“Support your scene!” is the battle cry for everyone who appreciates the musicians in their midst, the creative locals that work to make their corner of the world more livable. Rob Elba remembers the scene he stepped into South Florida in the late ’80s, after playing in bands in New York and Boston, as an assemblage of “freaks and outliers” united not by a particular sound or genre, like Seattle or Athens, but by location.
“The thing with South Florida was just that it was so isolated from the rest of the country,” Elba tells PureHoney. In this geographical bubble, Elba marveled “that anyone had the balls to play original music as opposed to covers.” Yet that’s what was going on from the late ‘70s onward — punks like Elba, metalheads, noise churners and rockers of every stripe doing their own thing for audiences off the radar of many national tours.
Singer-guitarist Elba and his former Boston bandmate, multi-instrumentalist Dan Hosker, jumped right in. Their comradeship in bands including the Holy Terrors lasted into the new century, and came to a devastating end with Hosker’s death in 2012 after a car accident. Elba saw to it that Hosker’s influence would live on by founding the Dan Hosker Music Continuum, a scholarship fund for high school students pursuing the arts. The centerpiece of DHMC is an annual fundraising (but free-admission) concert in South Florida that celebrates the ragtag, unsinkable, sonically all-over-the-map scene, with Hosker as one of its truest supporters and sustainers — a prolific, roving player in countless bands and projects. “Everybody fucking loved him,” Elba says.
Dan Hosker at Churchill’s by Teajay Smith
Elba made one rule for DHMC 12 on December 8 at Tarpon River Bend in Fort Lauderdale: It has to be a band reunion; no current groups or ones that never broke up need apply. “Before I knew it, we had 18 bands,” Elba says. Seventeen are playing, making the reunions-only version of DHMC the event’s biggest to date. It’s a CVS receipt of bands that defy genre, space and time all the way back to the late 1970s.
The Livid Kittens
There’s Forget the Name, who formed in 1984 and had a breakthrough of sorts to everyday South Florida when they featured in an advertisement for the now-defunct Burdines department store chain. There’s Charlie Pickett & the Eggs, the roots-punk combo that was championed by Peter Buck of REM and gained a cult following that persists. There’s Livid Kittens, tri-county mainstays in the 1990s fronted by the vixenish Paige Harvey. Their song “Flying” landed on a CMJ magazine list of 1000 Greatest Indie Rock Songs of All Time in 2004.
Friends of the Kittens, Pillmagnet are also on board. Featuring previous members of Jack off Jill and Morbid Opera, Pillmagnet played their first show in 1996 at Churchill’s in Miami and put out a cassette-only release produced by Mark O’Toole of Trapped by Mormons, loud, fun garage punkers who will also at DHMC 12.
Quit
I Don’t Know/Humbert V1.0, really the official band of Hialeah, are regrouping, as are punk scorchers Neptune B, fire-breathing swamp rockers One Dog’s Opinion, indie pop combo The Brand, dystopian destructors Armageddon Man, and alt-rock princes Dore Soul.
There’s Myron & the 2Wotz, from the restless brain of noise-rock maestro Rat Bastard. There’s QUIT, whose skate-punk tracks hit hard 30 years later. Last Stan Standing/Stan Still Dance Band harken back to the scene’s earliest days, while Shaved Hamster/Betty At The Station and Black Janet feature stalwarts of the scene, some still jamming in other outfits. Finally, there’s Shark Valley Sisters, Elba’s post-Terrors outfit with Load drummer Fausto Figueredo.
The Holy Terrors
Every scene has an ebb and flow that sees new people enter and others step away to tend to life’s responsibilities. Elba lives in Los Angeles and counts himself “happily retired” from band life (DHMC gigs excepted). Some of his peers and forbears are no longer with us, their absences lending to the mythos of bands that are talked about today with high praise and tall tales of good times. “When you’re in it, you’re don’t appreciate how special our scene was,” Elba says. “I’ve never met a more interesting cast of characters.”
Dan Hosker Music Continuum 12 runs 11am-9pm Sunday, December 8th at Tarpon River Brewing in Fort Lauderdale. Admission is a free, all ages welcome. facebook.com/DanHoskerMusicContinuum ~ Tim Moffatt
