The Stick Figures, Florida’s Long Lost Post-Punk Band, Premieres the Unreleased Track “Yesterday” + Interview

Bill Carey: I wouldn’t try to put our music in a single category. We had very diverse influences and liked to mix them up. As all five of us wrote lyrics and music, individually and in various combinations. We were influenced by 1st wave US and UK punk, but also by Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, Roxy, Eno, Bowie, The Who, Dolls, Stooges, VU, Parliament/Funkadelic, John Cage, Prog (…not me, but some of the others!), Stockhausen, James Joyce, John Waters, Buckminster Fuller, as well as our contemporaries such as the Athens Georgia bands, No Wave, The Mekons, Orange Juice, The Fall, etc. etc. etc.

Robert Dansby: I think we had so many interests and things going on it’s a little difficult to pin that down. I was an art major—so for me, in a sense, it was like an art project that wasn’t just visual. Before punk, I had sort of lost interest in “rock” music and was listening to a real mix of things ranging from U Roy, The Mighty Sparrow and I Roy to 20th Century composers to Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, plus I’d started going up to New York in ’78 and ’79 and was really thrilled by what I saw there. There was a Dolls influence from that, but also that transition into The Heartbreakers, the Voidoids, Television, Talking Heads. I was also interested in the art scene, film scene, disco and downtown composers and how they seemed to overlap a bit.

BC: I grew up in Naples, a couple of hours South of Tampa, and moved to Tampa in 1977 to attend the University of South Florida. Tampa was still an industrial city then—with working ship yards and phosphate plants. There are also a couple of universities. I met a couple of people early on who were interested in similar music to me, and we eventually found some bars where Punk bands played—mostly covers, some originals. I spent the summer of 1978 in London, and formed my first band The Art Holes when I returned. There were several bands that played in the few bars that would have us, usually for little or no money, and we “grew” a scene of about 100 people at it’s core. We all knew each other, the bands all supported each other, and we’d often play together. A couple who had recently graduated from college in Boston (Pam Wiener and John Dubrule) started a Punk/New Wave show on the local community radio station; we would all lend them our records, and they would also play live tapes and demo recordings by the local bands. Their show helped the local scene to grow. I was later part of the East Village scene in NYC in the early 80’s, and the C-86 scene in London, and the Tampa scene, while never becoming commercially successful, was very similar!

RD: I grew up in Jacksonville and other than two good art museums and an amazingly good newsstand, there weren’t huge cultural opportunities (although, amazingly, I did get to see Bowie there during the Station to Station tour!). Tampa had a University (USF) with pretty interesting  faculty and curricula and my brother met people there that ended up forming the Jetsons, the Three Weberns and the Stick Figures. There were three bars which would let bands play in them fairly consistently, and a few groups started playing out in these places regularly. This group of bands bands and a lot of students gave the bars consistent crowds and a little scene came together—pretty diverse, but with a lot of common interests too—so Tampa just seemed more interesting to me than any place in Florida.

BC: This list would probably change weekly, but I’d love to have seen a show with The Raincoats, Young Marble Giants and Joy Division. This is somewhat slanted, as I have seen many of the groups that influenced me at the time: Iggy, Johnny Thunders, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Elvis Costello, The Clash, The Jam, Suicide, The Specials, Television, The Velvet Underground (reunion tour), the Fall, John Cale, etc. etc. etc.

RD: XTC (with Barry Andrews) because I never got to see them, the Velvets, Chic,  the Static, Polyrock, Walter Steding, the Sailboats, the Necessaries, Loose Joints, Delta 5, Woodentops, PiL and Joy Division. Wire would be in there but I saw them…

BC: I think it would have been great to have finished proper recordings of our songs and released them at the time. I think we would have found an audience in NYC (some of us did stray on and played in other bands there). We also may have found a label to finance recording/record released and distribution—something that was lacking in Tampa. We were young and NYC was a tough place to be broke! I don’t feel like the music had run its course, we just ran into obstacles…

RD: Sure, but it was a tough time to survive in NYC. I’m not sure how I managed 9 years really …

BC: I hadn’t listened to them in a long time, and had recently been working on compiling best versions of everything I had (on 40 year old cassettes!) when Cullen from Floating Mill reached out. I did the best I could to clean up the recordings, most of which were only “demo” mixes. I think had we had the financial backing to spend a bit more time recording them they would have been better, but that’s also part of their charm; that is was early indie music sounded like! I’ve been playing in bands for 43 years, and I’ve learned that “success” requires that a lot of different elements align at the right time in the right place. Ultimately you have to make music that moves you, so that whether you become successful or not, you can be proud of what you’ve created.

RD: I think they are pretty magical—it’s young people working well together, really melding as a group, but also working pretty hard on something with few resources. There’s a certain wonder and excitement to that. Bill did an amazing forensics job on these rickety old tapes, and made them feel like when we were playing them. I can feel that fun really clearly again when I listen to the tracks.