One of our favorite pandemic year 2020 discoveries — and one of the precious few reasons to remain on Facebook — was the Orlando Punk Archive. It’s a freewheeling public Facebook group where members (musicians and devotees alike) share flyers, pictures, merch, stories and, crucially, audio recordings of rare ORL-centric releases and live sets. Orlando Punk Archive became an intriguing open-source repository for the underground music scene of a city that often doesn’t value its own history.
Joshua Dobbs, a tireless advocate for Orlando punk past, present and future, runs the Orlando Punk Archive group alongside Lance White, Scott White, Gregg Blachstein and Keith Mercer.
“The Punk Archive started in 2019, but the minute Scott White posted a picture of the Greening record [more on that in a moment] right after the pandemic started, it just exploded, jumped up from a couple hundred numbers to like 1,000 within a day,” remembers Dobbs. “People started going to their closets and getting all their old band stuff out.”
The initial Facebook group soon enough spun out into a collaborative Bandcamp page in 2020, to create a more permanent destination for the rare recordings that were being unearthed. The Bandcamp page currently hosts an array of seminal or forgotten (and the intersection of the two) albums across decades from the Holsteins, Fashion Fashion and the Image Boys, Rose Shadows and influential comps from local imprints Figurehead and Vapor. The albums are available for download on a pay-what-you-can basis, and new material is constantly being added. Donations go toward the essential work of getting more DATs transferred to digital for future uploads. (Dobbs takes time to shout out Dino Everett and Mark Ignoffo for helping to locate and transfer to digital some incredible material from their own collections.)
Not to get all misty-eyed, but the endeavor puts us in mind of amateur archivist-enthusiasts across music history, knocking on doors and scouring bins and attics for missing links and forgotten epiphanies, be it Alan Lomax, Harry Smith, Lenny Kaye or Greg Shaw.
“I’d always had this feeling of annoyance because when I first got into the scene, it was right after all these amazing bands had broken up. And that’s put me on this path of trying to honor all these older bands,” says Dobbs. “I’m always wanting to learn more about the older bands.”
This year, the Archive is taking a methodological leap back in time, having just released its first vinyl offering from their ample vaults in the form of the Runnamucks “lost” 1990s album, Back to the Muck, in association with Ripping Records and Kangaroo Records. The project is a personal one for Dobbs, as he was part of the band.
“We started in 1996. We tried to be like the fastest band in the world for a little while,” says Dobbs. “But that last record had more of a pop sound, we called it panic-pop.”
He remembers well the original vinyl pressing being scrapped as the band fell apart. “The original record that we made in 1997, we even had test pressings of it before we decided to scrap the whole idea,” recalls Dobbs. And now all these years later, he’s looking at the fully realized run of 200 vinyl albums.
As a physical artifact, Back to the Muck is an aesthetically pleasing package, with Toxic Avenger-themed art on the jacket and an insert with tons of archival photos, flyers and lyric sheets all telling a story in quick bursts of impression.
And this is only the beginning for the label, with releases in various stages of completion and planning.
“Our second release will be from Neuman Portentum, they were a chaotic hardcore band. It’s another lost recording from 1999,” says Dobbs. “That one is taking forever. We actually thought that album was going to come out first.”
After that, the plan is to press the complete discography of Greening, a pre-Reversal of Man project, on vinyl as a split release with various OPA-affiliated labels.
Digitally speaking, Dobbs is enthusiastic about getting online a lost album and live set from ’90s surf-rock band the Kosmo Kramers, and the discography of Gray Before My Eyes, a late-1990s emo-hardcore project.
Aside from that, Dobbs is committed to attempting to make the Archive a living history rather than just a reissue project or archeological dig. He sees connecting older heads to new bands, and vice versa, as key to continued vitality for punk music in Orlando.
“The secret agenda of the whole Orlando Punk Archive is to try to put older bands on for the younger people and vice versa, put newer bands on to the older people that have stopped going to shows … I just hope that maybe some of the older people will come and check out newer bands,” says Dobbs. “That’s my hope, I haven’t seen much evidence but it’s still a dream.”
Aside from these perhaps overly utopian ideals, Dobbs and co. are fueled by just good ol’ fashioned obsession.
“I stay awake at night thinking about all the people that haven’t gotten me stuff that they said they were going to get me,” worries Dobbs. “Do I just keep pestering them?”
Is it punk to pester? The answer has to be yes.
This article appears in Jun 7-13, 2023.