A PLACE IN THE SUN
Florida, sir, is not worth buying. It is a land of swamps, of quagmires,
of alligators and mosquitoes! A man, sir, would not immigrate into Florida.
No, sir! No man would immigrate into Florida, no, not from hell itself!
Sen. John Randolph (1773–1883), debating the purchase of Florida from Spain in 1819
We have now traced the relationship between rock and roll and Gainesville, Florida, from the mid-fifties to the present day. So exactly how did this small American city manage to fly under the cultural radar while steadily encouraging the careers of such a large number of successful rock and pop musicians and songwriters? If we consider just two rock bands with Gainesville musicians, the Eagles and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the total of records sold is in the hundreds of millions. Add albums by Sister Hazel, the Motels, Stan Bush, Less Than Jake, Against Me!, and Hot Water Music, and the total is—well, even bigger, with every sign of more music to come.
TELL ME WHY
The rapid growth of the local music scene that began in Gainesville in the mid-sixties is directly traceable to the success of the Beatles, a yet-to-be-surpassed example of what a rock and roll band could be, a self-contained musical ensemble whose artistic interactions brought out the best talents of every member. The Beatles’ music certainly had an impact, but of equal importance to the specific songs was the attitude of artistic freedom and growth the band embodied. The Beatles showed us that you could write a song about practically anything—holding hands, taking LSD, a yellow submarine, being tired, sleeping, rain, doing it in the road, eating a savoy truffle, a London street (“Penny Lane”), the back yard of a children’s home (“Strawberry Fields Forever”), a birthday, a blackbird. You could take a song idea and experiment with different styles, different time signatures, using a variety of musical instruments and musical approaches. No one could predict what the next Beatles single would sound like, and hearing “Lady Madonna” or “Come Together” for the first time could be a mind-altering moment for a musician, as it certainly was for the writer.
At its best, this synergy among a group of musicians is what set the band model apart from a solo musical performer. A band was a musical ensemble and a social unit, bringing interactive aspects of the musical process into play. A band could be a powerful musical force.
The band culture developed in Gainesville naturally, through how easy it was to start or join a band, learn to play music, and earn money playing, all while still in high school. You were a teenager with a novel job—a working musician playing dance music, a time-honored role that has existed through the centuries. A band such as the Maundy Quintet playing “Time Won’t Let Me” by the Outsiders at a fraternity party in 1966 was providing the same service as that of a dance orchestra in 1902 playing a ragtime schottische at a country club social event, the only real difference being the musical style and undoubtedly the decibel level. Both music ensembles were playing for the dancing pleasure of a paying audience.
There will always be a demand for live dance music, and playing the popular songs of the day is a common first step for many musicians who eventually become songwriters and performers of their own compositions and therefore part of the next generation of musical artists.
Musically, Gainesville’s proximity to the borders of Georgia and Alabama has influenced the city’s musical identity more so than the lower regions of Florida. Of course, rock and roll is a product of the South. With the notable exceptions of Chuck Berry from the Midwest and Buddy Holly from western Texas, a majority of the early pioneers of rock and roll were from the South, including Elvis Presley, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Gene Vincent—musical artists from Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Virginia, and Tennessee. A region of the country named by geophysicists the Coastal Plains includes the birthplaces of most of these pioneers of rock and roll.
BEING SOUTHERN
If we choose to view Gainesville through the cold and dispassionate eye of a social scientist, we begin by noting that it is a mid-size city located in the Deep South, more specifically midland Florida. The main population centers of Florida are Miami, Tampa/St. Petersburg, Orlando, and Jacksonville; Gainesville is not among them, ranking seventeenth in population.
The South is more than a geographic region of the United States—it is a cultural mindset and reference point. Although each state is unique by definition, the southernmost state of Florida is often viewed as “more unique” than most, with the longest continuous coastline in the continental United States, as the only state bordering the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, the only state with every point within sixty miles of saltwater, and, despite the dire predictions of Senator John Randolph in 1819, now the fourth most populous state.
