Restless again. My band stops playing and a smattering of applause fills the void of sound as the barkeep kicks on the punk jukebox. Love Comes in Spurts pipes through the shitty speakers as Richard Hell’s whiney voice affirms the nihilistic undertones of modern living. I look down at my sweat-stained shirt and a tiny button of Hell’s vacant stare pinned above my left breast pocket catches my eye. For a second, its blank straight-mouthed expression curls into a shit eating grin and he whispers up at me, “I know punk sounds better through the filter of a canned, thought-out and planned recording” as I rub my eyes, pick up my amplifier and carry it hastily out the back door.

Fresh air stings my lungs, billowing smoke escaping through the closing door behind me. I drop my keys, set the amp down on the pavement and pick them up. After throwing the amp in the back seat of my car, I reluctantly re-enter the bar from the back to finish cleaning up.

Unexpectedly, the door leads directly into my parents’ house three towns over. The sun burns through the large windows as my hands begin to shake uncontrollably. I must have really shaken something up in my head last night with that show, I tell myself in a panic. I can hear my parents arguing in the next room:

“Why can’t you use your gift of music to serve the Lord?”

“All you do is yell, scream and make noise. Don’t you remember what that guy told you? That singer up in Madawaska? What did he tell you? He told you to keep God close or you will be tempted by the Devil.”

Then I hear an even stranger sound; my own voice!

“I don’t think God is interested in mediocrity and banality.” I peak my head around the corner of the entryway and peer into the living room, and I can feel my eyes popping out of my skull as I find a version of myself standing with both my parents. My other self continues, “If anything, Satan is busy lowering the standards of culture with your national television karaoke contests and hack musicians who only play for money and don’t really believe in what they do!”

I sneak out the front door into daylight and run down the walkway to my car. “What the fuck is going on?” I ask aloud as I pat my pockets for my keys but can’t find them. I blink, my eyelids closing very slowly as I continue to scour the insides of my pockets so I can make my getaway.

As I open my eyes, the darkness of night shocks my vision and I feel tears swelling below my corneas. A rag covered young oi-looking punk with a Crass patch on his left jean leg leans against the outside wall of the bar and lights a cigarette. “I really dug that set,” he spouts without looking toward me as smoke trickles from his mouth. “I love that punk noise shit. Do you have a couple bucks?”

Still in shock, I reach into my pocket and throw him two one dollar bills. “Thanks for the kind words, man. I’m glad you enjoyed it,” I hear myself respond as I wander back into the bar.

A television flashes headlines too bright to ignore: Hurricane Warning… Headed Directly For Tampa Bay… and immediately cuts to a Home Depot commercial featuring images of gas-powered generators and storm shutters. The pounding rhythm of Ghost Rider by Suicide fills all ears as Martin Rev croons, “America America is killing its youth!” and I see him inside my head smash a microphone directly into his mouth three times. The disheartening thwoks of amplified violence cause me to cringe and smile a devilish smile at the same time.

Suicide- Ghost Rider

Screeching guitars over a rapid backbeat pierce 50 ears trying to hear 25 stilted conversations. A foot-long needle shoots directly through the beckoning orifices, winds around the ear canals and connects directly with the center of each half of the brain. A throbbing begins at the base of the skull as imaginary brain fluid leaks out of each ear. Each face contorts into wrinkled disgust and the faces move closer together.

“Music is my life!” screams one bearded-with-glasses 20-something into the ear of a young girl with hair framing her face, brown tank top, cut-off jean shorts and several colored tattoos spattered across each arm. Clouds of cigarette smoke linger between them and slowly rise to the tar-stained ceiling. From the other end of the bar, the shapes and cartoons on her arms aren’t distinguishable, but I’m convinced they’re more than just blobs of ink. ”Have you ever heard the first Bad Brains album?” he continues to yell, ”It’s so raw, I can’t get enough of it!”

