By “Tampa” Earl Burton
One of the benefits of living in a larger city is that you get to see things, like movies and concerts, which don’t usually visit smaller enclaves. This was the case on Friday night at Crowbar in Ybor City as an incredibly special documentary screening/concert took place featuring Athens, GA’s rock legends Five Eight. For over three hours, the veterans of the alternative rock scene wowed the appreciative crowd at Crowbar and solidified their place in the annals of alt rock history.
Nearly Forty Years of Rock Excellence
The evening began with a documentary screening of a film featuring Five Eight, Weirdo: The Story of Five Eight. Directed by Marc Pilvinsky and completed in 2024, Weirdo takes the usual course that rock docs take when featuring a band – the difference this time around is that Pilvinsky uses a deft touch to weave the tales of the band together with the laurels from some of those who were contemporaries of Five Eight and Athenians and industry people who were critical to the success of the band. Notables such as Amy Ray (Indigo Girls), Patterson Hood (Drive-By Truckers), and Bill Berry (R.E.M.) recount their experiences with Five Eight and what they brought to the Athens music scene in the late Eighties/early Nineties.
Quite a bit of that is brought by the guitarist/vocalist/catalyst of Five Eight, Mike Mantione. Throughout the documentary, Mantione is quite open about how his struggles with mental health affected him and his life (he describes a mental breakdown during his college years quite vividly) and became a major impetus to his songwriting. Mantione found his “saving grace” in music, and especially in the punk and rock sounds coming out of northern Georgia in the late Eighties.
Mantione found his Keith Richards, his Joe Perry, in bassist Dan Horowitz. Horowitz joined Mantione in creating the early works of Five Eight and, along with drummer Patrick ‘Tigger’ Ferguson (if you saw his drumming style, you’d know why he’s called ‘Tigger’) and guitarist Sean Dunn, the lineup of Five Eight was complete. For the next twenty-five years, the men would share van rides, concert stages, and their lives as they pursued the ever elusive “success” that musicians desire.
So, what happened? The fates would intervene, stopping Five Eight short on several occasions. A home invasion severely injured Dunn, forcing him from the band and into a dependency on narcotics prescribed to relieve the injuries. After a record company sat on their 1997 album Gasolina! for over a year and a half (resulting in poor sales), Ferguson ended his association with the band. Yet Mantione and Horowitz continued onward, enlisting Mike Rizzi on the drums, to create extremely personal and excellent work from the band through the early Aughts.
As Weirdo ended, both Ferguson and Dunn returned to the fold to close out a run as the opening act for the West Coast leg of R.E.M.’s 2004 tour. The band has reunited as a foursome, creating such notable albums as 2010’s Your God is Dead to Me Now and 2017’s Songs for St. Jude. The documentary closes with a big question – one which we will try to answer in a moment!
Scintillating Performance Caps the Night
Once the documentary screening was complete, Pilvinsky led Five Eight in a short but enjoyable Q&A with the crowd, who reminisced with the band about their previous stops in Tampa. “Of our Top Ten shows ever, six of them were in Tampa,” Ferguson noted to the excitement of those in attendance. As the questions slowed, people knew what was coming next – a raucous performance from Five Eight to close the night.
Even after almost forty years, Mantione still brings his frenetic, powerful vocals and guitar style to the stage, putting every bit of his being into the words and music as evidenced through his literal perspiration. Horowitz serves as the comedic relief, as he has the entire existence of the band, commenting at one point, “I’d love to tell you what song’s next, but we don’t have a set list!” Ferguson, in this writer’s opinion, was the backbone of the band, providing a pounding, powerful base for the band to build its sound. Dunn isn’t to be overlooked either, delivering superb solos to supplement Mantione’s lyrics.
It is exceedingly rare that I emerge from a concert and am moved to say, “What else is out there?” For Five Eight, I not only picked up every CD they offered of their previous work (and a cassette version of 1992’s I Learned Shut Up), but I also went online and digitally bought the remainder of their catalog (it would have been perfection if a DVD copy of the doc had been available). The power of the music from Five Eight was that moving, at least for me.
The big question of the night, between the documentary and the performance, was “How do you judge success?” If you judge it by how many albums you sold and how many asses you put in seats, that may not cover it for Five Eight. If you judge it by doing what you want to do – what you are driven to do – for nearly four decades, so much so that you have the respect of your peers, then Five Eight has fully covered that. And if you have touched people along the way with the messages in your songs, and you have helped them with their issues, then you truly are a success. In both Weirdo and with their still-smoking sets, Five Eight are still making their mark long after first stepping on stage at the 40 Watt Club in Athens nearly forty years ago.
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SOCIAL MEDIA
Weirdo: The Story of Five Eight
