MiamiTickets.co · Local knowledge
Car Wash Money, Hurricane Tapes and the Miami Band That Wouldn’t Quit
They paid for their first album with car washes. A hurricane scattered the tapes for their second. The music, and the friendships behind it, survived.
Rain ended the skate session near the Falls in 1988. Addison Burns, Andre Serafini and Russell Mofsky went back to Burns’s house, plugged in their instruments and started a band.
Within weeks, Quit was playing the Cameo Theater. Tony Rocha came to an early show as a fan, wearing a Descendents shirt and rushing toward the stage when the band covered one of their songs. He soon became Quit’s bassist. The four found their place in Miami’s punk scene, playing rooms such as Flynn’s, the Kitchen Club, Beirut and Churchill’s.
They played fast, but they cared about melody. Burns’s songs had the urgency of punk and the exposed nerves of someone trying to work out love, frustration and growing up in real time. That combination gave Quit a sound that could fill a club with skaters and punk fans while staying with them on the drive home.
A University of Miami music business student named Ralph Cavallero heard the band after a show and offered to manage them. He helped get them into Sync Studios, where they recorded Earlier Thoughts during late-night sessions. Finishing the music was one problem. Paying to release it was another.
Quit asked neighbors for help and held car washes to raise the money. In the summer of 1990, Earlier Thoughts came out. Mofsky soon left to study at the New England Conservatory of Music, and the remaining three members carried on. Cavallero worked the phones to get the album played by college radio stations; it reached No. 30 on the CMJ chart. For a band that had washed cars to put out its own record, people far from Miami were listening.
Then came the follow-up that never quite arrived.
In 1992, Quit recorded Grazing Day at Morrisound Studios in Tampa. They ran short of money before they could finish mixing it. While the tapes sat in a Kendall warehouse, Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida. When the band returned, two tapes had been soaked and a third was missing. The surviving recordings could be salvaged, but the album’s path had become uncertain.
The following summer, Burns fell from a rooftop and severely injured his wrist. He could not play guitar for about a year. Quit had lost time to the storm, and now its singer and guitarist needed time to heal. As melodic punk reached a larger audience in the 1990s, the Miami band’s momentum stalled.
That might have been the end of the story. Quit returned to performing in 1995, eventually announced a farewell show, and then played another farewell show so younger fans who could not enter the first venue would have a chance to see them. Members moved, worked other jobs and tried at different points to revisit the unfinished recordings. The band’s name became an accident of irony.
In 2015, Burns, Serafini, Mofsky and Rocha reunited for shows that included a return to Churchill’s. By then, some of their friends from Miami’s earlier punk scene had died. Playing together again offered the four musicians something they still had the chance to do. Quit has continued to make music available under its own name, including recent releases alongside Earlier Thoughts.
There is an easy story to tell about Quit as the band that missed its moment. It leaves out too much. Their first album reached listeners well beyond the clubs where they began. People remembered the songs years after those first shows. And after the car washes, the hurricane, the injury and the farewells, the friends who met around a skate ramp could still find their way back to the music.