Southside Johnny Depp (center) and the Pompano Jukes (i.e., members of Slyder, Z-Cars, and the Kids)

This Ain’t No Disco

Johnny Depp jams with his old bandmates and revisits South Florida’s
power-pop salad days BY EVELYN McDONNELL

It’s a classic rock’n’roll story: Angst-ridden misfit drops out of high school to join a band. Skinny son of divorce finds a new family in a tight-knit community of struggling musicians. Dozens of clubs open their doors to a new wave of original bands, and the golden ring of stardom seems just within reach. The Kids—that’s what the kid’s band is called—tour the East Coast, move to L.A., open for Chuck Berry. But no hit record materializes, for them or for any of their peers, and everyone drifts away to day jobs. Ambitions get swallowed up by “the black hole of rock’n’roll,” as one member of the little-known-but-much-beloved South Florida rock scene put it.

Then comes the twist ending: The skinny teen gets a job on a TV show and later becomes a world-famous movie star.

Johnny Depp drew fans from thousands of miles away to Club Cinema in Pompano Beach, Florida, on August 29 and 30, for the second annual Sheila Witkin Memorial Reunion Concert. But before they got to see Captain Jack Sparrow, the audience got a little history lesson, as nine late-’70s/early-’80s South Florida bands reunited

to raise money for charity. Sure, some sets proved that guys’ hairlines recede long before their egos. But the shows also buttressed claims that decades ago, the area known primarily for booty-shaking boasted a live-music scene that, chord for chord, could’ve challenged Athens, Georgia, or Cleveland, but, thanks to geographic isolation and regional stereotyping, never got its due.

“We knew that there was magic at the time, and we felt like we were winning every day,” Depp says in Rock and a Hard Place (Another Night at the Agora), the documentary that unearths this largely forgotten scene (and that also screened over the weekend). “There’s a whole chunk of time that can never be touched and will always be a beautiful memory.”

Thirty years ago, the stretch of Atlantic coastline from Homestead to Palm Beach was booming, and live bands helped provide much of that boom. The Cichlids, the Reactions, the Eat, Crank, Psycho Daisies, Slyder, and others were stepping outside the Southern-rock and dance-music boxes—long before the terms alternative or indie rock were invented.

“As far back as the early ’70s, if you wanted to play anywhere, you had to play disco,” says Bruce Witkin, bassist-singer for the Kids, who co-organized the concert. “And if you didn’t play [Lynyrd Skynyrd’s] ‘Gimme Three Steps’ at a kegger, you’d get killed.”

KC and the Sunshine Band and Skynyrd may be the Florida bands of record, but at venues like the Agora and Tight Squeeze (named after the band that was in many ways the foundation of the scene), groups made a different kind of noise. The August 29 concert featured the era’s classic rockers—Tight Squeeze and Slyder—along with Charlie Pickett, the cranky, gifted guitarist who, mid-set, entertainingly traded his Gibson SG for a Hello Kitty ax. More punk-influenced bands performed August 30. Critical Mass bashed out “I Get Up, I Get Down,” a catchy tune that at least deserves consideration for a future Nuggets comp. Psycho Daisy Lisa Nash joined the Reactions and sparkled like a goth Cher next to Alex Mitchell’s aggro Sonny. Z-Cars were fronted by an English singer who once recalled Pere Ubu’s David Thomas and performed