The band falls into a repetitive pattern of chunky chords, fast, pounding, tribal drums and hollering vocals. A few words sneak out of the mix, “MAKE…APPOINTMENT…TIME…MIND…EXCUSE!” Fuzzed mumbling fills the spaces between the recognizable words.

“I’m so glad you like them, too! Did you go see them at State a few months ago? They were great. I was there for Propaghandi, though!” the girl hollers back.

“What!? I can’t hear a fucking thing with this shit music!”

“Ha! I know! I wish they’d turn it down or something!” she yells in the middle of a song ending. Well, not exactly ending. The thumping tune had devolved into squelching feedback and noise crying memories of ghosts too fresh to even know they were dead.

The bar continues to fill with people lining up for beer and liquor memory tonic promising foggy notions for hours to come. Bodies pressing up against each other and conversations continue. A buffer borders the band a good five to 10 feet in every direction. In the middle of the vacuum, the group bounces off each other, climbs amps, jumps off, falls on the ground in a general hootenany and self-inflicted chaos.

On the other side of town, Johnny Winter fills a medium-sized open-aired venue and plays hits from the ’60s or ’70s or whenever he’s from. A 45-year-old man with greying hair, pony tail and beard turns to his 18-year-old son (in baggy jeans and with flowing long blond hair) to remark, “It’s so important to support local arts, son. If we don’t come out to these local shows, what kind of local scene will we have? Local music is so important.”

Clouds rumble overhead as Johnny looks skyward and pauses thoughtfully following a 12-minute blues jam. “Don’t forget Woodstock, boys and girls. I was there. Chant off the rain, just chant it off. There’s no mud here and you girls aren’t as young as you were back then,” he sputters into the microphone with a big inside joke grin. Cheers erupt as he leads a chant, “NO RAIN, NO RAIN, NO RAIN!” the crowd follows and stomps their feet.

All at once, the sky cracks open and pours dangerous amounts of rain onto the unsuspecting crowd. A few well-prepared concert goers still in their business leisure suits from the Friday 9-to-5 pull out their umbrellas and the rest run forward toward the stage.

In front of the crowd at the bar, I see and hear all these things at once. My wandering brain picks up random transmissions from across town and throughout the room. When I play music I black out in catatonic stupor for better or worse. I can’t control my thoughts as I rip my hand to shreds strumming my guitar and hollering my lungs out absentmindedly. Or completely focused and precise. I can never tell which one for sure.

To begin by beating a dead horse: Modern Radio sucks! We’re lucky in the Tampa Bay area with WMNF, but even this leftist station leans toward mainstream boomer culture rather than underground or avant garde sounds. And who can blame them? Fiscal feasability dictates the output of modern media (d’uh).

In a pinch, I tend to listen to right wing radio for a good, healthy gut laugh, because it’s better than being depressed by cheesy mediocrity! Bottom line: Radio is for the masses. Lowest common denominator pandering pervades every aspect of post-modern living. From the huge conglomerates to the indies, companies and not-for-profits don’t have faith in our ability to think, contemplate and make our own decisions. This is not special knowledge that I’ve tapped into / I do not have any extra intelligence not available to the rest of you. You are all well aware of the hoodwink that modern media attempts to pull over on us every day. It/s like that “Everybody Knows” song by Leonard Cohen (he supercedes boomer culture, right?).

Not that one lowly podcast does anything to change all that, but I started one, nonetheless. Check out music released and getting ready to be released by my record label, No Clear Records on No Clear Radio (http://sonicnadeau.podomatic.com) for a fun romp through genres like punk, no wave, folk, experimental, noise, garage and maybe even some sub-denominations I’m not willing to type at this point in my life…

There are two episodes completed so far, and I’m going to keep doing them because they are easy and really fun. Currently, all the music pounding out of anyone’s speakers who cares to press play is from Florida, except for one band from Nova Scotia I’m releasing a CD for very soon, Mess Folk (garage punk noisey electric eels awesome).

