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BeginningsAfter leaving the Bellamy Brothers band at New Year 1980, I spent most of that year in a blue funk and had no band of any kind. While I usually had big ideas and certain creative talents, Jesse had always been the one who got things done and he was still on the road. He had always managed the bands, delt with the personnel, booked the jobs, and played the bass. I now had none of these things going for me for the first time in almost twenty years. These were not areas where I was competent nor things I wanted to deal with. I felt like the proverbial ship without a rudder, just floating aimlessly around with absolutely no direction. Fortunately, Nancy (my wife of almost 2 years) recognized the problem and started to learn the skills and develop the traits that would eventually get us back on track. About the spring of 1980, I signed on as guitarist for a three city outing with country music legend, Slim Whitman. Along with Jon Corneal on drums, Donnie Helms on bass, Mickey Merritt on piano, and Slim's son on guitar, we played shows in Sarasota (Robards Arena), West Palm Beach, and for an SRO crowd at the Tupperware Auditorium in Kissimmee. Jon had this old converted school bus/camper (sprayed with a heavy silver texture coating and dubbed "The Silver Chicken") that we tried to use for travel -- but... well... -- that's another story all together. If I hadn't been so bummed during this time-frame, it would have probably been a lot of fun. But, such is life. Slowly as the year passed, I started to regain some hope and motivation after taking a couple of trips to Nashville with Herb McCullough that served to basically jump start my songwriting career. It took almost the entire year for me to finally want to get out and play live again.
Time Out for Southern Honey After the guys had left to seek fame and fortune with the Ricky Skaggs organization, Nancy and I started to consider putting together our 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. Nancy was pregnant again and again we didn't have any work. 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 doesn'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 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 near 13 lbs. The Theme-Park Years After Christina was born, Nancy 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. |
Around
the first of 1981, 
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
say
- we got fed up with that (no pun intended) real quick.