Tampa FL is close to the heart of Glorious Times. After all one half of the GT team lived there during the dying off of the hardcore punk scene and during the peak years of the Florida death metal era. Florida had as many top shelf hardcore punk bands as it did metal. We're really proud to bring you a good long chat with Tony Patino who's recently released the DIY documentary about the Tampa hardcore punk scene, entitled "We Can't Help It If We're From Tampa" !!
GT - Tony, everyone had to start somewhere, care to share what sort of music started you off toward punk/hardcore and what were the initial bands that got you in it for life?
Tony - I was always a big fan of music as a kid. I listened to the radio all the time and made cassette tapes and all that good stuff. When I was 11 or 12 my older sister started dating this guy that was a die-hard music nut. While the average person might have had 20 to 30 record albums in their home, this guy had like 800. They were all kept on a gigantic shelf in his bedroom, alphabetized, with plastic slip covers on them. He was like seven years older than me, and he started turning me on to early Bowie, Blondie, Ramones, Motorhead, and Thin Lizzy and stuff like that.
I remember one year I told him I wanted the newest Ozzy record. I guess that would have been Diary Of A Madman. He said, “Oh, I already have it! I'll tape it for you.” He brought me a cassette tape a few days later that said, OZZY on it, and told me to pop it in and give it a listen. We were sitting there in my bedroom listening to the first song together, and I thought it was absolutely horrible. He was like, “Man that's kick ass, ain't it!” As it turned out, it wasn't Ozzy at all. It was Captain Beefheart's Doc At The Radar Station album. Ozzy was on the other side of the tape. The joke was on me! He eventually married my sister. They immediately bought a small home, and I used to go mow their grass for them. I guess he noticed my growing interest in music, so rather than pay me ten bucks, he would just let me pick an album out of his massive collection.
Over time, I'd taken all of his Motorhead and Ramones records, plus stuff like early Scorpions, The Michael Schenker group, UFO, and The Plasmatics. That's how I got started listening to unusual music, and then when I found out about WMNF 88.5FM (out of the USF Tampa campus) it was all over with. I turned off commercial radio and to this day have never turned it back on.
GT - Tony, everyone had to start somewhere, care to share what sort of music started you off toward punk/hardcore and what were the initial bands that got you in it for life?
Tony - I was always a big fan of music as a kid. I listened to the radio all the time and made cassette tapes and all that good stuff. When I was 11 or 12 my older sister started dating this guy that was a die-hard music nut. While the average person might have had 20 to 30 record albums in their home, this guy had like 800. They were all kept on a gigantic shelf in his bedroom, alphabetized, with plastic slip covers on them. He was like seven years older than me, and he started turning me on to early Bowie, Blondie, Ramones, Motorhead, and Thin Lizzy and stuff like that.
I remember one year I told him I wanted the newest Ozzy record. I guess that would have been Diary Of A Madman. He said, “Oh, I already have it! I'll tape it for you.” He brought me a cassette tape a few days later that said, OZZY on it, and told me to pop it in and give it a listen. We were sitting there in my bedroom listening to the first song together, and I thought it was absolutely horrible. He was like, “Man that's kick ass, ain't it!” As it turned out, it wasn't Ozzy at all. It was Captain Beefheart's Doc At The Radar Station album. Ozzy was on the other side of the tape. The joke was on me! He eventually married my sister. They immediately bought a small home, and I used to go mow their grass for them. I guess he noticed my growing interest in music, so rather than pay me ten bucks, he would just let me pick an album out of his massive collection.
Over time, I'd taken all of his Motorhead and Ramones records, plus stuff like early Scorpions, The Michael Schenker group, UFO, and The Plasmatics. That's how I got started listening to unusual music, and then when I found out about WMNF 88.5FM (out of the USF Tampa campus) it was all over with. I turned off commercial radio and to this day have never turned it back on.
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Tony with Keith Morris (Circle Jerks) and Brandon Cruz (Dr Know) - (pic - courtesy Tony Patino)
GT - What sort of stuff were you up to back then, in your early years into this sort of music?
Tony - I grew up in Lutz, Florida, which is basically a community just north of Tampa. Once I got into High School I started picking up on skateboarding, which I began to embrace right away. There were a small group of weirdos that I hung out with and skated with there, and we all traded tapes and turned each other on to really obscure stuff. I already had a decent record collection by then, and I'd been playing guitar in my bedroom and stuff. I didn't know very much about the punk scene in Tampa, but I knew it was there. I first started going to shows in the summer of 1986, and one of the first bands I saw was Tampa's Jehovah's Sicknesses. They kinda' blew me away!
My friend John started messing around on guitar a little, and we ended up starting a band with our friends Chris and Dale. That fell apart, then we tried it again not too long after that. Dale ended up not being a part of it at that point for some reason. Somehow, through Jay from Guy Smiley, we got our first gig in late '86 at the now-legendary Pet Cemetery out in Land O'Lakes. Other bands that played that night were Guy Smiley, Core Of Resistance, and Blemish On Society. It was scary and we sucked! We called ourselves Public Enemy for our first few shows, then we changed the name to Offensive Outlook when the rap band Public Enemy started getting well known. We ended up playing a lot of shows, but nothing big. We did the Slamfest at The Eagles Club, we were part of a disastrous night at The Ritz Theater, and we also played Chances, The Generic Club, and several parties. Our last gig was at The Sunset Club over near USF in the summer of '88, opening for Chokehold. That was our last gig, and Awake's first gig if I remember correctly. I was always taking pictures of bands back then, and ended up starting a zine called Music To Live By. I only put out one issue, and it included record reviews, local show reviews, and interviews with BP, GBH, and MIA. I sold copies of it for one dollar at Alternative Records over off of Fowler Avenue.
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Tony and John Stainer (Jehova's Sicknesses, Battles, Helmet)
GT - Did you do much traveling during those early years or where you basically camped out in your own local scene so to speak. What were a couple of the most memorable shows you went to back in that time period?
Tony - I didn't leave the city much back then. A lot of people I knew at that time were making road trips to go check out shows in places like Gainesville, Melbourne, and Miami. Sometimes even Atlanta. I wasn't fortunate enough to get to go on most of those trips. It's hard to pinpoint which Tampa shows were the most memorable for me, because every one of them was pretty crazy. Even if it was just local bands playing, there was still always an element of violence involved. Sometimes people would come around to check it out, and they would get their ass beat just because nobody knew who they were. Sometimes those people would come back and take their chances, and eventually get welcomed into the mix, but I think most of them just said forget it. It was always huge when the big bands would come through on tour. Those shows always had security, so I guess people felt safer. The big shows would have like 500 people in attendance, but the local shows would only have like 50 or 60 because people were too scared to go.
GT - So during your exploits you ran a record label as well? You've certainly done a great deal! Can you tell us a bit about the label?
