Tampa Calling

After eight years, I’m still trying to find my identity in the Tampa Bay area. I’ve got the “you’ve got to drive everywhere all the time if you want to have any fun and be a part of anything” vibe down, but there’s something missing in my overall music-making and living experiences in St. Petersburg. The latest rash of confused feelings came to me Saturday night, when I found a review of my band Blast & the Detergents CD in the April issue of MAXIMUMROCKNROLL.

A great, short and earnest review, I was as giddy as a little 12-year-old whose parents finally let him get a cotton candy. This nationally distributed, punk-as-fuck, San Francisco-based ‘zine spent the time listening to and reviewing my CD. They even chose my hand-drawn album art to be displayed for eternity in the review section of their April 2009.

But wait, there’s more!

Comparing that to not getting a local review of this album in any paper, my local identity seems incomplete or tainted. Having a track played on the Avant Garbage show on KUGS in Washington state a day later made for weird synchronicity issues that I’m still dealing with a few days later. (You know, when it rains it pours kind of crap).

As I amp up the online presence of my record label No Clear Records, I can’t help but notice the overwhelming amount of support from geographical locations as disparate as Canada, San Francisco, New Jersey, Miami, Indiana, Macedonia (I know!) etc., and besides my personal friends, not a peep out of Tampa Bay.

I have lived here for over eight years now, and I moved down from small-town Maine, so I don’t have much to compare. However, the emphasis here on national acts instead of local seems to be overwhelming to a degree I hope is a regional problem and not a national one.

For example, I attended the Black Lips show last Thursday at the Orpheum. If you haven’t heard, let me be the one to tell ya: That band owned the Orpheum that night. They put on an amazing show with full garage-rock craziness (including a cover of a song from 1968 called, “You Must be a Witch” written by my hero Fred Cole) and wow they were worth the hype and all that. On the other hand, my friends Flexxehawk were slated to open the show as per the Black Lips, but they were chopped off the bill by No Clubs Promotions, saying they did not want any local acts to play.

This inherent lack of faith in local acts to deliver stems from an insurmountable lack of local identity in this traffic-clogged area. Yeah, nobody’s from here and whatever other excuses we have, but there is some great music happening around here right now. Have you heard of Florida’s Dying Records in Orlando? A true, bona fide garage-rock label right in your backyard!

All in all, I’ve been too whiny and ranty lately, which is why I haven’t had the gumption to sit and write anything to you good people. So now here lies the fruit of my frustration: a jumbled mess of schizo scribblings from beneath the underground. I think I need a priest at this point.

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