It is generally agreed that the South embodies “otherness” in the United States more so than any other region, such as New England or the West Coast, an identity that sprang from the antebellum plantations of the South and the slavery and the social environment it created and sustained until the Civil War. In The Mind of the South W. J. Cash attempts to sum up the archetypal southern characteristics and concludes the typical southerner was an individualist, unconcerned with status and wealth as the final arbiter of social standing, a pleasure-seeker whose world-construction was bound to be mainly a product of fantasy, with a tendency toward romanticism, quick to start a fight over perceived slights or insults, with honor being an integral aspect of southern culture. Cash writes, “in that void of pointless leisure that was his, the poor white turned his energies almost wholly to elaborating the old backcountry pattern of amusement and distinction—became (though it is shocking to say it) one of the most complete romantics and one of the most complete hedonists ever recorded.”
It can be argued that “romantic hedonism” is a fancy term describing the mindset of another archetype, the rock and roll musician, who transformed the well-known hendiatris “wine, women, and song” into “sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” If we assume that the sole purpose of music is to provide pleasure, the hedonism of the southerner would include music and the rebellious attitude it took to be a rock and roller.
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
A major source of Gainesville’s rock and roll music culture can be directly traced to the University of Florida and all that it brought to the region. It was the foresight of Gainesville’s civic leaders more than a hundred years ago that brought the university to a small Florida town known primarily as the largest shipper of Sea Island cotton in the South and—through its truck farming, phosphate, tung oil, and turpentine industries—as a regional agricultural trading center and railway transportation hub.
The presence and consistent growth of the university eventually made Gainesville into a vibrant college town teeming with students who—when not attending classes and studying—were actively looking for fun in the sun, and music was commonly part of that fun. Businesses sprung up in support, including every place that presented live music, music and record stores, and FM and AM radio stations. Recreational drugs were readily available, and a vast underground economy was generated through the growing and selling of local marijuana that may in fact continue to this day. Even as late as the eighties, truckers often referred to Gainesville as “the hippie city” on their citizen-band radios as they drove past on I-75.
On a more intellectual note, the university’s steady growth transformed the city into a regional center of learning and continued to attract faculty from around the world, including those who brought families with musically oriented kids who found themselves freshly arrived in a city that practically dared them to start or join a band. Among the children of university faculty members were future members of the Eagles, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Motels, and Sister Hazel. The presence of the university made Gainesville a cosmopolitan city of the South.
QUAINT
The charm of any city is difficult to quantify or enumerate and is often the sum of qualities both visible and hidden. Gainesville’s subtle charm attracted new residents through the years, such as Major John W. Tench of Newnan, Georgia, in 1877, the great-grandfather of Benmont Tench III, keyboard player in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers; Stephen Stills’s father, who, while driving through Florida in the fifties, as Stills later noted, declared the city was “the prettiest place he ever saw”; music entrepreneur Bruce Nearon, who noted how much nicer the Gainesville chapter of his fraternity was compared to the one in New York; Bill Killeen, while visiting from Tallahassee in the mid-sixties to sell his college humor magazine, Charlatan, who quickly determined that Gainesville had “a bigger and hipper student body than Florida State University,” leading him to move from one college town to another; and Against Me!’s leader, Laura Jane Grace, who headed straight for Gainesville from Naples, Florida, as soon as she dropped out of high school, describing the college town in a later interview as the place to go “if you’re eighteen and just moved out of your mom’s house.”
Minnie Riperton relocated to Gainesville in the early seventies, while pregnant with her daughter Maya Rudolph, having remembered the city from when she had performed there in previous years with the band Rotary Connection. People came to visit Gainesville and stayed, or visited and eventually returned, pulled in by the city’s low-key charm. Rock and roll pioneer Bo Diddley moved to nearby Hawthorne, Florida, in the late seventies and spent the last thirteen years of his life in Archer, Florida, fifteen miles southwest of Gainesville, until his death in 2008, often visiting Lipham Music and becoming friends with Buster Lipham. Gainesville wasn’t a booming metropolis, and it wasn’t on the coast, yet it consistently attracted artists and artistic people who found a comfortable place to live that allowed them to experiment and focus on the craft of their art and the art of their craft.
Opening a business seemed a lot easier in Gainesville than in other cities, as in the example of Jeffrey Meldon’s obtaining a free liquor license for the Great Southern Music Hall through a well-connected local official. The city government was relatively progressive, as along with the dozens of churches in town, there were two steadily patronized topless bars, one at the north side of town, one at the south. The Subterranean Circus hippie boutique opened in 1967, selling drug paraphernalia from their opening day and remaining in business for more than twenty years. Entrepreneurs of all sorts were attracted to the possibilities of the city.
