Gainesville Punk: A History of Bands & Music (Landmarks) by Walker Matt

Author:Walker, Matt [Walker, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2016-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

The Utility House in the mid-’90s. Bands represented here include Hot Water Music, Assholeparade, Palatka, Tired From Now On, Strikeforce Diablo, I Hate Myself, Gunmoll, Burnman, Pung, Highway 66, Ash County Sluggers, True North and Stressface. Photograph by Matt Geiger .

Hughes was the independent music purchaser for Hyde and Zeke’s at that point. After the show, with his glasses askew and “shaking and dripping with sweat,” he approached Rorschach and asked them how he could get their music and other albums they were selling on tour into the store. They gave him the information for Ebullition Records in Goleta, California.

Ebullition Records and its mail-order distro, along with San Diego–based Gravity Records, would help fuel a whole new wave of post-hardcore bands in underground America in the 1990s. Bands like Still Life, Iconoclast and Heroin were mashing together influences from what were considered emocore bands like Rites of Spring with more aggressive hardcore and sometimes metal bands. The result was an all-out emotional attack—the music was aggressive and angry, often with violent bursts of energy, yet it was not characterized by the testosterone-fueled baggage that usually accompanied aggressive music.

Hyde and Zeke’s took a pass on Hughes’s pitch to order from Ebullition. They were not interested in being on the cutting edge of the DIY underground. They had good, long-standing relationships ordering from places like SST and plenty of customers still coming in to buy that stuff.

But Hughes could see that the punk scene was in transition once again, as he had seen several times since the early 1980s. He was also personally searching for new inspiration. “Jon Resh moving away was kind of traumatic for me—the end of Spoke, and Scott going to Japan,” Hughes says. “That really sucked to see that era pass.”

Hughes decided to open his own record store with the help of his friend Mike Wohlgemuth. He would be able to carry any and all the punk and underground music he wanted to. The small store on University Avenue was called Shaft. Hughes stocked the place with the punk and hardcore basics like Bad Brains and Minor Threat, but he also stocked new and interesting records associated with Ebullition, bands like Integrity, and vegan straightedge bands that were popular at the time like Earth Crisis.

“I was like, something is happening here,” Hughes says. “I felt like there was a resurgence happening and I wanted to be part of it and I lucked out.…I remember the first day [of business] looking around like, ‘Jesus Christ, I sold everything in the fucking store.…I’ve got to get on the horn, I’ve got to get more stuff.’ So something was really happening.”

Shaft quickly became the go-to record store for punk and underground fans in Gainesville, of which there was a growing number. Hughes was a huge champion of the underground and was friends or acquaintances with just about every band in town.

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