I heard from Mike Romanyszyn who has been busy digitizing the old International Silverstring Submarine Marching Jug Band (ISSMJB) tapes. These bootleg basement masters were done almost 40 years ago! The tape is 10 inch reel-to-reel run through a preamp and fed as 'line in' onto a hard drive. Suddenly I'm 19 years old, a sophmore at Carolina, a budding hippie, hanging out with the coolest guys on campus! The first time I saw Mike (Figg), he was wearing a rope for a belt! Was that cool or what!
We formed this jug band and carried around a big blue 500 lb blue bomb with a face painted on it. There were five of us, all could play guitar, Mike also played fiddle and banjo. We also had a washtub base, wash board with metal thimbels, kazoo, mandolin and I played jug!We placed third behind a baton twirling cheerleader and a mezo soprano at the University of South Carolina Talent Competition in 1966. We won one hundred dollars. Split 5 ways. We bought beer.
We hung out at this beer joint/dive called JB Gant's. Gant's had a regular luncheon counter with a lift-up door in the middle. You walked through the lift-up and headed down stairs to a catacomb-like basement. Several small rooms were carved out with a table and chairs. Every weekend we would all head down to Gant's basement to drink bear and make music. JB use to adveritise in the Columbia tourist magazine. The line read "Folk Music Nightly." If any tourists came in hoping to hear us play, Gant would charge them $5.00 and send them downstairs. Mostly though it was the usual group of suspects. We never paid, nor did we ever see a dime for our labors.
We never smoked Marajuanahoochiemama down there, JB wouldn't allow that. But there was plenty of black lighting. The thing I remembered was how black lights lit-up the girl's make-up. Also you could see who had used Visine and had therefore gotten fucked up on Marajuanahoochiemama before arriving at JB's.
We usually played till 2 or 3 AM then stumbled out into the dark night, heavy guitar cases in hand.
:: Tom 9:33 AM [+] ::
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