This archive would have been impossible to put together without the considerable contributions made by Stacy Mathis, accurately noted in an article somewhere in these pages as “every local band’s staunchest supporter.” How true. It was a rare event in those days to look out into the audience and not see her standing somewhere nearby armed with her 35mm camera, a disarming smile, and usually within arm’s length of Jason Jonah. I imagine at least 80% of the hundreds of photos I have of our band came from her. I’m sure the same is true for many other bands.
Stacy also had the remarkable foresight to purchase multiple copies of the tapes we all used to sell. In fact, the seed for this archive was planted back in October of 2019 when, after hearing me lament the loss of my own blanket tape (played to shreds many, many years ago) she contacted me and offered to mail me a still-shrink-wrapped, totally VIRGIN copy of e. mag-rad if I would promise to digitize it.
So me being me, I had to turn it into a whole big project. Thankfully, she was on board to help with copious scans of photos, flyers, and album artwork as well as audio files.
This is by no means a complete or completed archive. For one thing, it’s clearly lacking media for some of the bands I’ve already created pages for. (Now is a perfect time to acknowledge the contributions of others who have helped make this possible too: Charlie Carter and Carl Millard King, thank you for sending me audio files!) Anyone wishing to add to this site with relevant pictures, audio, or video, please give me holler!
It’s also worth noting that this is a subjective archive. The content skews toward my old band because that’s mostly what’s in my hoard. It’s the scene as I remember it and is intended to focus on the bands we played with the most and the people we saw the most often. There is still more I intend to add but…this site will not be a repository for any and every band of the time.
I’m also limiting it to the general Sarasota area. We played with lots of great bands from all over Florida. Hell, half the lifespan of Simon Said… was spent living and playing in Orlando. (Heronymous!) But Sarasota was the more coherent scene, something that has always stood out to me because of the remarkable musical diversity that existed between bands. The bands we played with the most sounded nothing like one another. It kept things weird.
It wasn’t a huge scene. It feels like it was unique although I don’t know how true that really is. None of the bands broke big. Some of us were learning to play our instruments on stage.
Mostly I remember it being fun. Sarasota seemed so unbelievably lame and boring at that time. Nothing to do nowhere to go. We made our own fun. 25 years later I’m still getting a kick out it. I hope you do too.
XOXO – Stew
ps. I have done my best to credit photos and spell names accurately. If I got something wrong let me know and I will fix it.