Tony - There was a guy named Stepfan Jefferies that had just started a small independent label called Hello Records. It was 1998 if I remember correctly. He had been pointed in my direction by a mutual friend of ours because I knew a lot of bands and musicians, and had been organizing and promoting shows a lot over the past few years. Stepfan had a great business sense, and a passion for underground music, so when he found himself with an opportunity to start his own business he decided to try and do a record label. Neither of us were very familiar with how it all worked, but we started from scratch and learned together. When he came to me he had an alt-country band called Pleasureville, and a seventies-influenced rock band called The .357s. That was the foundation, and we built it from there.
GT - You mentioned it was up and running for about 5 years - care to elaborate a bit on how you started out, what the label wanted to achieve and so on?
Tony - I just started reaching out to whatever bands I knew, and I think in the first six months we signed Billyclub, Fang, Dr. Know, Raw Power, Phantom Rockers, and an L.A. band called Tongue. There we other bands too, but those were our heavy hitters. From there we had to figure out how to get distribution, which is the most crucial part of being a record label. We learned everything through trial and error too. The internet was just beginning to blow up at that time, and the big thing was CDNow. That was the original online record store that ultimately killed all the record stores across the country. The major goal, for me at least, was to get our records on there. I still remember the day that we got picked up by them and our records showed up on their site. It was a pretty triumphant feeling to say the least.
We ended up doing a deal with GBH that ended up in a split CD with Billyclub, and we were talking with Bad Brains manager Noel baker about releasing their next record. They just wanted way too much money. One of our big projects was a tribute record that has still not been released. My buddy Dave Woodard was the singer for Billyclub, and he had heard somewhere that Keith Morris from Circle Jerks was having some serious issues with diabetes, and was having trouble paying his bills. I tracked down Keith and talked to him about it, and got his permission to pursue a Tribute To The Circle Jerks. We were gonna' try and wrangle a bunch of bands into doing Circle Jerks covers, and give Keith the proceeds.
In the end I had (and still have) recordings from Nashville Pussy, Fu Manchu, SNFU, DOA, Mudhoney, Electric Frankenstein, Murphy's Law, Fishbone, Superchunk with Jane Wiedlin from The Go Gos on vocals, and just a slew more killer bands. I was even talking with Red Hot Chili Peppers and Foo Fighters about doing tracks. Foo Fighters actually contacted me about it, that's how big of a deal it was becoming. I did an interview with MTV about it and everything! Stepfan and I were hanging out backstage in Cincinnati at a Chili Peppers show, and they told us that Pearl Jam wanted to do a song too. It was interesting, because I found out how much love and respect so many people have for Keith Morris. It also gave me an opportunity to work with him myself on a personal level, and we're still friends and we still talk to this day. Unfortunately the label kinda' fell apart in the middle of that project, and all these years later none of those recordings have been released.
GT - While doing the label you were also acting as a tour manager?
Tony - When things started falling into place with Hello Records, we were putting our bands on the road after their records came out. At that point it was me, Stepfan, Ray Smith, and Keith Anderson. This made it possible for any one of us to take off and do label related stuff whenever we wanted. Since I was the one setting up all the tours, I decided to tag along on some of them as tour manager. It was a way to see the country, hang out with the bands, and meet some of the club owners I'd become acquainted with over the phone for so many years.
The longest tours I did were with Raw Power from Italy, and UK Psychobilly pioneers Phantom Rockers. Those were both really crazy trips for different reasons. Actually I think any tour is gonna' be crazy, no matter who you're with. For me, I was on cloud 9 most of the time, seeing all these amazing cities and clubs and watching my friends play every night. It just never got old. The funny thing about it all too, and any touring band will tell you this, is that you could write a book about all the oddball shit that goes down on smaller independent concert tours. Literally, if you go into detail about each day of the tour, you can write a crazy book. Almost everything that happened for me was really funny in some way. Except maybe when my van blew up in California and we had to leave it there. I wasn't smiling very much that day.
GT - How did things end with Hello Records?
Tony - Well, at first we were just doing it part-time at night and stuff. Then we were given a pretty substantial amount of money from Gibson Guitars. After that we were able to quit our jobs and try to make it work. It's a tough business though, and it took us quite a while to figure it all out. It was a lot more involved back then than it is these days, and we did everything from scratch. Magazine ads, posters, and all that. At one point, I was left to run the label while Stepfan explored other money making avenues in the field of music. Eventually, I guess he had found some more profitable ventures, and the investors decided to go with that. So by the time Hello Records was finally starting to see a profit it was a day late and a dollar short, and the plug was pulled on it. It was pretty upsetting for a lot of people, and I remember some bad blood flowing over it.
GT - 40 Amp Media rose from the ashes of Hello Records - what parameters of activity does 40 Amp Media have? What about the previous experiences made you want to still continue doing things in this sphere?
Tony - Once you get as involved in the record label business as I had, it's really hard to just shrug it off and go back to your day job. My main concern was that I wanted the records to still be available. When Hello went under, it just sort of disappeared off the face of the earth. When CDNow ran out of copies, that was it! I still had this roster of bands that trusted me and were willing to work with me, but I just didn't have the resources to do it all on my own. At least not in the same capacity that Hello was able to.
It was a lot of years before 40 Amp was born, and it's not a full fledged record label. It's more of a way for me to release projects I do as they happen. I don't do things on a large scale. I just make them available to the public. That way if someone goes hunting for it, it's there. I wouldn't trust any of my projects with a record label, book publisher, film producer, or whatever. I'd don't necessarily think that 100 percent of them are crooks, but I do think that about 75 percent of them operate with ulterior motives, and the rest of them are just good people that refuse to admit that their in over their head. I came dangerously close to getting in over my head with 40 Amp, and realized that I needed to pull back and not make promises that I wasn't absolutely convinced that I could keep.
With my life, things can be fantastic one day, and then the next day the bottom just falls right out. I'd rather not take anybody else on that ride, so I've had to keep things on a low profile.
GT - You've been involved in the often thankless world of booking and promotion, care to elaborate and tell some stories about that period of your life?
Tony - God! I set up some tours for bands, and I ended up getting lots of calls from other bands wanting to employ my services. When Hello first got started that was one of the things we tried to do. We wanted to be a fully functioning service for musicians. We put some ads in magazines promoting the tour booking end of the business, and it took off. I became the primary booking agent for a few independent labels, and also set up several one-off tours for some up and coming bands. It got pretty hectic, and I remember wanting to get the hell out of that business on more than one occasion.
As far as booking agents went, I was the new guy on the block, and there were a few seasoned old dudes that had been doing it for several years that did NOT like me. I guess they thought I was taking business away from them, which I was to a certain degree, but not on any kind of grand scale. When I think back on all that, there are a few incidents that still haunt me. One would have been when I booked a tour for The Hillside Stranglers from Detroit. Their tour had been over for several weeks, and I hadn't been paid for setting it up, and I hadn't heard from them at all. I went to their website, and saw that one of the band members had died from an overdose toward the end of the tour. That didn't sit very well with me.
