scene in a creative manner. Lazar reflects on the experience and on the city where it happened: “Gainesville’s story deserves to be told. It’s a remarkable place. I don’t think Gainesville will ever be an Austin or an Athens, but I think that’s kind of part of its charm. At the end of the day, if you’re a good band, it doesn’t matter where you come from.”
Two Gainesville music venues that presented many of the local bands who played the Alachua Music Harvest are worthy of a history beyond the scope of this book: the Hardback Cafe (232 SE 1st St.) and Common Grounds, later the Covered Dish and currently High Dive, co-owned by musician and entrepreneur Moe Rodriguez. Lazar describes the city and the ending of one phase of its apparently continuous music scene: “Gainesville was awesome because of all the house parties, and at Moe Rodriguez’s block party the cops came because people rioted, and that’s the moment that the Gainesville Police Department started cracking down on all the house parties. In 1998 they instigated a 2 a.m. curfew. That’s when the authorities were kicking the parties away.”
Pinske with Frank Zappa, Oster with Sabine Music, and Lazar, Lowe, and May with the GAMA and the Alachua Music Harvest are all examples of music lovers finding their own way in the world of music. Another example is a young, talented movie actor who, after starting a band in the Gainesville area, pursued an alternate career as a musician up to the last days of his brief life.
ALEKA’S ATTIC
Micanopy is a small town located ten miles south of Gainesville with a population of six hundred. Its history dates back to the early 1800s as the first white settlement in Alachua County and the oldest inland town in Florida, and the main thoroughfare was originally the path of an old Indian trading trail. With streets and dirt lanes shaded with Spanish-moss-draped live oak trees, Micanopy is a classic example of a sleepy southern town. Artists, hippie types, and musicians began to discover the place in the late sixties, attracted by the isolation, cheap rents, and natural beauty of a small town that time seemed to have forgotten. In the early seventies a commercial building on Main Street was converted to an art gallery and artist studios, and the band RGF rehearsed there for a while. Hippies found the landscape and outlying areas suitable for growing crops of varying legal status, including marijuana, and a potent variety known as Micanopy Madness was a clear indication of the town’s growing reputation. Micanopy soon became a sort of annex of the Gainesville hippie counterculture.
River Phoenix had already completed his sixth feature film in 1987, when he purchased a farm property in Micanopy for his parents and siblings, and between film shoots Phoenix often stayed in the area to visit and play and record original music. A musician and a performer since childhood, River and his siblings—Summer, Leaf (Joaquin), and Rain—had played music in earlier years on the streets of Guatemala to earn money; the Phoenix clan was there through the parents’ role as local missionaries for the Children of God, a religious cult the family eventually became disillusioned with and left.
In Gainesville, Phoenix formed the group Aleka’s Attic with sister Rain along with bassist Josh McKay and drummer Josh Greenbaum. Aleka’s Attic performed for several years around Gainesville in cafes and other intimate venues, including the Acrosstown Repertory Theater in the old Baird Hardware location at SE 6th Avenue and Main Street.
During a movie shoot Phoenix met Chris Blackwell, head of Island Records, who offered the actor a two-year music development deal that led to recording sessions at Gainesville’s Mirror Image Studio by engineer Mark Pinske, who recalled: “I recorded River for three and a half years. All of the master tapes never got released. There was a lot of session work and some moments with him singing and playing in the vocal booth that were filmed in home video cameras that would really move you. It was his escape from his always hard-working film life.”
A busy movie schedule interfered with the recording sessions, and Island Records passed on their option to renew the deal. Aleka’s Attic continued to record tracks for a future self-release, which never occurred, because of the untimely death of the twenty-three-year-old actor in Los Angeles on October 31, 1993. R.E.M. bought the rights to Aleka’s Attic’s recordings from Island Records in 1997, so the band’s material may still be released. Ask Michael Stipe.
WHO ARE YOU?
Perhaps the ultimate example in this book of a musician going his or her own way is the story of the punk band Against Me! and the transgender journey of Laura Jane Grace, the group’s leader and singer.
Born as Tom Gabel in Fort Benning, Georgia, the son of an army major, she—not a misprint; let the narrative unfold—grew up in various locations including Texas, Ohio, and Italy. Her parents divorced when she was eleven, and Gabel moved with her mother to Naples, Florida.
A fan of punk music and culture, Gabel was arrested at fourteen and in the process was assaulted by a group of Naples policemen; the experience had a profound effect on the young teen’s feelings toward authority and helped mold the attitude of the self-proclaimed anarchist punk musician who left high school at seventeen and moved to Gainesville in 1998. As Grace observed in a recent interview, Naples wasn’t a friendly place for youth. “If you’re living in Florida,” she said in an earlier interview, “and you’re eighteen and just moved out of your mom’s house, Gainesville’s the place to go.”
Gabel released the cassette recording Vivida Vis! in 1998, followed by 7 Song Cassette two years later. By 2000 Gabel had persuaded guitarist and fellow punk-rocker James Bowman to relocate from Naples, and along with drummer Warren Oakes and bassist Dustin Fritkin, the four musicians formed Against Me! Two years later the band’s first album, Against Me! Is Reinventing Axl Rose, was released on Gainesville’s No Idea Records. After releasing two more independent-label albums, the group signed to Sire Records. The 2007 album New Wave, produced by Butch Vig, was their best-selling album to date, voted Spin magazine’s album of the year, and listed at number nine in Rolling Stone’s Top Fifty albums of the year. The record’s single “Thrash Unreal” reached number eleven on a Billboard singles chart. After Tom Gabel moved to St. Augustine with a wife and child in 2010, the band released White Crosses with new drummer George Rebelo, on loan from Hot Water Music, another Gainesville band. The album was their highest charting yet at number thirty-seven.