P.S. This post serves as an open invitation for anyone who does not like my podcast, or any of the other radio around them, to take the time and start their own. Anyone can start a podcast just like anyone can start a band, anyone can paint a picture and talent is a loaded word that doesn’t mean anything.

New from No Clear Records: a schizophrenic compilation colliding different genres of the underground and crapping them together in one easy to swallow CD-R. No Clear, No Eyes Volume 2 spirals around themes of frustration, loneliness and salvation through the lenses of punk, no wave, garage, folk, experimental, noise, comedy, avant garde, rock ‘n’ roll and more without batting an eye. All thought up, recorded and executed right here in Florida (mostly Tampa Bay, though other acts hail from Gainesville and Melbourne), this compilation accurately depicts the underbelly of Florida culture that more and more people are seeking out as mainstream alternatives to their cultural intake.

Tonight, Friday, May 22, 2009, Cafe Bohemia hosts a compilation release show for this seminal Florida mix featuring live music from some of Tampa Bay’s most exciting weirdos. 937 Central Ave., St. Petersburg, 6 or 7 p.m. start time (it’ll go all night). (Follow the jump for track listing.)

Track list:
Waterdigger (feat. Jesi Langdale)-The Slowest Song Ever
Ghost Hospital- Head is Gone
Blast and the Detergents- Not Disposable
The Bay Mayfields- Doesn’t Matter
Hal McGee- small font lower cased cracked improvisation
Skare Taktiks- Skare Taktiks
Flexxehawk- CB Buckner
Insecticide Labotomy- Counterfeit Vagina
Modern TV- Stuck on the Moon
Paper Cranes- Death and Time
Co-ed Cokehead- Zoo Screw
Otolathe- Ignore the Mimes
The Uh…- The Uh…
Co-ed Cokehead- Failure to Appear
Flexxehawk- Whicker Thrown
Insect Joy- Iris Bay 2177
John Allen- Hollow Body
Skare Taktiks- Super Spew
Crow’s Foot- Mallard
Blast and the Detergents- Paranoid Future
Hunker Down Roy- Windowless Soul
Trousers- Mine Field
Waterdigger- She’s My Favorite Thing
Thereminist to Society- Cannibal

Sunday night rock ‘n’ roll shows: difficult to book, annoying to promote and hard to get people to leave their comfortable homes and come out for bands they may not have heard about. My band Blast and the Detergents last played a Sunday night show a couple months ago at Crowbar opening for amazing touring band, Pontiak, and “gets more Tampa shows than I do” Orlando band Kingsbury.

(Another band played and I can’t remember their name — kind of Hootie and the Blowfish-sounding singer songwritery stuff… not my bag).  Anyway, the show turned out great because the DJ played some really great classic punk and rock ‘n’ roll junk, Pontiak owned and I got to play, which I always enjoy regardless of crowd size or reception.

However, I always feel bad when I fail to deliver the promise of beer drinkers for these dive bars that put up with my crazy sound. Sundays, this memorable Crowbar night included, challenge the notion of profit for these beer holes.

On the other hand, touring band always need a place to play on Sundays, and with the notorious Atlanta tour cutoff we usually cry about down here, I am satisfied when a band I like plays any night of the week down this way in our chatty little twin cities.

Chapel Hill underground rockers Americans in France destroyed the Emerald last year (I think it was a Thursday) with one-man garage-rock  band Pinche Gringo (he covered The Gories, for Christ’s sake) and now they are returning to our fair sprawl. I am bringing them into bombed-out downtown Tampa’s little bar/venue Kelly’s Pub this Sunday, May 17 around 8 or 9 p.m.  (you know how these things go).

Americans in France play an ADD version of rock ‘n’ roll difficult to pigeonhole into a specific genre (especially as genres like indie rock and shoegaze continue to be dropped daily by hipsters who like the sound of their own voice) with lots of tempo changes, empathetic but still biting lyrics, neato simple beats, crisp bass and sparse but effective lead guitar.  I really like this band (d’uh) and they are especially good live, so do not miss their show!