There was another tour I set up for this band from Germany. I'm not gonna' say their name. It was their first trip to the states, and they were pretty much unknown. I told them not to expect a huge response. I told them they'd be lucky to get $100 a night, and to treat it more like a vacation than anything else. They flew over and started the tour, and were doing these little tour reports on their website every day. I went to check it out one day, and it was like three days into the tour. Every day they had something bad to say about me on there. "That fucking Tony Patino lied to us! He said we would get $100 for each band member every night! That bastard!"It went on and on every day until they said the tour was now called the Kill Tony Patino Tour. They were playing in my town the day after they posted that, so everywhere I went that day I was looking at people and wondering if it looked German, and if it was them, and if they were after me. The gig was like a mile from my house, so I just locked the doors and hoped they didn't get my address from some local band. For years after that you could google "kill Tony Patino" and a link to their tour journal would pop up.
Tony at a book signing for "The Road"
GT -When did you start getting the idea to write books, and can you offer a bit of information about each?
Tony - I always wrote little journals and stuff as a teenager. I had a typewriter when I was 17, and wrote a pretty lengthy one all about what was going on in my life. My father discovered it at one point, and immediately confiscated it and put me in a maximum security drug rehab. He finally gave it back to me after I got married. Another time, I wrote a lengthy account of my early childhood years and gave it to my mother as a gift for Mother's Day or something. The real writing didn't happen for me until more recently.
In 2009 I took my kids to the local library, and I came across a book by a stand-up comic named Mark Schiff. He interviewed nearly every comedian you ever heard of and had them tell him all these crazy stories about life on the road. The way it's put together, is basically like a book of short stories from each comic, and it's hilarious. I read it all in one day, and it's not a small book either. I'd never seen a book quite like that before, and it gave me the idea to try and pursue a similar project with musicians rather than stand-up comics.
At that point in my life I'd done a lot of different things involving music, and had become acquainted with several well known players in the punk rock genre. So with a few heavy hitters on my side to get the ball rolling, I started contacting all these people. Mostly people I admired and who's music I appreciated. I did recorded telephone interviews with all of them, then transcribed them and took selected stories they told me and made them readable. In the end I came up with 258 pages of stories, told by over 80 underground musicians, most of which are considered pioneers or icons in the punk/alternative community. That book is called The Road, and it was officially released in 2010.
"The Road" by Tony Patino
E-BOOK & PAPERBACK THROUGH AMAZON
I was learning a lot about writing techniques during the final stage of putting together The Road, and ended up pulling out that old journal that my father had found when I was 17. There was a lot of funny stories in that journal. Some of them I didn't even remember taking place, but there they were in black & white. I decided to use that as a starting point, and turn it into a fictional novel. Basically, I laid out the entire course of my life, beginning from the early years, and ending around 1991, which is when I left the state of Florida. Once I laid out the initial blue print, that left me with the task of filling in the gaps. So in the beginning, it was just a bunch of crazy stories that had to be pieced together into something with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. I did reference a lot of true events, some that I was involved in, and some that might have happened to people I knew, or might have been dismissed as simple rumors back in the day. Take that, and add to it a purely fictional storyline and ending to draw readers in, and you have a pretty good read. Especially for people that grew up in those surroundings at that particular time. I decided to call it Life and Times, and it became available in early 2012.
"Life and Times" by Tony Patino
E-BOOK & PAPERBACK THROUGH AMAZON
GT - How long did it take for the books to be completed, from inception time to being made available?
Tony - The Road was a pretty long process. I had to schedule all of these interviews with people all over the US and as far away as Australia, then I went ahead and transcribed the entire contents of the recordings into word documents. After that I picked out the parts of the conversations I wanted to use, then molded them into short stories. Some of the artists involved wanted to submit their own writings, so that saved me a little time, but it still took about a year and a half to get that one done. I started working on Life and Times when I was about ¾ of the way through that. It was a way of getting a much needed break from one project and focusing on another. I think the ideas for that book had been bouncing around in my head for decades though, so it practically wrote itself.
GT - How have the books sold, were they distributed and if so, how?
Tony - The Road was picked up and released by a publishing company out of Boston, and I told them to fuck off almost immediately after it was released. The contract stated that a professional proof reader and editor would review the book for any errors or typos, and it never was. I was in the process of checking and editing it myself, and then all of the sudden they started calling me and pressuring me to get it done so they could feature it in some big Black Friday bullshit they were doing on the day after Thanksgiving. I was up for like two days straight trying to get it done, and eventually told them I couldn't do it, and to leave me out of their stupid sale. The owner called me and said he would assign someone to get it done, and to just send him what I had. I did, and they released it, typos and all, exactly as I'd sent it to them. There weren't even any page numbers in the table of contents yet, and they published it that way. He and I got into it big-time, and I never saw a single royalty check or statement whatsoever. When I finally demanded that he send me a sales statement, it stated that they had sold exactly one (1) copy. That's really funny too, seeing as how friends and family members had purchased copies. Not only that, but I did some book signings to promote it before the falling out, and people were showing up left and right with books in their hands. They had to have gotten them somewhere, right?
I probably shouldn't say this, but I ended up fixing all the errors and releasing it myself on my independent label 40 Amp Media. So now if you go to Amazon or places like that there are two editions. The one with the typos has the subtitle A Book By Traveling Musicians. The one I released on my own has the subtitle Tales From Touring Musicians. I guess that publisher could sue me but I don't care. Another interesting part of all that is how the publisher charged me over nine dollars to purchase copies of my own book. My cut of the sales was about one dollar per book. But, I wanted a publishing deal and I got one, right?
The whole process of finding a publisher can be really frustrating and difficult. Anyone that's ever been there will agree with me. I had one guy offering to put it out, then when I checked out his back catalog I realized what a joke he was.
Book publishers are just as bad (if not worse) than record labels! Needless to say, Life and Times was released independently by me thru 40 Amp Media. It sells pretty well too, considering there hasn't ever been a single bit of promotion for it. I've found out the hard way that I'm able to do everything these self-proclaimed publishers can do all on my own. That includes the interior layout, the cover art, the manufacturing and even getting it into distribution and available to the public.
GT - So over all then, what was the experience like for you, having done the books and looking back on that whole time period?
Tony - The Road was a joy to make, because I got to have these long, candid, phone conversations with people I idolized all my life. I started working on Volume 2 right away, and wanted to go bigger. That project was never finished, but I have all these recorded conversations with people from different genres of music. I talked with original members from Thin Lizzy, Scorpions, Hawkwind, Iron Butterfly, and even Sha-Na-Na. One cool interview I did was with Steve Boone from The Lovin' Spoonful. He told me all about what it was like to tour back in the sixties and how different it was. He said they would play these big auditoriums using nothing but practice amps, and the crowd couldn't even hear the music, but would be down there going nuts the whole time anyway. Life and Times has been an interesting trip because so many people that grew up in the Tampa area during that time period have been able to relate to it so well. There's been more than a few people that have sent me emails telling me how that book is like a mirror image of their younger years.
GT - Yeah, we can definitely relate to that with the book we did on our own, we share very similar ground certainly. What's your opinion about the other books out there, do you pay attention to that sort of stuff?
Tony - As far as books I've read, I don't really enjoy books about the history of punk music because they always seem to be so selective about what cities they discuss. Just like I keep hearing people complain about that film American Hardcore. I'm constantly hearing people bitch about that film because it didn't include the city they grew up in. I think it's a great film, but it would have been impossible for them to have covered the entire US. I prefer autobiographical books over history books, and I mean that about any subject, not just music.
