Reloaded

It's 11 on a hot and sticky Friday night, and I'm sweating inside Hollywood's Club M waiting on a miracle. The once-popular, always-dysfunctional, heavily loved hardcore band Load is scheduled to play an impromptu set within the hour. If all goes well, it'll be the band's first time on stage together in six years — following a hallowed ten-year run of blistering punk-meets-metal greatness that ended in 2001. But considering the band's condition and the fact that its lead singer, Bobby Johnston, AKA Bobby Load, is blind-drunk at a table in the back of the club, their impromptu reunion show doesn't look like it's going to happen.

Known just as much for its onstage prowess as its offstage antics, Load is perhaps best met when its members are too drunk to perform. People who remember them best — and there are a lot of them — consider Load one of the hardest-partying bands to come out of South Florida and also one of the most talented. But after walking away from the band they loved for six years, even the members are a touch worried about how they'll sound as a unit once again.

"Bro, I don't know how it's gonna go," Fausto Figueredo, the band's drummer, says while nursing a Heineken inside Club M. "If we can just get Bobby onstage, I think we'll be OK." Then he takes one look at Johnston, who's been on an all-day bender and can barely stand, and admits, "But that ain't gonna be easy."

Within Miami and Broward counties' rock scenes during the 1990s, few bands played with the intensity and reckless abandon that Load cranked out every time it touched the stage. Armed with angst, determination, and a four-to-the-floor, hard-driven sound, Load tore up venues from Churchill's to Washington Square and developed a reputation as the bad boys of local rock. Composed of Figueredo on drums, Johnston on vocals, Tony Qualls on bass, and Jeff "Muthafucka" Tucci on guitar, the band met circa 1990 and immediately bonded over their ability to party and perform like their idols. Influenced by groups like the Circle Jerks, the Subhumans, the Melvins, and Suicidal Tendencies, Load found the common denominator among all those acts and developed a unique style of wreckless Southern screamo punk. It not only afforded them the opportunity to tour and release material with several independent labels but also gained them a sizable local fan base.

"Back then, there were bands like the Goods and the Mavericks that were capable of drawing 200 people per show, and you could easily put [Load] in that category," says Dave Daniels, longtime owner of Churchill's Pub. "They always had a consistent following, including lots of pretty girls, if I remember correctly."

In fact, Tucci recalls that the real motivation for starting Load was purely physical. "Me and Bobby were sitting at the bar one day and realized that we'd never get the kind of girls that we wanted unless we started up a band," he says. "Bobby didn't believe me at first, but sure enough..." And the bandmates all finish the sentence in unison: "We gotta whole lot of ass through Load."

At that, the band members start cracking up, and it's hard to understand why they ever broke up in the first place. After 16 years of being friends, enemies, sparring partners (the band was infamous for its in-fighting), and musical cohorts, the three remaining members of Load bust one another's balls like they all grew up together, and in a sense, they did. They've seen marriages begin and end, attended funerals of loved ones, bailed one another out of jail, and inhaled, smoked, or snorted every illegal substance they could find. To them, it was all a part of the rock 'n' roll aesthetic. They couldn't approach making music any other way.

"Those guys were really wild, and they lived it Mötley Crüe-style," says Juan Montoya, bassist for Torche and longtime friend of the band's. "They were a little too abrasive for people back then. They would play a lot of places, but people would complain cause they were always so loud."

For awhile, the band's antics didn't seem to have any ill effects. It released Hellraiser Sessions in 1992 and received praise from local punk cognoscenti who heralded the cassette as one of the grungiest and truest releases of its time. Local radio host Bob Slade of WLRN championed the band as well, and promoters started taking notice. Between 1993 and 1996, Load began touring regularly, going out on the road for four to five weeks at a time, usually making more in beer than in cash but developing a loyal Southern following along the way. During the best of times, Load opened for its heroes, like the Ramones, Bad Brains, and the Subhumans, and laid waste to any claim that it could never be anything more than a local band.