The latest exhibition at 309 Punk House is what curator Aaron Cometbus describes as a “potluck or funeral.”
“(It’s) where everyone brings a memory and helps manifest the missing loved one,” he said. “We have fliers, menus, and meeting minutes. We have T-shirts, photos, and bolt cutters. We have mugs, manuscripts, and door keys to long-gone businesses.”
Cometbus, alongside 309 Punk House co-director Scott Satterwhite put the show together with items that have been donated over time.
“The vast majority of our donations have come from the community, and include what people might expect from the 309 Punk Project,” said Satterwhite. “Fliers, zines, musical instruments, skateboards, and that kind of stuff.”
But the curators also put thought into expanding the collection beyond the punk scene.
“We also have a broad definition of underground,” added Satterwhite. “Was the Pensacola jazz scene in the 1920s underground? Yes, most definitely.”
The Pensacola Underground A-Z Archival Exhibition includes more than 400 items covering the walls of the 309 Punk House. Everything has a connection to Pensacola. The show is meant to celebrate the city’s “diverse counterculture history,” said Satterwhite.
“Something that’s rarely highlighted,” he said.
Some of the older items from the exhibit come from the John Sunday House, said Satterwhite. When the house was torn down, pieces of the rubble were given to the 309 archives. John Sunday wasn't necessarily a counterculture icon. But the movement was."
“In our entries, we don't list John Sunday as ‘underground’ or ‘countercultural,’ after all he was a well-known, wealthy politician, but the unsuccessful protests to save his house were certainly countercultural,” Satterwhite explained. “The dominant culture dismissed the public outcry to save his house, despite it being a significant place of African American history, which ultimately drove the early movement to save the 309 Punk House.”
While each item tells its own story, there’s not much of a throughline between the different counterculture eras, said Cometbus.
“The underground is not an evolution leading to today, it's a stream with lots of rivulets and eddies and dead ends,” he said. “One scene does not necessarily give birth to another and need not to have done so to be cool and interesting. The blues and jazz scenes in Pensacola are endlessly fascinating. I will say that the clubs and characters certainly feel familiar.”
There’s been an active effort to add to the 309 archives for months, said Satterwhite. And even after hundreds of individual pieces, there’s still a lot of untapped history.
“Just this week alone I've learned a lot things I did not know about Pensacola that surprised me,” said Satterwhite. “One of my favorite records by The Smiths featured a Pensacola native on the cover of a pretty iconic British album. We'll have a ‘What We Missed’ section where we hope audience members will tell us what we neglected and add to the show, which adds to our archive.”
The exhibition does cover a lot of ground from Iraq War protests, and queer newsletters from the 1970s, to a copy of the infamous “Green Book,” which highlights places in Pensacola that were safe for African Americans to eat and sleep.
Certain items pack a lot of history or lead to more uncovered history. Cometbus uses the 1960s underground newspaper “Gulf Coast Fish Cheer” and longtime activist Gary Sansing as examples.
“Scott and I had read about the Fish Cheer, the Gulf Coast's contribution to the sixties underground press. We searched out and found the people involved, and we became friends,” said Cometbus. “Gary Sansing found us when we helped run Subterranean Books downtown. He was a tireless public advocate and a thorn in the side of the Establishment, so much so that the city named the Public Forum after him after Gary died. So that's a hundred years of underground history just from knowledge and artifacts passed down directly from the sources. And those are just two examples out of nearly four hundred we have.”
While digital archives allow for accessibility, there is something to be said for tangible artifacts.
“We just get inundated with so much digital technology that we tend to forget that not everything that's ever happened has been digitized or should be digitized,” said Satterwhite. “We recently visited the Invisible Histories archives in Birmingham, where they store and collect pieces from Southern queer histories. They were recently gifted a large collection of Mardi Gras costumes. What do you think will be cooler? Seeing a picture of them online, or physically holding the gowns and masks and crowns? I'll tell you what I thought was cooler, and that was seeing it in real life.”
Physical copies, with their wear and tear, often tell a more personal story.
“A lot of our fanzines have stamps on them because they were sent in the mail, sometimes to well-known writers who gifted them back to us years later. We have fliers with cigarette burns and zines with coffee stains that tell their own stories,” said Satterwhite. “We have a box of t-shirts that a writer and editor for the seminal punk magazine ‘Maximumrocknroll’ sent us of bands from the late 1970s to somewhat recent. When you open the box, it smells like my dresser used to smell when I lived in punk houses 20 years ago. Whenever I break out that box, I usually get the visitor to smell the shirts. I know that sounds weird, but it gets really nostalgic for people who lived it. I heard one person say, ‘It smells like us!’ You can't get that from a computer, or if you do, something's wrong.”
The Pensacola A-Z Archival Exhibit is Saturday, Sept. 7 at the 309 Punk House, located at 309 N. 6th Ave. Doors open at 6 p.m. On Friday night, 309 and The Handlebar are hosting Laura Jane Grace. Keep updated on future 309 events such as the November Night on the Tracks and more. You can also see the exhibit on these dates:
5-8 p.m. Sunday, Sept 15
3:30-6:30 p.m. Monday, Sept 16
3:30-6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept 18
6-9 p.m. Thursday, Sept 19
12-3 p.m. Saturday, Sept 21
