Birth of the Parties that Birthed the Band
#248 / Flood Time Capsule: 1972
On the last weekend before Labor Day 1972, Pamela and Charlie Bowen hosted a music party in their new apartment in Huntington’s South Side. Everyone had such a good time that they wanted an encore the next spring, and another after that, and …
… well, before long, the gatherings evolved into what friends and family started calling the “Bowen Bashes.” These semiannual weekend-long parties — usually held once in the spring and again in the fall — would nurture The Flood during the band’s formative years in the hippy-dippy 1970s.
Bash #1
At the time of this first bash — held 51 years ago this week — the Bowens had just settled down in their new digs. Honestly, it was not the greatest venue for a raucous musical evening — an upstairs apartment in a yellow brick South Side duplex — but fortunately, the old lady who lived alone on the first floor was nearly deaf.
The landlord told the young couple that if they put down heavy rugs over the apartment’s bare wood floors, the party likely would not disturb their downstairs neighbor. Taking him at his word, the Bowens solicited the help of their buddy Stew Schneider and put down large carpets in the two main rooms.
Then, confident of carpeting's note-absorbing properties, they called in the pickers.
Alas, no recordings were made at that first gathering — that technology wouldn't be embraced by the bashers for another year or so — but post-party letters to friends and family reported quite a night.
The music ranged from cool folk and blues by long-time friend and mentor Terry Goller to rollicking old-time tunes by banjo picker extraordinaire H. David Holbrook to the clear-as-a-mountain-stream ballads of Jack Nuckols and Susan Lewis.
"The best we can figure," the Bowens wrote to family later, "some 30 folks came in for two days of talking, drinking, eating, guitar-picking, singing, chess playing, etc.
“And a thirsty-hungry lot they were, taking in four gallons of beer, six gallons of Coke, 10 bottles of wine, three pounds of potato chips, six dozen cookies, five dozen brownies, a pound of peanuts and two pounds of pretzels. Fortunately, most of the participants brought a jug or bag of their own to swell the common stock of cheer."
Bash #2
When the next bash came around the following spring, friends found the Bowens finally living in a house rather than an apartment; during late winter, they had moved a half dozen blocks to the west.
It was a rental, not anything they owned (yet), but that 70-year-old frame house at 604 13th Avenue was a world apart from that cramped upstairs duplex, and the Bowens were ready to celebrate their new lebensraum.
Many of the same pickers were back. And they brought friends, among them Floodster-to-be Bill Hoke. Years later, Bill still remembered his April 1973 introduction to the bashes. “I got out of the Navy at the end of February,” Bill wrote, “and spent a few weeks checking into a couple of 'dream jobs’ before landing in Lexington.”
The dream jobs were the Cass Railroad and The Delta Queen, he said, “but the timing was bad for both. Then I went to Lexington and met Jim and Ralf Strother and later David and Jack and Susie.”
Bill's cousin — the same Susan Lewis who had attended Bash #1 — said the bunch of them were traveling to Huntington for a party, “and we needed to go 'cause there would be music, though, she said, Stewart and Charlie mostly sit around playing chess.
“Well, I don't remember the chess games,” Bill recalled, “but I do remember hearing more music that night than I'd heard in every coffeehouse I had ever been to. Being just out of a six-year stint in Navy, I'm thinking, 'My God! Life is good! I was hooked!”
The Legacy Films
As noted, the first couple of bashes are lost to the ages — why it didn’t occur to us to turn on a tape recorder? — but by the third bash the next spring, we had wised up. With the help of Stew Schneider at the control, we started taping the highlights and from 1974 on, we would record at each gatherings.
Those tapes, along with the photos taken at the parties, enabled us to create the Bowen Bash films series released several years ago to memorialize those remarkable years.
