The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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21 years ago the South End String Band got asked to Help Save the Grange. We’d played the Tyee Store parking lot once, the Elger Bay Store parking lot once, and we were still recovering from monoxide poisoning but we said yah shure, u betcha, why not? We put on a concert, had a spaghetti dinner with spumoni ice cream for dessert, held a raffle for goodies we’d had donated, charged 5 bucks a head. Even though it was a cold and rainy night in February, folks turned out and stood in a long line outside, so many that we had to ask two times for people to leave so we could get the next shift inside, after all, it was a fundraiser. In the end we managed to make thousands of dollars, folks signed up to join the Grange, hundreds of Camano Islanders rolled in to help.

Last night we played a short remix of that event long ago. Spaghetti dinner cooked by Mike Nestor, same guy who was chef in 2002. Pat Major collected 10 bucks for the dinner, still the Grange Master. And of course the Grange is still here. Bad bathrooms and all. After dinner the Band played our set on the same stage we used back then and the same one we used on quite a few benefits we put on over the years for the place. Made them a lot of money in 21 years and were happy to keep the Hall a community gathering place.

But … I’m not sure we can take credit for saving it. Although, I do know this: if you’re an upstart band and you get to play for hundreds of folks who came down to the South End on that cold rainy winter night, the Grange might have saved us.

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The South End String Band didn’t start out planning to be a band — they were mostly a back porch drinking society with music as a viable excuse to offer their wives for staying out til after midnight. What most of them didn’t know was how grateful the mizzus was to have a peaceful evening to herself. Well, at least until Shelly joined the band.

For years the boys hauled out their guitars and banjos, pulled their fiddles off the wall and strung up all those mandolin strings, met up down at the South End Grange Hall where Tommy the fiddler was Master. In the beginning they were all much more proficient on the jug than on their own instruments, but as often happens with practice, they got better. And as they got more proficient, they drank a little less and began to talk playing in public. When the South End Historical Society asked them to perform for their annual salmon bake fundraiser, they jumped on the opportunity. “Can’t pay you anything,” Edith Wonkszeski told the boys, “but we’ll feed you. And the beers are on us.” That sounded more than fair, Tommy told her and warned her to stock up on those beers, you might lose money on this band.

And so the newly named South End String Band went public. If they liked drinking and strumming, they loved live performances for an appreciative audience twice as much as both put together. Trouble was, they soon found out, none of the boys could sing outside a shower worth a hoot or a holler. Billy on the banjo tried, but he sort of talked his way through, not really sang. And then Shelly came up to them after a gig at the Mabana Sunset Villa Nursing Home and said, “You ought to give me a listen.”
Which they did. She came to the next practice wearing a low cut cowgirl dress and even if she’d sung out of tune, the boys knew she’d be their new vocalist. It didn’t hurt either she could outdrink every manjack of them.

The South End String Band still performs, but after a couple of divorces, the personnel have shifted frequently. Shelly fronts the band now and she’s pretty much the last remaining original member. You can always find a banjo picker in the backwash here, but not another Shelly. The Band practices at her cabin these days and when the night winds down past midnight, Shelly shows the boys the door and always says, “Jug’s empty, boys, time to face the music.” It would be funnier if it wasn’t so godawful true.

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Radio Free South End was the ‘brainchild’, or lack of, of Wolfman Chuck, once a DJ for KRAP, the alternative music station down in Seattle and Gomorrah back before the city morphed into Tech Town. He claims he was ‘let go’ for pushing the boundaries of even those leftist programmers who decried censorship, something to do, they told him, with violating all manner of human decency.

Not to be so easily cast off the airwaves of Puget Sound, Wolfman laid his plans, moved to the politically incorrect South End, recruited a few of us slackers for his Bandwidth Comeback and launched Radio Free South End, a laughably puny low watt FM frequency so low on the dial even the FCC would have to stoop to find us. This was the Year of our Lord 1999, slightly before podcasts and blogblasts, sort of Old School but without much emphasis on the school. Wolfman had a primitive transmitter — don’t ask me the technical — and a tower he erected over his trailer’s roof. All he needed, he said, were volunteers to be the DJ’s when he needed a break. Of course we asked if this was criminal and of course Chuck said Hell No! Freedom of speech, he told us, First Amendment, he claimed. So sure, we volunteered, why not, we had some things to say, even some music to play.

