"We're bad at math. We really started in May 2013," Chuck Livid, founder of TuffGnarl.com, says. You could say his music blog — which New Times declared 2015's best — is running on Miami time.
"I had old ladies calling me to complain."
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"Last year's was in late summer too," Livid says while trying to remember the foggy details of 2014's anniversary party. This Saturday, TuffGnarl will throw itself a party for its second birthday, and like last year's celebration, there will be no shortage of loud noises. "It's hard to remember what happened since the night was a drunken blur," Livid says. "We had go-go dancers, bands, food specials. I was amazed how the scene turned up for it. No skinheads started anything. It was a lot of crazy times, good people, and hot dancers listening to good music."
This year's bash will have an '80s-and-'90s punk flair. The headliners are No Fraud — a hardcore thrash act founded in Venice, Florida, in 1982 — and 210, a band Livid describes as "a punk supergroup" that features members of the Crucifucks and Scream (which included Dave Grohl before he joined Nirvana). Local
Though Livid has a background in music — playing in bands and running his own label — he wanted TuffGnarl.com to be about more than music, even if the website gets its name from an old Sonic Youth song. "This was kind of a direct response to the site BeachedMiami.com going down," he says. "It was a great blog, and I wanted there to be another news outlet out there. We have a staff of 13 writers and two editors who write for other publications, like you guys at New Times and the Miami Herald. This gives the writers a chance to cover things in pop culture that aren't exactly in their field of expertise. If they're music writers, here they can cover fashion. Adam Huss covers pro wrestling for us. Our editor Jesse Scheckner won an MMA Journalist of the Year award for his coverage on the UFC." The site also publishes stories about food,
Livid enjoys watching his content step bravely into the unknown depths of the internet and welcomes whatever feedback it brings back with it. "I had one interview with Doyle from the Misfits where he revealed his brother Jerry was holding up any Misfits reunion, which brought a lot of traffic. Then I did a piece on the five worst things about Boca Raton, which became a fiasco. I had old ladies calling me to complain."
Most interesting to Livid, though, was a story that made the website a phenomenon on the other side of the world. "Jesse did a piece on the five weirdest things on YouTube. There ended up a link to it on some Reddit-type site in South Korea that was driving thousands of hits a day. I started getting emails in Korean about music reviews."
Livid hopes this Saturday's Rock & Roll Debauch — with its loud music, hard drinks, and interesting people as an embodiment of his beloved domain name — will be yet another chapter in a long and prosperous history of his website. "We're more than music," he says, "but our music events are pretty
