Frog Attack, a Valentine's Tale

#36 / Flood Time Capsule: 2004

For Valentine’s Day 2004, Joe Dobbs’ lady love Edwina Zeigler brought the band a weird, wonderful little gift: a cute little metal sculpture of a goofy frog playing a guitar. “Oh, I suppose some musicians might take umbrage," Charlie told his mom in an email the next morning, "but not us. Not a single umb was to be heard. Of course, we don't know how the frog feels about it.”

Only later did we come to suspect that The Flood’s First Frog might have been harboring simmering hostilities toward us all along.

Now, for several years the tin toad stood amiably strumming atop a bookcase in the Bowen house library where the band still practices each week, stationed beside an aluminum cat who later joined in with his fiddle.

Without incident the pair accompanied us weekly until one night when an overly animated Dave Peyton rocked back a bit too far back in his chair in mid-story, nudged the bookcase and toppled Froggie down on top of himself.

The un- (okay, well, mostly un-) provoked amphibian assault on the innocent Brother Peyton immediately inspired a new bit of Flood Lore, unique in that we actually captured it all on a recorder. Click here for a two-minute clip that has three audio artifacts: First come sounds of the actual incident. This is followed by our later recounting of that bump in the night to friends at a subsequent jam session a week or so later. Then hear how all of this inspires Joe to recall a wonderful little story about certain parenting traditions in the Dobbs household.

The Story Corps

A band that has been around as long as ours has accumulated rather a lot of stories over the years, tales, memories and outright lies that form Flood lore and legend. (Obviously sometimes the good stuff just falls from the sky. ) If you like to hear more of these bits and pieces, check out one of the newer feature on The Flood’s website, the Our Stories page, by clicking here.

Often between the tunes at shows, jam sessions and rehearsals, someone in the room is moved to spin a yarn, and if a recorder is running, it is saved for the ages. This page is a linked index to the stories we've saved on the site, inviting you to click in for the ride.

In Other Business…

Lately we’ve had a bunch of new folks coming on board to read this newsletter. Thanks, people! You make our hearts sing with all the kind emails. We’re hoping the newsletter becomes a kind of sharing / gathering place for us, so have fun with it.

Meanwhile, we're thinking that new readers maybe could use some help browsing, searching and reading the archives, posting comments and replies and sharing articles, so we’ve expanded our help file to cover these things.

Click here to give it a look, then scroll the resulting page to the section headlined, “If You’re New to the Newsletter…”

Enjoy, and if you have any corrections, suggestions or questions, drop us a line.