Just about every year in late October, Gainesville undergoes a radical transformation: punk fans arrive in droves for FEST, the music festival that is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2022. The town trades the orange and blue for denim and black (Gator fans having decamped to Jacksonville for the Florida-Georgia game), beer flows aplenty, and venues across town reverberate with a tempest of thrashing guitars and hardcore sound. Whether it’s your first FEST or your twentieth, you can brush up on the basics of punk rock at the library.
Listen to Gainesville punk mainstays and upcoming FEST headliners Hot Water Music, praised by music website Stereogum as creators of “their own hearty, melodic form of punk rock.” Or take a spin through the back catalogue of local legends like Less Than Jake and Against Me! Other FEST 20 bands that you can sample at the library include Broadway Calls, The Menzingers, Bouncing Souls, and Anti-Flag.
Local author Matt Walker penned the definitive history of the scene in “Gainesville Punk: A History of Bands and Music”. It’s an incredibly detailed blast to the past: before the punk pioneers Roach Motel burst onto the local scene in 1981 (their first show actually got shut down after their edgy flyers attracted religious protestors). The music scene in the Gainesville of the early ‘80s was, in Walker’s view, rather stagnant. Disco had edged out rock at the clubs, but most local bands were either fitful Lynyrd Skynyrd knockoffs or solely devoted to playing covers. The early Gainesville punks were eager to bring the New York City hardcore scene down South.
As Walker describes it, Roach Motel’s second try at a debut, at the Catch-22 club, certainly heralded the arrival of a new sound in Gainesville:
“As they ripped into their first song, [singer Bob] Fetz unleashed his growling, rolling, drunken screaming frontman routine on the tiny Catch-22 crowd. The performance was sloppy, rudimentary, and rude—and unlike anything Gainesville had seen before. It was aggressive, dirty and scary in a way the previous crop of Gainesville punk-influenced bands was not. By the end of the vigorous debut, Fetz — a severe diabetic — was suffering from a combination of low blood sugar, excessive booze and exhaustion. [Guitarist George] Tabb had to drive him to the hospital in what would become a semi-regular routine following Roach Motel shows.”
Perhaps you want to get a feel for the punk rock lifestyle behind the music. Luckily, several punk musicians have penned memoirs that will have you smelling the sweat and stale beer of the stage. Against Me! Frontwoman Laura Jane Grace’s “Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sell-Out,” in which she details the ups and downs of growing up as an Army brat, forming a scrappy band that found meteoric success, and her own struggle with drugs and gender dysphoria. To further your punk memoir fix, there’s also “Get in the Van” by Henry Rollins (front man of the LA hardcore group Black Flag) and “Clothes Clothes Clothes Clothes: Music Music Music: Boys Boys Boys” by Viv Albertine, guitarist for The Slits.
So, to local FESTgoers and out-of-towners alike: welcome, stay safe, and rock on (but please be sure to use headphones in the library).