The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I remember the first time I heard one of our band’s songs come on the radio, just filled me with such a surge of pure adolescent joy that I worried I might break out in zits. When the Beatles heard their first song over the airwaves, so the story goes, they were all driving in the same car and pulled over to the side of the road to listen, gobsmacked, exactly how I felt. Not that we were in the same league as the mopheads.

But … if you had told me when I was younger that one day I would be in a band playing an instrument and singing, I’d have told you to back off your meds. I didn’t play an instrument and I had never sung anything. We started up the band back in 2002, a bunch of us on the South End getting together on the back porch to play a little music and drink a few beers. Some of us couldn’t play an instrument. Hell, about a third of us couldn’t. But we learned. And over the next couple of years we even performed in public, admittedly just some parking lot impromptus and the Tyee Store and Elger Bay, then a concert to Save the Grange that drew 700 people on a cold rainy February night in 2004. We saved the Grange and we became a real band.

The South End String Band still exists, still plays the area, still gets radio time. We’ve changed personnel a few times and of the four of us survivors, three were in the original lineup. Not bad after a quarter century. I play the 5 string banjo and hard to believe even now, I’m the lead singer. Who’d have dreamed?

Like a lot of things in this surprising life, I would be hard pressed to tell you I’m a musician. Same thing with art, another serendipitous detour totally unexpected. What starts out as a lark, a hobby, a sideline … ends up defining who you are. Do I think of myself as a music man? Well, it’s like Lynda Barry, a cartoonist I thought was incredibly funny, told an interviewer (when he asked if she considered herself an artist) it took her a long time to accept that mantle. She just drew year after year, got her cartoons published, made a living and finally she said she had to admit to herself that yeah, ya know what, I’m an artist. Let the critics decide if she was a good one or not.

So … we didn’t make the Top 40. We don’t make a living playing old time fiddle music. We aren’t the Beatles. We didn’t make the Big Time. But … when I look back at this life, I have to smile that occasionally we got to play for an audience and that yeah, ya know what, I got to be a musician. Turn up that radio! We might be up next.