With that in mind, there aren't very many autobiographical books out there by punk musicians. Jack Grisham from TSOL wrote a good one. He seemed to be on the same level we were down in Florida as far as the chaos he likes to create. Joey from DOA's book is really good. Bob Mould from Husker Du did one, but I've read some mixed reviews so I haven't picked it up yet. I think some good ones will be coming out soon though, but some of these people are so busy that it's taking them a really long time to get them done. I know Keith Morris from Circle Jerks is working on one right now, and so is John Stabb from Government Issue. Those should both be pretty interesting.
Tony with mountains of vhs to work through and a camera that didn't make it.
GT - You sound like us! We're of the basic same nature concerning history vs autobiographical accounts . When did you start thinking about making a documentary about the Tampa punk scene? What was the impetus that started the ball rolling? Obviously many of the locals embraced the idea, was it well received in general or did you have a hard time getting material?
Tony - I've always been into video. For a while there, if I went to a show I would have my camcorder by my side and would always be filming. I eventually started trading with other people around the country and amassed this huge collection of bootleg live performances. There was never much video documentation of things that happened in Tampa in the eighties, just a few things. I think the most well known thing out there is a film loosely called The Scene. It's a mini-documentary that was put together in 1987 by a guy named Steve Burcham. That thing is all over youtube, and get's lots of praises by the people that have viewed it. He shot some interviews and live footage over the course of two or three shows, and it's a really good film.
To me though, I didn't want that to be the final statement on the Tampa scene in the eighties. Toward the end of writing Life and Times, I started toying with the idea of making something a little more in depth. Thanks to things like myspace and facebook, lots of photos and music that probably never would have been seen or heard otherwise were beginning to see the light of day. I started gathering all these things, just see to if there was enough content out there to even consider the idea of making a film. Before long, it seemed like there was. There wasn't much live video footage though, so I tracked down Steve Burcham to see it he had any unused footage that he might want to contribute. He and I talked on the phone for a really long time, and he told me that there was quite a bit of unused footage at one point in time, but he had taped over it. Ha!
I forged on anyway, asking people to pull out their old videos, and accumulated pretty much everything that was filmed back then. After that, I needed interviews. I was doing a book signing in Tampa and took my camcorder, hoping to round up some of the old scenesters, but didn't get much done on that trip. It took me making one more trip down, along with the enlistment of my friend Eric Grant, and we were able to get interviews here and there with the people you see in the film now. Zak Kirlis from BP did the interviews with Tony and Dave from No Clubs Productions, and Richie Lawler did one with Tanya McKee, who was one of the most outspoken girls from the eighties scene, and ended up being the only female in the film.
SEE TONY'S INTERVIEW IN THE STUDIO ON THE MIC SHOW
GT - It's only recently that a hard copy dvd of the documentary has become available, how'd that feel to see all that hard work finally come together in that format?
Tony - It definitely feels great to finally see it available now. It does have it's flaws, but I'm pretty proud of it, seeing that it's my very first attempt at making a documentary film.
GT - What were some of the highlights (or low lights) about making the film?
Tony - One thing people don't realize is that my camera heads were going bad during the second trip I made for interviews. I had no idea that was happening at the time, and when I got home and started reviewing the footage I realized that a lot of it was unusable. It took 100s of hours in different video production labs to salvage some of those interviews, and even then, I wasn't able to save them all in there entirety. The interview footage you see of Dorsey Martin, Mike Mchugh, Jay and Dano from Guy Smiley, Chris Barrows, and our old pal Edgar, all had to be spliced together in a very primitive way. It took literally one hour of work to get five seconds of usable footage. I refused to redo the interviews though, because I didn't want to lose that original spontaneity, and I refused to make the film without those people in it. That's why those particular people aren't seen more in the film. Each of them had a lot more input I would have liked to have used, it just wasn't salvageable.
I'm truly happy that I was able to get Edgar in there, because as a lot of people already know, he is no longer with us. That interview almost didn't happen too. He called me and told me we would have to reschedule because he was in the ER. I was only gonna' be in town for two days, so I told him I'd call him back because I thought it might be cool to do his interview at the ER. I got caught up doing something else and ended up meeting up with him the next day. When I asked him how it went at the ER, he said, “I don't know. I left!” When I asked him why he left he said, “To hang out with you and get interviewed for the film.” So Edgar was so supportive of that project that he ditched the ER hoping to meet me at his house that night. It was confusing to me, and I wish he would have called me before he decided to leave the hospital. He died shortly after the film screening, and that kinda' haunts me a little.
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Tony and Sammytown (Fang)
GT - How was the local screening of the documentary received?
Tony - I originally started scouting out places in Tampa to screen it before it was even finished. We had one place that looked like it would work, but then Zak got Tony and Dave from No Clubs productions to do interviews and that changed everything. From that moment on, Dave Hundley was interested in making it a No Clubs/State Media event. That was what I'd wanted all along so I couldn't have been more happy about it. Dave wanted to do it at the Orpheum in Ybor CIty, but they'd never done anything like that there before, so certain factors came into play. I think he had a projector, but he wasn't sure what to project the film onto. When I showed up there, they had a gigantic white sheet hanging from the ceiling, and were trying to do a few test runs. At first the lap top they had to send the video to the projector wouldn't play the disc. We were beginning to scramble, but luckily they found one that would work. There'd been quite a bit of press to promote the screening, including interviews I did with the locals papers and stuff, and the turnout was pretty positive. I think we had over 200 paying patrons, and who knows how many people on the guest list.
After the film, which was a rough version lasting about two hours in length, we had some live music. Slap Of Reality, Guy Smiley, and Pagan Faith, all basically reunited to play, then we had Dan Destructo, who had flown in from California to do a No Fraud set with some original members. The headliner was Fang from California. I've been friends with Fang's vocalist Sammytown for a number of years, and I thought they would be perfect. He was into the idea, so he flew the band in and we set up a week long string of shows for them to play all over Florida. Pagan Faith and No Fraud took turns opening up for them in different cities, leading up to the film screening. Big thumbs up to Brian from Pagan Faith! He helped out in a major way that night by supplying all the gear for the bands, among other things. It was also great to work with Dave Hundley. That guy know what he's doing for sure!
CLICK HERE TO SEE A NEWSPAPER ARTICLE ABOUT THE SCREENING
GT - Many of the folks that took part in the documentary come to the screening? How did you feel seeing your work like that, being screened in public?
Tony - The guys in Rat Cafeteria had a prior engagement, and that kinda' bummed me out, because I really wanted them to play, but otherwise I think everyone else was there. It was kind of crazy seeing it on a huge screen like that. Of course it was a sheet, but I'm sure anyone that went will tell you that we all felt like we were sitting in movie theater. The whole experience also gave me some insight into a final edit to make it more proper for a DVD release. I ended up cutting some things out, including some of the later, more metal bands like Assuck and Paineater. I hated to cut those guys out, but the film was way too long at two hours, and they were more a part of that grind-core scene that came about as the eighties punk scene wound down to a close. I'll be making the original, uncut, long version available on DVD as soon as I change the cover art. I actually sold some DVDs of that version at the screening but they had "FIRST 100" printed across the cover.
