Most would call a mass of people swaying to music in a tiny building with a broken air-conditioning system on a day where the heat index put the temperature at over 100 a circle of hell.
But on June 21, about 200 people called it a good time when headliner Anthony Raneri, preceded by local band My Summer Semester and Andy Jackson of Hot Rod Circuit, played an acoustic concert at Gainesville's 1982 Bar.
Raneri, lead singer of the alternative band Bayside, said in an interview that the three Florida shows were the latest installment of a year-long off-and-on solo tour, which he continues in his downtime away from the band.
"Our schedule is so crazy that I never have a month or two months to do a whole tour," he said. "So when I do the solo shows, I usually fly somewhere and then go back and do Bayside stuff, then go somewhere else."
But Raneri said the city is special to him because of Bayside's early performances in Gainesville and other small towns.
"It's hard to get shows in bigger cities before you get a record deal," he said.
Recalling a dinner at Mellow Mushroom during Bayside's first tour, Raneri said Gainesville holds a special appeal.
"Gainesville to me is very punk-rock," he said. "There's a lot of history here. It's a really awesome vibe different than college towns somewhere else."
Of course, not only good vibes come with playing at a venue less than a mile from one of the largest college campuses in the country.
Raneri spent about a third of his hour-long set playing cover songs, and after opening with Matt Skiba of Alkaline Trio's "Good Fucking Bye," a fan begged for more, but Raneri didn't oblige.
"Play more Trio?" Raneri addressed the mini-skirted offender with a tinge of annoyance thinly veiled by a smirk. "Maybe you should have gone to an Alkaline Trio show."
But for the most part, Raneri kept the evening light.
"The Bayside stuff is more of a performance," he said. "But with stuff like this, it's kind of like I'm that guy in a coffee shop just trying to entertain."
Raneri played an upbeat song, "The Ballad of Bill the Saint," from his forthcoming first solo album, which he said should hit the shelves later this year.
He also played seven Bayside songs, including "The Ghost of Saint Valentine," which Raneri said is his favorite of all the songs he's written, and "Landing Feet First," the only love song of Bayside's four full-length studio albums. "Sometimes I've had a song stuck in my head all day and I'll play it that night," said Raneri, who last listened to Paul Simon's "Kodachrome" before arriving at 1982, of choosing a set list for a solo concert.
But he doesn't commit to a strict list.
"You never know what's going to happen [at a solo show]," he said. "It takes me back to the roots of playing music."
Before Raneri took the stage, a representative from the nonprofit suicide-awareness group To Write Love on Her Arms spoke about depression and using music as a buoy in times of heartache, and the songs Raneri chose for the concert seemed to follow a theme of pain and pulling through.
"Don't Call Me Peanut," "Duality," "Good Fucking Bye," and "The Ghost of Saint Valentine" are about what happens in the wake of love gone wrong.
"Blame it on Bad Luck," "They Looked Like Strong Hands," "I and I," and Bad Religions "Sorrow" all deal with picking up the pieces and moving on.
Raneri closed his set with a cover of the gloomy-yet-ultimately-hopeful Smoking Popes song "Megan," which describes a man who lives through an attempted suicide-by-train following the death of his girlfriend.
At the end of the song, the man sits on a train track again but is pulled from the track-and out of his depression-by a friend.
Though not written by Raneri, the song, which appears on Bayside's acoustic album, fans had shouted the song's title during moments of silence throughout the show.
As he sang the melancholy tune, people closed their eyes and sang along, fulfilling Raneri's hopes for a successful night.
"It doesn't matter if there's 50 people here or 1,000," he said. "People singing along or smiling, that's what I do this for."
