Every year at around this time, people gather to celebrate Dan Hosker, who made waves in The Holy Terrors, Harry Pussy, Laundry Room Squelchers and countless other South Florida punk and noise bands. Before his untimely death in 2012, Hosker was a ferociously experimental guitar player with an encouraging spirit that is embodied today by the charitable Dan Hosker Music Continuum.
“I was always very impressed with the fact that Dan was one of these guys that would get along and play with any type of person and all different kinds of music, and I would never be able to do that,” Continuum co-founder and ex-Holy Terrors frontman Rob Elba tells PureHoney. “And Dan would live for all that shit, and everyone. That’s why everyone loved him.”
That Continuum’s annual music festival was co-founded in 2012 with Hosker’s surviving family by Elba and drummer Fausto Figueredo. Launched at Churchill’s in Miami, DHMC has since migrated to Fort Lauderdale. Figueredo, formerly of Load, likens it to a class or family reunion: “We never did we expect that at 1 or 2 p.m. we would have almost 300 people there, and there would still be that many people there at 7:30 at night.”
The lineup is a multi-generational arc of South Florida stalwarts who were and are, in true Hosker form, often if not always in each another’s bands and side projects, Elba and Figueredo included. The theme of DHMC No. 13 is “special guests,” meaning everyone on the bill will feature a surprise cameo.
The Continuum awards cash grants to high schoolers in the arts. With new grants already funded, proceeds from merch sales this time around will go to Miami noise maestro Frank “Rat Bastard” Falestra, a Hosker bandmate in recovery from a serious car accident.
Elba lives in Los Angeles and Figueredo is moving soon to Tennessee, so the organizational challenges are many. “We’re always like, ‘Should this be the last year?,’ ” Elba says. “But people go, ‘No, you have to keep doing it.’ They really look forward to it.”
Dan Hosker Music Continuum 13 runs noon-10pm Sunday, Dec. 7 at Tarpon River Brewing in Fort Lauderdale. facebook.com/DanHoskerMusicContinuum ~ Olivia Feldman
