Joe Dobbs' Last Album
#192 / Flood Time Capsule: 2013
The Flood walked into Bud Carroll’s Live at Trackside Studios 10 years ago this week to begin recording its fifth commercial album, which also turned out to be the last for one of the band’s founders.
Joe Dobbs — who joined with Dave Peyton, Charlie Bowen and Roger Samples to form the group in 1975 — would have another couple active years before his death in September 2015, but March 27, 2013, was his final trip to a recording studio.
The album -- released as Cleanup and Recovery — featured fiddlin’ Joe on one of our favorite standards. To hear Joe rocking it on “Ragtime Annie,” click the button below:
Flood Firsts
The recording also marked some firsts.
It was the disc debut for then-new Flood bassist/vocalist Randy Hamilton, who joined the band a year earlier.
And it was to be the first album on which Doug Chaffin, who played bass on the first four Flood albums, moved on to guitar and mandolin.
Not only that, the album also featured The Flood’s new emphasis on tighter vocal harmonies, as you can hear in its opening track:
Returning to Bud Carroll’s Realm
The March 2013 session was the band’s second visit to Bud Carroll’s very cool studio. In fact, The Flood was one of the very first local bands to come to Live at Trackside shortly after it opened in 2011. That particular steamy August’s marathon session, which coincided with guitarist Jacob Scarr’s last night with the band, resulted in The Flood’s Wade in the Water album.
Carroll — a local guitar hero who had been signed to a major label and done several national tours — said Trackside developed out of conversations with his friends Michael Valentine, an award-winning indie filmmaker and Marshall University graduate, and ardent local music supporter Adam Harris, who also happens to be the producer of the famed Mountain Stage radio show, which originated from Charleston.
Along with engineer James Barker, Carroll taped studio quality audio of what consisted of a band jamming live in a circle, while an agile team of videographers recorded the proceedings.
"There is a whole different philosophy that goes into making a record that this thing dispenses with," Carroll told journalist Dave Lavender, who profiled the studio’s one-year anniversary for The Herald-Dispatch in 2012.
"They come in and play the song and it's over with in three minutes and 33 seconds,” Bud told Dave, “so there is an immediacy that a band's record can't really convey, and I think the best part of it is that maybe it isn't note perfect or pitch perfect or have the ultimate fidelity that you could have making a studio recording, but it has the vibe and the energy of a completely relaxed live performance without the pressure of having to perform with an audience or the fact that the monitors don't sound good. It is like a band practice."
That was precisely the experience The Flood had in Bud’s house each time the group visited there. As Bowen told Lavender for the same H-D article, “We were all so impressed with them. Once they put us in a circle, it was like we were at home and it was as if they had known us for years.
“They picked up on what was happening here,” Bowen added, “and so many inside jokes with the band. It's an awful tight connection and they immediately were on the inside.”
About the Album’s Strange Name
Speaking of inside jokes, the album born at that second trip to Trackside was itself built around just that sort of gag.
At a jam session a couple of days before the initial recording session, the band mates were talking about how Doug Chaffin’s wife, Donna, had inspired a concept for this new album. The conversation was captured on the recorder; click the button below to hear that bit of talk:
As a result, The Flood has perhaps the only album you’ll ever see with a footnote on its cover.
Play the Album Online
Nowadays, you can play the entire album online for free through the band’s Radio Floodango music streaming service.
