Last night in Tampa, the old punk rock haunt The Harbor Club burned down, about ten years after most thinking people believed that it would have. Frankly, it was the only way to effectively clean up some of the messes that had been left there. GG Allin did things inside that even a raging inferno cannot completely eradicate. In the same week, the Cuban Club demolished its outdoor bandshell, site of the famous 1986 Black Flag 'riot' as well as performances by punk giants like Bad Brains, Seven Seconds, Descendents, and many memorable Tampa "Slam Fests". Now the mayor wants to destroy the Bro Bowl skate park, a famous daytime hangout for Tampa's disaffected youth since the late seventies.
So here's the truth about all of these venues: they all sucked. That's precisely why we were allowed to have them as a bunch of violent, snot-nosed little nihilists in the mid-to-late eighties. The community, such as it was, didn't give a shit about us or any of these venues during those years, and we used that neglect to our advantage. We could do whatever we wanted in these places. It was the first lesson for a group of predominantly middle-class, predominantly white youth, about the (limited) benefits of marginalization. "Benign Neglect" would have been a good name for one of the many hardcore bands that came and went so quickly in this era.
I always feel a little conflicted about the loss of one of these 'institutions'. We can get up-in-arms that our history is being destroyed, but what is the alternative? Preserve it in its present state of decay as a museum to some bygone era? The Harbor Club was a death trap. The Cuban Club was a horrible performance venue with terrible acoustics, and the Bro Bowl is one of the lamest skate parks still in existence. But again, it was those shortcomings that made them available to us, and it was that benign (or possibly malignant) neglect that allowed us to explore methods of expression that actually came to matter to America's cultural legacy. This is the lesson that Tampa seems incapable of learning. The official response has always been to recognize the importance of underground or grassroots movements only after they have either run their course or they have become simply too big to ignore. The first official response is to shut down whatever is happening and then announce a plan to build a state-of-the-art replica of that which they've just destroyed (witness the current assault on the burgeoning craft beer industry by our state legislators for a current example of this behavior). This makes me think of the first time Kelly (Kombat) Benjamin ran for City Council. He was in a panel discussion at Tampa Theater where one of the other candidates -who had long been involved in the workings of Tampa’s government - was crowing about their plan to turn downtown Tampa into an “arts district”, Kelly laughed and said “You had an arts district in Tampa. It was called ‘Ybor City’, and you destroyed it.”
It’s easy to say negative things about politicians and their love of money and power, but there’s something else at work that is not often expressed. Politicians are dorks. They have never known what is cool, and they never will. They appeal to a large swath of their constituents in the same way that a beige wall appeals to the largest group of potential home buyers. If they were cool, they wouldn't spend so much time worrying about whether or not people like them (people don’t). So here’s an idea: what if we just lead them down the wrong path? This technique has a long history in this region. The local Indian tribes convinced the first groups of Conquistadors that the gold they sought was always just around the next bend. They passed them off to neighboring tribes and got them to walk all the way to Texas. So let’s change tactics. Let’s start talking about how much we like Family Dollar and Wal-Mart. Let’s insist that they move into our neighborhoods, and then let’s NEVER shop there. Soon enough, these places will be abandoned (ex. NAPA Auto Parts on Florida), neglected, and all-but-forgotten by the powers that be. That’s when we pounce! We can move in to their buildings, have punk rock shows, and once again beat the shit out of each other with impunity.