Rock The Catacombs

#177 / Flood Time Capsule: 1975

On a wintry Friday evening 48 years ago tonight, David Peyton and Charlie Bowen headed across the border to play some tunes in The Catacombs, the coffeehouse at Ashland Community College in Kentucky.

Creating the Coffeehouse

The Catacombs had a long history with us. Seven years earlier, Charlie and Pamela were instrumental in creating the coffeehouse in the spring of 1968, when Charlie was still a student at ACC, a school where Pamela also had studied before transferring to Marshall University.

They set up the venue on the subterranean level of the college’s old Carter Avenue building (a dark, funky area of the facility that already was long known to ACC faculty and students as “the catacombs.”) In the years before they married in the spring of 1969, Pamela and Charlie regularly performed on that stage in Ian & Sylvia wannabe duets.

And later, it was The Catacombs at which the Bowens first heard Peyton picking with Roger Samples at a benefit concert in February 1971, an evening that in many ways was the beginning of The Flood Story, as we reported here in an earlier article.

Flash Forward: 1975

On this particular other February evening, in 1975, Nancy McClellan and Barbara Edwards invited Charlie and Dave to come around and perform some of the music the two of them had begun experimenting with in their first year of regularly jamming together.

As you can hear in the following seven-minute audio from that night, even in this early incarnation, Dave and Charlie were offering up a hybrid brand of folk music.

While the quality of the audio isn’t the greatest — in those pre-digital days, recording on magnetic tape could be iffy — you can still make out the duo’s treatment on an eclectic mix of tunes, ranging from Uncle Dave Macon’s “Way Downtown” to John Prine’s then-new “Please Don’t Bury Me” to the pair’s latest dope song, a take on “Take a Whiff Off Me.”

The Name Wasn’t The Thing … Until It Was

As you’ll also hear, Dave and Charlie were still searching for a name to give to their new collaboration. (Being reporter-types, they toyed with calling themselves “The Liberated Mountain News.”)

The Flood’s true name wouldn’t come surging forth until later that year, when Joe Dobbs joined the aggregation.

In Other Words …

So what we have here is antediluvian audio, a tape made just months before Dave and Charlie met Joe Dobbs in April 1975. Joe would be fiddling regularly with Dave, Charlie and Roger by that summer, when finally The 1937 Flood was a-borning.