CHECK OUT 40 AMP'S FACEBOOK PAGE - THERE'S A TON OF AWESOME PHOTOS FROM THE AFTER SCREENING GIG !!
GT - What's the next project you have in store? Plus, you're compiling a coffee table type photo book as an accompaniment to the documentary, and Glorious Times has donated some photos for possible inclusion which have never seen the light of day. How close is the book to being completed?
Tony - The coffee table book is done. Right now I'm contacting everyone to get info on who to credit some of these photos to, and to make sure everybody is OK with me using them. It's about 300 pages long, and includes all of the photos I gathered to make the film and more, plus it has all the flyer and poster art from back then. I'm doing full color, full page images, and some even take up two pages. With the content and the size of the book, it looks like it might be a little pricy to purchase, so I plan to make black and white editions and smaller editions as far as dimensions. That way people can chose how much of an investment they want to make. This is my way of closing the door on the Tampa punk stuff and moving on. All I can hope is that these things stay available over the years so people can continue looking back if they choose to.
Other than that, my second fictional novel should be out soon. I'm editing it right now, and my friend Joshua Rothrock, who did the cover art to The Road, is working on a cover for it. This book is called "Free Drinks", and it's sure offend at least a few people that pick it up. Let's hope anyway!
PURCHASE "WE CAN'T HELP IT IF WE'RE FROM TAMPA" DOCUMENTARY STRAIGHT FROM THE MANUFACTURER HERE
FOR PURCHASE BY PAYPAL OR CREDIT CARD SALES, CLICK HERE
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Thanks Tony for the awesome insight into your work, and activity - SUPPORT DIY FOLKS! If you thought Tampa starts and ends with metal you're dead wrong, do yourself a huge favor and grab a copy of this documentary!
GT - What sort of stuff were you up to back then, in your early years into this sort of music?
Tony - I grew up in Lutz, Florida, which is basically a community just north of Tampa. Once I got into High School I started picking up on skateboarding, which I began to embrace right away. There were a small group of weirdos that I hung out with and skated with there, and we all traded tapes and turned each other on to really obscure stuff. I already had a decent record collection by then, and I'd been playing guitar in my bedroom and stuff. I didn't know very much about the punk scene in Tampa, but I knew it was there. I first started going to shows in the summer of 1986, and one of the first bands I saw was Tampa's Jehovah's Sicknesses. They kinda' blew me away!
My friend John started messing around on guitar a little, and we ended up starting a band with our friends Chris and Dale. That fell apart, then we tried it again not too long after that. Dale ended up not being a part of it at that point for some reason. Somehow, through Jay from Guy Smiley, we got our first gig in late '86 at the now-legendary Pet Cemetery out in Land O'Lakes. Other bands that played that night were Guy Smiley, Core Of Resistance, and Blemish On Society. It was scary and we sucked! We called ourselves Public Enemy for our first few shows, then we changed the name to Offensive Outlook when the rap band Public Enemy started getting well known. We ended up playing a lot of shows, but nothing big. We did the Slamfest at The Eagles Club, we were part of a disastrous night at The Ritz Theater, and we also played Chances, The Generic Club, and several parties. Our last gig was at The Sunset Club over near USF in the summer of '88, opening for Chokehold. That was our last gig, and Awake's first gig if I remember correctly. I was always taking pictures of bands back then, and ended up starting a zine called Music To Live By. I only put out one issue, and it included record reviews, local show reviews, and interviews with BP, GBH, and MIA. I sold copies of it for one dollar at Alternative Records over off of Fowler Avenue.
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GT - Did you do much traveling during those early years or where you basically camped out in your own local scene so to speak. What were a couple of the most memorable shows you went to back in that time period?
Tony - I didn't leave the city much back then. A lot of people I knew at that time were making road trips to go check out shows in places like Gainesville, Melbourne, and Miami. Sometimes even Atlanta. I wasn't fortunate enough to get to go on most of those trips. It's hard to pinpoint which Tampa shows were the most memorable for me, because every one of them was pretty crazy. Even if it was just local bands playing, there was still always an element of violence involved. Sometimes people would come around to check it out, and they would get their ass beat just because nobody knew who they were. Sometimes those people would come back and take their chances, and eventually get welcomed into the mix, but I think most of them just said forget it. It was always huge when the big bands would come through on tour. Those shows always had security, so I guess people felt safer. The big shows would have like 500 people in attendance, but the local shows would only have like 50 or 60 because people were too scared to go.
GT - So during your exploits you ran a record label as well? You've certainly done a great deal! Can you tell us a bit about the label?
Tony - There was a guy named Stepfan Jefferies that had just started a small independent label called Hello Records. It was 1998 if I remember correctly. He had been pointed in my direction by a mutual friend of ours because I knew a lot of bands and musicians, and had been organizing and promoting shows a lot over the past few years. Stepfan had a great business sense, and a passion for underground music, so when he found himself with an opportunity to start his own business he decided to try and do a record label. Neither of us were very familiar with how it all worked, but we started from scratch and learned together. When he came to me he had an alt-country band called Pleasureville, and a seventies-influenced rock band called The .357s. That was the foundation, and we built it from there.
GT - You mentioned it was up and running for about 5 years - care to elaborate a bit on how you started out, what the label wanted to achieve and so on?
Tony - I just started reaching out to whatever bands I knew, and I think in the first six months we signed Billyclub, Fang, Dr. Know, Raw Power, Phantom Rockers, and an L.A. band called Tongue. There we other bands too, but those were our heavy hitters. From there we had to figure out how to get distribution, which is the most crucial part of being a record label. We learned everything through trial and error too. The internet was just beginning to blow up at that time, and the big thing was CDNow. That was the original online record store that ultimately killed all the record stores across the country. The major goal, for me at least, was to get our records on there. I still remember the day that we got picked up by them and our records showed up on their site. It was a pretty triumphant feeling to say the least.
We ended up doing a deal with GBH that ended up in a split CD with Billyclub, and we were talking with Bad Brains manager Noel baker about releasing their next record. They just wanted way too much money. One of our big projects was a tribute record that has still not been released. My buddy Dave Woodard was the singer for Billyclub, and he had heard somewhere that Keith Morris from Circle Jerks was having some serious issues with diabetes, and was having trouble paying his bills. I tracked down Keith and talked to him about it, and got his permission to pursue a Tribute To The Circle Jerks. We were gonna' try and wrangle a bunch of bands into doing Circle Jerks covers, and give Keith the proceeds.
