Busting Outa the Wintertime Blues

#450 / Flood Time Capsule: 2002

Eager to break out of the 2002 winter doldrums and to start promoting its first-ever studio album, The Flood began a series of gigs in late February.

A road trip to Charleston kicked off the new jobs, an opportunity to play an open house reception for the West Virginia Division of Tourism’s new headquarters.

The guys got the job through the good work of the band's new banjo guru, Chuck Romine, a man who as a former member of the state House of Delegates had more than a few contacts.

Chuck gave Gov. Bob Wise a copy of the band's first album; in turn, the governor passed it along to the tourism folks with a recommendation to call these old boys.

(Wise would have his own Flood interactions a week or so later, making his clog-dancing debut at the capitol with The Flood’s backing.)

The tourism center gig was a fun afternoon of tunes and stories. Ironically, Chuck himself couldn't make the show. By then, he had, as his band mates liked to say in those days, “gone to a better place …. uh, Florida...."

Borders Books

The next day, The Flood fold returned to Huntington to play a Friday night at the now-defunct Borders bookstore at the Huntington Mall.

A cool evening, it was standing room only. All the seats in the cafe-coffeeshop area were taken, and the crowd was three deep all around the edges for the whole concert.

"The guys were so turned on by the reception that everybody played especially well, I thought, and the patter between the songs was great," Charlie told his cousin Kathy later in an email.

"We took a break after an hour and I thought, 'Well, we'll lose 'em now,' but no, they stayed for the second set — still every seat taken. We were so flattered. It was like the Renaissance evening in January all over again. I talked to some folks in the audience who said they go to the Borders Friday evenings often and that we were the best group they've heard there.

“Doug, our bass player, said he and Donna came up to a performance by another local group a few weeks ago and the crowd would fluctuate -- sometimes full, sometimes half full -- but our bunch stayed for the whole thing. Quite a high for the guys.”

Library Gig

Then on March 3, the band played at the 100th anniversary celebration of the Cabell County Public Library.

During the summer, the library sponsored noontime concerts on Fridays on the pedestrian plaza outside, and if it rained, the band moved to a space inside the library. The Flood performed in this inside space, joined by our tiny dancer, Zoey Stull, as seen below.

Here's a snippet of the day as reported by WOWK-TV and WSAZ-TV:

George Mallot Memories

The library gig also produced a couple of favorite stories in The Flood Lore Files, both courtesy of an old friend, the late George Mallot.

The first story was recalled at a Flood rehearsal about a decade later. Dave Peyton had just written a particularly fiery column in The Herald-Dispatch and his band mates were wondering if it would prompt round of threats from unhappy readers. Here’s the resulting conversation:

That same gig produced this second choice bit of Mallot commentary, also recalled at a rehearsal: