Sound Idea

Part One: Introduction

Sound Idea. As you drive along State Road Sixty coasting by islands and islands of strip malls there once inhabited a place where if you looked with the right set of eyes and had the right tune to your ears, something great once existed. Every day of high school was nothing but a daily reminder of how much of a loser I was. Girls wanted nothing to do with me; the job in which I held at a snack bar in a skate park was becoming boring; everything around me seemed to make no sense; I felt alienated in world in which I was becoming an adult in and graduation was slowly on the horizon where you’re really thrown out into the shit. One rainy afternoon in Tampa, I found myself driving down State Road Sixty to this place I kept hearing about and a couple of nomads suggesting, “you gotta go check it out, you’ll really love it. They got some sick records and CD’s in there.”

Needless to say, I pulled into a black tar parking lot with two fine looking restaurants, a comic book store, tattoo shop, salon, real estate office (if memory is right) and this small alcove with a dim light harboring shirts and music, Sound Idea. Upon entering, three people sat in there talking and chuckling and I felt awkwardly pondered upon but not rejected. The bald guy behind the counter showed little expression but wasn’t giving off the impression of agitation for intruding on their conversation. Walking around the small room, flyers hung the walls with bands in which I scarcely knew from with the exception of various tracks but these flyers were encrypted with dates, times, venues and eras in which were long gone. I was entranced. Immediately the ones that jumped out were Misfits flyers and these eerie Black Flag posters with dark artwork and tiny captions that (at the time) made no sense at all just that it rolled out well in dialect. A girl approached me and says, “if you like street punk, check this record out,” gesturing with a smile.

On the way home after purchasing three different records and snagging a flyer for a show, I tuned in deeply to what the lyrics were saying and they spoke things in which I thought about every day, feeling of rejection/isolation yet with a sense of humor that wasn’t gloomy and grim ergo they laughed at their tragedies. A weekend which I found myself free on Saturday night, I thought to check out a show with a band Automotive headlining. You paid the bald guy five dollars and would enter into a dark cave that was a cleared out makeshift back room with carpet and tables stacked to the sides in order for people to stand. Automotive played ten to fifteen minutes of high octane energy, nothing like I’d ever seen before compared to the select few shows in which I’d been exposed to at Spot; something about how these were kids my age doing this and making music had such a weird tremendous effect on the cranium sponge, they weren’t older dudes slamming beers and yelling into the microphone, they were just kids jumping around and yelling things like: “start a riot, throw a brick, break a window and break some shit” it was stuff in which I’d always had subconsciously thought of and then when a group of suburban kids yelled exactly these words, something clicked. 

Progressively I began going to more shows, at hole-in-the-wall bars like Pegasus Lounge, Brass Mug and whenever the Brandon scene would venture over out to SpoT. A monumental thing occurred when Saturday evening, a band by the name Bad Eating Habits played with Surfs Up in the future venue that would harbor bigger shows and introduce a whole slew of new characters into the scene (of that time) much later. Everyone in Bad Eating Habits had been a mutual acquaintance or a very good friend in fact prior to this encounter, call it what you may but a reunion would be the better term of use. What was so astonishing about it was watching the energy they broadcasted, how simple the music was and how they only did this to a room of seven people. Why would they try so hard if no one is in here? I thought. When you’re seventeen years of age, you’re very impressionable especially when your peers have seemed to have made a few steps ahead of you. We all hung out that night and drank cokes and skated around and initially this is where my life of Sound Idea began. Each person that slowly came out of the darkness of that era was either just as a misfit as I was or more so (in their own beautiful way). Everyone was precise and articulate, though rejected in many stratums still accurate in their speech and tone when it came about records and music, it was never simply written off as “The Dead Kennedy’s are sick bro,” no never to that extent, it was always precise with detail; “Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death is good but Plastic Surgery Disasters is better” etc. Thus was the endless stream of conversations that began to dominate our whole being. For the first time ever no one was filled with an ego which ran rampant to the previous place I’d been hanging out at. A community of people who were just as weird and marginal as I was. Sound Idea was a place that breathed DIY (Do it yourself) without any sense of discrimination. As much as it kills me to write this little prologue about it, all of the stories of the individuals and what sort of misadventures we got into, is for another Project.