But did you know that Don Felder and Bernie Leadon of The Eagles also came of musical age in Gainesville? Or that Stephen Stills spent part of his teen years playing in local bands there? Or that the Elvis Presley hit “Heartbreak Hotel” was conceived there? Or that Stan Bush — whose “The Touch” evolved from soundtracking the closing credits of an animated Transformers movie to becoming the inspiration for a scene in Boogie Nights and an ironic playlist staple — was once a fixture on the scene?
These are just a few of the interesting tidbits from a book about the Gainesville music community’s ‘60s and ‘70s origins that’s jammed with them. Released in April via University Press of Florida, Marty Jourard’s well-researched and insanely detailed Music Everywhere: The Rock and Roll Roots of a Southern Town covers much more than the big names. Starting with rock’s primordial origins in pop, R&B and folk, and their influence on this single (and singular) locale, Jourard chronicles the factors and faces that came together to create a vital and energetic scene that probably couldn’t have arisen anywhere else, and whose influence is still felt globally.
Jourard knows of which he speaks. He and his brother Jeff were very much a part of the goings-on, playing the area’s frat parties, University of Florida events and topless bars before eventually relocating to California and becoming part of rock’s greater history themselves as members of ‘80s band the Motels, which scored two Top Ten hits with “Only The Lonely” and “Suddenly Last Summer.” Music Everywhere is by no means a memoir; he rarely inserts himself directly into the stories, but Jourard’s personal knowledge of a specific community over a certain period of time adds depth, texture and a tangible emotional resonance to a tale that includes so much more than music. Racial tensions, the hippie counterculture, the feel of specific music stores, bars and shows — “you had to be there,” the saying goes. And he was, for enough of it to lend his book an unmistakable sense of authenticity, even as he touches briefly on the more recent eras of the Alachua Music Harvests, No Idea Records and Fest in the book’s final chapter.
Music Everywhere also includes an exhaustive appendix of concerts and local shows performed in the Gainesville area from 1960 through 1976 (which becomes even more impressive when the reader considers the countless thousands of party gigs not listed for lack of confirming documentation), and copious indexed endnotes — it is, after all, out on a university press. But this isn’t some dry academic overview. There’s a love letter to the scene here, woven through all the dates, facts, societal circumstances and suppositions, holding them all together and making the book a charming read for diehard music fans and casual pop-culture historians alike.
This article appears in Dec 15-22, 2016.