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After Hurricane Andrew, Against All Authority Found Its Voice
After Hurricane Andrew, two friends in South Miami-Dade picked up acoustic guitars. What they built became one of the area’s most enduring punk bands.
In the weeks after Hurricane Andrew, electricity was hard to count on in parts of South Miami-Dade. Joe Koontz and Danny Lore could still play guitars.
The high school friends spent a long power outage playing acoustic punk songs together. Koontz later recalled that they even climbed onto a bridge and played for passing drivers. When the power returned, they plugged in, recruited a drummer and began building Against All Authority.
The band formed in 1992, amid a recovery that was reshaping their part of Miami-Dade. Koontz and Lore wanted to play shows badly enough to start with house parties. Their first club appearance came months later at the Gallery of the Unknown Artist on South Beach. The lineup changed as they found their footing, and the music grew more forceful. Punk gave the songs their speed and anger; ska brought in offbeat rhythms and, eventually, horns.
Against All Authority carried its convictions beyond the lyrics. Lore designed a logo that turned the familiar American Automobile Association oval into a row of anarchy symbols. Band members covered South Florida with stickers. They put on shows, sought out places willing to host them and worked to make a scene where they could play.
In 1995, they recorded Destroy What Destroys You and a split single with Gainesville band Less Than Jake. The album moved between hard, fast punk and horn-driven songs, with Lore’s vocals pushing through both. Against All Authority took it on the road for a two-month tour that brought them to living rooms, church basements, parks and a racquetball court in El Paso. This was a band willing to play wherever someone would listen.
More people did. Their small label struggled to press enough copies of Destroy What Destroys You to meet demand. Against All Authority later signed with Hopeless Records and released All Fall Down in 1998. Touring carried a band born in South Miami-Dade far beyond it.
As the years went on, the sound became harder. By 2000’s 24 Hour Roadside Resistance, the group was drawing more heavily on straight-ahead punk while keeping its songs fixed on authority, inequality and the lives they saw around them. “I’m Weak Inside” looked at a changing skyline and disappearing open land. Years later, Lore drove through the area where he had grown up and saw how much of that landscape was gone.
The band stopped in 2007. Fifteen years passed before Against All Authority performed together again, returning at The Fest in Gainesville in 2022. Fans who had followed them from South Florida came to see them. So did a new generation finding the records long after the shows where those songs first took shape.
Hurricane Andrew did not create Against All Authority’s ideas or write its music. It did leave Koontz and Lore with time, acoustic guitars and a reason to make something of their own. They carried that impulse through house parties, club stages, records and years on the road. For a band that began without electricity, they made themselves heard a long way from home.