Description
SHIPPING OCTOBER 2023
HoZac Books is pleased to announce the impending release of the first book to chronicle the alternative music, art, and club scenes of a particularly amazing time and place: the 1980s in South Florida. Comprehensive in its approach, Punk Under the Sun documents the bands, venues, galleries, and scenesters who started and sustained the groundswell of activity that made Miami and nearby beaches a progressive hotspot, setting the stage for South Florida to become the international cultural destination it is today.
Authors Joey Seeman and Chris Potash were there, participating in and documenting the first, second, and subsequent waves of musicians, indie labels, DJs, retail stores, publications, and players who came together to create a unique cultural moment and movement in South Florida history. This essential document of a powerfully expressive decade features never-before-seen photographs by Jill Kahn, Debbie Baylis Sunshine, Laurie Alaimo, and others, plus dozens of fliers, posters, and other souvenirs from that heady time. Punk Under the Sun includes a discography of 1980s albums and singles, along with an 11-page index that’s a valuable Who’s Who of people and places that created South Florida’s alternative culture.
In the 1970s, Miami Beach was a crumbling pastel paradise, gone to seed since its sun ’n’ fun heyday in the 1950s. In the 1980s, even as the boarded-up hotels, grindhouse theaters, and grimy streets served as back-drops for Miami Vice shoots, South Florida—from West Palm to Lauderdale to South Miami—was being transformed by a relatively small but intensely free-thinking group of cultural pioneers. These DIY musicians, artists, and dreamers brought with them a ferocious creative energy and breathed new life into once-grand spaces. Abandoned bars, hotels, and restaurants were transformed into live-music venues, art galleries, and nightclubs that fostered an original-music scene that rivaled larger ones across the country in talent. Driven by punk and new wave music, the scene unfolded against a backdrop of racial, economic, and political upheaval as greater Miami emerged as a truly metropolitan, world-class city.
Bands like Screaming Sneakers, the Cichlids, Tight Squeeze, the Kids, Charlie Pickett & the Eggs, Critical Mass, the Eat, and the Reactions were on the front lines of the change. There were places to play dotted along the coast; underground and college radio stations spun their records; people in the scene created zines and papered poles with photocopied fliers; the mainstream press even took note and started giving these and other bands column inches. Meanwhile, national and international punk and new wave bands began making the long road trip down the Florida peninsula to play at respected venues such as Flynn’s and the Cameo Theater, including the Ramones, Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Adrenalin O.D., and Dead Kennedys.
There already exist numerous books covering the Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, D.C., Boston, and even Texas punk scenes. Finally, South Florida is in the spotlight.
SHIPPING OCTOBER 2023
