Dave Reeder is the typical office drone: a frumpy, middle-aged, white male. One might even call him a company man. After all, he has been a page designer at the St. Petersburg Times for 23 years. When Reeder shuffles into work, it's difficult to imagine the receptionist thinking of him as anything other than an anonymous timecard-puncher. But Dave Reeder has a dark side. And you gotta pay a cover charge to see it.
On stage, he's Car Bomb Dave, maniacal leader of Car Bomb Driver, hands down the most entertaining punk-rock band operating in the Bay area. The 46-year-old bounces around like a teenager who just washed down a handful of Mini-thins with a vodka and Red Bull. Several years back, CL awarded him a Best of the Bay for Best Performer. Sitting on a bar stool at South Tampa's Tiny Tap Tavern, however, Reeder is unassuming and almost shy — with only the slightest hint of Car Bomb Dave ever crawling to the surface.
"That's why they call it performance," Reeder says dryly. "The music starts and then I start."
It took a long time for Reeder to become Car Bomb Dave. After graduating from high school in New Jersey, he relocated to St. Pete and enrolled at USF, graduating 12 years later. While most angry young men form bands when they're in their teens and early 20s, Reeder waited until he was well into his 30s. That's when Joe Borelli showed up at his home with a guitar. Thanks to Borelli's urging, the two men recruited others and formed Car Bomb Driver in 1994.
"I wanted the name to be both funny and subversive," Reeder says. "The template was the Dead Kennedys."
As fate would have it, Car Bomb Driver would eventually open for the Kennedys, along with punk icons Iggy Pop and The Buzzcocks. Despite those mini-brushes with fame, CBD have never embarked on the proverbial van tour, mostly because each member has a legit day job.
It didn't take long for Car Bomb Driver to build a strong following around Tampa Bay, most notably in downtown St. Pete, thanks to combustible performances at all-ages shows thrown at the State Theatre.
"Once people started saying 'Dude, you rawk!'" Reeder says, "That was it — I was hooked."
Reeder was no longer just some schlep who laid out news copy. His first marriage ended when he was in his early 30s. A divorced man whose day gig wasn't exactly his dream job, rock 'n' roll gave Reeder a fresh identity and a new set of friends.
"Suddenly, everyone calls me Car Bomb Dave," he remembers. "It's a good identity to have."
Reeder adds: "Being a musician is like being a cop or a fireman. There's this local community, and you have respect for your fellow musicians, and hopefully they respect what we're doing — that's the most important part, being a part of that community."
Another pitcher of draft beer arrives. The singer is seated next to Borelli, who nods in agreement while his buddy speaks. Bassist Todd Johnson, second guitarist Shea Moxon and drummer Matt Grimshaw are also seated at the table. Reeder downs his brew at a fairly impressive clip.
No one at the table looks like a rock star. The median age is about 40. But listen to Car Bomb Driver's newly released debut full-length, Evacuate, which is being distributed nationally by the Tampa imprint 24 Hour Service Station, and it's as energetic, brash and irreverent as early Green Day. Grimshaw and Johnson's rhythm work is like a twin-turbine engine. The guitar interplay of Borelli and Moxon possesses a buzzsaw beauty, their strings twining on songs like "Brookwood Girls" in a manner that would make Keith and Ronnie proud. But for all the talent of the four instrumentalists, Reeder remains the star of the show, delivering hilariously adolescent lines like: "Jerkin' off five times a day/ My parents seem to think I'm gay/ I don't know what to say/ I just wanna get laid."
That lyrical salvo kicks off "Chicks Don't Dig Me." One of the band's most beloved numbers, it could also serve as a theme song. See, not getting enough ass plays a huge role in Reeder's songwriting. Just check out some of these song titles from Evacuate: "$20 Date" (with a hooker), "Electric Sheila" (she's a blow-up doll), "Six Inch Friend" (he wants the girls to "lend a hand") and "Fist of Love." (You can figure that one out.)
Reeder is and isn't Car Bomb Dave, the sex-starved singer with the sick sense of humor and sharp eye for satire (see "Balls on the Outside," a song that brilliantly reduces faith issues to getting laid). He's often seen out with his wife of the past five years, and fans have remarked that chicks, do, indeed dig Car Bomb Dave. But that doesn't mean the desperate, quasi-misogynistic lyrics are necessarily a sham.
"I hate to sound pretentious," Reeder says, "but the whole anger, self-loathing thing is only somewhat based in reality — it's just me taking a piss on everything. But I'm not joking, either."
Interestingly, many people, especially the self-appointed intellectual hipsters who call themselves fans of Car Bomb Driver, prefer to view Reeder's sex-obsessed lyrics as ironic. But that's bullshit — just like it would be absurd to claim the Marquis de Sade wrote black comedy.
I push Reeder on the subject and get the honest answer that makes his R-rated music all that more endearing. "On the surface, I'm trying to find words that rhyme, but there is an underlying truth to all that," Reeder admits. "I went 10 years in between marriages. That's when these songs were written. I wasn't getting much action then."
To read an interview with Disturbing the Peace founder and organizer Tom Nestor and to find links to Car Bomb Driver tunes, go to Wade Tatangelo's blog TampaCalling.com.
This article appears in Jul 11-17, 2007.