POP MUSIC
If we examine the songs of bands with Gainesville musicians as members, it seems evident that the city’s musical identity was informed to the greatest extent by pop music and the influence of Top Forty songs. In the sixties and seventies a cover band’s job was to play the hits, the familiar songs. For a working Gainesville musician in a cover band, pop singles were programmed into your head at the very start, from the radio and from your focused study of how these songs were constructed in order to play them properly. Gainesville was a pop music city that celebrated songs rather than instrumental virtuosity. The pop songs everyone heard on the AM radio of the sixties and seventies provided the musical common ground for these cover bands, who were constantly learning newer songs, dropping songs that were no longer popular, and reviving older favorites. With all these bands playing many of the same songs, a musical community built around a common goal, and the pursuit of similar musical skills made the Gainesville musician a member of a large group of peers. The main issue was quality, being good. There were plenty of examples of good players in town, and by watching and listening to a top regional band such as the Tropics, Mouse and the Boys, the Nation Rocking Shadows, or Ron and the Starfires, you knew what good looked like and what good sounded like. These players were the midland Florida rock stars of their time and place, universally respected examples of excellence. This exposure to hearing a well-crafted pop song played with skill was a strong presence in the Gainesville musical community.
I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW
One result of playing in a cover band for years was the eventual recognition of reoccurring musical patterns, starting with the ubiquitous twelve-bar blues form, the most common chord progression in popular music, applicable to blues, early rock and roll, pop, rock, and jazz, followed by the almost equally ubiquitous I-vi-IV-V progression, from “Blue Moon” to “Every Breath You Take” to “I Will Always Love You.” A working musician in a cover band had to become adept at the musical sounds and rhythmic styles of the moment, and there was always some new sound or a new guitar riff to master, be it the fuzz-tone guitar psychedelia of the Strawberry Alarm Clock or Iron Butterfly, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s iconic chugging rhythm, the syncopated “chicken scratch” style of James Brown’s guitarist Jimmy Nolen, or the laid-back groove of a Jimmy Reed song. A guitar player in a busy cover band also needed to learn catchy guitar “hooks” such as those in the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” in Free’s “All Right Now,” and Deep Purple’s iconic riff from 1972, “Smoke on the Water.” For some of these musicians in cover bands intimately familiar with the forms of popular rock music, songwriting was the inevitable next step. The two songs of the Maundy Quintet’s 1967 single are an example of Bernie Leadon’s early mastery of the pop song form and Don Felder’s playing and arranging skills.
Actually, some bands never stopped playing oldies. There is essentially no difference between Tom Petty’s 1971 performances of “Cry to Me,” as a member of Mudcrutch when they played at Dub’s, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s version of the song at coliseum concerts in 2014. A good song is a good song.
FUNKY GAINESVILLE
The French composer Maurice Ravel (1875–1937), whose famous composition “Bolero” has been featured in film, television, video games, and anime, was an early admirer of American blues and jazz, and his composing and orchestration skills were of such craft and perfection that Stravinsky referred to Ravel as “the most perfect of Swiss watchmakers.” However, in the only music lecture he ever gave, Ravel stated, “we should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art.”
The true content of music is emotional expression, and music embodies the feelings of all races and expresses universally held emotions. Gainesville has some native African-American rhythm and blues, gospel, blues, and funk in its musical roots, a trait not evident in the music of every southern college town.
Bands that played black music with feeling and understanding got plenty of work in Gainesville. An unexpected example of the far-reaching musical influence of black musical culture is through Don Felder’s explanation of his guitar solo on an Eagles song: “My strong influences were from the African-American community, so my playing on ‘One of These Nights’—that’s basically an alto sax solo. We didn’t have a sax player in the Eagles, so I wrote something that sounded like what a sax should play.” Felder’s musical involvement with John Winter, the sax and organ player in Gingerbread (later Flow), influenced and guided Felder’s approach. “He played soprano sax like Miles Davis. He was selective about his notes and very melodic. I learned my phrasing from John Winter.” Winter listened to John Coltrane, Jimmy Smith, and many other black jazz musicians. Felder’s unlikely musical source when conceiving a guitar solo is one example of Gainesville’s diverse musical environment. Everything a musician heard eventually came out through their instrument.