Also playing are the unpredictable Melbourne, Fla. band Co-ed Cokehead, which should be playing fun 2-piece minimalist skronky post-punk or whatever genre you want to throw onto it. My band Modern TV (guitar/violin/drums velvet underground/raincoats rip-off) will be performing as well.

here’s a flyer for the show:

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.

The Cramps crapped the punk of The Sonics/Ramones continuum and Hasil Adkins/Link Wray rockabilly together in the late ’70s, extolling the virtues of simple, high-velocity distorted music and inescapable, in-your-face attitude, and naming their new subgenre “psychobilly.” Best described as a psychotic crooner, Lux Interior sang and contorted for The Cramps for the last 30-something years. Poetry about death, alienation, revenge and caustic self-affirmation littered their first EP, Gravest Hits, and LP, Songs the Lord Taught Us, (my two favorites), and rang true for me and countless others across the world over the years. “The way I walk is just the way I walk” and other such declarations paired with science fiction/horror references defined their early records. Early live shows were characterized by Lux literally going crazy and falling apart onstage, including vomiting all over himself and other antics. Here’s some footage of The Cramps playing a mental hospital in 1978:

Delayed, choking/massively stuttering vocals filled spaces between two or three chords heavily drenched in reverb and distortion punk. Mesmerizing, inspiring simplicity speaks toward the minimalism of the amateur (doing something for the love of it).

Rest in peace, Lux, and thanks for the music/inspiration/thoughts and references to an underground culture of rollicking rock ‘n’ roll fun.

Danny McGuire
Polk City is damn far from Tampa and it’s further from St Petersburg. Somehow, the only person I know who lives in Polk City, Danny McGuire, makes it to more shows in the Tampa/Orlando metropolitan area than anyone who lives in either town. Whether playing shows in any of his many bands, hawking genres for beer, or just attending and documenting with a little digital camera, Danny gets around. His main vehicle, the weirdo rock Pixies meets Ween juxtaposed by some Nirvana/Butthole Surfers action, Waterdigger, hasn’t played a show in a while because of drunk drama between the members. Volatile and out-of-control (rumor has it they’re banned from the New World Brewery), Waterdigger remains the only band that covered “Sweet Home Alabama” and turned it into a song I liked.

It’s not like McGuire sits around and waits for his mates to stop hating each other and get together — he just plays his songs in one of his five or 10 other bands. Improv crap guitar noisemakers turned repetative songsters (and usually still both), Thee Heidlecrumbs shock as much as they entertain.

Reworked Waterdigger songs, cosmic freak outs and other sounds comprise their latest sets. This band’s main other contributing member, Kat(hleen) Magyar, embodies an inspiring punk aesthetic — the confidence to play in front of people without any formal training and very little (but growing amounts of) experience. Their music should make school-learned musicians hang up their flutes and take up accounting. Insulting, hilarious songs about your granny and mother mixed with heartfelt introspection and anger explode out of McGuire’s unusual brain.

Hunker Down Roy, the ever (r)evolving cast centering around McGuire, and Don Butler and his magic Theremin and an amplified spring mounted to a wooden plank, creates beats with noise screaming and crashing all around like a Florida storm created by some drunk gods hanging out in the clouds with nothing better to do. Improvised sounds and an occasional yell (called “The Scare”*) fill their sets with onlookers holding on to their hats and popping their ears back into place.

*I told Danny I heard a scream like his in a song by The Wipers I really love called “Youth of America.” He replied, “Never heard of ‘em. We made up ‘The Scare’ being bored in Polk City and screaming in people’s faces, yes’um.”

When you see Danny McGuire lurking about and playing some music or just screaming in your face you’ll know: Maybe this area’s got some culture to shove into the bloated American lexicon after all.

Little Fyodor returns to Tampa Bay Friday night to downtown St. Petersburg’s Cafe Bohemia. After blowing the roof off of Transitions Art Gallery and then the whole town of Gainesville one year ago with his cohort Babushka, Fyodor returned to his home in Colorado, kept in touch with some Floridians, and played some Florida music on his radio show, “Under the Floorboards.”

