People here still talk about Halloween 1979, when the Cichlids performed at a Fort Lauderdale record store for a radio broadcast. It was, in the words of one witness, “a new wave trainwreck.” But a triumphant one. Peaches Records & Tapes on East Sunrise Boulevard was packed with fans of the South Florida quartet — two women, two men and their nervy pop sound. A storm was raging outside. The show inside was airing live on WSHE-FM. The energy level in the room kept climbing.
The actual power supply was another matter. I’ll let one Lou Ming, he of the “trainwreck” appraisal, pick up the story:
The Peaches building had originally been an A&P Supermarket, probably since the '60s. And although all that square footage made for an appealing in-store performance space, the wiring wasn’t up to the power drain. In the store, localized power loss dropped out instruments throughout the first five songs … while on the air, low cloud cover and literally electric atmosphere sporadically replaced the right channel of the stereo mix with police band conversations, static or other audio distortion. Needless to say, it wasn’t pretty.
But the Cichlids persevered, and Ming has the tapes to prove it.
I wasn’t there but I love the story because, from all I’ve learned about South Florida rock, it sums up the mixture of glory and mishap that marked the local music scene in the ’70s and ’80s.
The Cichlids are playing on Sunday for the first time in 26 years. The occasion is a benefit concert with seven bands from that era. The event is named for the late Sheila Witkin, a booking agent and band manager who became a kind of den mom to local punks, rockers and new wavers.
The bands were playing venues such as the old Agora Ballroom in Hallandale, Tight Squeeze in Fort Lauderdale and the occasional misfiring record-store event. South Florida was minting bands at an impressive pace then — the Kids, Slyder, Free Wheel, Critical Mass, the Reactions, Z-Cars (pronounced “Zed Cars” in the British manner), Psycho Daisies and Charlie Pickett & the Eggs, to name a few.
It was an actual scene, with a network of clubs, avid fans, radio support, band rivalry (most of it friendly) and what Cichlids drummer Bobby Tak calls “a lot of interbreeding” — side bands, one-off bands, hybrid bands comprised of people from two or three other bands.
Most were local or regional favorites. A few got close to the sun. Critical Mass signed with MCA, the same major label behind The Who and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Pickett was picked up by a respected indie imprint, Twin/Tone. The Cichlids worked with the Miami label, TK, that helped make stars of Harry Wayne Casey’s funky disco troupe, K.C. & the Sunshine Band.
Now, TK basically dealt in dance music, so signing a band that was kinda punk and kinda new wave — locals argued about how much of each — was bound to produce tension, even allowing for the Cichlids pop-savviness.
“They didn’t know what to do with us,” says Cichlids singer Debbie DeNeese. So TK’s impulse was to tamp down the punk and play up the marketable pop. They had help in this makeover project from Robert Mascaro, the band’s hard-charging manager, who made it his mission in life to find the Cichlids a national audience.
And who, or what, was Mascaro? Here’s a description, courtesy of one former acquaintance who blogs under the name Hamhead: “ … think of wicked Uncle Ernie with a hairy unibrow and big scary bug eyes and not all burners firing.”
Of Mascaro, Ming observed, “There’s just nothing like a short, irritating non-band member (aka manager) to push, pull and drag a band beyond where it can, or even wants, to normally go.”
DeNeese says Mascaro had “an enormous impact” on the band’s fortunes. The group created national buzz out of a region widely considered retiree paradise, not a punk hotbed. “Cichlids have taken their name from an aggressive variety of tropical fish known to raise their young in their mouths. Band displays the primitive and bizarre tendencies the name suggests,” Variety magazine wrote in 1980.
The band released its album, Be True to Your School, that year and toured with the Pretenders. But there was internal friction, owing to the push-pull over what sort of band the Cichlids were supposed to be. The impulses that got them to the outer rim of a real rock career eventually broke them apart.
“From my perspective we were a really good punk bad,” says Tak. But he adds, “We were kids. Management pushed us in this kind of cutesy new wave direction, and none of us were really happy with it, and one by one we left … until there wasn’t any more chemistry.”
Listening to Mascaro “was a mistake,” says Tak. “We should have stayed true to our roots and played punk.”
DeNeese says that after the Cichlids album was released, TK urged her to go solo. “They wanted me to be a dance singer,” she says. Instead of pursuing a solo career, DeNeese eventually stopped playing in bands, built a recording studio with her husband and worked largely behind the scenes.
DeNeese, Tak, bass player Susan Bartel and guitarist Alan Portman played together for the last time in 1981. Tak formed other bands but later stopped playing altogether.
“I didn’t pick up a pair of drumsticks for 17 years,” he says. He also got sick and underwent “grueling” medical treatment, during which,“I made myself a promise that if I live through this I’m going to play again,” he says.
Tak later stumbled on Ming’s handiwork, a Web site called the Pete Moss Memorial All Night Record Shoppe, and once there basically found himself: early recordings of the Cichlids and two more Tak bands, the Bobs and Nouveau Reach.
A digital archive and seller of SoFla music from the ’70s and ’80s, the Shoppe is named for Ming’s late friend, musician Pete Moss. Ming, truth be told, is a pseudonym: The real person is Michael Chatham, a contemporary of Moss, Tak and others who made up the South Florida scene. Chatham now lives in New York.
So Tak, his interest piqued by somebody else’s interest in his work, got to talking with his ex-bandmate DeNeese, and DeNeese was talking to Bartel, and soon they were all chatting, and then along came opportunity: the Witkin memorial reunion concert with six of the Cichlids contemporaries.
The revived Cichilds lineup is three-quarters original; only Portman was unavailable for the reunion. Bartel has taken over on guitar, and the band’s new bassist is Scott Putesky, better known for his turn as Daisy Berkowitz in Marilyn Manson, a South Florida creation of some renown.
Putesky never saw the Cichlids — he would have been too young to get into the clubs. But he knew them by reputation. “The story of them playing Peaches on Halloween in 1979 is legendary,” says Putesky. He also saw a Cichlids offshoot, Nouveau Reach, open for somebody — possibly Billy Idol or the Psychedelic Furs — at old Sunrise Musical Theatre around 1983.
He didn’t know the Cichlids repertoire, either, “but I absolutely fell in love with it on first listen,” he says.
Tak and DeNeese both call Putesky a good fit — recovering ’90s shock-rocker and resuscitated ’70s punks.
“Scott was born to be a Cichlid,” says Tak. “We’re very very hapy with the sound we have.”
The Cichlids resurface with something of a cult following: their recordings circulate on eBay among vinyl freaks, garage-rock fiends and connoisieurs of the obscure. A Japanese punk-pop band called Prambath plays the Cichlids song Bubblegum. At last look the Cichlids MySpace page has 1,475 friends.
“It’s flattering,” says Tak. “We’ve gotten an amazing reaction.”
DeNeese is curious to see what the Cichlids can do beyond Sunday’s reunion date. But she doesn’t see a long second act. “In honesty, the clock is definitely ticking, I don’t think three, four, five years from now it would even be a consideration,” she says. “But the ball’s rolling, it’s a good chemistry. ... We’re not playing with the pressures that we had, or the delusions that we had, before we had our experiences with a record label.”
As to why this seems like a good idea 26 years aft
I met Jacob Jeffries last year at a Dashboard Confessional concert in Delray Beach. He was Jacob Groten then, and hadn't yet taken on the more alliterative public name. He was supposed to play the late shift at City Limits, after Dashboard had wrapped up, and because I couldn't stay he gave me a CD-R in a red sleeve with a handful of his songs.
One observer calls them "The Holy See of the SoFla music scene" that bloomed in the 1970s and 1980s.