To people who don’t live here, Florida is as much a collection of clichés as it is a state. The icons and ideas many people associate with the peninsula – only some of which are justified -- are legion: plastic lawn flamingos, swaying palm trees, hanging chads, turn-signal-challenged retirees, jogger-eating alligators, mosquitoes the size of buzzards. Florida is all these things and none of these things. It’s a sociological experiment gone terribly wrong and intriguingly right. It’s a paradox on a peninsula, and it’s perhaps the only place that could have birthed a country band such as Los Diablos.
Fronted by singer-guitarist Mark Dubin and boasting a roster of veterans from South Florida’s underground punk and rock ‘n’ roll scenes, Los Diablos reconnects the region to a part of its identity that is seldom remembered and less frequently discussed: that of a country-music stronghold. Although it’s tough to see the area’s rural personality beyond the manicured golf courses and skyline of towering condominiums, it’s there all right -- from the stubborn natives who refuse to act like tourists in their own back yards to the working-class roughnecks who couldn’t give a damn about the modeling agencies of South Beach or professional poodle-groomers of Boca Raton.
In a place that has become increasingly unfriendly to original, nonmainstream country music, this band of hard-bitten, seen-and-done-it-all musicians is forcing even roots-averse music fans to take notice. During the past year, Los Diablos has filled clubs typically reserved for scabrous punk bands and by-the-book rock artists. This is partly because the members of Los Diablos – Dubin, guitarist Jorge Hernandez, bassist Will Trev, steel guitarist Tom Stankus and drummer Chino Leon – cut their teeth in some of these clubs playing in snidely named bands such as The Johnsons, The Comatones, The Holy Terrors and The Pookiesmackers. But it’s mainly because the music of Los Diablos is bracingly authentic, from the high-lonesome cry of Stankus’ steel guitar to Dubin’s penitential, open-wound songwriting.
Los Diablos plays somebody-done-somebody-wrong songs, and in most of these compositions -- which marry the exposed-nerve energy of classic punk rock with the clear-eyed worldview of old-time country -- that somebody is Dubin himself. In tracks such as “This Hotel,†about bottoming out in a rented room, the singer holds nothing back. Private, self-inflicted sins are made public, and redemption is always a few miles up the road, but the road has been cut off and the car’s run out of gas. “I’m always looking in from the outside,†Dubin sings in “Nashville City Sky,†a song about finding the grass on the other side isn’t so much greener as it is different. And then, there’s “Honestly Endlessly Hopeless,†in which Dubin distills 35 years of living into four blisteringly raw minutes. He’s his own target here, and proves harder on himself than anyone else could be: “Said you were ‘different’/Said you were so ‘punk rock’/Claimed nobody loved you so you do what you want/Now they all laugh and treat you unkind/And point their fingers as you walk on by.â€
As the old song goes, if that ain’t country, you can kiss my ass.
Jake Cline
Author/journalist