In the end I had (and still have) recordings from Nashville Pussy, Fu Manchu, SNFU, DOA, Mudhoney, Electric Frankenstein, Murphy's Law, Fishbone, Superchunk with Jane Wiedlin from The Go Gos on vocals, and just a slew more killer bands. I was even talking with Red Hot Chili Peppers and Foo Fighters about doing tracks. Foo Fighters actually contacted me about it, that's how big of a deal it was becoming. I did an interview with MTV about it and everything! Stepfan and I were hanging out backstage in Cincinnati at a Chili Peppers show, and they told us that Pearl Jam wanted to do a song too. It was interesting, because I found out how much love and respect so many people have for Keith Morris. It also gave me an opportunity to work with him myself on a personal level, and we're still friends and we still talk to this day. Unfortunately the label kinda' fell apart in the middle of that project, and all these years later none of those recordings have been released.
GT - While doing the label you were also acting as a tour manager?
Tony - When things started falling into place with Hello Records, we were putting our bands on the road after their records came out. At that point it was me, Stepfan, Ray Smith, and Keith Anderson. This made it possible for any one of us to take off and do label related stuff whenever we wanted. Since I was the one setting up all the tours, I decided to tag along on some of them as tour manager. It was a way to see the country, hang out with the bands, and meet some of the club owners I'd become acquainted with over the phone for so many years.
The longest tours I did were with Raw Power from Italy, and UK Psychobilly pioneers Phantom Rockers. Those were both really crazy trips for different reasons. Actually I think any tour is gonna' be crazy, no matter who you're with. For me, I was on cloud 9 most of the time, seeing all these amazing cities and clubs and watching my friends play every night. It just never got old. The funny thing about it all too, and any touring band will tell you this, is that you could write a book about all the oddball shit that goes down on smaller independent concert tours. Literally, if you go into detail about each day of the tour, you can write a crazy book. Almost everything that happened for me was really funny in some way. Except maybe when my van blew up in California and we had to leave it there. I wasn't smiling very much that day.
GT - How did things end with Hello Records?
Tony - Well, at first we were just doing it part-time at night and stuff. Then we were given a pretty substantial amount of money from Gibson Guitars. After that we were able to quit our jobs and try to make it work. It's a tough business though, and it took us quite a while to figure it all out. It was a lot more involved back then than it is these days, and we did everything from scratch. Magazine ads, posters, and all that. At one point, I was left to run the label while Stepfan explored other money making avenues in the field of music. Eventually, I guess he had found some more profitable ventures, and the investors decided to go with that. So by the time Hello Records was finally starting to see a profit it was a day late and a dollar short, and the plug was pulled on it. It was pretty upsetting for a lot of people, and I remember some bad blood flowing over it.
GT - 40 Amp Media rose from the ashes of Hello Records - what parameters of activity does 40 Amp Media have? What about the previous experiences made you want to still continue doing things in this sphere?
Tony - Once you get as involved in the record label business as I had, it's really hard to just shrug it off and go back to your day job. My main concern was that I wanted the records to still be available. When Hello went under, it just sort of disappeared off the face of the earth. When CDNow ran out of copies, that was it! I still had this roster of bands that trusted me and were willing to work with me, but I just didn't have the resources to do it all on my own. At least not in the same capacity that Hello was able to.
It was a lot of years before 40 Amp was born, and it's not a full fledged record label. It's more of a way for me to release projects I do as they happen. I don't do things on a large scale. I just make them available to the public. That way if someone goes hunting for it, it's there. I wouldn't trust any of my projects with a record label, book publisher, film producer, or whatever. I'd don't necessarily think that 100 percent of them are crooks, but I do think that about 75 percent of them operate with ulterior motives, and the rest of them are just good people that refuse to admit that their in over their head. I came dangerously close to getting in over my head with 40 Amp, and realized that I needed to pull back and not make promises that I wasn't absolutely convinced that I could keep.
With my life, things can be fantastic one day, and then the next day the bottom just falls right out. I'd rather not take anybody else on that ride, so I've had to keep things on a low profile.
GT - You've been involved in the often thankless world of booking and promotion, care to elaborate and tell some stories about that period of your life?
Tony - God! I set up some tours for bands, and I ended up getting lots of calls from other bands wanting to employ my services. When Hello first got started that was one of the things we tried to do. We wanted to be a fully functioning service for musicians. We put some ads in magazines promoting the tour booking end of the business, and it took off. I became the primary booking agent for a few independent labels, and also set up several one-off tours for some up and coming bands. It got pretty hectic, and I remember wanting to get the hell out of that business on more than one occasion.
As far as booking agents went, I was the new guy on the block, and there were a few seasoned old dudes that had been doing it for several years that did NOT like me. I guess they thought I was taking business away from them, which I was to a certain degree, but not on any kind of grand scale. When I think back on all that, there are a few incidents that still haunt me. One would have been when I booked a tour for The Hillside Stranglers from Detroit. Their tour had been over for several weeks, and I hadn't been paid for setting it up, and I hadn't heard from them at all. I went to their website, and saw that one of the band members had died from an overdose toward the end of the tour. That didn't sit very well with me.
There was another tour I set up for this band from Germany. I'm not gonna' say their name. It was their first trip to the states, and they were pretty much unknown. I told them not to expect a huge response. I told them they'd be lucky to get $100 a night, and to treat it more like a vacation than anything else. They flew over and started the tour, and were doing these little tour reports on their website every day. I went to check it out one day, and it was like three days into the tour. Every day they had something bad to say about me on there. "That fucking Tony Patino lied to us! He said we would get $100 for each band member every night! That bastard!"It went on and on every day until they said the tour was now called the Kill Tony Patino Tour. They were playing in my town the day after they posted that, so everywhere I went that day I was looking at people and wondering if it looked German, and if it was them, and if they were after me. The gig was like a mile from my house, so I just locked the doors and hoped they didn't get my address from some local band. For years after that you could google "kill Tony Patino" and a link to their tour journal would pop up.
Tony at a book signing for "The Road"
GT -When did you start getting the idea to write books, and can you offer a bit of information about each?
Tony - I always wrote little journals and stuff as a teenager. I had a typewriter when I was 17, and wrote a pretty lengthy one all about what was going on in my life. My father discovered it at one point, and immediately confiscated it and put me in a maximum security drug rehab. He finally gave it back to me after I got married. Another time, I wrote a lengthy account of my early childhood years and gave it to my mother as a gift for Mother's Day or something. The real writing didn't happen for me until more recently.
In 2009 I took my kids to the local library, and I came across a book by a stand-up comic named Mark Schiff. He interviewed nearly every comedian you ever heard of and had them tell him all these crazy stories about life on the road. The way it's put together, is basically like a book of short stories from each comic, and it's hilarious. I read it all in one day, and it's not a small book either. I'd never seen a book quite like that before, and it gave me the idea to try and pursue a similar project with musicians rather than stand-up comics.
At that point in my life I'd done a lot of different things involving music, and had become acquainted with several well known players in the punk rock genre. So with a few heavy hitters on my side to get the ball rolling, I started contacting all these people. Mostly people I admired and who's music I appreciated. I did recorded telephone interviews with all of them, then transcribed them and took selected stories they told me and made them readable. In the end I came up with 258 pages of stories, told by over 80 underground musicians, most of which are considered pioneers or icons in the punk/alternative community. That book is called The Road, and it was officially released in 2010.
