Plenty of people like Bruce Springsteen align their music with where they
grew up; they write songs about their hometown, they reflect the people and
their values and their ethics. But the music of the Sugar Oaks goes beyond
simple romanticism of pleasant geographic features or the region's blue
collar workers. Like their namesake, their music is deeply rooted in Florida
soil, the same soil tread by Ray Charles, William Bartram, Zora Neale
Hurston and the Highwaymen.
As of late we've been looking for new sprouts from that soil. Not some
imported farm-grown palm tree like the ones they plant in perfect rows on
the sides of the toll roads. Not Mississippi Jimmy Buffet and his
margaritas, not Frankenstein Lou Pearlman and his Universal Studios
patchworks. More like the one I found five years ago in Eric Hayden's
bedroom, after he moved back to Clearwater from a failed attempt to leave.
And believe me, there are plenty of reasons to leave. Living in a converted
Florida room in the back of his mom's house he'd play me a new song he
wrote, one or two new ones every week. And I had a revelation. Soon I had my
own cassette tape, dubbed from the TV after I brought my parents' camcorder
to an early Sugar Oaks show. That tape became the soundtrack to every car
ride home with the windows down and our bathing suits soaking the seats,
getting sand on the floormats. The soundtrack to every new realization on
the path to discovering what it is I loved about my home. I'd play it at
work that summer during the violent, late afternoon thunderstorms; the Sugar
Oaks being the steam that rises from the pavement when it's all over.
Where we're from, the line between paradise and wasteland is hard to draw.
In every sparkling, dolphin-spewing vista there's a smokestack from an
abandoned chemical plant or a crumbling railroad bridge. For every golden
eagle's nest, there's a radio tower or a splintering telephone pole
underneath. For every idyllic Grapefruit League spring training day at the
park, there's the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and a Tropicana Field full of Yankees
fans.
You don't have to be a Floridian to get it. America was once the United
States, sovereign entities each with something unique to offer. We are
moving more and more towards one America, where every town looks and feels
the same. But you can still find something in that soil. That soil some see
as an undevelopable swamp waiting to be drained and built upon. But if you
look closer you'll see it's a river of grass, an elaborate, self-sustaining
ecosystem found nowhere else on the earth. That's where you'll find the
Sugar Oaks.
-- Brett Walsh
