Jimmy Buffett had warned me well with his sage advice at the beginning of “The Weather Is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful.” Don’t ever start a band.
I didn’t listen of course. And now I look back on being a performer for 30 years and wonder where all the time went. How did I get into this in the first place. Well, I’ll tell you.
As I’ve mentioned, I was a band geek in school. I played trumpet, then switched to French horn in 10th grade when I found out the law of supply and demand. 1 of 25 trumpet players = a C grade. 1 of 3 French horn players = easy A.
I didn’t even know I could sing until Mr. McManus, the choral director, drifted into the practice room that was between the band room and the glee room. Three of my friends and I holed up in there every day during lunch to play pinocle and shoot the shit.
He needed tenors for A Cappella and asked if anyone of us could sing. I took a shot. He hit a key on the piano and I sang the note. He did it again. I said, “Hey cool, I can sing a middle C.” He had me turn around and hit a couple of other notes. I sang the same notes and told him what the notes were as well. I was told I had perfect pitch.
Well, I couldn’t make room for A Cappella on my class schedule because of journalism and band. So I never joined. So much for singing.
I didn’t think much more of it. In college I had always wanted to play a stringed instrument. I’ve tried a guitar but as I still tell everyone, “I never play an instrument that has more strings than I have fingers.”
A banjo, however, had five. So I gave that a shot. At the University of Washington they haf something known as Experimental College. Anyone could teach a class. So I enrolled in Beginning Clawhammer Banjo. If you don’t know what clawhammer style is, don’t fret. I didn’t know either.
But I did learn to play banjo, along with 20 other budding banjo players. I never liked the clawhammer style, so I developed my own after finishing the class. I call it “wanking.” Basically, it uses the outside of the index finger to strum on the downstroke and then the inside on the upstroke. It looks really odd, but works. I only know that the members of the Seattle Banjo Band saw me play once and were mesmerized by the style and wanted to know how I did it. I told them I didn’t know how I did it, I just didn’t know how to pick the damned thing.
About that time my two brothers had a band, the Second City Slickers. It was heavy on novelty songs and covers sang by Dan D. Dodd. When Dan quit, I was promoted to the position. I didn’t ask to be a lead singer. But I was the only one in the family who played a stringed instrument and my two brothers didn’t trust another outsider.
My debut came at the Bunkhouse in Renton, Washington. I was so scared I must’ve drank two pitchers of beer before going on stage. I was also so drunk that I blacked out somewhere in the first song. I don’t remember anything about it, but I did an hour set and everybody seemed to like it.
I think my favorite moment in that band, and one that told me I was in the wrong place in my life, was when we played at a Chinese restaurant in Bellevue. We had been playing there as Seafair Pirates and the owner invited the band back the next weekend. So we showed up, but not in pirate garb. Midway through the second song, he asked us if we could pack up our gear and pointed to another door. We thought, how cool, he wants us to play a private party in the banquet room. So we quickly packed everything up and headed through the door. It led to the parking lot. We had been kicked out.
And there was my start as a singer/musician. Eventually my brothers and I had a falling out over my divorce and we parted ways. We haven’t spoken since either. Oh well, I didn’t really care for the schticky novelty music anyway and they wouldn’t let me sing anything I liked.
So I went solo. I found an old tenor guitar (it only has four strings) in a pawn shop in Renton one day. I paid $60 for it. It was instantly my favorite instrument. I still could play the banjo, but now I could play a guitar, even without a single lesson. That’s only because I tuned the tenor to the same key as the banjo so I could use the same chord progressions. Smart, huh?
I didn’t solo for long, however. I ran into this Irish guy named Bobby Smyth in the Seafair Pirates. He played baritone uke. We were soon joined by Big Nick Nichols on guitar, Animal on banjo and Buckwheat on washtub and gratilators (vent grates that he played like a washboard).
Even though Buffett had warned me, I had started a band. We were pretty good, too, considering that we regularly joked that we only practiced once a year when we’d be on stage (which was mostly true). For a time we were doing some pretty big gigs. We even opened for Tim Noah, a hugely popular kiddy entertainer of the day. He didn’t like us because the kids wanted us back and didn’t want to listen to him. Never upstage the main act. A lesson we’ve never really learned.
We were making pretty good money, too. I only know this because I have an entertainer friend now makes $400 a night with his band here in Florida for a three hour set. We were making that 20 years ago.
We performed for four years at Folklife. We called ourselves The Coachmen when we weren’t running around as pirates. One year we decided not to perform there and just go and watch. As we’re looking through program we saw that The Coachmen were on stage in an hour. We panicked. We thought we were performing again but we didn’t even have our instruments with us. Turns out there was a group way back when that had the same name. They even did a lot of the same Kingston Trio type songs.
By the time we had figured out that there was another group by the same name, Nick had returned with passes for The Coachmen, which gave access to the VIP area and the free beer. I heard a couple of The Coachmen doppelgangers bitching about the hard time they got for asking for more buttons at the check-in desk. Sorry guys — PIRATE!
Other people came and went in the band over the years. Lollypop joined us for a time playing congas, Long Gone John sat in on harmonica, Sharon and Michelle sang with us until I divorced them. Then there was Sir Nigel (guitar) and Cassie (vocals), who are still part of the band today.
And then was Animal and I. Still performing all these years later. We still can do about 80 or so songs off the top of our heads, some of which go all the way back to the very beginning, others we learned just last week.
Even though I never started out to have a band, I can’t imagine life without these guys. They have been like family to me over the years. And just like family, we’ve fought, we’ve made up, we’ve had some adventures no one but us would believe, and we’ve made many, many memories that I dearly cherish as the self proclaimed “leader of the band.”
To all my mates, may the music and memories last forever. May we make new ones in the coming years before we all get too old to remember the words.
Living a melodic life here on the Treasure Coast,
— Robb