The Hamiltons are going back to where it started.
When the venerable Orlando punks take the stage at Will’s Pub Saturday, Sept. 26, for what its members promise is their final show, it will be a return to the place where their story began. It’s a fitting bookend for a band whose history has been shaped by music, addiction, incarceration, friendship and the death of founding member Ralph Ameduri.
For The Hamiltons, this is not simply a last hurrah. It is a chance to play together one more time, surrounded by friends and the Orlando music community that watched them grow, fall apart, reunite and carry on.
It is also a chance to remember Ameduri, whose death remains woven into the band’s — and the Orlando music scene’s — story.
“He was my best friend,” vocalist Robert English tells Orlando Weekly. “And I 100 percent let him down. One hundred percent let him down.”
There was a time when English was deep in the throes of addiction, his relationship with Ameduri and the rest of the band deteriorating as drugs took over his life. Eventually, English would serve time in prison for being what he describes an “adrenaline junkie.”
For English and The Hamiltons, Ameduri was more than a bandmate. He was an integral part of the band from day one. English and Ameduri started The Hamiltons in the late 1990s after both musicians had grown disillusioned following brief dalliances with the music biz.
“We started this band, me and Ralph,” English remembers. “Our whole agenda was just to play music.”
They wanted nothing to do with the machinery of the music industry anymore.
“We were not going to be involved with the record industry. Period,” English says. “We just wanted to play music.”
The Hamiltons played their first set at the original Will’s Pub, then located in the Loch Haven area. Ameduri played with the band from 1998 until roughly 2007, over nine years that helped establish the Hamiltons’ musical identity and place in Orlando’s independent music scene.
Over the years, the band’s lineup shifted repeatedly. Bassist John Koroshetz joined not long after the band’s formation. Original drummer Matt Hugen spent years behind the kit, while other musicians, including guitarist Matt Hurston, passed in and out of the band’s turbulent ranks.
The band took the fluctuations in stride; The Hamiltons were never particularly interested in being a traditional band with a traditional career.
“We just wanted to go up and play, have a good time, have friends, people come out,” Koroshetz says. “We didn’t want to sit by a merch table.”
Throughout The Hamiltons’ musical life, English ended up in prison twice, the first time for bank robbery.
“I was an extreme junkie,” he admits. At Hamiltons shows, he says, he would sometimes take the band’s earnings to support his drug addiction. “I would show up to the gigs and steal the money,” English says. “Like, ‘No, don’t pay them, pay me.’ And I would just go take the money and do drugs.”
His behavior, understandably, notched up tensions between English and his bandmates.
“I ended up pretty much alienating these guys,” English says. Eventually, he would be back in prison, this time for heroin possession.
While English was in prison for the second time, Ameduri was performing at a Winter Haven venue, smoking with friends between sets, when an armed man approached and demanded their money. In the confusion that followed, someone struck the gun and it fired. The bullet hit Ameduri in the head, killing him. Friends Brian Chodorcoff and Thomas Wynn rushed to him, trying to hold his head together as they waited for help.
“All we’ve been trying to do since then is try to hold our heads together,” English says.
For the musicians who were there, the violence of that night became inseparable from the memory of the man they knew — a musician, a friend and a larger-than-life presence who was always the center of attention wherever he went.
“He vibrated at a different level than everybody else,” English says.
English was in prison when he learned what happened.
He knew inmates jailed with him who were from Polk County, so he asked his father to send him a photograph of the suspected shooter. English says the men helped identify the person responsible, and the suspect was eventually apprehended. The man was later sentenced to life in prison.
Back in Orlando, Ameduri’s death reverberated through the local music community. Friends began organizing RalphFest, an annual gathering that celebrated his life while raising money for music programs in schools. It was a way of transmuting grief into communal healing.
English, however, was still incarcerated when the first RalphFest took place. He and the other members of The Hamiltons did not speak during that period. There were too many unresolved feelings — anger, disappointment and resentment over the way the band had fallen apart and the impact English’s addiction had on the people who loved him.
Still, the connection between the musicians never completely dissipated. The ties ran too deep. When The Hamiltons were asked to play RalphFest, the reunion felt inevitable.
For English, the experience was almost dreamlike. After spending so much time incarcerated, he was suddenly outside again, surrounded by music and people he had known for years. He looked toward the sky and saw a crescent moon.
“There he is,” he remembers thinking of Ameduri. “He’s smiling down at us.”
Koroshetz remembers that night well too. He felt the weight of playing songs English and Ameduri had written, while sharing a stage with English for the first time in years.
“It was something like, ‘OK, maybe there’s something that we still have and we can build on,’” Koroshetz says.
After English walked out of prison for the last time, he knew something in his life had to change. He wanted to mend the relationships that he had tarnished, and he wanted to create something beautiful. Crucially, he got clean.
“Ralph had a much better outlook on life,” English says. “He really did.”
The band committed to taking Ameduri’s passion and strumming it into song, letting his soul stand onstage with them as memories of his accidentally philosophical phrases rang in their ears.
“He was always like, ‘It doesn’t fucking matter. We’re gonna have fun, and it needs to be visceral, and we don’t need to overthink anything,’” English says.
Enjoying life came easy for Ameduri. Shining a light during the darkest times was something that the band wanted to honor, to follow. “The fucking point is to have fun, right?” English says. “The point is to have brotherhood in the band that you’re in, and shine a bit of your light on whoever’s in front of you. None of it means fuck-all. It really doesn’t at the end of the day.”
Now, they are ready to let some things go: merchandise, old expectations and the idea that their band has to become something. And Will’s Pub is the place they decided to bury it all.
“We started there,” English says. “We’re ending there.”
For English, he wears a guitar strap of guilt, reminding him of the immense strides he and the band took to come together again despite almost impossible odds.
“He was my best friend,” he repeats. “And I let him down.”
When the band thinks about Ameduri now, his memory isn’t tied into the addiction, the prison stay or the violence. They remember a musician who believed the moment mattered more than everything surrounding it.
And there is a moment that matters quite a bit in just a few days.
On Saturday, the band will play their 2025 debut (!) album, FLA. in its entirety, and it will be gloriously loud.
In addition, the band is refusing to bring home any merchandise or memorabilia, leaving everything behind at the night’s “Great Estate Sale.” All they ask is that you share this moment with them.
“Somebody can buy it. Somebody can take it. Who cares? There it is, sitting on the table. Help yourself. Leave a dollar in the shoebox if you want to,” Koroshetz says. “But we’re just kind of ready to move on.”
The Hamiltons have found a path to grieve soulfully and heavily, with their brotherhood.
“I think we just have always been trying to have a brotherhood and an outlet artistically,” English says. “We actually never wanted to be any kind of anything other than just playing and enjoying ourselves.”
Sometimes that meant playing a show and then going bass fishing off the dock together.
“Whether it’s a mess, whether it’s amazing, whatever it is,” Koroshetz says.
English and Koroshetz are the sole remaining original members. Josh Gibson and Mike Levin wield guitars and drummer Chris LeBrane currently sits behind the kit to round out the band.
For The Hamiltons, there is nowhere else they would rather be to close the book on their band than where it began.
In Ameduri’s words, “The best place to play music is where your feet are.”
Now, with those feet set to be planted at Will’s Pub, The Hamiltons will do what they always have: stand together, play loud and keep it visceral. For a few hours, the past can stay where it belongs, the future can wait and Ameduri can be remembered not for how he died, but for how he lived, through the music, in the friendships and in the moments worth being there for.
8 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 26, Will’s Pub, 1042 N. Mills Ave., willspub.org, $10.
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This article appears in Sept. 23-29, 2026.