From June 18 through September 2, 1985, the The Dizzy Rambler Band played a 5 day a week schedule (Tuesday through Saturday). The park was closed on Mondays and we were off on Sunday. It opened at 10 AM and our first show was usually at approximately 1 PM following the first of two daily Circus Spectacular shows. It seems like we may have also occasionally played an abbreviated show at either the "load" or the "dump" of "The Great Western Stampede" show (the rodeo style arena entrance was also near our stage). But the next full show was at approximately 4:45 PM at the close of the second Circus Spectacular show. The Bar-B-Q was not open for this show -- but this is the time appointed for the Grand-A-Day Giveaway each afternoon. The gates to the lower park (where the rides and amusements were located) were closed down, but the front gates (accessing the upper park where we were located) were open to the public at 5:00 PM (the parks official closing time). Local residents could attend the daily drawing without charge at that time.

Speaking of that "Grand-A-Day" giveaway, it was a hoot and almost always drew a large crowd for the drawing at the end of the day. But unfortunately, a small group of greedy locals devised a way of skewing the results. Since there was no provision in the rules that would forbid winning multiple times (a serious oversight), there was a small group of locals who would bring in garbage bags stuffed with thousands of entries every day, and were winning every drawing. The park patrons (who the management actually wanted to win) didn't stand a chance. Needless to say, management was not happy. But, before the summer was over the local's skulduggery had been counteracted by some of management's own devious devices (so the rumor went) and no matter how many entries they stuffed the box with, they weren't winning anymore. I'm sure it was probably illegal, but hey, we were just the band - what did we know?

Since, for all practical purposes, we were setup and playing outdoors, we couldn't just leave the equipment exposed at the end of the day. The gazebo was not secure from the weather, and anyone that knows Florida - knows how unpredictable the weather can be. The best answer we could come up with - that didn't involve having to strike the entire set-up and then set it all back up the next day - was to wrap the entire back-line (amplifiers and such) in a couple of giant tarps at the end of each day. Needless to say, the extreme humidity changes wreaked havoc on some of the electronics over the course of that summer but amazingly enough, the only real damage to the equipment usually came during the park's open hours when one of those sudden Florida thunderstorms (disguised as a cool summer shower) would be on us before we could get the stage secured and everything tied down. On more than one occasion we spent our time between shows disassembling electronics cabinets and drying out the components with hair dryers. Of course we always carried our stringed instruments back to the dressing room between shows. Fortunately for us, the P. A. belonged to the park and it usually took the brunt of the weather damage. They had a good technical staff who could usually make needed repairs in a relatively short period of time.

The band had really gotten good at working with a rhythm track tape by this time. We had really honed that skill during the time we spent at "Skeeter's". The tracks were still quite simple and there were usually more live instruments at any given time, than recorded ones. Basically, it was just drums, keyboards, and the single part of harmony that we couldn't do live because Nancy didn't sing. Occasionally, we might add something else, but it was rare. We had one song on a tape, same song on both sides. Each song had a stick-click count off and Nancy was in charge of having the tapes in order and rewound. She started them and stopped them. At the time, we were using a TOA eight channel mixer that had a built-in cassette recorder/player with pitch control (we tuned the machine's speed before each show). We used two vocal mics (SM58's) and went direct with my Takamine acoustic guitar and Joe's Gibson Mastertone (with a pick-up built-in). The electric guitars and bass were ran through guitar amps with no further amplification. The overall sound was very "live".

I really wanted to do some of the songs I had written, but there just wasn't any call for it. Occasionally, there might be some "Americans" in the crowd who would recognize "Close Enough To Perfect" as having been an Alabama hit, but even then, the words I remember most were those of a young lady down near the front of the stage one afternoon, who with furrowed brow remarked to her friend, "You mean that old man wrote that song?" Hey, I was only 39 at the time! It's been downhill ever since.

Our big "show song" was a banjo version of "The Devil Went Down To Georgia" and it was almost always a crowd pleaser. But in all honesty, the crowd always reacted best to the cloggers. It was the visual thing. They could get the crowd whoopin' and hollerin' the quickest so we used them to bally the crowd at the beginning of the show, featured them in a show routine around the middle of the set and let them improvise, along with the clowns, in the shows closing.

Did I mention...."the clowns".