12 December 1987, the Sunset Club in Tampa, a room that held two hundred people when it was full. Third on the bill, under Nocturnus and Atheist, a band from the suburb of Brandon plays its first show under the name Xecutioner. Eleven months later, in the same room, the same band opens for Death and uses the name Obituary for the first time. Nothing about that night was expensive. That is the point of this article.
The scene has been explained a hundred times through the studio and the engineer, which is the account in the Florida chapter and it is correct as far as it goes. It leaves out the ledger. Tampa death metal happened in Tampa because of what a room cost there, what a shed cost, what an hour on a two inch machine cost, and how far a teenager could drive on four dollars of petrol. Take the money out of this story and you have mythology.
The city is not one city
Start with the map, because almost everybody gets it wrong. Morrisound Recording stood at 12111 North 56th Street in Temple Terrace, a small separate municipality on the northeastern edge of the county, in a low commercial strip nobody would drive to for pleasure. Brandon, where the Tardy family had moved and where Nasty Savage had come from, sits eleven miles east of downtown. Sarasota is an hour south. Altamonte Springs, where Death began, is the far side of the state's midsection.
Tampa Bay in the late eighties was not a city with a bohemian quarter. It was a sprawling metropolitan area of freeways, storage yards, light industry and new subdivisions, and the effect of that on a music scene is precise rather than atmospheric: everything was cheap, nothing was walkable, and no landlord, promoter or neighbour had any particular reason to care what happened inside a metal building at the end of an access road.
Rent, and the rat shed
The single most useful sentence anybody has said about this scene came from Cannibal Corpse's Alex Webster, who described the practice room the band rented after moving south. The shed smelled of rat droppings, he said, it was hotter than anything he could print, the air conditioner they had installed did nothing, and they finished every rehearsal soaked through. They stayed anyway because they were determined. Note what kind of building that is. It is not a rehearsal complex with hourly rates and a vending machine. It is a metal outbuilding on a storage lot, rented by the month for the price of a night out, with a domestic air conditioning unit bolted through a hole cut in the wall.
Dozens of Tampa bands worked that way, and it decided the music more than any producer did. A shed at ninety degrees with a window unit that cannot cope is a place you go to work, not a place you go to hang about. Rehearsals in that heat are short, loud and efficient, the material gets hammered into shape because nobody can bear to play it slowly for four hours, and the band that emerges has drilled the same thirty five minutes until it can be played without thinking. Every account of Florida bands sounding rehearsed on their first albums traces back to a building nobody would keep a car in.
A shed at ninety degrees with a window unit that cannot cope is a place you go to work, not a place you go to hang about.
There were almost no clubs, which is why the bands got good
The venue list for this scene is embarrassingly short and it is worth reading as an inventory rather than a memory. The Sunset Club took two hundred and was regularly full by the late eighties. The Volley Club took bills of local bands, Jannus Landing in St Petersburg took the bigger nights, and the Masquerade eventually took the touring shows. Beyond that, the Brass Mug was one of the few rooms in the city that would book this music at all. Bands played backyards, veterans' halls and community centres because clubs would not have them, and one Obituary date in June 1989 is listed at nothing more glamorous than a street address in west Tampa.
A scarcity of stages produces two things at once. It produces bills where four local bands play to each other's audiences, which is how a hierarchy forms and how a standard rises. And it produces the tape trade, because a band with six shows a year has to reach its listeners some other way. The venue shortage was not a hardship to be overcome, it was the engine.
What an hour of tape actually cost
Here is the part that gets romanticised into nonsense. Morrisound was not a temple. It was a general purpose commercial studio that opened in 1981 and spent its whole life cutting jingles, gospel, country and session work alongside the metal, and it took the extreme bands for the same reason it took anybody: they booked days and they paid. A death metal album in 1990 sold in the tens of thousands, the advances were correspondingly small, and the arithmetic that governed everything was days in the room against copies sold.
That arithmetic is why the Florida records are short, why they were tracked in one or two weeks rather than three months, and why the bands arrived able to play the material. Studio time punishes the unprepared at any rate per hour, and a band with a four figure budget cannot afford to learn its own songs on the clock. The professionalism everybody hears on these albums was bought with rehearsal in a shed, which cost nothing, in order to avoid buying it in a control room, which cost everything.
I don't think it has anything to do with the city; I think it just has to do with happenstance.
David Vincent of Morbid Angel, interviewed by KazaGastão, November 2022
Vincent is half right and worth arguing with. The city did not supply an aesthetic, no, and there is no swamp in this music whatever the sleeve notes say. But happenstance did not put a well equipped studio in a cheap suburb, keep it solvent on gospel and advertising work, and surround it with storage units a teenager could rent on a supermarket wage. The city supplied the conditions and the studio supplied the method, and neither one produces a scene without the other.
The distances did the rest
One more mechanical fact and then the verdict. This scene ran on cars, and the drive times are the reason it held together as one thing rather than four. Brandon to the studio is a twenty minute run up the interstate. Sarasota to Tampa is an hour. Orlando is ninety minutes. Those are commuting distances, so a band could rehearse in one town, record in a second and play in a third without anybody moving house, and the same fifty musicians could turn up at each other's sessions all week. Put the same fifty people in the American northeast, with the same rents and the same weather, and they would have needed a decade to meet each other.
The verdict on Tampa is therefore unsentimental and it does the city more credit than the mythology does. This was a cheap, hot, unglamorous, car dependent metropolitan area with a surplus of empty industrial buildings and no cultural establishment to answer to, and it converted that surplus into the most productive extreme metal economy on earth for about six years. The names it produced are in death metal bands from florida. What became of them after the money left is another question, answered in what happened to the original Tampa bands.
