Carl's Scrapbook: My 80's Bands: Southern Honey #6 (1983)

 The Quartet

Musically, version #6 was the weakest edition of Southern Honey. Without piano or steel, their was just none of those midrange frequencies that tend to pull a bands sound together. We also had no variety of instruments to take leads or do fills. Fortunately, we were a quartet for only a little over a month.

Another problem was that we were starting to get lazy and apathetic. We took a lot of bookings at a local restaurant/lounge called the Coachlight (later named the Sea-Flame) which was located on Havendale Blvd. between Auburndale and Winter Haven and lost a lot of our enthusiasm and started to develop that barroom mentality. It was more of a lounge atmosphere than we were used to and required nothing more than to just show up and play something. The management was debaucherous, the crowds were lackadaisical and we played there a lot.

 Southern Honey Date Book (early 1983)

• Early Jan - Band retools again to work as a quartet. Begin carrying equipment in old white Econoline van.
• Jan 10-15 - Coachlight Lounge, Auburndale
• Jan 17-21 - Coachlight Lounge, Auburndale
• Jan 22 - Auburndale Opry House, Carter's Corner
• Jan 23 - Calusa Fish Lodge, Okeechobee - Lotso drunk Seminole Indians. One guy has a parrot on his shoulder and he proceeds to get it so drunk, it can no longer stand up. The girls are gettin' hit on big-time and the equipment gets packed up in record time (20 minutes from the last note -- we were on the road).
• Jan 24-29 - Coachlight Lounge, Auburndale
• Feb 5 - River Ranch - Concert with Mel McDaniel and local artist Russell Hornbuckle - Big crowd / good show. Len Walls is doing the sound and blows the horn drivers in my Altec speaker cabinets.

It was becoming more and more evident that the music was suffering and in mid-February we decided to add Greg Towle, a picker I had worked with in the seventies, to the mix and see if we could rekindle some of the fire in our performances.