At The Elephant Walk, Dave and Charlie's First Gig
#204 / Flood Time Capsule: 1974
Forty-nine years ago this week at a club in downtown Huntington, the duet that was to evolve into The 1937 Flood performed its first gig.
Four months earlier, David Peyton and Charlie Bowen had started jamming together at a memorable New Year’s Eve party at the Peytons’ place on Mount Union Road.
Following that raucous evening of tunes, food, laughs, drinks and fireworks, Bowen and Peyton got together to pick nearly every week. They learned a slew of songs and crafted arrangements that showcased Peyton’s powerful Autoharp playing and Charlie’s vocals, and they took their first stumbling steps into singing harmonies.
Then in May 1974, David got a call from a friend who was planning entertainment for a group of retired railroad employees who were to meet in the city.
“Do you guys know any railroad songs?” the man asked. Dave chuckled. “Maybe.”
At The Frederick
The afternoon gig was in the Hotel Frederick, where the visiting retirees were staying. By 1974 the celebrated Frederick was nearing its end as Huntington’s premiere hotel. In fact, Dave and Charlie’s May 4 gig there was less than three months before The Frederick closed to transient trade.
After its glory days in the 1940s and ‘50s, the Frederick’s occupancy rates had dropped each year. Finally, in July 1974, manager William R. Ritter Jr. converted the old hotel ijnto units for residential occupants and businesses, which is how it continues to function to this day.
The Elephant Walk
It was in the hotel’s snazzy Elephant Walk Club that Peyton and Bowen met the first audience for their eclectic mix of acoustic music.
Created by Ritter and designer John Jenkins, The Elephant Walk had launched 10 years earlier, in 1964, as a private club, open only to members and hotel guests.
Now, about those pachyderms. Legend has it Ritter came up with the club’s name after he woke up in the middle of the night and saw a book on his nightstand entitled Elephant Walk. After deciding to use that moniker, Ritter and Jenkins went full on, ordering all types of gold elephant sculptures and wallpaper to decorate the space.
“The two men were so committed to this theme,” says an article on the Clio history website, “that they even booked a live circus elephant named Shirley, who entered the club doors on her knees, much to the amazement of the club guests.”
Today, even though the original club is long gone, you can still see elements of it in the architecture of the current Club 21, ranging from the elephants decorating the walls to the front door which features an elephant's head on one side and tail on the other. Also one of the elephant head sculptures still hangs in the building’s lobby.
Picking Train Tunes to Pick
But it was trains, not elephants, on Dave and Charlie’s minds as they prepared for their first gig; they needed to work out at least a half hour’s worth of train-oriented songs for their afternoon with the retirees.
Want to sample what they came up with? From a pre-show Friday night rehearsal at the Peyton house, here from the spring of 1974 is one of the tunes prepped for the set, David’s rendering of “The Wreck of the F.F.V.”:
And The Parody
An early piece of Flood Lore also was born that weekend, and 40 years later, Charlie and Dave were still talking about it. Click the button below to hear, from a Flood show in 2012, Charlie reminisce about how at that initial gig they offered up an irreverent parody of some train history:
And, from a 2009 podcast, here is the full song he’s talking about, a tune called “The New Wreck of the Old ‘97,” composed by the great, late Utah Phillips:
But what’s missing from that podcast are the comments that cmae after the song was sung the Bowen house. So here, as Paul Harvey used to say, is “the rest of the story”: