Carl's Scrapbook: My 80s Bands: The Dizzy Rambler Band


 Startin' Over Again

First, a word or two about the name of the band. When I played with my dad and/or my uncles, Boots and Ervin, it was "The Dizzy Ramblers", the name they had been using since 1936. Back in the 70s, Jesse and I started using the name "Dizzy Rambler" to identify the band we were playing with at that time. During the eighties, I started to use another variation, "The Dizzy Rambler Band", to denote several different groupings of musicians at different points in that decade. This is the name I still often use today for a variety of musical endeavors.

Around the first of 1981, Jesse and drummer Rodney Price were making preparations to leave the Bellamy Brothers organization and go to work with the Ricky Skaggs band. Jesse had also secured another local picker, pianist Mickey Merritt, a job with Skaggs. In the interim period before they left to go on the road, we took several jobs locally under the name, the Dizzy Rambler Band, to kinda keep their cash flow as intact as possible. We worked a local dive, the Ramble Inn, for a weekend and some other odds and ends jobs with Judy Bailey, who was a great vocalist from Lacoochie, FL, that we had met at Central Sound Studio. Judy had just recorded the duet "Following the Feelin'" with hot country artist, Moe Bandy and had developed somewhat of a Central Florida following .

My wife at the time, Nancy, had started to work for the Orange Blossom Jamboree organization and made some connections that allowed her to book the band for a couple of weeks at the Hartridge, a new restaurant and lounge that had gone in out on Highway 17, between Winter Haven and Lake Alfred. The establishment's principal owner was Paul Yates, who was a big time country music fan, and always treated the band with respect (something that could not be said for most club owners). Paul was one of the investor partners in the Orange Blossom Jamboree concert series, the second of which was coming up on the approaching May 2nd. She had also secured me a spot as one of the acts appearing on that upcoming OBJ show. On March 1st, "Take Me Home With You", a song Nancy and I had written, charted on the Billboard chart and was getting some decent airplay locally, making the top 10 on small market giant, WGTO, at Cypress Gardens. Since I still had no band of my own at the time, I did that OBJ show with the temporary version of the Dizzy Rambler Band.

 Time Out for Southern Honey

After the guys had left to seek fame and fortune with the Ricky Skaggs organization, I again started to consider putting together my own band and thus "Southern Honey" was conceived. It would be 1984, before the Dizzy Rambler Band name would again resurface.

By the end of December, 1983, Southern Honey had run it's course. A combination of some internal unrest and some really crummy bar jobs had taken it's toll on the group. The woman was pregnant again and again we didn't have any work.

 Will Work For Food

After a short hiatus, in the Spring of 1984, Joe Spann, Nancy and I retook the name Dizzy Rambler Band and started to perform as a trio, at a local eatery in Winter Haven, called "Skeeter's Big Biscuits". Joe had this new device - a 4-channel multi-track cassette recorder and a little black box called an Ace Tone drum machine and we decided try our hand at recording the drums (boomp - chink - boomp - chink), some basic keyboards (he also had this little half-size Casio keyboard) and one part of the three part harmony to cassettes. Along with this tape, we played live: lead guitar (or banjo), acoustic rhythm guitar, and electric bass. I sang the lead vocals and Joe provided the other harmony part not included on the tape (Nancy didn't sing). Actually - when the mix of the live and recorded portions was right - the whole thing had a very live sound. It did teach us to have great timing and concentration - ("the tape don't make no mistakes").

Skeeters paid very little plus tips (let's see that's: very little + very little = very very little) - but - we could and did eat just as much as we wanted. For po' folks, we was eatin' real good! Sometimes we played the breakfast crowd (8 am till 12) and sometimes the dinner crowd (6 pm till 9). It was a "mm-mm good" home-cookin' style restaurant and was very often a full house. Diners don't usually make good listeners but occasionally the crowd response was great. We played there for several months before the Winter Haven location went belly-up (had to be poor management) and then we moved for a time to another Skeeters on Lee Road in Orlando. That was always the breakfast shift and we had to get up at around 5am to make the 50 mile or so trek to Orlando. This one was run by the chain's owner who was a bit of a jerk and beside that, the waitresses would steal our tips from the tip box. Needless to say - we got fed up with that (no pun intended) real quick.

During our stint with Skeeters, on June 16th and 17th, 1984 we were booked to do a pair of Fraternal Order of Police concerts -- one in Ft. Lauderdale and the other in Jacksonville, Florida, as the opening act for featured artists Tanya Tucker and Leon Everette. Since we were currently working as a trio - we were not set up to do concert work so we hired Rodney Price to play drums and Mickey Merritt to play piano. Nancy was now 8 months+ pregnant and her doctor told her she could not make the trip and do the jobs. The jobs paid very well and she told the doctor that she would not be able to pay him his fee, if she didn't work the jobs. He paused, and then said, "Be careful!". When she was introduced during the band introductions the crowds went wild. She was huge with child and when she finally gave birth on July 12th, the baby (Christina) would weigh in at just over 13 lbs.

 The Theme-Parks

After Christina was born, we went to work trying to get the Dizzy Rambler Band a job at Circus World, a theme park located about 20 miles from our home. After three auditions -- over about a two month period -- we were finally hired and did seasonal and weekend shows until the summer of 1985, when we added cloggers to our show and started working shows 6 days a week. We were still working as a trio (Carl, Joe and Nancy) with a recorded tape track and if I do say so -- we were gettin' pretty good at it. The pay was decent and working with circus people was one of the most interesting highlights of my career. For a more in-depth look at the Circus World story -- click here.

In 1986, Circus World was sold to textbook publishing giant Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich (HBJ). Imagining the park needed a new theme, it was closed for remodeling for almost a year and reopened as Boardwalk and Baseball. We had been promised at Circus World's closing that we would be rehired in roughly the same capacity when the new park opened. True to their word, we played our first job at the new park, for a special media preview, a couple of weeks before it officially opened in April 1987. The Dizzy Rambler Band would be the only entertainment to play the parks entire three year existence -- which ended abruptly in January, 1990. It has been estimated that we played over 3500 shows during that period. A complete overview of the Boardwalk & Baseball years is available here.