Three million one hundred and ninety one thousand people. That is what Florida added between the census of 1980, which counted 9,746,324 residents, and the census of 1990, which counted 12,937,926, and it is the first number anybody explaining the florida death metal scene should be made to look at. A population figure explains no music. It explains the ground the music came up through, which is a different job and a more useful one.
What arrived with those newcomers was ten years of subdivisions, interstate construction, shopping plazas and air conditioning. What did not arrive with them was a record industry. That absence is the argument of this piece. The studio, the engineer and the triggered kick drums belong to florida death metal as a business story, and the business came second. Before it there was a state with three million strangers in it, several thousand teenagers with garages and cars, and nobody in any position of authority who knew or cared what those teenagers were putting on tape.
A state with nothing to audition for
Los Angeles in 1985 was a city where a metal band existed in order to be looked at, by a club booker with a pay to play sheet, by an A and R man with an expense account, by a photographer, by somebody. New York had its own version of the same machinery. Both places had a ladder, and the ladder had rules, and a band that broke the rules stayed on the bottom rung. Florida had no ladder at all. No major label kept an office there, no metal magazine of any weight was published there, and commercial radio in Tampa Bay in 1986 would not have played this music if the tape had been handed to the programme director in person.
Two things follow from that, and they run in opposite directions. The first is that nobody in Florida could be discovered in the ordinary way. The second is that nobody in Florida could be told no. There was no gatekeeper standing in the corridor explaining that guttural vocals would never sell, because there was no corridor. The teenagers who filled those garages were not auditioning for an industry. They were writing for each other, for a mailing list, and for a standard of severity that got higher every month because the boy across town was raising it.
There was no gatekeeper standing in the corridor explaining that this would never sell, because there was no corridor.
The post office did the work of a record company
Formed in 1983 in Altamonte Springs under the name Mantas, renamed Death in 1984, the trio of Chuck Schuldiner, Kam Lee and Rick Rozz recorded a demo called Death by Metal onto domestic cassette equipment in a suburban room, and then did the only distribution available to them, which was to copy it and post it. The tapes went out to addresses collected from the classified pages of fanzines, to Britain, to California, to Germany, to anywhere a stamp would reach, and they came back as other people's tapes. By 1986 the demos had built a reputation in a subterranean network that had no shops in it, and in April of that year Schuldiner and drummer Chris Reifert cut the Mutilation demo and won a contract with Combat Records on the strength of it.
Understand what that means in practical terms. A seventeen year old in a Florida suburb reached a foreign audience before he reached a local one. The tape network was a distribution system with no warehouse, no invoice and no filter, and it selected for exactly one quality, which was extremity, because a second generation cassette that sounded like everything else got traded once and then stopped moving. Under those conditions the music was going to get more violent every year whether anybody planned it or not. The mail rewarded whoever went furthest.
Brandon went first, and the rest followed a proven route
The band that showed a central Florida suburb it could get out was not a death metal band at all. Formed in Brandon in 1983 around a singer, Ronnie Galletti, whose stage act included breaking a television set over his own head and finishing shows covered in blood, Nasty Savage signed to Metal Blade and released a debut album in 1985, which is two years before anything the genre now treats as year zero. Brandon at that point was an unincorporated bedroom community eleven miles east of downtown Tampa, 41,826 people in 1980 and 57,985 by 1990, with a shopping mall, a new interstate connection and no reason whatsoever to produce a recording artist.
That is the domino. Once a band from Brandon had a record on a Los Angeles label, every fifteen year old within driving distance knew the route existed and roughly what it cost. Savatage were already selling records out of the same metropolitan area. The Tardy brothers, whose family had moved to Brandon, were watching both. Death and Obituary have both been described as taking their cue from what Nasty Savage were doing locally, and the pattern that produced is unusual: the Florida bands did not imitate a sound they heard on a stage, they imitated a career they had seen work.
The scene ran on petrol
This was never one town, and the maps that draw a circle around Tampa get the mechanics wrong. Death came from an Orlando suburb about eighty five miles away. Atheist came from Sarasota, sixty miles down the Gulf coast, and still recorded Piece of Time at Tampa in November and December 1988. Morbid Angel and Deicide were in Hillsborough County itself. What held the thing together was not a neighbourhood, it was a full tank and an hour of interstate, and the entire scene therefore depended on a condition nobody writes about, which is that Florida teenagers had cars.
| Band | Home town | Formed | Distance to Tampa |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nasty Savage | Brandon | 1983 | 11 miles |
| Morbid Angel | Tampa | 1983 | in the city |
| Obituary | Brandon and Tampa | 1984 | 11 miles |
| Death | Altamonte Springs | 1983 | about 85 miles |
| Atheist | Sarasota | 1984 | about 60 miles |
Read that table as a labour supply rather than a map. The suburbs going up across four counties in the 1980s were built for families with two cars and a garage, and a garage with a car in it is a rehearsal room with a car in it. Nobody planned a genre out of that. The building boom simply produced ten thousand rooms a year of exactly the right size, at a rent of nothing, in a state where the nearest neighbour was far enough away to complain slowly.
Florida was busy prosecuting somebody else
Here is the part of the story that gets left out, and it is the funniest thing in the whole account. While bands in Hillsborough County were mailing out sleeves depicting dismemberment, the state of Florida was conducting the most aggressive record censorship campaign in the country, aimed in a different direction entirely. In June 1990 a federal judge in the Southern District of Florida ruled the 2 Live Crew album As Nasty as They Wanna Be legally obscene, which made selling it in that jurisdiction a criminal matter; deputies arrested band members days later in Broward County, and the Eleventh Circuit eventually overturned the ruling and the performers were acquitted.
Not one of the death metal bands was touched. They were selling records with far worse imagery on the front, in the same state, in the same eighteen months, and nothing happened to them for a plain reason: obscurity. A record that sells in the tens of thousands through specialist shops and the post does not reach a sheriff's desk. The scene's commercial weakness was also its legal armour, and by the time anybody in authority noticed this music existed, the bands had four albums out and lawyers of their own. If you want to understand why we cover this stuff at all, start with the KaosMetal death overview, then come back to this decade.
What the conditions produced
By 1989 the thing had reached the state every scene wants and few get, in which a bill could be filled without an out of town headliner and a local band could sell a room out on its own name. There were enough groups within an hour's drive to argue with, enough demos in circulation to be judged against, and enough evidence on the shelf that a record deal was reachable from a subdivision. Then the studio opened its diary to them and the industrial phase began, which is another article.
The verdict is unromantic and it is the correct one. Florida did not have a musical tradition that produced death metal. It had cheap land, a construction boom, three million arrivals, a garage per household, a postal service, and an absolute vacuum where a music business should have been, and into that vacuum walked people who would not have been allowed near a studio anywhere else. Every scene that came afterwards had to invent one of those conditions artificially. The names of the groups it produced are set out in death metal bands from florida, and the list is longer than the five bands everybody can name.