Locals in attendance at Transitions for Fyodor’s performance have been waiting with bated breath and salty skin for the return of an underground legend. A combination of weird, angular and hilarious, the music of Little Fyodor represents an underground barely covered in any medium.  His 80s band Walls of Genius got one line of text in the Richie Unterberger classic book, Unknown Legends of Rock n Roll.

Extremely entertaining, spastic and poignant in combating our current boredom/mediocrity based culture, Little Fyodor promises to put on a great show this Friday, January 16.

Pictured: Little Fyodor strangles a guitar (courtesy www.littlefyodor.com).

Locals Otolathe (experimental/electronica/ambient/noise), Thee Heidlecrumbs (experimental, improv, guitar) and my band, Blast and the Detergents, will play as supporting cast to Little Fyodor’s triumphant return to Florida.

We will be spinning records, playing music and hanging out from 6pm-ish on, so come on down to Cafe Bohemia and hang out!

P.S. I do not usually promote my own shows on this blog. Little Fyodor coming to town is reason enough for me to break my rule. Here’s some video to make up for my sin:

Little Fyodor and Babushka in G-Ville 1 year ago

How did my mom go from owning such a wide range of rock n’ roll records, from the Beatles to Black Sabbath, to devoting her ears solely to Celine Dion? Living in the land of oldsters and hipsters (some people are both), this question ultimately pervades every aspect of existence in Tampa Bay. Issues of marketed generation norms, like older people being more mild mannered and set in their ways and younger people experimenting with sex and drugs, maintain arbitrary divisions between age groups and sonic preferences. Generalizations of the 1960’s “Summer of Love” are quickly ripped to shreds in records by bored mutants like The Stooges. Their self-titled record in 1969 and Fun House in 1970 destroyed notions of the singular cultural experience by being nasty and unlearned instead of nice-sounding and well-trained. History has never been as cut-and-dry/black-and-white as we are led to believe. Likewise, our present continues to be very complicated.

All my life I’ve heard things like, “now that John Lennon could sing” or “Eric Clapton knows how to play real guitar music” or other such flapdoodle. People who make statements like those assume there’s a correct way to sing or play guitar, and other musicians who are inferior or get it wrong should do something else. Iggy Pop’s snarling vocals and Ron Asheton’s unsophisticated, immediate and exceedingly raw approach to the guitar challenged the notion of perfect technical skill as the ultimate goal in music. (Pictured: the late Ron Asheton, photo by Dena Flows.)

I was pretty bummed out by news of Ron Asheton’s death this week. I consider him one of my favorite guitarists because of his ability to play with music for the sake of sound and emotion on truly immediate levels instead of precision of notes and clarity of intonation. As I was driving home from band practice last night, I caught WMNF’s Surface Noise paying tribute to Asheton by playing some of his songs and discussing his legacy. My closed-minded preconceptions of Tampa Bay’s cultural buffoonery happily dashed for a few minutes, I reflected on death and nostalgia while I drove up depressing 66th Street.

Recently, The Stooges re-formed, toured a bunch and put out the solid album, The Weirdness, in 2007.  Standing out in the rash of comeback tours and reunion shows, Ron Asheton’s guitar playing, while slightly more refined than 35 years ago, cut through preconceptions of people losing relevance with age. Simplicity in riffs and biting imperfect leads influenced and continues to influence generation after generation or underground mutants. The Stooges always made me want to play music, regardless of my skill level. Anyone who can open their mouth and emit sound can sing, anyone who can pick up a guitar can play and getting old doesn’t mean you have to be lame and irrelevant.

*side note: Obviously Asheton didn’t wait around for Iggy to call him up and play again for 35 or whatever years. Check out some of his other really great sounding guitar bands like The New Order (not THAT New Order) and Destroy All Monsters.