I doubt anyone further than 5 miles north of the island’s head could hear us, but when you consider most of the bloggers out there on internet podcasts get half the listeners Wolfman got, who really cares? Chuck wasn’t interested in advertising revenue, he just wanted what he called, reverentially, airplay. Chuck played old rock and roll, early blues, strummed his homemade mandolin, told off color stories mostly about us local yokels, even played the South End String Band every damn day, probably as thanks for half of us band members volunteering to DJ.

I can remember like yesterday the day our music died. It was my morning to fill the 10 am to noon slot only to find Wolfman slumped over his microphone, headset off one ear, holding up an official looking paper from some government agency or other.

‘We’re signing off today, Skeeter,’ Chuck told me as American Pie was playing, I bet for the 16th time that morning, the last song on KINK’s brief but glorious existence. A week later Wolfman was gone, the radio equipment too and his trailer had a For Sale sign out by the road. Camano’s infamous and only radio station had put a thumb out and hitchhiked into legend.

Rumor has it there’s a pirate radio station operating off the coast up in the San Juan islands, some DJ on the run from the Feds, still broadcasting to any and all in listening range. I’m betting it’s Wolfman Chuck. Every now and then I crank my radio up and run the dial north to south, hoping, I guess, to hear a crackly South End Blues coming out of Canada on the magnetic waves of an aurora borealis, Wolfman still howling into the wind, the last real DJ fighting the corporate mega-stations. And some nights, maybe too much to drink, I think I hear him and his tinny little mandolin. Godspeed, Wolfman C!!!

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It is encouraging to know that this coronavirus thingy is being ably handled by our President whose motto must be The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Facts Themselves. The spin doctor is In. I suspect when he claims to be fantastically knowledgeable about all things medical, evidently because his gene pool has an MIT expert somewhere in the family tree, we can all relax, we’re in capable hands. In fact, if we’re symptomatic of Covid-19, go ahead and go to work. Do us good and probably generate optimism among our co-workers.

Apparently the folks out here on the Left Coast, ground zero for this mutating virus, aren’t reassured one bit. Josephine Nursing Home in Stanwoodopolis just went into quarantine mode. The Community Center just canceled the South End String Band’s scheduled St. Patrick’s Day dance and concert. Along with most every other public event this coming month. I tried to explain the band was infectious, not contagious, but panic had already spread from the nursing homes to the senior centers, schools to fire stations. Naturally we agreed it was probably in the public health interest, then immediately booked a gig at the Stanwoodopolis Hotel for St. Pat’s Saturday March 14th, figuring, I guess, green beer would inoculate any and all from the scourges of this fast spreading epidemic.

Me, I’m recovering from my yearly bout of Camano Crud, the symptoms of which seem astoundingly similar to Covid-19, but of course there are no tests available right now which is reassuring to the Doctor-in-Chief who wants those numbers to stay low. Even now a cruise ship is drifting like a plague ship off San Francisco, but offshore, those contaminated aren’t going to be counted in the national numbers. If I don’t miss my guess, the stricken in Washington will soon be quarantined in dinghys and rowboats off the western coast to reduce the headcount of victims. Let’s not even imagine what will become of the fatalities, but tomorrow’s death count should be substantially less. Today’s count? A hoax to embarrass the President.

They say St. Patrick chased the snakes from Ireland. Kind of like St. Skeeter’s Day, memorializing ridding the South End of crocodiles. We may, before long, have to celebrate St. Donald’s Day, to commemorate chasing the plague from our shores. Stay calm, go to work, come down to the Hotel Saturday night, nothing to fear here.

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Floyd Norgaard Cultural Center Benefit Concert
Making Artists Great Again — No More Faux Muse!!!
South End String Band

Once again, despite popular demand, the South End String Band is bringing its authentic, definitely NOT fake, Camano backwash roots music to the Floyd Norgaard Cultural Center in Stanwood’s Historic District Saturday, Feb. 3rd, 2018 from 7-9 pm with a 6-7 pm social hour with snacks provided and wine and beer for sale. Their aim, of course, besides helping bring culture to the great washed masses of the Stanwoodopolis area, is to Make Artists Great Again. So great you’ll get tired of greatness. Not that the Band has ever really been great before, but … well, they liked the slogan and in these provocative prevaricating times, they decided to wag the dog. No more Fake Muse!

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