A skinny kid with a ball of unkempt hair plays a steady rolling melody on the keys. "Yeah!" comes a holler from crowd. The dimly lit room is small and crowded. The drummer drops a low rumbling backbeat. A bearded guy in a floppy fedora plays a rugged electric guitar intro. A second guitarist and bass player join the mix. Girls scream, clap their hands, shake their hips and sing along to the opening lines of the hard-driving kiss-off "Goodbye Woman." Extended cheering greets the musicians after the song ends.
The crude video clip vividly captures a hungry young band playing its ass off for an appreciative hometown crowd. It's posted on YouTube as "Reynosa live at the Handlebar." Reynosa took its name from the street where the five musicians practice. The Handlebar is an old rock den that serves as the band's headquarters in downtown Pensacola, one of the least rock 'n' roll cities in the entire nation.
Pensacola is where Dubya drubbed Kerry in '04 and George Wallace won support in '68. The area's favorite son is Republican-congressman-turned-right-wing-blowhard Joe Scarborough.
Pensacola's East Hill Christian is a private school "committed to a doctrine, which supports the infallibility of scripture, that the Bible is the ultimate authority against which all evidence is examined." That's where four of the five men from Reynosa, ranging in age from 20 to 23, met. The school is also where keyboardist Aubrey Nichols stole "a sweet Hammond B-3" from a faculty member.
"I borrowed it for the day, and then she got fired. … so, I kept it," confesses Nichols during a recent phone interview. That same Hammond can be heard on Reynosa's commendable debut CD Directions, which the band just finished recording in December. The album is a roots-rock collection of songs about escaping the drudgery of their small-minded, Bible-thumping hometown.
"A soaring prophet, selfish nonsense, aren't we all one in the same?" sings guitarist Jordan Richards, the band's primary songwriter. "But don't you let this town, ever keep you down."
Those lines are from the song "Live Before You Die," a simple sentiment sold with lived-in sincerity. "We were definitely not the poster boys of some Christian school — you can tell by listening to our CD. We got in a lot of trouble," Nichols says.
How have their families reacted to the band's CD and their gigs at Pensacola's Handlebar, a near legendary beer joint where Nirvana, Black Flag and R.E.M. have reportedly played?
"It's been weird and different for all of us," Nichols says. "The music has not been quite as well received by some of our families, while others offer a lot of support."
Another highlight from the Reynosa album is the breezy, Byrds-ish "Find Some Faith." It's a song about lost innocence and putting faith in loved ones rather than higher powers. Anyone raised on religion who has grappled with faith issues should be able to relate. Richards sings: "Tell me about the faith you used to have/ Like a swing-set girl on the wings of her dad/ Filling up your shoes with sand and never losing the grip of your mothers hand."
Musically, Reynosa blends the twin guitar and keyboard attack of the Allman Brothers Band with Ryan Adams-style alt-country. Interestingly, the band also cites Garth Brooks as an influence on their MySpace page.
"Pop-country is what everyone listens to here; this place is slammed with pop-country," says Richards during a separate phone interview. "When Toby Keith plays the [Pensacola] Civic Center they close down the city.
"Garth Brooks is someone who all of us remember from a younger part of our lives," he continues. "He's had a cool thing going with his live show."
Nichols looks at the Brooks issue from a similar perspective.
"Most of us liked Garth Brooks," he says. "Jordan sure did. I never really got too big into him, but Jordan showed us a live DVD and he's just so incredible to watch on stage. Watching him in front of 80,000 people, just taking control, is something. I have a lot of respect for him as an entertainer."
When Reynosa plays Thursday at the New World Brewery, it'll be the band's first performance in Tampa (they've played St. Pete before). The date is part of a mini-tour that includes stops in Tallahassee, Orlando, Daytona Beach, New Orleans and Birmingham, Ala. The band members say they would prefer to stay on the road rather than return to their dead-end jobs in Pensacola.
The band formed in '05, and Nichols just joined several months back. He played guitar and mandolin, but his pals in Reynosa needed a keyboardist. They had shows lined up, so "I quit my job two weeks before our two-week tour and learned to play piano," Nichols says.
The keyboardist cites the Allmans' iconic Eat A Peach as the album from which he draws his most inspiration: "Definitely, that's the pinnacle."
Before the Reynosa guys embraced the Florida-bred sounds of the Allmans, the same stuff their parents enjoyed, they rebelled. The guys sought out aggro metal bands during middle school.
"To tell the truth, in ninth grade I really got into post-hardcore bands like Blindside," Nichols says. "But there was never a point for me, or any of us, where we would have dogged the Allmans or Lynyrd Skynyrd."
Richards agrees that he and his bandmates started moving away from classic rock during middle school and turned toward punk.
"But by the end of high school we got back to our roots," he says. "I was driving in my car and this Creedence Clearwater Revival song came on — I can't tell you which one — but that's when it happened. I realized that was real music. There's not enough of that being made today."
This article appears in Feb 21-27, 2007.