In 2011, Grace, still identifying herself as Tom Gabel, purchased an abandoned post office building in Elkton, Florida, converting it to a recording studio where she began work on what was to become the 2013 record Transgender Dysphoria Blues, in reference to the 2012 gender reassignment of Tom Gabel into Laura Jane Grace, who had struggled with dysphoria her whole life and is now performing under that name, as a woman. She, along with the band, is going her own way.
Another example of Gainesville’s consistent appeal to those involved in alternative musical styles is the longtime presence of the band Less Than Jake. Drummer Vinnie Fiorello at sixteen years of age moved from New Jersey to Port Charlotte, a city three hours south of Gainesville, where he met guitarist and singer Chris DeMakes when they both attended the same high school during their senior year. In 1991 DeMakes moved to Gainesville and enrolled in the university. Fiorello made the move a few months later to enroll, but he had already checked out the city. “I had come up to Gainesville in 1988 with a friend to visit his older brother who was going to college, and I was eighteen and kind of blown away by it—a lot of music stores and a lot of good vibe, a lot of bands—but what I reflect back on is, Gainesville was a kind of island. It was secluded from a lot of other influences, prior to the Internet and a lot of other things. So what you had was a really fertile ground of creativity, which most universities have, but Gainesville was located in a secluded part of Florida, far from the beach and Disneyland and any big city.”
The two found a bassist to form a trio and eventually added saxophone and trombone to create Less Than Jake, a band with the horndriven rhythmic drive of a traditional Jamaican ska lineup in combination with the fast tempo and distorted guitar sounds of punk bands to create a unique ska-punk hybrid. The band name was inspired by Fiorello’s dog Jake, who was treated better than the rest of the household, so everyone in the family was considered “less than Jake.”
By mixing super-fast punk rock and ska music, the group created a singular style, “a kind of crazy frontier we were pushing into that hadn’t been experimented with before. Gainesville being the place it is, it let us be able to do that experiment in music, but on account of how small it is, Gainesville held us back as well.”
The question arises as to how Gainesville, Florida, bred a ska-punk band, two styles of music not generally associated with the Deep South, but the source of Less Than Jake’s musical influences is the same as what inspired so many Gainesville teens back in the mid-sixties—England. “You ask how ska came to Gainesville? There is an obvious connection, which is English music. England adopted ska music, but also punk rockers embraced that vibe and put that twist and edge onto it. There was a Third Wave of ska like the Specials and English Beat or early Elvis Costello influences and of course the Clash. In the UK it was embraced by a lot of working class, and the Third Wave came and was edgier and darker. It took the upbeats and added a little distortion guitar to it and sped it up a little bit, and the thematic behind the music, instead of “My Boy Lollipop” [Millie Small, 1964] was “Ghost Town” [the Specials, 1981].”
So Gainesville had its own ska-punk band, a result of the natural migration of musical styles from one part of the world to the other. The band began releasing their own records, first a single, followed by an extended-play single as they built a strong local following. Less Than Jake released their first full-length album, Pezcore, in 1995, then signed to Capitol Records and released 1996’s Losing Streak. Meanwhile Fiorello had formed a record label, Fueled by Ramen, now based in New York and releasing records by punk-inspired rock bands through a distribution deal with Warner Records, along with another record label, Paper + Plastick, selling books, records, and fashion accessories.
After their second Capitol release, 1998’s Hello Rockview, the record label and the band parted ways, and Less Than Jake’s next album, Borders and Boundaries, was released on indie label Fat Wreck Chords. It was 2003’s Anthem, distributed by Warner Brothers and Sire Records, that led to the band’s mainstream success, with a single in the Top Forty and extensive live performances on three tours.
The geographic isolation of Gainesville undoubtedly contributed to the band’s self-reliant approach. “We started making our own T-shirts, pressing our own records, booking our own shows. Now, twenty-two years later, it’s just an extension of all those lessons we were taught. So it makes sense if you follow the timeline of how the band is that we should be doing those things we do. We handle our own web store; we do our own publicity; we’re heavily involved in the social media of our band; we record and market our own records.” The band records in Gainesville at the Moat House, a studio built in the bassist’s house on Depot Avenue, a few blocks from where Fiorello runs the band business from his office in the Baird Hardware Company Warehouse, built in 1890 and the site of many arts-related enterprises over the years.
Ultimately, what brought Fiorello to town was music. “What drew me to Gainesville: it had a fertile punk scene and a specific sound in the punk scene, kind of melodic but gruffy vocals. I liked some of the bands from Gainesville and the scene happening in the moment.” Less Than Jake is now part of that scene happening in the moment, and the Gainesville-based band has an active touring schedule that varies but usually includes “one main U.S. tour a year, one European tour every year, festival appearances in the UK and Europe, one-off tours and festivals in the U.S., and every two to three years go back to Australia or go to Japan.”
MORE
Many other musicians and music entrepreneurs have contributed to the collective musical output of Gainesville in ensuing years, and other bands rightfully scream out for inclusion. Although selective, this brief glance at the city’s music scene through the eighties and nineties provides evidence of Gainesville’s ever-present and agile musical culture, and these few examples are indicative of the city’s continuous relationship with popular music in its many forms.