Pamela Bowen Brings Much Needed Female Supervision

#309 / Flood Time Capsule: 2002

The Flood finally got the female supervision it had long needed when Pamela Bowen, Charlie’s wife, agreed 22 years ago this week to be the band’s manager. It is a position she still holds today.

Pamela’s appointment represented a major shift in thinking for the original old-boy band. Up until her involvement, for instance, the guys all tended to let people "low ball" them on the price for performances.

Pamela, by contrast, had no qualms in properly marketing the outfit, getting higher paychecks, especially when jobs took the boys on the road.

It was she on the phone arranging those band dates at venues as far away as Wheeling, Fairmont and Morehead. Pamela handled the logistics for gigs from Bedford, Va., to Lexington, Ky., and points in between, like Lewisburg, Tamarack, Marlinton and Cranberry Glades, for shows from down on The Delta Queen to up on Snowshoe Mountain.

She Has Been There All Along

Going into full Flood control was a natural fit for Pamela, since she had been in The Flood zone from the band’s very beginning.

In fact, for many of those 40- and 50-year-old recordings from our collective youth that we so cherish today, it was Pamela who was pushing the buttons on the old reel-to-reel tape recorder at all those parties.

In fact, The Flood’s legacy film series on the Bowen Bashes simply would not exist without the audio that Pamela recorded at that near decade of music parties she hosted with Charlie at the Bowen house.

Pamela, The Publicist

So, Pamela Bowen was perfectly positioned for telling The Flood’s long story, from cultivating media contacts like writer Dave Lavender and broadcaster Tim Irr to printing and posting flyers on bulletin boards around town to announce upcoming shows to overseeing the merchandise tables at the gigs themselves.

(She even made sure we kept a cache of kazoos on hand to distribute to audiences when the late Dave Peyton conducted his mini-workshops on that hummer of an instrument at the shows.)

Videos, We Get Videos!

And since 2008, when iPhones came into our lives, Pamela also has been the band’s principal videographer, beginning with our very first YouTube hit, now nearing 10,000 views online.

Dozens and dozens of other YouTube-able moments these days — from front-row views at shows to laid-back “Flood at Home” features — have been recorded by Pamela.

Most of her work is archived in the band website’s “Our Videos” page. Click here to see that collection of links.

Her videos, of course, are the basis of many of the band’s more ambitious projects in recent years, such as the “Pajama Jam” series (2020) we produced during the Covid pandemic and the band’s first full-length film, Flood and Friends (2018).

Help with the Repertoire

Not only that, Pamela occasionally weighs in on the tunes her guys play.

As reported in an earlier edition of Flood Watch, back in 2017 when The Flood was set to become the house band for the new Route 60 Saturday Night shows, it was Pamela who came up with the theme song.

At her recommendation, we started each monthly show by getting the audience to sing along on “Raise a Ruckus Tonight!”

And, as demonstrated just last month at the band’s big “Flood At 50” birthday bash at Alchemy Theatre, Pamela’s song is still very much our clarion call whenever Floodified fun is coming down the road.