Supersizing Ourselves
#321 / Flood Time Capsule: 2008
It was just one our wisecrack. We told a reporter that The Flood lately had so many members that the outfit might be outgrowing its status as a mere “band.”
The next morning — with the straightest of journalistic faces — The Herald-Dispatch story about the job identified us as “The 1937 Flood Orchestra.”
Yikes. It was a joke, son, a joke!
But the truth was in the spring of 2008, The Flood had started taking the stage in a configuration two or three times larger than that original merry band (and larger than the equally merry band of characters in today’s Flood).
In those days, with young Jacob Scarr then regularly sitting, with Michelle Hoge (“the Chick Singer”) ever-more frequently fronting the vocals and with the addition of Mike (“Mickey D”) Ellis on drums, it was usually anywhere from seven to nine of us behind the mikes.
For example, 16 years ago this week, when the band rolled into the civic center in downtown Huntington (the facility now called Marshall Health Network Arena) to entertain at the Cabell County Public Library's Ohio River Festival of Books (ORFOB), there were eight of us: Doug and Charlie, Joe and Sam, Bub and Mickey, Jacob and Michelle.
“We kicked off with a blues,” Charlie told his mom in a email later, “followed by a fiddle tune and then a swing tune with Michelle doing the vocals, and we just never looked back. It was a great evening, and the people really appreciated it. It was a great evening.”
Earlier Festivals
In those days, The Flood was a regular feature at ORFOB, often invited by library directory Judy Rule to entertain the crowd of booksellers and book buyers, and a wide variety of Flood configurations answered the call.
For instance, just two years earlier, it was the Flood Lite — just Joe, Doug and Charlie — that played a hour set. Two years before that, when the band played its ORFOB debut, the band was twice that size.
"We had a super time," Charlie told his mom in a later email. "We all arrived at the civic center about 6:30 and got set up in the corner of the dining room where all the visiting authors would be assembling for a little food and conversation.”
“We kicked in to our first tune promptly at 7,” Charlie told his mom, “and the crowd loved it. We just jammed — no set list this time — and everyone was in a very good mood and the music reflected that.”
Whither the Supersized Flood?
The jumbo version of the band lasted a few years. For instance, when we headed back to the studio in 2011 to record the band’s fourth album, it was an eight-member Flood that sat down with engineer Bud Carroll.
Many benefits resulted from the bigger band of those days — a fuller sound, a wider variety of instruments available for the solos, more pickers to help keep things perking along at gigs, a bigger repertoire of tunes to choose from and a lot more jokes and stories between the songs — but, oh, the logistics! Just ask manager Pamela Bowen what it was like herding those particular cats.
Eventually, the band started trimming back down, but not before its supersized persona also spawned a wild two years of weekly public parties at the Bowen House with a whole host of guest players wandering by to sit in. But, hey, that’s another story, one that we’ll tell here next week. Stay tuned!