A Cameo Role

Back then the Cameo had it all: peace, love, unity, and skinhead fights. Kristen Thiele, a 30-year-old Miami native who graduated this year from the Chicago Art Institute, remembers one June night in 1987 when she was a University of Miami student. She was at the Rollins/Descendents show. Rollins was onstage. "It was my first hardcore night. And I guess I was dating somebody who must have been dating one of the skinhead girls. I didn't know he was dating somebody else. Anyway, she and her cronies saw me outside talking to this guy. And later they cornered me upstairs in the little lounge. Initially it was this one girl and she was definitely looking for a fight because she stuck her hand in my face. My brother was there. It was instinct; I knew we were going to fight. So I actually hit her first. And I guess that took her by surprise and then all the girls jumped me.... There was a pile of people on top of me. My brother put his body over mine like a turtle shell and his hands were reaching under his body to grab me. Somehow he and I jumped up and it was kind of like a movie because we hid under some stairs and they all ran past us. And then we ran outside and that was the end of it. I wasn't injured but I never went back. We went straight to Wolfie's."

Violence at the Cameo attracted Chuck Loose, who was a seventeen-year-old skateboarding gnome from a small town near Albuquerque when he moved to Miami in 1986. He had heard that South Florida punks were tough. "I had, like, dreadlocks and a nose ring and a skateboard. The environment in New Mexico was, like, all your parents were hippies so it was all, like you know whatever, you can dress as funny as you want but you can still hang out and smoke pot with your parents and it's cool. For me, coming from New Mexico where everyone was kind of mellow and got along with each other, it was really, like, oh my God, such a culture shock. Seriously, like, the big thing was there were these speaker stacks and you'd really prove your mettle if you fucking jumped off them. And they were really high. And there were a lot of cases of nobody catching you when you jumped off. I remember guys diving from the stages and nobody being there to catch them and being knocked unconscious and that's why the ambulances were out front."

Inside the Cameo punks coexisted with a growing cluster of bohemians. Tuesday nights became Asylum, a place for local artists to display their works in a clublike setting. Joe Delaney, a promoter at the Cameo, remembers it this way: "There would be mood lighting and you'd just kind of walk around and look at the art and maybe there'd be a film showing, maybe there wouldn't. There'd be some really cool music playing and there were cocktails. And it was really a cool kind of social, art thing. Something really vibrant. We probably haven't seen anything like it since."

De Onis paid DJs Ed Bobb, Howard Davis, and Frank Falestra to experiment with multimedia presentations at Asylum and on other nights. "They would do great projections," de Onis says. "All the walls of the Cameo and the ceiling and everything were covered with images that were changing all the time. It was really nice."

Laura Quinlan handled the Groovy Movie series, which presented arthouse classics like Metropolis, Nosferatu, and Simon of the Desert, along with vintage cult favorites such as Andy Warhol's Bad and Ed Wood's inquiry into cross-dressing, Glen or Glenda. Wednesday was poetry night, organized by de Onis's sister, Francesca. Among the bards who read were Bob Gregory, Lionel Goldbart, and Glen Ganz.

Of course there were some glitches in the aging theater. In May 1989 Crossover Concerts decided to further diversify its live music offerings by presenting a gospel show. De Onis and the Quinlans made a deal with an outside promoter to put on a BeBe and CeCe Winans concert featuring Whitney Houston as a back-up singer. "It was a really big deal for us. And we were working so hard to make sure the theater was really nice for this gospel show," Laura Quinlan recalls. "At a certain point we realized there was no way we could get the seats replaced and so our maintenance crew painted them red to make them look really nice." The next night gospel fans in silk suits packed the place. "When they got up to go home everybody had red fannies," Quinlan chuckles. "We had a lot of dry-cleaning bills. It was very stressful." The following May the air conditioning failed during David Byrne's concert with Brazilian singer Margareth Menezes and a sixteen-piece Latin-dance band. Everyone sweated and partied on.