E-BOOK & PAPERBACK THROUGH AMAZON
I was learning a lot about writing techniques during the final stage of putting together The Road, and ended up pulling out that old journal that my father had found when I was 17. There was a lot of funny stories in that journal. Some of them I didn't even remember taking place, but there they were in black & white. I decided to use that as a starting point, and turn it into a fictional novel. Basically, I laid out the entire course of my life, beginning from the early years, and ending around 1991, which is when I left the state of Florida. Once I laid out the initial blue print, that left me with the task of filling in the gaps. So in the beginning, it was just a bunch of crazy stories that had to be pieced together into something with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. I did reference a lot of true events, some that I was involved in, and some that might have happened to people I knew, or might have been dismissed as simple rumors back in the day. Take that, and add to it a purely fictional storyline and ending to draw readers in, and you have a pretty good read. Especially for people that grew up in those surroundings at that particular time. I decided to call it Life and Times, and it became available in early 2012.
E-BOOK & PAPERBACK THROUGH AMAZON
GT - How long did it take for the books to be completed, from inception time to being made available?
Tony - The Road was a pretty long process. I had to schedule all of these interviews with people all over the US and as far away as Australia, then I went ahead and transcribed the entire contents of the recordings into word documents. After that I picked out the parts of the conversations I wanted to use, then molded them into short stories. Some of the artists involved wanted to submit their own writings, so that saved me a little time, but it still took about a year and a half to get that one done. I started working on Life and Times when I was about ¾ of the way through that. It was a way of getting a much needed break from one project and focusing on another. I think the ideas for that book had been bouncing around in my head for decades though, so it practically wrote itself.
GT - How have the books sold, were they distributed and if so, how?
Tony - The Road was picked up and released by a publishing company out of Boston, and I told them to fuck off almost immediately after it was released. The contract stated that a professional proof reader and editor would review the book for any errors or typos, and it never was. I was in the process of checking and editing it myself, and then all of the sudden they started calling me and pressuring me to get it done so they could feature it in some big Black Friday bullshit they were doing on the day after Thanksgiving. I was up for like two days straight trying to get it done, and eventually told them I couldn't do it, and to leave me out of their stupid sale. The owner called me and said he would assign someone to get it done, and to just send him what I had. I did, and they released it, typos and all, exactly as I'd sent it to them. There weren't even any page numbers in the table of contents yet, and they published it that way. He and I got into it big-time, and I never saw a single royalty check or statement whatsoever. When I finally demanded that he send me a sales statement, it stated that they had sold exactly one (1) copy. That's really funny too, seeing as how friends and family members had purchased copies. Not only that, but I did some book signings to promote it before the falling out, and people were showing up left and right with books in their hands. They had to have gotten them somewhere, right?
I probably shouldn't say this, but I ended up fixing all the errors and releasing it myself on my independent label 40 Amp Media. So now if you go to Amazon or places like that there are two editions. The one with the typos has the subtitle A Book By Traveling Musicians. The one I released on my own has the subtitle Tales From Touring Musicians. I guess that publisher could sue me but I don't care. Another interesting part of all that is how the publisher charged me over nine dollars to purchase copies of my own book. My cut of the sales was about one dollar per book. But, I wanted a publishing deal and I got one, right?
The whole process of finding a publisher can be really frustrating and difficult. Anyone that's ever been there will agree with me. I had one guy offering to put it out, then when I checked out his back catalog I realized what a joke he was.
Book publishers are just as bad (if not worse) than record labels! Needless to say, Life and Times was released independently by me thru 40 Amp Media. It sells pretty well too, considering there hasn't ever been a single bit of promotion for it. I've found out the hard way that I'm able to do everything these self-proclaimed publishers can do all on my own. That includes the interior layout, the cover art, the manufacturing and even getting it into distribution and available to the public.
GT - So over all then, what was the experience like for you, having done the books and looking back on that whole time period?
Tony - The Road was a joy to make, because I got to have these long, candid, phone conversations with people I idolized all my life. I started working on Volume 2 right away, and wanted to go bigger. That project was never finished, but I have all these recorded conversations with people from different genres of music. I talked with original members from Thin Lizzy, Scorpions, Hawkwind, Iron Butterfly, and even Sha-Na-Na. One cool interview I did was with Steve Boone from The Lovin' Spoonful. He told me all about what it was like to tour back in the sixties and how different it was. He said they would play these big auditoriums using nothing but practice amps, and the crowd couldn't even hear the music, but would be down there going nuts the whole time anyway. Life and Times has been an interesting trip because so many people that grew up in the Tampa area during that time period have been able to relate to it so well. There's been more than a few people that have sent me emails telling me how that book is like a mirror image of their younger years.
GT - Yeah, we can definitely relate to that with the book we did on our own, we share very similar ground certainly. What's your opinion about the other books out there, do you pay attention to that sort of stuff?
Tony - As far as books I've read, I don't really enjoy books about the history of punk music because they always seem to be so selective about what cities they discuss. Just like I keep hearing people complain about that film American Hardcore. I'm constantly hearing people bitch about that film because it didn't include the city they grew up in. I think it's a great film, but it would have been impossible for them to have covered the entire US. I prefer autobiographical books over history books, and I mean that about any subject, not just music.
With that in mind, there aren't very many autobiographical books out there by punk musicians. Jack Grisham from TSOL wrote a good one. He seemed to be on the same level we were down in Florida as far as the chaos he likes to create. Joey from DOA's book is really good. Bob Mould from Husker Du did one, but I've read some mixed reviews so I haven't picked it up yet. I think some good ones will be coming out soon though, but some of these people are so busy that it's taking them a really long time to get them done. I know Keith Morris from Circle Jerks is working on one right now, and so is John Stabb from Government Issue. Those should both be pretty interesting.
Tony with mountains of vhs to work through and a camera that didn't make it.
GT - You sound like us! We're of the basic same nature concerning history vs autobiographical accounts . When did you start thinking about making a documentary about the Tampa punk scene? What was the impetus that started the ball rolling? Obviously many of the locals embraced the idea, was it well received in general or did you have a hard time getting material?
Tony - I've always been into video. For a while there, if I went to a show I would have my camcorder by my side and would always be filming. I eventually started trading with other people around the country and amassed this huge collection of bootleg live performances. There was never much video documentation of things that happened in Tampa in the eighties, just a few things. I think the most well known thing out there is a film loosely called The Scene. It's a mini-documentary that was put together in 1987 by a guy named Steve Burcham. That thing is all over youtube, and get's lots of praises by the people that have viewed it. He shot some interviews and live footage over the course of two or three shows, and it's a really good film.
To me though, I didn't want that to be the final statement on the Tampa scene in the eighties. Toward the end of writing Life and Times, I started toying with the idea of making something a little more in depth. Thanks to things like myspace and facebook, lots of photos and music that probably never would have been seen or heard otherwise were beginning to see the light of day. I started gathering all these things, just see to if there was enough content out there to even consider the idea of making a film. Before long, it seemed like there was. There wasn't much live video footage though, so I tracked down Steve Burcham to see it he had any unused footage that he might want to contribute. He and I talked on the phone for a really long time, and he told me that there was quite a bit of unused footage at one point in time, but he had taped over it. Ha!
