You may not have been part of the punk scene in Tampa in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I know I wasn't, but you could have time-traveled right into the center of it last Saturday night. The Gold Dragon Gallery, in a ranch house among other ranch houses in suburban South Tampa, was the unlikely spot for the opening of "Punk Since 1977," a multimedia art show brought to us by GDHB, otherwise known as the G--d--- Hubbard Brothers.
More about them later.
Who knew what to expect? The gallery is only a few minutes from my house; we had been there once before, to an opening of painter Ray Paul, who handed out 3-D glasses to view his Day-Glo abstracts. So we knew the place wasn't all pinch pots and watercolors of sea gulls.
But we weren't really prepared for this.
Punk types - tattoos, rooster haircuts - had seemingly come out from under the rocks to gather in the gallery and adjoining garden, drinking beer and talking about good times past. Walls were filled with photographs Tim Hubbard had taken of his favorite punk acts to come through Tampa: the Ramones, Cramps, Bad Religion, Suicidal Tendencies, Fang, Grassy Knoll Gunmen, Rancid, to name a few. The photographs hadn't looked right against the gallery's paneled wall, so Tim, an acknowledged pack rat, dug out and copied his old promo fliers for Tampa area shows and plastered the walls with them.
"The only club not represented is the Losers," a guy was saying excitedly about the fliers. His eyes glistened as he remembered the Buffalo Roadhouse, Ms. Lucky's and the Peanut Gallery, places where the punk scene was so underground the cops didn't bother with it.
He turned out to be Mike Mann, whom you might remember from the original Vinyl Fever on Fletcher in the early 1980s. He waved over the crowd, and said, "Everyone you see here was either in a band or part of the punk scene."
A gray-haired man walked past wearing a Murder Junkies T-shirt.
The Hubbard brothers were wearing shirts they'd created especially for the occasion. They were being sold for 10 bucks in a semidark room.
"They're county jail colors," said gallery owner Billie Cox-Glimpse.
Tim's shirt had a hand grenade and a message that was unreadable and, once translated, unprintable.
The Hubbard brothers were not the least bit scary. Tim was carrying around his new baby. Jason, a beefy guy with platinum spiked hair and wearing cargo shorts and combat boots, talked excitedly about his contribution to the show, an almost-life-sized punk band and an audience member aloft and horizontal. The figures are made from baling wire, he explained, then stuffed with newspaper and colored paper on top of the newspaper to delineate the clothes and skin. The faces have eyes and teeth, and in both the posture of the figures and the facial expressions, they were very real, and really very powerful. Amazing, and as we complimented him, he just smiled an aw-shucks kind of smile. He loves to do these, he said, but has a day job to pay the bills.
As for Tim, he's still taking concert photographs but mostly for hire. The photos in the show he took for love. Love of punk.
There just isn't that much music he can get excited about these days. "I find I'm buying "best-of' albums," he said. He and his wife just had a baby, so running out to clubs isn't really in the picture right now. "I'm just kind of having fun, kicking back with the family."
Tim and Jason and the third Hubbard, Jeff, who took some portraits and a few of the concert photos, were giving away stickers and buttons with the show's logo, a silhouette in profile of a head with a rooster haircut.
They all live in Largo.
"See ya, Flash," someone said to a guy wearing a vest without a shirt, who if he wasn't a post-punk rocker should have been. "Good to see ya."
It was good to see everyone again, wasn't it?
Nostalgia for punk rock.
Who'da thought it?
- Sandra Thompson, a writer living in Tampa, can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com City Life appears on Saturday.
