Born in Miami Florida in the late 50s. My father was a professional jazz accordionist, had a music store and booked bands in South Florida. I started out as a vocalist in Junior High and started playing drums soon after. We closed the music store in 1975 and I moved to Winter Park at the age of 18.
Bob 'The Bird' Cara grew up in Sanford, Florida and attended local schools. In 1964, he got the bug while watching the Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan show; however, after his mom took him to the doctor and got some antibiotics he felt lots better. Some time later after hearing "They're Coming To Take Me Away", he was inspired to take up the guitar .
Flo Rida - Let It Roll .mp3
He joined his first band as one of three guitarists and it was decided shortly thereafter that he would switch to bass since he was the worst guitar player. But, he soon discovered advantages; for example, since you pluck one string at a time instead of strumming all six, tuning is not as big a deal. After playing in countless local bands with names that sound corny today, he got the call to join SOMF CIty in 1979, ultimately becoming the longest lasting bass player in the group's history. Other bands he worked with include the Sick Band and the Blind Dates. These days he plays with the Pendletones, a classic blues rock band in Central Florida. He likes to play vintage Fender basses and has a Hartke stacked speaker rig, which looks cool.
AL: I quickly realized that I didn't want to go into business, which was my degree is in business and economics. I wanted to go into student affairs. I did my four years and was mentored into student affairs, and I wanted to go to a good program so I went to Florida State. It was really the only program I applied to and I got in and I didn't do the RA housing thing. As an undergrad I pretty much had an eh relationship with housing at UPJ. Florida State wanted a strong programmer in housing because they were trying to do better programming. They took a risk on me and I took that assistantship because it paid the best because it included housing. Because I was trying to budget this off-campus thing and it wasn't working here in Tallahassee.
AL: I went to Florida State and got into housing. Did a brief time in University of Pittsburgh, University of Western Illinois after Florida State, and then was job searching. Had a job interview here. Had a good interview, but decided to turn it down because I didn't know if I wanted to head to Greenville, and also there was some other professional reasons. Funny enough I took a job somewhere else and it didn't work out, so I was looking for a job the following year. A colleague of mine did come to East Carolina and she was looking for another hall director, and I took the job because I didn't have anything else going on. I was having a really crappy job search that year, and it brought me back to East Carolina University. I always tell people I declined my first job offer at ECU and took it the second time a year later. I take that as a little bit of provenance that this was the right place. (9:05)
AL: I arrive at the doors at East Carolina University and as a hall director and pretty out. Fortunately for me I really did my job search out and I got a job through a coworker so she knew I was gay and so I was very honest and direct about. Even when I was at Western I was involved with the LGBT student organization there. When I was at Florida State I was involved with the LGBT student organization there, and I helped found a sort of secret group at University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown that met through the counseling center because it was a lot more conservative. We were whispering and knocking on doors and having secret meetings. (10:36)
AL: I wasn't really in the closet towards my last years at Pitt, I was pretty much honest who I was. I arrived at Florida State gay and out, I arrived at Western gay and out, so I was going to arrive at Greenville as gay and out. It was a little bit more shocking here. Tallahassee, I mean, it's a big school, but here it was just a little bit more of a shock to the system. I was the second gay hall director. There were some other ones that hadn't come out yet and whatever else but Jeff Gersh had arrived a year before so it was in his second year. He thankfully knocked some of the closet doors open. Because the thing is no one was surprised that there was a gay hall director because there was one the year before that really knocked the closet doors off.
AL: It was an attempt for gender parity so they'd get an advisor who was just an advisor in name because they wanted gender parity. They wanted a male advisor and a female advisor. Generally the male advisors at that time were more active. John O'Brien and Jeff Gersh and then myself. Then John O'Brien stepped back, Jeff Gersh took more of a roll, and then Jeff left and I came. There's been other advisors along the time, I haven't been the solo advisor. Probably for the last decade I've probably been the solo advisor but that's ... People say, "Well, why do you keep doing it?" I was like, "Well, if somebody would come to a meeting and they said they want to take over the advisorship I'd probably let them have it." Nobody's ever showed up at the meeting and asked for that but we will see on that one.
AL: That's a coming and going thing. You'd like to think that it was some sort of set, like "Oh my god, we're gonna have pride week for sure!" Every year was a debate. Are we gonna do a pride week? Or what are gonna do for pride week? Loved them, though. Because there was a period that we were doing them pretty and... Jeans Day, I'm sure some other people. We used to do Blue Jeans Day, which caused a consternation on campus for sure. Because all suddenly people were running back to their residence hall room to change their clothes suddenly, because they realized that they wore jeans on Blue Jeans Day. So we took something that was rather commonplace and made it the item. "Wear blue jeans on Friday if you're gay." You just put an ad in the paper on Thursday saying, "Tomorrow wear blue jeans!" And they do an article on it and all of a sudden everybody on campus is in panic about accidentally wearing- Denim Days! That's right. Not blue jeans, Denim Days, that's right. So they're wearing denim, dear God its right back to... you never see so many sweat pants on campus. I loved it. (31:37)
Deejays formed the base of hip hop culture during the 1970s. They organized parties and served as the primary artists. By the mid-1970s, DJs Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaataa dominated the burgeoning hip hop scene. Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, and Herc controlled sections of the Bronx (Figure 1).8
Herc played in the nightclubs in East Bronx and in neighborhoods in the West. Grandmaster Flash and his Casanova Crew controlled the South Bronx from 138th to 163rd streets. However, Bambaataa saw hip hop culture as a path out of gang violence and an instrument of black and brown unity.9 Inspired by a trip abroad and the movie, Zulu, Bambaataa formed the Universal Zulu Nation, which would draw from black nationalism and pan-African themes and sought to use hip hop as an organizing tool against gang violence.10 2ff7e9595c
Comments