I forged on anyway, asking people to pull out their old videos, and accumulated pretty much everything that was filmed back then. After that, I needed interviews. I was doing a book signing in Tampa and took my camcorder, hoping to round up some of the old scenesters, but didn't get much done on that trip. It took me making one more trip down, along with the enlistment of my friend Eric Grant, and we were able to get interviews here and there with the people you see in the film now. Zak Kirlis from BP did the interviews with Tony and Dave from No Clubs Productions, and Richie Lawler did one with Tanya McKee, who was one of the most outspoken girls from the eighties scene, and ended up being the only female in the film.
SEE TONY'S INTERVIEW IN THE STUDIO ON THE MIC SHOW
GT - It's only recently that a hard copy dvd of the documentary has become available, how'd that feel to see all that hard work finally come together in that format?
Tony - It definitely feels great to finally see it available now. It does have it's flaws, but I'm pretty proud of it, seeing that it's my very first attempt at making a documentary film.
GT - What were some of the highlights (or low lights) about making the film?
Tony - One thing people don't realize is that my camera heads were going bad during the second trip I made for interviews. I had no idea that was happening at the time, and when I got home and started reviewing the footage I realized that a lot of it was unusable. It took 100s of hours in different video production labs to salvage some of those interviews, and even then, I wasn't able to save them all in there entirety. The interview footage you see of Dorsey Martin, Mike Mchugh, Jay and Dano from Guy Smiley, Chris Barrows, and our old pal Edgar, all had to be spliced together in a very primitive way. It took literally one hour of work to get five seconds of usable footage. I refused to redo the interviews though, because I didn't want to lose that original spontaneity, and I refused to make the film without those people in it. That's why those particular people aren't seen more in the film. Each of them had a lot more input I would have liked to have used, it just wasn't salvageable.
I'm truly happy that I was able to get Edgar in there, because as a lot of people already know, he is no longer with us. That interview almost didn't happen too. He called me and told me we would have to reschedule because he was in the ER. I was only gonna' be in town for two days, so I told him I'd call him back because I thought it might be cool to do his interview at the ER. I got caught up doing something else and ended up meeting up with him the next day. When I asked him how it went at the ER, he said, “I don't know. I left!” When I asked him why he left he said, “To hang out with you and get interviewed for the film.” So Edgar was so supportive of that project that he ditched the ER hoping to meet me at his house that night. It was confusing to me, and I wish he would have called me before he decided to leave the hospital. He died shortly after the film screening, and that kinda' haunts me a little.
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GT - How was the local screening of the documentary received?
Tony - I originally started scouting out places in Tampa to screen it before it was even finished. We had one place that looked like it would work, but then Zak got Tony and Dave from No Clubs productions to do interviews and that changed everything. From that moment on, Dave Hundley was interested in making it a No Clubs/State Media event. That was what I'd wanted all along so I couldn't have been more happy about it. Dave wanted to do it at the Orpheum in Ybor CIty, but they'd never done anything like that there before, so certain factors came into play. I think he had a projector, but he wasn't sure what to project the film onto. When I showed up there, they had a gigantic white sheet hanging from the ceiling, and were trying to do a few test runs. At first the lap top they had to send the video to the projector wouldn't play the disc. We were beginning to scramble, but luckily they found one that would work. There'd been quite a bit of press to promote the screening, including interviews I did with the locals papers and stuff, and the turnout was pretty positive. I think we had over 200 paying patrons, and who knows how many people on the guest list.
After the film, which was a rough version lasting about two hours in length, we had some live music. Slap Of Reality, Guy Smiley, and Pagan Faith, all basically reunited to play, then we had Dan Destructo, who had flown in from California to do a No Fraud set with some original members. The headliner was Fang from California. I've been friends with Fang's vocalist Sammytown for a number of years, and I thought they would be perfect. He was into the idea, so he flew the band in and we set up a week long string of shows for them to play all over Florida. Pagan Faith and No Fraud took turns opening up for them in different cities, leading up to the film screening. Big thumbs up to Brian from Pagan Faith! He helped out in a major way that night by supplying all the gear for the bands, among other things. It was also great to work with Dave Hundley. That guy know what he's doing for sure!
CLICK HERE TO SEE A NEWSPAPER ARTICLE ABOUT THE SCREENING
GT - Many of the folks that took part in the documentary come to the screening? How did you feel seeing your work like that, being screened in public?
Tony - The guys in Rat Cafeteria had a prior engagement, and that kinda' bummed me out, because I really wanted them to play, but otherwise I think everyone else was there. It was kind of crazy seeing it on a huge screen like that. Of course it was a sheet, but I'm sure anyone that went will tell you that we all felt like we were sitting in movie theater. The whole experience also gave me some insight into a final edit to make it more proper for a DVD release. I ended up cutting some things out, including some of the later, more metal bands like Assuck and Paineater. I hated to cut those guys out, but the film was way too long at two hours, and they were more a part of that grind-core scene that came about as the eighties punk scene wound down to a close. I'll be making the original, uncut, long version available on DVD as soon as I change the cover art. I actually sold some DVDs of that version at the screening but they had "FIRST 100" printed across the cover.
CHECK OUT 40 AMP'S FACEBOOK PAGE - THERE'S A TON OF AWESOME PHOTOS FROM THE AFTER SCREENING GIG !!
GT - What's the next project you have in store? Plus, you're compiling a coffee table type photo book as an accompaniment to the documentary, and Glorious Times has donated some photos for possible inclusion which have never seen the light of day. How close is the book to being completed?
Tony - The coffee table book is done. Right now I'm contacting everyone to get info on who to credit some of these photos to, and to make sure everybody is OK with me using them. It's about 300 pages long, and includes all of the photos I gathered to make the film and more, plus it has all the flyer and poster art from back then. I'm doing full color, full page images, and some even take up two pages. With the content and the size of the book, it looks like it might be a little pricy to purchase, so I plan to make black and white editions and smaller editions as far as dimensions. That way people can chose how much of an investment they want to make. This is my way of closing the door on the Tampa punk stuff and moving on. All I can hope is that these things stay available over the years so people can continue looking back if they choose to.
Other than that, my second fictional novel should be out soon. I'm editing it right now, and my friend Joshua Rothrock, who did the cover art to The Road, is working on a cover for it. This book is called "Free Drinks", and it's sure offend at least a few people that pick it up. Let's hope anyway!
PURCHASE "WE CAN'T HELP IT IF WE'RE FROM TAMPA" DOCUMENTARY STRAIGHT FROM THE MANUFACTURER HERE
FOR PURCHASE BY PAYPAL OR CREDIT CARD SALES, CLICK HERE
FOR A ROUGH DIGITAL VERSION THRU SELLFLY, CLICK HERE
Thanks Tony for the awesome insight into your work, and activity - SUPPORT DIY FOLKS! If you thought Tampa starts and ends with metal you're dead wrong, do yourself a huge favor and grab a copy of this documentary!
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