Blues, rock and roll, and jazz—three genres of music that were born and raised in America—would not exist without the contributions of African-Americans, who were brought to this country against their will as free labor to raise and harvest the crops indigenous to the South. For several months following the end of the Civil War, the 3rd United States Colored Troops regiment was stationed in Gainesville, and their continued presence attracted freed slaves and more African-Americans to come to the city, including a large number of black migrant workers hired to pick cotton. At one point, blacks outnumbered white persons in the city. This core fact may explain a key aspect of Gainesville’s musical roots dating back one hundred and fifty years. The African roots of music had been there since the end of the Civil War.
SMALL WORLD
Another aspect that worked in Gainesville’s favor was its relative isolation, a city located in a region of Florida unrelated to the tourist trade, partly because of its being almost precisely between the two coastlines. This isolation led to a core of players interacting for longer periods of time in comparison to those in larger cities that might offer a broader choice of players and musical genres, and it helped create a do-it-yourself culture in Gainesville that remains in place today through such bands as Less Than Jake and Sister Hazel. In the seventies Mudcrutch’s desire to play for large gatherings of their hippie friends rather than the typical patrons of bars and clubs led to their creating festivals at the Mudcrutch Farm. In the nineties Codi Lazar, Marshall Lowe, and Geoffrey May formed the GAMA to promote Gainesville bands and were instrumental in producing the Alachua Harvest Festivals that featured many local bands playing at a series of outdoor shows.
Gainesville’s acceptance and encouragement of large-scale rock music events continues. An annual music festival known simply as the Fest features punk and alternative music. Held in Gainesville over a weekend every fall since 2002, it was created by music entrepreneur Tony Weinbender with support from No Idea Records, a local record company founded in 1994 and a large force in the current Gainesville music scene. The Fest is now in its fifteenth year, attracting more than twenty thousand attendees and nearly four hundred bands, and has grown bigger with each event.
PUT UP OR SHUT UP
Two traits inherent in the Gainesville band culture are a general lack of artifice, also known as “posing,” so common in rock and roll, and a do-it-yourself approach that remains vital when living in a city geographically isolated from the larger urban centers.
For a musician, Gainesville was too small of a scene to “cool guy” your way through. There was no social infrastructure to climb and be socially superior to another musician—only talent allowed you that privilege, and your performance said it all, for better or worse. Also, being cool in terms of fashion was virtually impossible in a subtropical climate. Jeans, shorts, sneakers, flip-flops, and T-shirts were the basic garb. No one showed up in a costume on stage except lounge acts and “show bands.” You could either play or you couldn’t, and a certain amount of southern pride figured into it. Once you had heard Duane Allman play, either on record or live, the facts of the matter were clear: this is what virtuoso musicianship sounded like. Those Gainesville musicians who relocated to Los Angeles were surprised to encounter numerous musical posers, musicians with the finest music gear, the proper hairstyle, the perfect wardrobe, and the “rock star” attitude—everything but musical ability and musical experience. The City of Angels was heavily populated with these musical posers and remains so today. It was a shock to meet musicians in Los Angeles and, after talking to them awhile, realize that despite your smalltown roots, as a Gainesville player you had more onstage experience than most of them. A lot more.
Generally speaking, a Gainesville musician who arrived in Los Angeles easily had at least a thousand hours of onstage experience. At twenty hours a week, this had taken a year or two in a player’s life, working the club circuit steadily. Few players in Southern California could say the same. There wasn’t a lot else to do in Gainesville, and as it turned out, you had become pretty damn good as a live musician through playing all those cover songs in the frats and bars.
Gainesville created its own thriving musical culture, put on free concerts for the fun of it, and grew its own recreational drugs, and local bands figured out ways to make records, which often meant driving south to Tampa or Miami. Gainesville was also a party town, and those in the surrounding areas of midland Florida flocked toward the city to attend.
There it is, hidden in the deepest corner of the South: Gainesville, Florida. Diverse. Geographically isolated. Southern, yet liberal and relatively progressive in politics, with a long tradition of supporting music. A city with equal parts higher education and hedonistic behavior. These are some of the aspects of Gainesville that helped make the city an ideal breeding ground for musicians. As a result, the city has produced some of the greatest rock and roll songwriters and musicians of our time.
But there is another reason, often referred to as the “X” factor. Sometimes a place just happens naturally of its own accord. Gainesville has brought a lot of musical soul to the world, and Gainesville continues to nurture the musical spirit of those who live and play music there. It’s the hippie city and retains the best of that era.
Gainesville will continue to sustain musical artists. Based on what we have learned about the city, there will always be musicians and bands gettin’ down in Gatortown.