My name is Bill Ectric. Throughout the 1980s & 90s, I video-taped, hung out with, and otherwise badgered many of the local bands and club owners in Jax. Some of my footage of Stevie Stiletto at the Post & King Lounge is featured in Kevin Dunn's documentary, My Life Is Great: The Stevie Stiletto Story.
Stephen Dare (not only a "hero member" on this site, but one of my heros as well) has posted a few of my videos here on Metro Jacksonville. I have a blog called Nothin' Ever Happens In This Town (http://nothineverhappens.wordpress.com/) that will feature more videos, as well as commentary. All the material on the blog will one day be collected and published as a book. But that's a little ways off, yet.
I've written a novel and a bunch of short stories already, and my work appears on numerous literary web sites, but I'm not here to talk about any of that. I want to talk and write about Jacksonville! Between 1975 and today, I have lived on the Westside, in Riverside, Neptune Beach, Arlington, Southside, Orange Park. I even lived briefly in a warehouse on Forest Street, where several bands (including Stevie Stiletto) used to practice and which is now torn town. But that's a story for another time.
Metro Jacksonville is one of my favorite sites and I'm happy to be here!
Hello good to have you. I love vintage band videos.
(http://i196.photobucket.com/albums/aa111/Ocklawaha/CRITICAL%20Special%20Effects%20Images/JacksonvilleAirship2-6.jpg)
Hey Bill:
Welcome man! The resident old hippie would like to know if your a Jaxson native or transplant? If what part of town did you grow up in? Or what part of town did you first land in (okay, besides the airport)? Always happy to see another artistic type join our site.
OCKLAWAHA
Howdy, Ocklawaha. Well, I was born and raised in Virginia, near the Blue Ridge Mountains in a little town called Christiansburg (kind of like Mayberry on the old Andy Griffith show). In 1972, right after graduating from high school, me and a friend of mine joined the Navy on the spur of the moment. To this day, I don't know why we did it, because we were bascially hippies, against the Viet Nam war, in favor of peace, love, & drugs, but never-the-less, it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. I was stationed in Rota, Spain for two years and then Cecil Field here in Jax, which of course is no longer a Navy base. Long story short, I got out of the Navy in 1976, moved to Riverside where I had gotten to know a lot of musicians, artists, and general bohemians. I started going to FCCJ, Kent Campus, when it was called FJC. I've wanted to be a writer all my life, but I got side-tracked, first by the Navy, then by being in a band where I wrote songs but partied too much to finish a novel. Then I temporarily injured my wrist working at UPS and couldn't play the guitar for almost two years, and that's when I started videotaping bands because I still wanted to be in the scene somehow. Finally I got a real job and got married and I've written a novel which is semi-autobiographical about a couple of youngsters who grow up in a small town and decide they want to be paranormal investigators, and all kinds of freaky things happen, and one of the characters has amphetamine-induced psychosis and goes to Malta.
But now I'm rambling. Hey, I finally got the URL to work properly in my first message. Whoohoo!
Oh, by the way, I really like that picture of Jacksonville with the Hindenberg. It looks real!
Hello
Good Jefferson quote, Sportmotor.
Thanks ^_^
fitting on alot of levels
Welcome aboard (600th post BTW)