Tropical Heatwave Always Looking for Fresh Acts, Like The Shackeltons
When WMNF's Wes Courtney attends the South by Southwest music expo in Austin, Texas, each year, one of his purposes is to scout out acts to program at the station or possibly book to come to the Tampa area to perform.
So the music director for Tampa's alternative, non-commercial FM radio station had his work ears on when he attended a party this year hosted by Seattle radio station KEXP. That didn't prepare him for the show he heard there by The Shackeltons, a gritty alt rock band from Chambersburg, Pa., whose name refers to the intense Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton.
"I found the nearest phone, called (WMNF program manager) Randy Wynne and said, 'You got to get these guys for Heatwave,'" Courtney recalls.
That's Heatwave, as in Tropical Heatwave, the annual Tampa music bonanza.
The Shackeltons' music impressed Courtney, but what makes a good band a Heatwave act involves showmanship as well.
'The lead singer seemed like he was all over the room,' he continues. 'He was like a young Mick Jagger, and the playing was full of surprises, fresh alternative rock that would have things like blues riffs burst through at points.' (A videotaped performance of the group's metallic confessional 'The Breaks' from the SxSW performance currently on YouTube bears this out.)
Mark Redding, the singer in question, accepts compliments like this with only slight unease. 'We can't control what people hear in our music,' he said on behalf of the others, 'but I'll take a comparison like that to the bank.'
He credits his on-stage intensity to life and death issues.
'My father died when I was 16, and I've had these feelings that each moment can always be it,' he says. 'That led to some really wild shows at first. I've had to learn to pace myself.'
Tropical Heatwave is WMNF's largest event, annual or otherwise. Spread across six stages in and around the historic Cuban Club in Ybor City, the eight-hour concert-dance showcases the most kinetic performers on the station's various playlists. A Heatwave experience involves splashes of New Orleans eclecticism, African and Caribbean styles from reggae to griot, and two and a half generations of indie, punky, alternative rock.
Over time, the stage at El Pasaje Plaza has come to feature Louisiana music, and the New World Brewery Stage, the cream of Central Florida's alt.music scene. 'Heatwave started out all local,' Wynne notes. 'In the '90s, national acts had started to squeeze local acts out, but we moved to correct that.'
Graham Parker, a stalwart of the British pub rock scene with a central role converting it to punk rock in the mid-'70s, is the best known performer on this year's bill. It's his first Heatwave, but only because the event didn't exist in 1978.
'The biggest names often have the most to lose at Heatwave,' Wynne observes. 'The audience goes where the energy is, and every year you hear about a major performer whose crowd suddenly thins because it just isn't clicking and some upstart band is playing the set of its life.'
The thinking, booking The Shackeltons, is that the suburban Philadelphia band might be just such upstarts.
'I write 99 percent of the words, and the others write 99 percent of the music,' Redding says. 'On stage, the words only work when the music clicks. When they get going, I feel like I can do anything out there.'
STEVE WEBB
Ledger Correspondent