Tim Pryce - Powerhouse part II

The is the continuation of our interview with Tim Pryce, the guitarist for Miami, Florida's late 80's hardcore band, Powerhouse. Read on and more importantly, if you haven't heard Powerhouse, search the demo or New Age 7" down now! -Tim DCXX

Any memories from recording the Powerhouse demo? How do you remember it being perceived locally and nationally at the time?

The demo was made with a really cool drummer named Mario. He was into a little more metal than we were, but he was a great drummer. I think I played both the bass and the guitars on the demo. Back then we just wanted to have something to share with everyone we were writing to. Before the internet, everyone would just order demos straight from the bands - and we wanted to be a part of that, to show that we had a really cool, growing HC scene in Miami. Personally, I made so many great friends from then – a lot of them (like you, Timmie!) I still talk to a lot. Sometimes I just can’t believe it’s been over 20 years…



Any favorite or stand out shows you remember playing during that demo era of Powerhouse? Did you feel a solid momentum behind the band at this point?

Oh yeah! We had a blast playing shows and meeting touring bands! We played The Cameo Theater, and pretty much every other venue we could at the time. We got to play with Up Front, Release, SNFU, The Accused, even Quicksand! We wanted to tour really badly. In fact, Mike Hartsfield had a US tour booked for us with his band Against The Wall – but a lot of the members were too young to pull it off. We were pretty poor and didn’t even have a crappy van to go in…


Tim Pryce (Powerhouse) and Tony Downs (The Believers) hanging with Insted and crew in 1988, Photo courtesy of: Tim Pryce



As Powerhouse was coming up, I recall hearing about other Florida bands like The Believers and Awake! What can you tell us about those bands and what other bands of that era stood out?

The Believers were a really great band from West Palm Beach. They were much more musical than we were – I mean, they could PLAY! I still talk to Dain and keep up with Tony. Those were great guys. Awake were from Tampa (I believe). We played with them a bit, but we talked a lot – they were also really good! There also was Beyond Reason (featuring the great Jason Lederman) and a few others that were really good as well. 



One thing I do recall hearing a lot about in regards to the late 80's early 90's Florida HC scene was the influx of nazi skinheads. Was this a serious problem at the time or was it just over magnified? What can you tell us about it?

The skinhead scene in South Florida (Miami & Ft. Lauderdale) was completely non-racist. There may have been a few of those kids in WPB, but it was a problem in other cities in Florida. Those guys would come down to our shows sometimes just to have all-out war with us. Not too fun…but we held it down. That was a big part of what we stood for with Powerhouse. It meant a lot to us (still does, of course). What sucked about that whole “rivalry” was that touring bands came through, not knowing where the audiences happened to be from, and just thought our scene was crazy violent. It was bad, but the people who lived in our scene were stand-up cool people. It was hard at times trying to convince people from out of town of that…