Anatomy of a Flood Yarn
#535 / Flood Time Capsule: 2001
In November 2001, about a year and half after Doug Chaffin’s first gig with the band, he and his fellow Floodsters returned to the same venue — Huntington’s historic old YWCA building on Fifth Avenue — for an encore.
“We had a full house,” Charlie Bowen told his mom in an email the next day, “and they really seemed to like the music. Even gave us a standing ovation at the end. We did two sets, each with a mix of swing numbers and jug band tunes, Appalachian folk songs and fiddle tunes. It was a ball.”
It was fun too for the guys to chat with folks between the sets. “Apparently,” Bowen added, “a lot of them had visited our new web site,” which Charlie had rolled out just four months earlier, “and so they knew a little about the band before we got there.”
And by then there were many new things to talk about in Floodlandia besides the new web site.
Six weeks earlier, for instance, the guys had worked with the incomparable Buddy Griffin to finish recording the band’s first studio album, due for release the following January.
Herald-Dispatch writer Dave Lavender, on hand for the YWCA gig that November night, said he was eager to hear the disc, adding he’d like to do a spread on The Flood in the paper when the recording was released.
It was a promise he kept, of course. Click here to read the story that Lavender published Jan. 6, 2002, as the band was launching what the late Joe Dobbs and Dave Peyton would dub the guys’ year-long “grand tour” of gigs around the region to promote the album.
Evolution
The band had grown from a trio to a quartet to a sextet. Since Doug’s joining in early 2000, the band had also added Chuck Romine a year later and Sam St. Clair six months after that.
Solidifying around these six players, the band added new songs and arrangements to its repertoire to feature each. During live performances, like the one that night at the Y, it was nothing — de rigueur, as the more Frenchified Floodies might say — for Charlie to call out for any one of them to ad lib a solo on the spot, confident it what would be delivered.
In other words, when a tune the band was cooking on could use a peppery ending, Bowen was by now quite accustomed to turning to Romine — usually a happy fixture on his left at gigs — for a bit of raucous banjocity.
And thereby hangs a tale.
The Night Charlie Talked to a Chair
On this particular wintry Wednesday evening at the Y, the audience was grooving on some lively tune and, nearing the end, Charlie called out, “Take it, Chuck!” In surprise, the guys look at each other and then at their fearless (if suddenly clueless) leader. They all started laughing as the tune collapsed in chaos.
Then, paraphrasing his all-time favorite Cheech and Chong routine, Peyton loudly proclaimed:
“Uhhhh…. Chuck’s not here, man!”
True, that. The chair to Bowen’s left was empty that evening, because Brother Romine was a thousand miles away, vacationing with Miz Phyllis in Florida.
“I thought,” Peyton later said with a chuckle, “we were going to have to lead Charlie off the stage.”
After that, “Take It, Chuck” joined other stories in Flood lore. Click the button below to hear how, a dozen years later, it still popped it in a bit of palaver between songs at a jam session:
Want More Stories?
We have an archive of Flood yarns, like the one the guys related in the audio clip above. Visit the band’s website (www.1937flood.com) and click on the “Our Stories” link to reach this page:
